Brand Names

Hi. while I respect peoples political decisions as from where their purchases are made, when buying goods that contain electronics and despite which part of the world they may be made in, it is likely that one or many more of the components inside would have been made in China. The thing is, most places in the world have their political objections including the UK.

Regards Nick.

I'm with SOD on this. I've seen Mitutoyo go from unfairly-despised cheapies in the 70s, to a top brand with its own choir of fanboys and gang of counterfeiters. Nationality-based quality judgement is nothing other than a cloak for prejudice.

You can really only decide on the quality of an item by inspecting it yourself for the quality criteria that bear on your own actual requirements. Sometimes you just have to have to buy without physical inspection and take a chance - and then you win some, you lose some.

My dear old dad - a clever chap, with an Engineering job, bought a Yaris for the same reason. Excellent cars in their day, and their reliability compared with most other marques was confirmed over several years by customers, the trade, and motoring organisations. Unfortunately, dad fancied an automatic, and went for a special offer without doing his homework. He bought a version of the Yaris fitted with an unreliable automatic transmission, which I think was eventually withdrawn.

So despite Toyota being a trusted maker, and the Yaris range having a proven track record, buying by brand landed dad with a disappointing car. Pleased with everything apart from the transmission, which made driving easy when working properly, but it frequently misbehaved. Anyone know the details : I suspect the design was flawed, rather than the box being badly made of poor materials?

Rolls Royce have had their share of failures too! Everyone knows about the marvellous Merlin, which not only worked well, but the high-performance design supported many improvements. Power output was boosted repeatedly, and the engine stayed reliable. However, at about the same time RR got into serious difficulty with the Vampire engine. More powerful than the Merlin, but riddled with large and small technical issues, and never reliable. A failure.

I thinks it's much more important to concentrate on evidence than names. Based on Rolls Royce failing to deliver the Vampire, the RAF should have dumped them in 1940. Fortunately, it wasn't the RR brand that mattered, it was the companies overall ability to deliver results, and the RAF knew about the Merlin and other goodies.  All the evidence has to be considered.

I fear humanity is much too fond of accepting simple but wrong answers to complex problems. Why bother painfully extracting extracting knowledge from information, and information from data, when prejudice, beliefs and herd instinct are so easy? I'm in favour of simplification, but done properly it's hard work and must never be taken too far. Let's not simplify our hammers by removing the handle.

In my world there are no sacred cows. Or infallible brand-names. And history shows believing in things despite the evidence always ends badly. Sadly, as a species, we'd rather believe in a comfortable lie than accept an uncomfortable truth.  Fight against it!

Dave

Edited By SillyOldDuffer on 17/07/2022 10:42:21

Reputation does have a lot to do with choice. Remember back in the '60's & possibly into the '70's when British motorbikes were unreliable, and leaked oil everywhere? Then along came the Japanese with their reliable leakproof buzz boxes. A passing fad, perhaps. Only the British motorcycle fraternity deserted the British manufacturers in favour of the Japanese! Where are the British manufacturers now? Having said that, I did have a Yamaha SR500 single cylinder, big thumper. Nice machine, too fast for me, but it did have a serious design flaw in that mine did not have any means of lubricating the rear swinging arm pivot with the inevitable result of an expensive repair after a MOT failure.

Similarly, think of the British motorcar industry. Leaky, possibly unreliable although mine were not that bad, not well made. Along came people like VW - remember the original Beetles? You could drive them all day flat out without a problem and without any oil leaks. And so on. Where is the British motorcar industry now?

It wasn't all perfect. I remember Japanese being a byword for being junk. But they realised that, and cleaned up their act, adopting things such as TQM (Total Quality Management) with the result we know today. It's fair to say that my present car, Toyota Avensis 1.8 petrol, 110K miles, 9 years from new, is the best car I've ever owned in every respect. I've had an A35 van (rotbox), Minor 1000 (incurable oil leaks), two Maxis (Oil leaks, suspension problems, clutch failures due to the oil leaks, door rot), VW Beetle (1969 1300 - generally reliable but ultimately body rot), VW Type 3 Fastback Estate (Crap), Peugeot 405 TDI, Focus TDI (fuel filter/clutch/airflow sensor/engine failure/poor tyre life). And the present Toyota? Erm, my wife broke the internal mirror, and the air-con has failed, but well that's it really. Of course, I am discounting what you might consider to be disposable items, eg tyres, brake components, bulbs, normal servicing, exhaust systems, but even here, the Toyota is still winning hands down.

