Havn't seen anything like this for a while....

adequate. To

secure, so I

hacksaw

surprising

It's probably been case hardened, but the case is too thin - I had some 12" blades like that a few years back. Screwfix are very good with refunds or replacements - give 'em a call.

AWEM

I bought a bow saw that was cheap and Chinese made. Impossible to do a straight cut with it so useless on branches above an inch thick - you start out cutting them across and by the time you're half way through the blade has moved through 90 degrees so you're cutting the branch down it's length. Threw it away and bought a Stanley one for 5 times the price. At least it works. The difference in the blades was very noticeable. The Chinese one was really thin and also not very wide, teeth the back, compared to the Stanley one.

Also had a staple gun that was crap and ended up in the dustbin - made in China.

I've had several disastrous purchases that on subsequent inspection turned out to be Chinese and complete crap. Now I always look at the label before buying anything. I treat "Made in China" as a hazard warning label and never knowingly buy anything Chinese made.

In message , David in Normandy writes

I'm wondering what you might actually have bought then

My impression is that Chinese industry now is sort of comparable to Britain in the height of the Industrial Revolution, except that they have embraced Japanese quality control along the way. In contrast to Hong Kong half a century ago, I think they take a genuine pride in producing good products at keen prices. I mean, they don't *have* to include a spare set of brushes with electric tools, but they almost invariably do. Presumably they expect to get a long and hard life out of them in their domestic market. OK, for the bargain basement stuff they don't spend a lot of time in finishing and I wouldn't buy a cheap cordless drill because the batteries won't last so well. But I have a little two stroke genny and a two inch petrol water pump and they are very well made and have been totally reliable. Like a Velocette, but without the oil leaks.

It's interesting, too, that the West is obviously fighting back in what would once have been a Far East preserve: I recently bought a couple of basic Nokia phones and one was made in Hungary, the other Romania.

A mate of mine works in auto engine development and mentioned that some of the production is done in former eastern Europe as the manual labour is cheaper than robots to do the assembly.

Like those screwdriver sets you see in fancy-goods stores. Made of metal with similar properties as cream cheese.

Generally agree with that sentiment, but we bought a 2-ton folding engine crane this week to change a Discovery V8 engine, and although it was cheap and obviously Chinese, the basics were fine, it does the job and for £139 collected, was significantly cheaper than the same thing sold by Sealey/Clarke/Machine Mart etc.

The main 'improvements' would be nylocs on the M16 pivot bolts and more flat washers on the fasteners, but it is fine 'as is' for the occasional job.

We do have other lifting tackle BTW, but they are all at the house and the Disco is at the factory.

Peter

-- Peter & Rita Forbes Email: snipped-for-privacy@easynet.co.uk

You're likely buying a number of Chinese made things without knowing it - just because it says 'made in Germany' etc means not a lot in practice.

In message , David in Normandy writes

I bet you've bought loads that wasn't marked as made in China but had many if not all of it's components made there and assembled somewhere you have a higher opinion of though.

China has a wonderful attitude, you can have almost any price or quality you want and they'll happily manufacture it for you.

It's not *really* their fault that Western companies buy cheap tat and slap huge profit margins on it or cheap westerners buy the tat and expect miracles from it.

Well you bought one

Cliff Coggin.

I think that is what drives the market. I've bought cheap Chinese made tools or other products only to realise that many of them were crap. However, they've got my money by then :-(

The net result is that I look for the "Made in China" warning label and try to avoid repeating the same mistake. I'm not saying all Chinese products are rubbish, just enough of them are to make me very wary about knowingly buying any more of them.

The worst Chinese product I bought was a garden marquee. It only survived 24 hours. A heavy shower of rain wet the canopy which made it sag which then collected more water which made it sag all the more until finally the whole structure collapsed into a pile of twisted tubing. All in the space of around 10 minutes. It was a complete write-off. I couldn't believe my eyes when I went outside after the shower and saw the crumpled wreck. In retrospect it was easy to see why the product was useless - the steel tubing was way too thin to have any significant structural value. As far as I'm concerned it wasn't fit for purpose - as seems to be the case with any number of Chinese products.

To be fair that's less because it was made in china, than *why* it was made in china..

I.e. a fairly usual game is to take a sum of money, spend 50% on getting a bunch of ,marketing going, then some idiot takes a sketch to China as says 'can you do this for $10' and they say 'yes, if you don't mind it collapsing when it rains' and they say 'not at all' ..

I met the guys behind some early alcopops once... 2p of grain alcohol,

1p of flavoring 3p of packaging, 30 p of tax and 35p of TV marketing and then sell it for a quid.

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember "newshound" saying something like:

They're not fake - they're just shit.

I was told this once - I assume it's true:

A UK clothing retailer took some samples of hand-made prototype white cotton shirts to a Chinese factory as examples of what they wanted manufactured in bulk. The Chinese would unstitch the hand-made samples and make the necessary patterns/machinery etc. required. Each of the original samples had some holes punched out - the retailer wanted to retain material samples from the originals. Guess what? Yep, the Chinese manufactured thousands of shirts which also had sample holes punched out.

I don't mind cheap stuff at all if I can see the construction and assess how long it'll last. The problem I find is with the 'complex' stuff, or where you can't see under the covers at the shop - I tend to avoid those like the plague and will rather go with something that has a good reputation. But if I can see how it's built, there are good and bad Chinese products - just as with items closer to home - and so long as physical shops still exist I can go take a look at the item and make a judgement based on that.

But the nice thing is, you can do those upgrades yourself quickly, easily and cheaply, so it's an all-round win. No point paying lots extra for a 'brand' in that particular case.

cheers

Jules

Yes indeed.

The place we collected it from was full to the (factory unit) ceiling with imported stuff, generators, shot blasting cabinets, and so on. They probably buy by the container load at a pretty good price.

Peter

-- Peter & Rita Forbes Email: snipped-for-privacy@easynet.co.uk

Clint Sharp coughed up some electrons that declared:

That is pretty much the sum of it.

China will make you wonderful multilayer PCBs, gold plated, the full monty (who do you think makes the hideously complicated PCBs for computer motherboards)?

They will also happily make you crap PCBs out of recycled bog rolls for your

4.99 Argos radio.

You choose.

I agree with the sentiments that it's in essence our fault. The market is flooded with choices of cheap crap that barely works, fairly cheap crap that works for a while and excellent stuff that lasts quite well. Very occasionally cheap stuff that lasts forever.

The fact that many people would rather buy 3 cheap items than one expensive item that lasts 3 times as long isn't the fault of the manufacturer.

A friend of mine bought one those cheap drill press vices off ebay =A36.99

it came ....he said it rocked on his table ..

so, sent it back at his expence ...

and received a few days latter a replacement vice that also rocked on his table

he';s helped me do a few things in the past .. so i said i would plonk it on my surface grinder and sought it out ..

so I thought ...use the the top ways a reference and grind the bottom

the effing top faces were just as rocky as the bottom ..rocked on the parallels..2mm out took me blinking three hours to sort the thing..now that's what i call crap.

I should have just chucked it away.

all the best.markj

Only very indirectly as the rest of the job lot was fine. But someone actually decided they could manufacture and sell the rubbish to someone. I really don't believe it all came from the same place.