What price frustration?

With regular questions from new arrivals (like me) in ME about various issues, like what to buy and, at the risk of prolonging the anguish from established members, I offer the following comments :-

Some years ago, when I was self-employed and earning what I considered to be an acceptable living, I wanted to progress from setting up my ML7 for jobs other than those to be turned, eg. milling and dividing. I should add that every part of my skeleton clock and many other items which required machining in some way, advanced by way of the Myford. So I bought a mill/drill apparently built to an Eastern philosophy.

Yes, it was cheap, and I should have expected cheap results, but I didn’t. There were lots of things on this machine which I should have recognised as cheap. But I didn’t. It was full of surprises at no extra cost. Well, not at first. But what makes something cheap? Who are the value analysts who generate cheap?

As an occasional expert witness in the plastics industry, I have seen some appallingly cheap products coming out of the Far East. You know, the ones that fail and cause serious injury in the process.

About the mill/drill - how about being in the process of drilling a hole when suddenly the grub-screw gripping the cross shaft with about two and a half turns of thread, lets go? Surely, fixing-screws in any machine should be long enough that the threads don’t strip? That’s real penny pinching.

And what about sand in the castings, such that parts which actually turn inside them, make grating and crunching noises.

I patiently accepted my mistakes, and decided to buy a milling cutter head and several collets similar to the Clarkson’s I’d used in the toolroom years ago. The parts of this Asian variety looked nice and shiny in their cardboard box, but when I came to use them, not one of the collets ran true. Eccentricities measuring up to 0.12mm TIR were revealed. When I took them back, I was offered a small box of collets from which to choose `good' ones. As opposed to taking them home, measuring the collet’s wall thickness with a graduated calliper was my only convenient and comparative means of determining concentricity. There were none to be had with an acceptable accuracy. Why would I want to mill an item when only one side of the milling cutter was actually doing any cutting?

But I’ve left the best of this saga till last.

On this particular mill/drill, the two lead-screws had a 3mm pitch. OK so far. Also, the hand-wheel scales could not be zeroed. Still OK.

Then I discovered that the hand-wheel scales where calibrated with twenty main graduations, ie. the wheel was stamped from nought through to nineteen. That would be OK for say a 1mm movement, and perhaps I could get used to 1mm equalling 6.6r graduations. But without a zeroing facility, and this obtuse calibration, imagine the albeit brief mental arithmetic if (say) 1.7mm needed to be removed from a cherished work-piece.

Was the manufacturer’s approach intended to cut costs even more, or was it just plain stupidity? Fortunately, and although they would be the same in any language, the hand-wheel graduations were in English numerals, and machined off a treat, to be replaced with something that made sense.

I started another half-page posting to this thread with more mumbles and grumbles, but having been the thread originator, I decided to scrub it.

Instead, I offer the following :-

And - THE GREATEST COST OF ALL,  is losing a customer who will never return.