We have two Canon cameras, more point and shoot than SLR, but they work. Actually, the older one has just failed at 16 years old. Before that a Russian Cosmic 35 which literally fell apart after 25 or more years, and a Yashica manual SLR. Nice camera that, but too much messing about to set it up for me.

I've already mentioned elsewhere the Toshiba laptops, now Dynabook. The Tosh's did quite well: the present Dynabooks are too new to say. Our first automatic washer, TricityBendix, lasted 5 years, then fell apart. It's replacement (same make) lasted nearer 15 to 20 years. The current Bosch is over 20 years old. To be fair, the amount of work they did has dropped as the kids left home. In the early years we had TCE (Thorn Consumer Electronics) TV's. Then a Philips 10" colour tv - that ended up as a colour monitor for a Spectrum computer. And then a Mitsubishi 21" tv. 25 years but then wasn't compatible with DVR's.

I could go on, but in reality I'm getting down to small consumer items, items which if they fail, are simply replaced. Most things usually work and work well until outdated, and even then we sometimes can't be bothered - if it works, why waste time and money updating it.

The one thing that does stand out to me is the preponderance of Japanese stuff. Makes one think, doesn't it?

Cheers,

Peter G. Shaw

Whatever you are reading this on is very likely at least partially Chinese-made, its pcb for example mass-produced on machines designed and manufactured in Holland, Germany and here in the UK*.

Trying to make a Covid-related point by not buying anything Chinese-made, nor presumably even if made in Britain but by a Chinese-owned firm, is all very noble but not far off impossible these days; and it would take far more than just a few making choices like that to worry a country the entire "Western" commercial world has spent several years encouraging to develop as it has.

.

Backing away from the "P-word", there is nothing new in badge-engineering and outright IP theft.

For some years I owned a big IXL lathe, and subsequently learnt from Tony Griffiths' lathes.co that "IXL" was little more than a dealer blind-rivetting its prominent brass name-plate to machines made in Germany, though I forget its real maker's name. (I subsequently donated the lathe to the Lynton & Barnstaple Railway's workshop.)

Ajax sold a mill-drill very much like those from Warco etc, familiar to many of us; but I think Ajax itself did not make all its own "products"; just stuck its name on others.

.

Among that "IXL" lathe's duties were the early parts for my miniature Hindley steam-wagon, a project still unfinished and dragging for far, far too long! Hindley & Sons, based in Bourton, North Dorset made a large range of engineering products including a number of 3 patterns of steam-wagon; for which they patented a boiler design intended to cope with steep hills - such as that from their valley-floor factory.

I have seen, via miniatures, basically the same boiler design used on a French-made Portable Engine and the Shay locomotives: the latter as a pair built by 'Western Steam' - deciding my choice to contract my Hindley boiler to Helen Verrall's company.

Hindley also cheekily patented wheels supposedly intended to absorb road-shocks. This merely gave their standard wheels - rose-pierced plates joining hub to plain steel tyre - a thick layer of wood between the plate flanges and the tyre. None of their publicity photos show these, probably a lot cheaper than the Bauley wheels optionally offered, but I have copied them for my project. How did they gain the patent? I can't believe it sufficiently novel for patenting; but it was a bit late. This era saw the advances of rubber tyres beginning to enjoy MacAdam-surfaced roads now gaining Tar-macadam tops. While Hindley stuck with plain steel rims that must have been awful on ice and wet granite setts, despite their Ackermann steering.

Whilst my research showed a Hindley wagon was bought by the Chewton Mendip company of C.W. Harris. This Somerset outfit made a petrol car under the 'Mendip' brand; but also tried offering a 'Mendip' -brand steam-wagon looking identical to the existing product from South of the said Hills.

