Chinese rotors are junk

Another point is to take notice of how hard the old brake pads were to remove. If they come out with the fingers, fine. If you had to pry them out with a screwdriver, check for rust underneath the shims. Rust expands when it forms and can cause the pads to jam. Clean the rust out with a wire brush and apply a thin coat of brake grease.

That (that you can have good engineering but a generally bad part) is a contradiction. Engineering includes material specifications, dimensions and tolerances, *and* the processes used to make the part. If you have one or a combination of poorly chosen raw material, and/or bad processes that result in bad reaction to the application (i.e., residual stresses, spatially and temporally varying coefficients of thermal expansion throughout the part due to varying grain structure and material properties so that it warps when moderate heat is applied), and/or sloppy initial tolerances, the part is, by definition, bad due to bad or non-existent engineering.

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

We are talking about parts sourced in china here. The print doesn't carry the same weight with most vendors it does in places like the USA, europe, and japan.

Generally not when you are dealing with a part sourced in china. Vendors will actually switch plastic resins and materials claiming they are the same thing, first the engineer learns of it is when the parts fail. After the processes are set up and agreed upon they are changed, first the engineer learns of it is from failing parts.

I could agree with you wrt parts made in the USA, europe, and japan for the most part, but for china, in most cases the engineer has no power.

The MBA's and the finance folks picked the lowest price source, the engineer had no say in the matter. The engineer has to get quality parts out of them, but the vendor knows the engineer has no power with regards to him getting the buisness. So the vendor turns out crap sells it cheap, makes a ton of cash. The finance guy is happy, the MBA is happy, everyone blames engineering for the shitty product, the company gets a bad rep, profits drop, more gets moved to china, engineers get laid off, design engineering is relocated to china, finance and business people are really happy getting bonuses for saving so much money, product is ODM'd, chinese company learns how to make it, chinese company becomes a competitor, US corporation goes out of business, top MBA's and finance guys get fat severance packages and move on to the next company.

That about sums it up.

Why the hell did I become an engineer when this society rewards weasels?

Not necessarily. The design engineers rarely live in the plant and constantly audit the manufacturing process to ensure that it is followed precisely. That is the domain of manufacturing personnel. Some do this extremely well and some are sloppy. Sloppy manufacturing will overcome excellent engineering every time. Chrysler is a great example of this. for decades they had some of the best engineered vehicles in the world, but Chrysler manufacturing has never been better than average on a good day, and worse than average typically.

Matt

I ask myself that question from time to time as well, but then I enjoy being able to look in the mirror and not be ashamed.

Matt

the USA and obviously

here in Canada and

"made in Canada" would

have to check what

works right out of the

"made in the USA" really only means engineered and assembled. Most outsource to China and play the percentages game to make that claim - if they even do that. Most lie outright and say "Made in the USA" if their company is there.

They ask for a rotor to be made to this spec. The Chinese firm outsources steel as cheaply as low quality as possible becuase there's squat the firm can do about it other than go elsewhere, which costs them double.

Consider Ford's 5% cost reduction a year goal. Never going to buy one - they are already dropping in reliability as true junk like Kia and Hyundai are catching up to them.

At this rate, they'll be dead in 20 years. No big loss.

Don't worry about the 5% cost reduction a year rutine of big corporations. The vendors just screw em over (including those in china) when they do this. I worked for a big corporation that demanded each year that the parts would cost less and tried to put in a similar program. What the vendors do (and a co-worker had a friend who worked at ford that said the same thing), and it's really obvious, is they pad the first year's cost. So that by the time the cost reductions kick in they've already made the money.

That means the vendor has the money earlier, they get to earn interest on it, they get to use it as capitial, and if the product the part goes in flops and dies early, they make more than they would have without the silly program.

The quality of the parts is not hurt by these programs, but it looks good in a power-point presentation given by the MBAs despite hurting the corporation over all.

It's not so much that the part costs double, it's the lead time to get another vendor's tooling completed. Many of the vendors in china that I had to work with were notorious for saying 'we can do it' to anything to get the business. It's only once beyond the point of no return that it is discovered they can't. But now it's too late to go with someone else, so they have to be tought, quality squeezed out at great effort, etc to make the project's dates.

