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Old January 13th 18, 02:52 AM posted to rec.bicycles.tech
Andre Jute[_2_]
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Default DIY China

On Friday, January 12, 2018 at 1:32:32 PM UTC, AMuzi wrote:
On 1/11/2018 8:43 PM, Frank Krygowski wrote:
On 1/11/2018 8:54 PM, Emanuel Berg wrote:
Andre Jute wrote:

As for value, the Chinese offer superb value
to those who know what they want and how to
evaluate it. Much of what you buy in America
under familiar brand names is made in China.

Here, virtually all tools sold are made in
China (i.e., the PRC). I have a torque wrench
that is also made in China, only in Taiwan.
I also have a (new) revolving punch that is
made in Germany. Other than that, all my
Swedish tools (e.g., Bacho), German
tools (Heyco), Japanese tools, socialist Poland
tools, etc., are old, from the
"pre-China" period.

Also clothes are often, but not always, made in
the PRC. HH, the famous Norwegian brand of
winter clothes, have there stuff made there, as
do many, many others.

Even tho they seem to make all the stuff for
the western contractors and DIYers alike, one
thing I wonder is how much of a DIY culture
they themselves have?

My father, who has a Chinese wife, told me
about their shopping palaces and how shopping
is the key pass-time for people there.
And apparently the biggest building in the
world isn't the Pentagon like in the 50s but
a Chinese mall! So I asked him if he could get
tools as well? And he said he never saw any!

And I have met many Chinese people during my
computer years at the university and by the
look of their bodies and they way they carry
them around, compared to westerners - N.B.
also university people - from the looks of it
the Chinese guys and girls never used a hand
tools or did any physical labor whatsoever,
and some of them, surprisingly, I don't think
ever did any sports or dancing or
whatever either.

Obviously their skill of manufacturing stuff is
beyond doubt, but I wonder if it is limited to
the people doing it, and not a reflection of
their entire society as it was during the
European/American industrial era?


There are some interesting ideas about the evolution of a
nation's manufacturing capability at
http://www.sheldonbrown.com/shimano333.html

Start reading at "Background: The International Bicycle Cycle"

The author seems to have the opinion that the skill in
manufacturing is not inborn, but is brought in by companies
from other countries looking for cheaper labor and cheaper
manufacturing in general. I think that's a reasonable
explanation for China's manufacturing growth.



Let's hobble our manufacturers with endless licenses,
permits, fines, fees, inspections and various impedimenta
then mandate high labor costs, obfuscate those costs with
additional employer expenses, insanely inflate
transportation and energy costs, throw in a frenetic
plaintiff's bar and see what happens.

Ya think chinese vendors could beat the price?

--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971


Chinese ex-factory prices are rising fast. I very bought some very large squirrel brushes and the average price was 12 Euro at my door. They're very nicely made, but less than a handful of years ago they were around a fiver each, whereas the price for European production over the same timespan has increased only from about €40 to €45 - 50 per unit. Similarly, years ago I bought a wooden box of Chinese brushes from the very best factory for about thirty bucks from a Chinese brush maker who was given the brushes as payment in kind; the other day I saw the same brushes advertised for near enough a couple of hundred bucks (still a bargain compared to European prices, but probably not for long).

Surprisingly, what screws Chinese trade with the West is their rotten infrastructure and, inferred, poor attitude of transport system workers. Aliexpress permits you to track a parcel from picking off the shelf and packaging of the order to your door in tiny steps. What struck me is that days or weeks could pass while the parcel sat at the vendor waiting for the Chinese Post Office to come pick it up, and then more days or weeks being shunted around pointlessly, and then at the airport more of the same, and then spend apparently weeks in the air -- more likely stuck in a warehouse where the scanner doesn't work -- whereas once it reaches a destination in a place where the post office has been privatized, say Dublin, you can bet money it will be delivered to you the next morning even if you live deep in the countryside. At each of these stages there is clearly Chinese overmanning complete with forms to be filled in, including one for export customs clearance. WTF? (And I complained when my letter to the driver license bureau in Johannesburg was answered by three separate important-sounding executives all eager to help renew a license I used only when I was caught speeding.) I saw the same wretched overmanning-drag in Russia when I lectured there in the Brezhnev years, trying to help them use their excellent statistics (it is no accident that my statistical mentor was a Russian) for better purposes than telling lies, and in the socialized parts of Africa. This is a root problem, and the attitude that goes with it will not be changed overnight, regardless of what industrial miracle the leadership might dream of, and entrepreneurs strive to create on the ground. A routine delivery from China takes six weeks and if anything goes wrong, up to twelve weeks. That's not the near-instant gratification that Amazon is using to bond Westerners to it.

Andre Jute
From small acorns do large oaks grow
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