New front rotors for 300m

The quality Brimbo rotors I purchased for my PT Cruiser were made in Canada.

Richard.

Don't even try to figure out the aftermarket world with all it's legal and marketing cooperative agreements and third party manufacturing/labeling contracts. We had a similar discussion of this nuttiness a couple of days ago (see thread titled "Moog Sway Bar Links").

As you can see on this Federal Mogul home page, they own Wagner:

Doesn't matter what "some say". :) My '99 LH car FSM says that a new rotor thckness is 1.019 to 1.029 - so your part was within the designated OEM tolerances.

Not a bad idea to do that to make sure there's not some rust that may tilt rotor and wheel and cause vibration (if no vibration, then no need to brush it - but good prevention practice for any future work you do).

Bill Putney (To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address with the letter 'x')

When you read that, it becomes clear why manufacturing and material processing is increasingly being done overseas (China, Mexico, etc).

Yikes (re: asbestos racket that has decimated Federal Mogul). The Wall Street Journal has had many editorials on how the asbestos racket is destroying responsible companies (read employers and American Jobs), but that article in the Detroit News really hits home. A few lawyers and their class action lawsuits are destroying entire industries by getting $$ millions and $$ millions of tort money due to alleged practices decades ago, and this is from people who aren't even sick and there is no reason to believe that they will ever get sick. Jackpot justice doesn't even describe this as the "injured" aren't injured at all. Eventually even the lawyers will lose when the golden goose dies as all of the companies they can sue throw in the towel, forever.

The previous CEO had to be a moron to buy into asbestos litigation.

wrong, they are destroying entire companies.

Correct, that is why so many companies flee to bankruptcy court when things go awry. And not just companies, the Catholic Church is doing this in the face of all the priest sex abuse claims.

But it is rediculous to feel sorry for F.M. They are going to end up far stronger post-bankruptcy. The company will do fine. It's the investors that get screwed. And this is a perfect example of why many companies don't permit employees to put all their 401K into a single companies stock and only give them options of different plans. Investment 101 says to diversify your investments precisely to avoid the kinds of sob stories you read about here.

Ted

The company's board could/should have been sued for failure to do proper due diligence. I guess you guys would not want to see another lawsuit though.

Post Enron, a lot of corporate Boards suddenly woke up to the fact that they are supposed to be overseeing the exec staff.

I never have had a problem with lawsuits against corporate managers. The Asbestos lawsuits are not like that, however, they are against the corporation, not against the clods that steered the corporation into the mud. Big difference, that.

Ted

Management conduct in this case seems to be inexcusable. Even if they wanted to buy another company, they could have operated it as a separate subsidiary and the parent would have been untouchable financially.

Or another thing that companies often do is buy a company, operate it as a subsidiary, then start making all the purchased companies products themselves, setup joint marketing ventures and start dropping items from the subsidiaries product line and weaning the customers from the subsidiary to the parent.

Ted