Perhaps my favorite movie line of all: "A man's got to know his limitations." Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) in Magnum Force, 1973.
I think the TV stations need to show that movie a lot more until it sinks in with a decent amount of the population ....... especially people in their 20's.
They are a communist Chinese internet retailer that spans the globe, much like an Amazon, but with merch of questionable origin and quality. Not my thing.
I agree about Temu ads and anything made in China. I avoid Chinese products as much as possible. I buy American made (MTL) and Japanese (primarily Kato) when I can but unfortunately most products are made in China with no alternative available.
Very true. A few years ago I was at our local woodworking store to buy a Forstner bit for a project. No U.S. bits were among the inventory. Rather than go cheap Chinese, I was amazed to find one made in Great Britain and almost felt patriotic buying it.
Most of the things on Amazon are made in China However, I agree on the poor quality of Chinese designed and made items.
A classic example. For Christmas I chanced a $17 eBay battery adapter that would allow me to connect Ryobi batteries to my old DeWalt 18V tools. The Ryobi battery fit the adapter well, but the adapter would not insert into my DeWalt tools, not even nearly so. After a lot of fussing around with a caliper, I found that the Chinesium 3D print was way off throughout. It wasn't worth the hassle to return it, so I spent a few hours with sandpaper working the various surfaces just so and finally achieved a fit.
Are you guys aware of where the majority of your model trains are made? So when you say that Chinese goods are junk you are saying that Atlas, BLI, Intermountain, Rapido Trains and Scale Trains are junk by association? However a good portion of Chinese stuff is inferior but not all of them are.
Alister, I agree with you. I have 4 BLI and 3 Atlas locomotives that are very well made. My objection to Chinese products is not their quality though many are definitely inferior. My objection is the CCP (Chinese Communist Party). All large companies in China are owned by high level CCP members. I only buy products made in China when I have no alternative.
Not all latest BLI locos are made in China. The latest release of F3 units in N scale are made in Vietnam! Good paint and detail on the locos. Have both DCC and DC versions. DC units have next 18 sockets, but looking at the DCC version it appears to be he usual hard wiring without any socket for drop in decoder exchange. John
It depends upon the entire process for how they are made. Those brands you named also exercise a good amount of quality control. Their targeted market demands it, or they'd be quickly out of business. The battery item is a knock-off/made for mass market type of export, which follows a much less stringent or completely lacking manufacturing process. Where they may not, or simply do not care at all and just dump it out there on the unsuspecting world. It is seeing so much, too much, of this latter scheme which tarnishes the whole nation. They know good and well about it, but do little to nothing to stop it.
There was a piece some years ago in The Atlantic magazine about this (back when I was still reading it in print!)... a manufacturing facility making goods for a name brand, then using the rest of the available capacity to make "off brand" copies of essentially the same thing for direct sale. The example used, if I recall correctly, was cell phone batteries. The "off brand" version was one-seventh the price of the "name brand" version. So I'm ahead, I thought, even if it only lasts 25 percent as long...
I have a friend that does a bit of business in China, he told you have ride them pretty hard to get a quality product. You can agree on the concept and production practices, then they try to change it, take short cuts and the like, it's just so cheap to do it there that it makes it worth it I guess.
About 25 years ago I met Wolfgang Richter at a Long Island Garden Railroaders meeting. Wolfgang and his brother Eberhard founded the LGB G Gauge brand for Lehmann Brothers. He told us that LGB was moving manufacturing to China. At the time LGB was very high quality but more expensive than other G Gauge manufacturers and sales were slumping. After the meeting he stayed a while to talk to people. I asked him about the poor quality of many Chinese products. He told me that the trains and accessories would be made from German materials shipped to China and that they would keep a close eye on the manufacturing process. He said the Chinese were capable of producing quality goods but you had to stay on top of them. Left to their own devices they would slack off and cut corners.
Then they'll steal your methods and appearance, make copies that look similar and undersell you by 50%. That's their MO.
I recall that there's no patent protection for non-Chinese companies having products produced in China. I talked with a manufacturer of mechanical seals (a precision industrial product) and within several months of them transferring production to China, copies were being produced. Too, a number of N Scale manufacturers found that they did not possess the molds or further rights to products they had produced in China, despite their having invested much time and capital in product design.