It does not seem to have caught on. There seems to have been no legal fight, but by then (1910s), the overtype and vertical-engine steam-wagon with open cab, or no cab at all, was old-fashioned. The battery-electric vehicle was in its ascendency until someone twigged that petrol and diesel had certain advantages further still...

*

*(I worked for several years for the last, which is going from strength to strength. Now called ASM under new ownership, it retains the original DEK name as the brand on the screen-printing machines that were always its speciality. No, 'DEK' is not a misprint for computer company 'DEC', nor an abbbreviation. The firm's founder carefully and shrewdly invented it as a brand-name meaning nothing as a word but easy to pronounce in any language!

DEK used to have its own machine-shop, where one day a machinist accidentally scraped an aerosol can of cutting-fluid to reveal another make completely hidden under the seller's label! Though allegedly we did the same things when our early product range catered for the souvenir and brand-goods makers: supplying "recommended" , "own-brand" inks in bottles filled from bulk containers bought from a generic-ink maker! )

Since someone has mentioned cameras and as possibly the only one here who still uses a Hasselblad regularly, we must be careful not to get into an apples/oranges situation. Like my Leicas Rolleis and the 'blad all mechanical cameras demand regular cleaning and lubrication. So too with many bits of engineering equipment.

An electronic device (with a few notable exceptions) does not. So if I wanted to take the Hasselblad out I would need to remember it has not long been cleaned - while the Plaubel Makina, in theory a better camera, has never been serviced since I had it. About 2 feet from me is a 1913 N&G Baby Sibyl which I have just serviced and the first film was great. The comments on Former Soviet Union cameras are interesting as they were often dumped in the west for foreign currency, crude in the extreme. While some never worked well, or at all (a fault found in some american cameras as well to be fair) and the quality depended upon the number of vodkas taken with the assembler's lunch, they can usually be repaired and made to work well (ie clean off the same gun oil they were lubricated with that I remember from Lee Enfields!)

But If I want to take out a camera that I have not used for a while I would take the Nikon f3 or Bronica because as they are electronic they will (subject to the lens being ok) always work with a fresh battery. However if the electronics were ever to go wrong it would be extremely difficult to repair either and far beyond me, even if spare parts are available.

In cameras it was mainly the Japanese who went electronic and european brands went in the direction of increasingly uneconomic low production devices either mechanical or electronic and a meaningful comparison is difficult to impossible.

It is also interesting that Austria remained in the game longer than most with Eumig movie equipment and Emco engineering stuff staying after much other european kit had gone.

Cynicism about product names and grades is sometimes well justified. I spent much of my working life at a large international paint manufacturer. Their standard practice was to make a large batch of popular lines, like white interior PVA and then split it. Some went into premium quality cans, some went into plainer cans for the trade market, some went into cans with another company's name on it that was owned by the parent company but had a reputation for cheaper products, and some was sold to any little known manufacturer that wanted it. So four different selling prices for the same batch of paint. Hard luck for anyone that thought by paying more for the premium product would give them a better product. It seems unlikely that some companies that make workshop equipment would hesitate to use similar tactics if they could get away with it. Then there is the question that some countries may work to a totally different standard of ethics to those applied in the UK.

And while on the subject of electronics v. mechanical I drove several dodgy Minis in the 70's and a 1966 VW Beetle in the 90's that could always be repaired until the tin worm got too much of a hold - but had to drop a 1997 car because the engine warning light came on too often but not because of an engine fault but something in the many interconnected systems that fed it and the main dealer could not locate.

Similarly a couple of cars later on we had one that didn't have a key but a card and starting was unreliable.

We were recommended a new battery by the breakdown service but they gave us some of the money back when it didn't solve the problem. Apparently the starting sequence was to put the card into a reader, check with the body computer that the alarm was not triggered, check the electric power steering was not hard against the kerb and if so disable it to prevent damage, check the electric hand brake was on and then talk to the ABS before going to the engine computer to set that up for starting providing there were no issues. Then the steering lock was released. Only then would the motor turn over and subject to oil pressure and air temperature start.

That one ran perfectly for 6 years but when the trouble started the dealer suggested replacing each component in turn, at my expense, until the fault was fixed. My comment that I could do that so why did I need to pay his labour charges when his 'technicians' were no better than I was did not go down well!

