Newspaper article about a machine tool manufacturer moving back from China

goods and it's validated every time I go to the city dump and have a look at the kinds of items that are ending up in our overflowing landfills.

You go to the "city dump" a lot, do you? I'm sorry, I don't believe you.

they probably account for more sales volume than all of Europe combined.

That's lovely. I still doesn't make you an expert in Chinese culture. I suspect your consumption of egg flower soup and cashew chicken is about as much exposure to Chinese culture as you've had in your entire life.

I read the article. It's an anecdote. It may - *may* - be describing a small trickle of on-shoring; it's not a flood, and it's unlikely to become one.

I think he is leaving that to you.

You seem to be doing a good job at it..... so carry on. jk

The Chinese military industrial sector is probably more of an anomaly, = than it is an accurate reflection of the China's overall average = mainstream manufacturing prowess.

And because a relatively small number of Chinese nationals are getting = themselves filthy rich by paying their workers at near-poverty = wages--very similar to the situation that exists here in the USA

If you provide no facts or rational then it seems like your statement is just something you want to believe in.

Your idea of a good response is the bit about a chicken?

Dan

As far as I know, the Chinese are perfectly capable of making good products, or shoddy products, depending on what they are asked to do. Very often they asked to make shoddy products.

I mean, with CNC equipment and generally modern production methods, there is no problem in making products made to the exact spec, consistently. If I program my machine to make a 0.237" flat and a 7mm keyway, turn the part 31.92 degrees and do the same thing again, the machine will do exactly that, regardless of where it is located, China or the US.

In China, though, I can dump used coolant near my front door, treat my employees like shit, and cheat on trademarks, something that is not possible here.

Your points regarding CNC manufacturing seem reasonable, but that's where many folks are mistaken about consistency in manufacturing when current technology is involved. Yes, you can make a few parts accurately at your leisure, but if feeding/housing your family depended upon you producing those parts at a rate of 100 per hour, the picture may change. China produces products by tonnage, not quality standards.

Epiphone guitars was an example that I mentioned earlier, and the blatently obvious cosmetic and numerous other quality issues are being "passed" as far as quality inspections go.

For the most part, people still do parts setups, programming and maintenance on CNC equipment, and those areas present opportunities for inconsistent hole locations, routing paths, sloppy fitting parts etc.

Explain the commonly experienced problem of internal threads being oversize.. or not perpendicular to a flat surface, etc, etc. I get it.. But those parts aren't being scrapped, instead they end up on retail shelves every day.

Choices are made to maintain or increase production numbers, and possibly often without the consent of the company located thousands of miles away.

Operating a large corporation by remote control is a crap shoot, and I think most manufacturers having products made in China are beginning to realize this. Now they're faced with the massive investments made to move production to China turning out to be total losses.. obviously some corporate leaders are not willing to accept that the whole "double your money by moving production to China" idea was an idiotic concept/decision/gamble.

So, now they're at a position of running a well-known brand name into the ground for the last cent they can get (crash and burn), or if they have any intentions of restoring the quality of their products and seeing continued growth, they'll need to throw away the "excuse manual", and relocate manufacturing elsewhere.

It's commonly stated that this learning to crawl before learning to walk scenario has been witnessed before. There is little in comon with post-war Japan's "imagined" gradual improvements in manufacturing quality (which you may not be familiar with because you didn't grow up here in the US).. and what's taking place in China today.

Deluded folks were saying 10-15 years ago that China's product quallity will improve just like Japan's did.. bullshit. There is essentially no comparison, since 50 years ago the overall quality of most goods was much higher than in recent years. We've been accepting the throw-away goods based class of consumerism for a couple of generations now, in the race to the bottom of quality, But low prices.

I don't see a problem with China (India, other) producing goods for Wham-mart and dollar stores.. and that's exactly what was done initially with toys and low quality goods from Japan in the 50s and 60s. But relying on China's ability to improvise their cunning methods of making a product cheaper has proven to destroy the minimally acceptable expectations of quality.

Consumers are slow to catch on, mostly oblivious and blinded by cheap prices.

Corporate execs and managers can see the writing on the wall if they aren't in denial.. when profits drop due to a 20+% product return rate of buyers returning defective products/lost sales, unacceptable ratio of marketing/advertising expenses to sales profits, etc.. they will feel the pressure to make changes in previous decisions which led them to the place they are today/tomorrow.. or they might just get replaced with another like-minded doofus who continues to make the same mistakes which end up killing the company.

Trouble is, then we have job losses here in the US and elsewhere.. but not in China where they shift production to a counterfeit product or some other POS, which can take place, essentially overnight. Not only corporate job losses, but in retail store jobs, truck drivers, on n'on down the chain.

That wasn't a potential problem in the 1950s with post-war Japan products. For one reason, because companies like RCA Victor still had a full product line of other domestically-produced goods, and the products made under license from RCA in Japan, were merely supplemental products in their overall number of goods.

I think that Japan's growth and reconstruction were being aided by numerous foreign entities, but largely by American assistance.. not corporate welfare as it's done today with a few execs getting multi-million bonuses (or the Marcos in the Phillipines), but trade agreements that led to substantial growth in production and technological advancements. It didn't take Japan 50 years to reach world-class quality levels, instead, it took the rest of the world a long time to accept that Japanese quality matched and exceeded any precision product from Germany, Switzerland, USA etc.

Almost no one learns anything.. oh, I already said that.

You can bet that these factors aren't being taught to the twenty-x year old MBAs and future corporate leaders.

I have some early products of Japan made for export, and the consistent quality is obvious, manufactured on manual machines, made to accurate precision tolerances. It seems that if there were defective or low quality parts made, which didn't meet acceptable quality, they were probably scrapped.. not packaged and packed into a shipping container headed to the USA.

It's not my belief that China can't make quality goods (CPUs aren't a trivial product), and I haven't said that.. not even in years past.

My metalworking machines being the major exception, I typically don't buy products that need to be repaired, but with my machines, I didn't have unrealistic expectations of what I was getting for the price. My new 9x20 lathe was $600 delivered.

I'm not willing to buy a $600 product that fails within weeks or months and can't be repaired because sophisticated replacement parts aren't available or the fabrication techniques can't be duplicated manually (massive ICs requiring specialized equipment to replace them, components bonded to a large circuit board with epoxy).

So, my equpiment purchases are often made from the trailing edge of technology.. stuff that can still be repaired even if I have to make a new part on my machines.

I'm not particularly cheap or poor, but there's a limit to how much I'll pay for present day throw-away technology.

I'll leave the spreading landfill aspect rest, but the issue of scrap cardboard is an export commodity now, speaks volumes.