Chineese tools getting better

UK has recently introduced tougher laws on vibration levels for hand tools. With a global market, this may change the design of those that you bought.

John

Excellent point John!! Yes, I got into the habit of using gloves just for that reason. I absolutely don't use gloves for anything else including welding and shoveling. Becoming a stubborn old fart.

Ivan Vegvary

Just wonderful. I suppose they are getting better at producing quality knockoffs of all their pirated technology. Soon they will have high quality US-designed missles ready to lob at us.

Steve

Soon? You've been able to buy plans from the Government Printing Office for years!

They should be.......... thery're stealing our technology right out of the US patent office and claiming it for their own, I have a link to a report to the US Government on my blog. They also have a Myfip worm that steals CAD files from computers they don't even hide the fact the information is going back to China. I read about that in Forbes magazine. We won't do anything about it for fear of upsetting the apple cart.

This would be the missiles designed by the German engineers would it?

Mark Rand RTFM

Right you are. There are many good reasons for NOT getting a patent, and forced disclosure is one of them. The Chinese reportedly have 17,000 intelligence officers working in the U.S., and everything from the source code for Windows NT, to the design for the W88 SLBM warhead has been sent back to Beijing. Before the advent of internet access one of their favorite sources of information was the patent files on microfiche at university libraries. Films were out in the open in carousel-type cabinets for self-service use. The Japanese/Chinese/Korean/Indian "students" would steal them and then librarians would dutifully order new copies as needed. Finally around 1985 somebody figured out the drill and they put the fiche files under lock and key with new sign out rules.

Here is an interesting take on patents in the context of a small business:

http://www.t> I don't think this is new, as a problem with patents is that in order to

Yes, and after they obliterate our entire country, they can sell all those products to the Somalis.

sort of an OT aside on this thread...

We bought about a dozen "j*rk-off" flashlights for our shooting crews for the 4th. Y'know... those things you shake a magnet through a coil to re-charge?

We'd bought a handful last year, and they worked fine. So this year we bought a case of the same model, same manufacturer. They were identical down to the parting lines in the plastic mouldings.

Except...

I lazily glanced at one against the sun to see the components inside the translucent case. Hmmmm.... I can't see any diodes on the board. Hmmm.... I can see LIGHT coming through the coil that should have 10K-12K turns on it. Hmmmm.... No cap on the board, either. Hmmmm......

I took the damn thing apart. The "coil" had about 100 turns of fine wire on it. Just enough to "color it copper". The board was bare. There were two corroded and lumpy (reject?) little lithium cells in there powering the LED. The coil leads terminated into air under a piece of Scotch tape. The "magnet" was a lump of pot metal, crudely snipped off with clippers.

"Round eye not notice! Light work for intermittent duty for a few months, it stop, he say 'Oh... must be broke... buy more.'"

Same price, same company, universal rip-off of every customer who'd come back for more of the original product.

LLoyd

Lloyd, this is an amazing story, I never heard anything as outrageous.

Yep. We're considering if it's worth the time to get involved with customs and the US foreign trade people. That would cost us a lot more in time than the flashlights are worth... but it's the principle that bugs me. Most people - even tinkerers like us here on this group - would seldom take apart something they're familiar with and which seems to be working.

It was really an accident while I was taking a rest from the San Antonio sun that I noticed it. If I hadn't just been idly playing with the flashlight at the time, I'd never have seen it.

LLoyd

I would think that you could report it to the FTC with little effort. Might need to send samples of the original functional and new scam versions to them.

Pete C.

"Revenge is a dish best served cold."

You might not be able to get a refund straight off, but you might be able to get the word out to Customs and the Importer Community - and suddenly a refund check may show up in a lame attempt to get you to shut up. ;-)

Start by putting up a webpage with a dissection of the flashlight - both the way it's supposed to work, and the faked model you got. Include pictures picking up iron filings with a real flashlight's magnet and trying to do it with the faked one's slug...

They probably aren't lithium batteries, that would cost more. Why spend for lithium if you are already setting out to build a rip-off? Just a plain carbon-zinc with the zinc can exposed - the lumps are where the electrolyte is working it's way through a thin or impure spot in the zinc already. It just has to work long enough to show it works, and get thrown in a drawer "for emergencies" - by the time most people find out they're dead, the flashlight is "out of warranty"...

More important, make sure you include complete contact information for the supplier and importer, and the factory if you can get them.

And make sure the page is Bot-Crawlable and has a nice keyword file, so anyone searching Google or Ask.com for a suppler to buy those "Faraday Flashlights" from, or for information on that supplier, will be sure to find it.

-->--

There were similar tales in a thread on alt.home.repair recently.

As a skeptic I objected on first principles that the mechanical input of a shaking arm was simply not enough watts to light a bulb. Others responded that I was an idiot because this gadget obviously had a coil and magnet in it.

Cripes. Why do we need the gummint to be nannying us away from such trivia? What's next? Real women don't look at all like retouched magazine models?

I mentioned that in a thread about a year ago.. Some of the shake lights were being counterfeited..... Chinese counterfeiting other Chinese products. Which I found fascinating.

Gunner

"If I'm going to reach out to the the Democrats then I need a third hand.There's no way I'm letting go of my wallet or my gun while they're around."

"Democrat. In the dictionary it's right after demobilize and right before demode` (out of fashion).

-Buddy Jordan 2001

The fact that there are fakes in circulation in no way proves that the real versions don't work. The real versions of that flashlight do indeed work as advertised. They of course still can't compare to a real Maglight since the LED just doesn't have the output and it's not one of those 3W Luxeons either.

Pete C.

Co. I usedtoworkfor looked to work with a Chinese company based in california. The company was based in CA because of the threat of being cloned by another chinese company.

Dave