What price frustration?

[Chris TriceParticipant @christrice43267]

That may be true but were the articles about improvements in the design or about poor quality of manufacture? I suspect the former. The core of the discussion is about how the machines compare today. For example, the Chinese designs might be essentially sound (many of them unashamedly copied from western designs) but the execution in respect of manufacture is generally not as good, at least at the hobby end of the market, although they’re getting better. If you build to a price then the first casualty is quality. Another example, compare the grittiness of ballraces of some far eastern accessories compared with a more expensive bearing. How many have changed out their headstock bearings for better ones? I’m not talking about upgrading, just replacing with the same spec but better branded. There is a difference. Co-centricity of collets. That’s a regular gripe on these boards. How accurate are centres ground? Good enough for many and that’s fine and as mentioned, very good for the price but Swiss or British/US quality they aren’t…. generally.  Yes, there are some exception that are very good but unless you check the exact machine and every accessory you are purchasing before handing the money over, what is your level of trust that all will be well?

[Chris TriceParticipant @christrice43267]

… and just to show I’m not set on auto eastern bashing, I should mention  I’m on the verge of buying a second lathe for the work arena which will probably be chinese, however, it’ll be a careful selection process and I won’t be expecting Schaublin quality while still leaving myself open to having my expectations pleasantly surpassed.

[John Stevenson 1Participant @johnstevenson1]

I bought a new Myford ML7 in 1969, brand new so the profits went to the factory as opposed to buying second hand.

 

I bought a brand new C7 Capstan Tri-lever in about 1985, again profits going to the factory, just to point out that I have supported them directly.

 

My ML7 and C7 had their beds ground on their slideway grinding machine, I have no idea what age it is but it is still the same machine they use today.

Last time I was over in China at the Canton show I made a point of asking on the various stands how old their slideway grinders were. It was an interesting exercise getting this across. The answers ranged from don’t know to 1 year old, 6 months old and we are waiting a new CNC grinder from Switzerland.

 

The reason I asked this was that 3 years ago now I was getting some tooling reground and asked the guy at the tooling place if they were busy. He said they were but they could be busier if they could get the new machinery they needed. Turned out that that years total production and most of the coming years production was going to China.

 

His comment was they are making tooling we can’t and not only that they are making it on machinery we have never even seen.

 

I don’t want to bash British engineering but why should we pay thru the nose for a 60 year old design produced on outdated machinery, that’s their problem, not ours.

The basic Myford lathe is a very simple design and cannot warrant a price tag of £7,000.

 

John S.

[John CoatesParticipant @johncoates48577]

Posted by Sam Stones on 04/08/2010 08:58:45:

Instead, I offer the following :-

William Edwards Deming 1900-1993 (refer Wikipedia) had one statement which has stuck in my mind –

 

“Quality is Free”.

 Interestingly the quote is normally attributed to Philip Crosby as it was the title of his best selling QM book. The quality of wikipedia may need assessing

I don’t think that Deming or Crosby meant that quality is cheap. The phrase can be summarised (by me) as the total cost of a product can be the same and quality improved if various techniques are employed to reduce waste, re-work and warranty repairs.

  

[Bill PudneyParticipant @billpudney37759]

When I had to work for a living one of my jobs was to select and buy new

machine tools.

The last project was quite significant by Australian standards.  The first phase was for three very specialised large capacity 5 axis CNC mills.  The company that I worked for was getting all excited by the size of this deal, until it was pointed out very politely by each of the three companies we were dealing with (one Japanese, one Swiss, one German) that they were a bit stretched at the time because of the twenty and thirty large capacity 5 axis CNC machines being installed in China, PER MONTH.

They may not be producing  equivalent quality machines yet, but they will, as sure as water flows downhill

cheers

Bill Pudney

[Author]

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