What happened to factory rejects?

A recent purchase prompted this. Actually two.

I bought a 33JT/3MT arbor for my drill chuck last week. It has a threaded drawbar hole. It arrived today and I was about to mount it when I decided to check it first. Good thing I did as the hole is crooked to the point of not being able to use the drawbar because it fouls on the spindle before I can even thread it in a couple of turns.

I wondered: How is the hole NOT true to the axis??

And then I wondered: Whatever happened to factory rejects?

It used to be, when you went to a clothing store, you might find some items marked "irregular". Items known to have a problem; perhaps some sewing was off. But the items were definitely marked as such with the expected discount from the regular price.

Factory rejects of other products could also be found in speciality stores dedicated to seconds and merchandise was marked as such, like "item may have a problem...". Where it was permissable, of course. You obviously don't want a reject machine that could catch fire.

But I'm not seeing products labeled as factory rejects anymore. I don't see them in clothing stores and of the two products I purchased from this one tool vendor (US) both had problems. I suggested to them both times that they may have been factory rejects, but they said they don't sell rejects.

Yeah, but humans are still making mistakes. Factory rejects still exist and will continue to be made.

I suggest that vendors are just getting away with it by lumping it in with regular merchandise (those vendors that aren't charging top dollar) and just dealing with the complaints as part of customer service.

I purchased a set of spark plug wires off Amazon a while ago. Vendor was listed as the manufacturer. They had a manufacture defect so I contacted the the company directly. Their response was that "Oh, that company on Amazon isn't us. They just use our name. We've complained to Amazon, but they won't do anything."

My reaction: BS! They probably just use their Amazon account to dump the products they would otherwise lose money on.

Thoughts?

.

I think you have sussed it there, Mike … The customer is doing the QA

A ‘no quibble’ replacement apparently builds a fan base, and makes one a good supplier.

< sigh >

MichaelG.

That being said, the companies I have worked for (admittedly defense not consumer products) were very heavily involved in a "Right first time", "measure twice cut once" style quality system to reduce defective items. Obviously that was safety driven rather than profit driven but it did have a measurable improvement on the amount of rejected tasks or components.

I think the answer is that the factories that we're thinkng about have quality control procedures of such sensitivity and discernment that no rejects can ever possibly be made. It's cheaper that way...

I had an interesting conversation with a chap who ran a machine shop and had a contract to machine exhaust manifold castings for a well known premium brand car. He lost the contract to a Chinese machine shop, the price they charged was hugely attractive but the reject rate was also huge but was still worth it to the end user who had to inspect every component.

Mike

There are plenty of reject outlets for far eastern produced items that don't pass the quality checks that is why it can be pot luck with what you get from marketplaces such as Amazon, Banggood, Aliexpress, Estacy, etc.

The parts are either sold off at reduced rates or simply disappear out the back door to be found for sale elsewhere.

Cadbury have a good reject shop tool, always pick up a 1kg bag or to of "mis-shapes" Same with many of teh highstreet brands they do have factory outlets that may have slight seconds. On the engineering front we also see some of our regular suppliers selling off "customer returns" , picked up a 5C chuck for myself that way for £20 that runs fine for me. Then there is that KX3 CNC mill that was a customer return as customer was not fit to use but it works OK for me.

A friend of mine used to run an animal feed mill. Feed is made to specific protein and carbohydrate specs, regardless of actual source of that ingredient, which is how the whole BSE thing happened, one of his ingredients was chopped up Kitkat including foil and wrappers.

If you go round a far eastern market there will be stall full of T-shirts with company logos, I've even seen my own employer's ones. They are the excess made in case of rejects that weren't needed.

I'm here ! Noel.

That's broadly true, but there are many exceptions. Quality Management has a long history of improvement, but it's not applied equally everywhere.

Modern techniques, like TQM, take a wholistic approach to quality, concentrating on process such that quality is built-in to each stage of manufacture. If anything goes wrong, the process is fixed, proof of the pudding being the ability to turn the fault on and off. The approach aims to eliminate the need for inspectors because they find faults much too late. The manufacturer strives to operate a system that doesn't produce any rejects. Total Quality is typical of high-end products - cars, electronics, white goods, and much else. In the West, it's difficult not to go for low reject rates because labour is so expensive: globalisation means manufacturers can't sell expensive products produced by inefficient staff using low-productivity tooling. What customer are prepared to pay for is an important input to modern quality methods: although customers say they want the best possible, they are rarely prepared to pay for it! Manufacturers are also unwilling to make products that never wear out: they go bust if they do! So manufacturers strike a balance between cost, features and product lifetimes. With low-end goods, it's often cheaper to fix problems by replacing occasional failures than it is to employ Inspectors.

