Chinese Manufacturing.

Everything I have bought from China so far has been a monster headache. I should have just gone to the children's orphanage and given them the money

mykey- wrote: MattStolton wrote: Also need to stamp it big on quality control. The Chinese don't often know what they are making,  first and maybe second shipment will be perfect, all the rest will be sh-t

Perhaps I should have said continued quality control. Give them an inch, they will take a yard.

However, the "greed" works both ways.

A certain DJ manufacturer we used to do some evaluation work for, basically got greedy. Kept pushing the chinese for a repeat shipment, but "could you make it $2 cheaper per unit this time" Retail price was the same, they wanted to increase their margin....

Chinese kept obliging the requests, and ended up making absolute unreliable sh1te. It wasn't the chinese's fault, they just honoured what was asked from them. It was the UK "manufacturer" fault.

I like Prolight's way of dealing with China. There guy Geoff of the Service Bench, is very often out there to inspect new and old product lines. He also sees what gets returned to them by customers, for warranty repair. So he knows what products have issues, and gets them sorted. He also does a lot of pre-production prototype evaluation in the UK. Also, they have stuck with pretty much one factory, so have built up a serious relationship.

MarjanM wrote: Manufacturing in Eastern Europe is not by far more expensive then China, and the quality is much better. So i do wonder why everyone went to China. Yes it has some advantages, but when you consider the long transit time for transport, and everlasting question weather you will get what you ordered or not, makes choosing eastern Europe much wiser choice.

yeah, but we don't want to people hiding in our scoops, passport or no passport

QSC RMX range is made in china . Same for ALTO Macro and Behringer Europower . In fact , they all come from the same factory . It even seems that the QSC and the ALTO are the same amps .

Interesting posts. I've never directly imported from China, although I exported quite a lot of gear. Basically, you can't trust them. With me, they wanted the Earth, and then once you'd agreed a price and committed yourself to production, they would ask for changes or add ons. On the next batch, they would want 10% off etc. On these occasions, I was able to get my suppliers to drop for cash up front to ease the situation. After all this, they disappear off the face of the Earth, and swear allegiance to someone else. 

Heh. Remember the electrolytic capacitor farce a few years ago - that affected god knows how many PCs ? Story that eventually got out was :-

Many of the (reasonably reputabe) Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers like Asus, MSI etc (who made mobos for big names like IBM, Dell, HP et al) . switched their assy to mainland China - but some components were then still made in Japan, Korea, etc. Then some bright spark in China decided to start making electrolytic caps to undercut price - and tried to copy/clone the formula for the electrolyte - but got it a bit wrong, resulting in caps that "worked" - but just didn't last the course over time. Shortly after - all over the world - we started getting PCs exhibiting strange intermittent crashing, blue-screening etc. - wasted _so_ much time for techs, service bods etc. Then it got traced to those electrolytic caps (usually the ones around the VRMs for the CPU) beginning to fail, spew out and going off tolerance.

Now the cost of replacing those mobo caps by hand was prohibitive .... so 1000's - mebbe millions of PCs around the world were basically junked because of this ....... all because someone in China was after saving 1p or 2p per cap. If you're Asus or MSI - I'd assume you specify 10uF at 16V or whatever - you may specify temp tolerance and mebbe other stuff - but are you gonna specify manufacturer or source ?

I think its embedded in the business psyche to try to pull these kind of strokes - its part of the "game" .....

As others have said - if you manufacture there - you _must_ watch em like hawks. Have you're own staff literally prowling the production lines and checking _everything_ . Also scrutinising every batch of components.

Bizarre really .... if you try and mass-market manufacture anywhere else you'll probably go out of business.