Edited By Nick Clarke 3 on 17/07/2022 11:49:19

When I was working I had a Morris Marina diesel company car. I used to put a pint of oil in every Monday Morning.

( 1000 -1500 miles.) The dealers claimed that it was within spec. I never had any problems with it and the odometer went all the way round plus about 30000 miles before it was replaced.

Roy

My Dad says that when he worked for Foster Clarks, their own internal quality control was stricter than all of the big-name contracts, simply because they got to decide how the money got spent and where the profit came from.

Most of us are only casual buyers - a new car every few years, or one lathe per lifetime - so our experience and advice arising from it is largely subjective and anecdotal. And that's without personal dogma, like not buying Chinese or I'll never own a Ford, which ought to be instantly discounted but rarely is.

Nick Clarke 3 another regular hassy user here 1 500cm and 2 elm’s

Edited By Ian Parkin on 17/07/2022 13:04:45

Edited By Ian Parkin on 17/07/2022 13:04:59

Re Badge Engineering

When I was in Purchase, I visited one of our filter suppliers.

We had our filters branded for us, but when we got to the assembly line there were filters painted and badged as ours, the OEMs and several of our customers.

returning to the office, we walked between two mirror image assembly lines. At the end, on one side the filter was put an O E M branded box, on the other side of the aisle they went into a box printed as a "Genuine" vehicle manufacturer's part.

Apart from £90 the apparent difference between my Panasonic and it's Leica equivalent seemed to, be the red spot. Reputedly, the software was different.

If you buy enough of anything, the manufacturer will call it whatever you like! Witness supermarket "Own brands"

Howard

I din't know that Heinz was American, still the best baked bean though.

I have owned two American cars, well probably Canadian I think because they were both right hand drive. A 1959 Chevrolet, and a 1968 Rambler. Two good cars, well built, and strongly built. Each came with a bumper jack. Hook the jack under special points in the front or rear bumper and lift the car.

When I was very young, Japanese made goods were frowned on as being poorly made. Now look at them. I wonder if the Chinese will get to the same point one day?

For what it's worth, if we are talking about reliability and car mileages, the first 'decent' car I bought, i.e. about 3 years old as opposed to the over 15 year old rubbish my previous financial circumstances had compelled me to run, was a 1984 Volvo 240 with 84K on the clock, probably the only reason I could afford it even then. I took it round to 299K miles, never put a spanner near the engine but changed the oil and filter, cleaned the plugs and points fairly regularly as you did in those days and had some new discs and pads fitted. I even got £1K (on paper) in one of those 'special' deals they offered in those days (yes, I know I didn't really get £1K but it looked good on the finance application form) which I am sure fooled some people into thinking that they were actually getting something for nothing when they used to offer to take any car in any condition as a deposit. I bought a Volvo 740 Estate automatic after a short dalliance with a Jaguar XJ6, which if that was the best the supposed creme-de-la-creme of the British motor industry could produce at the time, then no wonder we lost it. I took the 740 round to 301K miles, again with the very minimal of expense and attention. Just before my employer then put me into a company car the engine was still running fine and the auto-gearbox still worked perfectly but the torque converter (I think) had started to vibrate. I got £150 for it from a guy who at the time specialised in refurbishing and rebuilding Volvo's and wanted it for parts. When I retired and bought two new-ish cars, one each for myself and the wife, guess which brand I chose to the exclusion of all others, even though I know Volvo Cars are now owned by the Chinese.

Wow DEK! I used to work for them, as a customer support engineer way back in the mid nineties. They have changed their name but still based in Weymouth. It used to be said there is a 1 in 3 chance that any surface mounted PCB would have been made on a DEK printer...

Kind regards

Derek

To be fair, the products differ a bit from country to country. Canadian Heinz baked beans are different from British. Even though I originally grew up in the UK I prefer the Canadian version .... it's what you get used to.

.... and Canadian cars are left-hand drive !

Not a universally-shared opinion.

I think they're way overrated, with too much thin sauce and too few actual beans.

I think Sainsbury's own brand is at least equal and Morrison's better - more beans and thicker sauce, without all the favour-bearing ingredients like salt, fat and sugar reduced or taken out.