There was one supplier who did the 'we can do it' rutine when they couldn't so much that I wanted to make up a part that was physically impossible to make, just to see what they'd say.

Or they make the first 6 months in the US and when they outsource it to overseas they never get around to changing the box labelling, giving them an excuse if they are caught.

Ted

Ahh - so it's management malpractice. So rather than bad or non-existent engineering, good engineering was there, but later stripped out of the process. Companies should be held liable due to the implied warranty of merchantability. But alas, we live in the real world as you indicate in your next paragraph.

As an engineer, I know what you mean. I'm sure we both have war stories. Like the time I was with my daughter during a week of her cancer treatments. While I was away and managing my projects by phone, a fellow engineer pulled the draftsmen off of all my projects onto his, and when I got back, guess who was in the dog-house because his projects were behind schedule? When I complained about it, I was labeled as paranoid and within a year he was promoted to manager of engineering. I guess he knew how to "get things done", eh?

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

Yes - they're probably too busy faking the quality documentation that they aren't provided manpower to do. Of course if the quality system is designed and implemented correctly, the engineering intent is forced and therefore effective. But due to trimming the workforce down below the threshold required to do that (the quality assurance) work properly, the whole quality process (designing, implementing, and performing on the line) all gets faked - and that's not just in China). So to save money, they wast their money three times: once on engineering that does not follow thru the manufacturing process, secondly on designing and implementing the quality system that is faked, and thirdly on the product that benefits neither from the original engineering nor a good quaility system. *BUT* - they're saving money!!!

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

This of course, is compounded by their lack of respect for patents and copyrights, which means they feel that it's perfectly well and good to try to copy things without understanding or contacting the original firm first.

Yes, paying royalties/fees/etc sucks, but it does get you reams of data if you want on what you've just bought into. That whole capacitor fiasco due to some chemist in China trying to reverse engineer the fluid and having as many as 50% of them explode under normal use is a prime example.

China is hopelessly corrupt, ignores patents, warranties, and copyrights, and well - that's the way it will be until their government changes.

Iran would be a better place to get these things made. Shoot, *CUBA* would be as well - I hear they have a lot of bright, hardly employed people over there, and while they are run by a dictator, they still conduct themselves honorably when it comes to the points above - at least with the nations in the area other than the U.S.(warranties are a bit spottier there, but most firms try, so I hear)

Tire Rack sells Italian Brembo rotors. Here is their speal:

You can have Brembo quality in original equipment replacement brake rotors that are fully compatible with your vehicle's original brake system. And as you would expect, Brembo OE Replacement Brake Rotors are designed to equal or exceed the performance of the original equipment rotors that came on your vehicle. For that matter, in order to provide higher levels of performance and comfort, Brembo even developed one-piece cast rotors to replace original equipment two-piece rotors that feature economically stamped steel centers fastened to the braking surfaces.

Starting with a casting from a Brembo foundry that assures uniform thickness, Brembo OE Replacement Brake Rotors are machined to exacting tolerances (the rotor run-out tolerance is only 0.0025", about half of the industry norm), feature a braking surface finish (ground or fine turned) compatible with the vehicle's OE specifications and are electronically balanced to minimize the possibility of vibration.

Brembo offers its OE Replacement Rotors with the same levels of quality, technology and performance that have earned it Dodge Viper, Ferrari, Ford Mustang Cobra and Mercedes-Benz OEM fitments. All Brembo OE Replacement Rotors are manufactured under QS-9000 and ISO 9001 certifications to ensure the highest level of quality. Brembo brake rotors offer applications for most every automobile - domestic to import, compact car to luxury SUV.

NOTE: Brembo Original Equipment (OE) Replacement

Sounds alot like a guy I worked with who couldn't design his way out of a wert paper bag. With alot of work myself and other engineers rescued the project from his design idiocy and he got promoted.

I would love to work at such an ideal place, where I've been the quality system was the beast that needed to be fed and drove the engineering.