Not everyone operates an aggressive modern quality system, or needs to. Older methods are more appropriate to small production runs and specials. They also work where labour and materials are cheap. Unfortunately, the resulting factory rejects often cause problems when they reach customers. They're sold by both fair means and foul.

Quality systems go wrong! They are particularly vulnerable to human error. Dishonesty, sabotage and laziness as well as mistakes. Interesting example occurred at Sellafield 20 years ago. Sellafield is a British nuclear fuel reprocessing plant, the largest nuclear facility in Europe, and the scene of serious incident in 1957. Very much the sort of installation where I'd expect everyone to be thoroughly on the ball. Not so. After a customer noticed the safety records attached to a batch of fuel were faked, the resulting enquiry revealed incompetent management, a culture of complacency, staff shortages, failure to provide training, inadequate supervision, and widespread falsification of records. All human organisations are prone to this kind of failure and constant vigilance is required.

On the whole I'm impressed at how good most stuff is. I rarely have to reject anything, perhaps because I avoid buying 'too cheap' from unreliable sources and don't have overly high expectations of inexpensive goods, whether shoes or hobby lathes! The duds were all replaced with no fuss.

Dave

Of more concern (to me) are 'fake products' that claim to be something that they are not.

A typical example is memory cards **LINK**.

Whether factory rejects or just outright fakes, the only way that I have found to combat this is to purchase from a reputable local supplier and enjoy the protection of consumer legislation (which is excellent in Australia btw)

Sometimes, it pays to buy once and get what you spent your hard earned pension on.

* danny *

Some thirty years ago I was employed by an engineering company, part of a global engineering supplier, to assist in getting the company an ISO Quality Certification. To give you an idea of some of the problems that were commonplace there, the drawing office would produce drawings for parts of the finished product and these would be issued to production, they would give them to machinists to produce parts, the machinists would find errors on the drawings or the parts wouldn’t fit others in the assembly so the machinist would alter the drawing and make the part to fit. The altered drawing would then be retained by the machinist at his workstation to use next time the part was required to be made, no feedback was given to the drawing office so there were now two different drawings for the same part, if and when the drawing office issued a drawing to a sub contractor to produce a batch of these parts when they arrived they wouldn’t fit the product, you can imagine what sort of problems this caused. When I questioned why this was happening I was told well this is the way we have always done it. The company was trying to introduce “just in time” manufacturing and they also wanted to introduce “statistical process control”, this was a recipe for chaos, you can imagine how much scrap was being produced. To give you an idea of how old fashioned the company was there was still the old line shafts running the full length of the machine shop from the days when the machines were belt driven, it only modernised to a degree during the war years when “modern” machines were installed to produce armament equipment. The old values were so firmly entrenched that needless to say the company didn’t get its quality certification and was closed down not long after I left. The product that they were making was a very sound product engineering wise but the quality of its parts meant it gained a reputation for poor workmanship, seeing the situation that we had at that factory it’s not difficult to see why so many incorrect parts end up being sold to customers. Dave W

before retiring, I was engaged in a (global) company wide scheme to obtain components more cheaply.

We found that it was possible to buy a fully machined manifold from China for less than the cost of a UK casting.

The drawback was that when there was a problem, "There's a container of those en route to you" and it will be six weeks before corrected supplies,(Plus trans[port time) will arrive!

Implement Plan B!

As always, you get what you pay for.

Possibly made by operators who neither Know nor care what the product is required to do, or at the other extreme, "You pay for the name". The quality is good, but with a big mark up.

Somewhere in between, you get acceptable quality, durability and reliability, at a reasonable price.

In which case everyone in the supply chain from O E M to end user win.

Howard

Another item arrived yesterday. A 2MT/3MT sleeve. Seller claimed 0.015mm accuracy. After subtracting out my milling machine spindle runout I measured the sleeve to be about 0.050mm out. I think I'm going to start forking over money for the real deal.

Hard to find the 'real deal' these days, as the dealer actually stated a run out figure send it back for a refund.

Tony