Rotors made in China

The ones we get come from a warehouse in the south, don't need to identify anybody on line. Plain white boxes, same part # as "quality" product with a "c" suffix. Mabee you all missed the part where I stated that I put a set on my own truck & had no problem, & many on customers cars with the only headach being a warped one or 3 that was easily remedied with a lathe. It's a piece of machined metal that gets bolted behind the wheel then gets the s*it squeezed out of it & heated up with brake pads. It ain't rocket science, if anybody on here has ever seen one actually come apart, that wasn't overly thin, I will stand corrected. Once again it seems that people are overthinking the theorys & book values before actually seeing how these things work in actual practice. And lets not forget the untested theory that the more expensive ones may just be the same thing in fancy packaging, thereby boosting profit margins of the more reputable big companies that might not be as reputable as you think. Nuttin' wrong with 'em in my book & when I'm saying about installing them on customers cars, I mean for the last 10-12 years, not just yesterday. Good luck.

See, that's the thing about brake problems: You don't have a problem until

-- OH S*IT! -- you have a problem.

Yes. And the Chinese are expert at smiling and shaking the stupid white guy's hand and signing the contract, then substituting whatever random iron alloy their brother-in-law can get cheaply for the specified alloy, running worn-out tooling on unmaintained production equipment, falsifying quality and safety tests, and applying counterfeit regulatory approval markings.

Sure in *small* numbers in the '50s and '60s but not many people were talking about them then.

Matt, matt, matt,... you're so glib....

Don't you know that Daniel is THE expert on EVERYTHING!! Especially the fact that there has never been an R-13 refrigerant. And of course every part that anyone else has ever used - Daniel always know more about other peoples experiences then the people do themselves.

My Chinese rotors have performed every bit as well as the OEMs.

I talked to a guy in the biz of making inspection gauges for these and other auto parts. He said there is some truth to the idea that there are levels of tolerance and that if a given part is outside vendor A's tolerance it may still be within vendor B's tolerance. Does that make it a "bad" part. He certainly did not think so. I haven't used nearly as many of these "white box" disks as you but my experience with them is that at about one-forth the cost of the Genuine OEM part the perform functionally identical IF NOT BETTER. My original OEM disks on my 92 were warped in 4000 miles and after 3 trips to the dealer with at least one of them replaced (too thin to keep machining) they still continued to warp up till 40K when I gave up. But the "cheap Chinese junk" I replaced them with are still on there, UNWARPED at 100K.

And the last time you saw a Chinese Brake Rotor failure was???? If so, and you will have to google hard for this one, what was the cause of failure??

You might know something about "stupid white guy's" but, going by the nonsense that you write you have never signed a contract with any mainland Chinese to produce anything. Back to automobile parts I'm seeing more and more Toyota parts being made in China. They must have found a way to get quality from over there...

The last time I bought (front) rotors, I weighed them. The more expensive ones were about 2# heavier than the cheap ones I was replacing, which had warped.

Still no answer, D.S. Have you ever seen a chinese rotor come unglued & kill anybody. Mabee they are machined on shoddy equipment but 98% of them come out of the box, get bolted on the car, have a nice day. Problems being very minimal & longevity being the same as the "expensive" brand. Give us some feedback on the horribleness of these things or get back to work in your perfect world.

That is really what we are looking for at the end of the day..safe and dependable performance at a reasonable price.

By the way, some of the OEM hard drives from respected suppliers are not so hot either. One popular hard drive was identified which had consistent short run failures. Not so short as to be a warranty liability, maybe, but short enough to piss the owners off.

Please tell us the details of the side-by-side test that allowed you to reach such a sweeping conclusion about brake rotor performance. The test I'm sure you have that compares the performance of rotors by their country of origin.

Since most suppliers don't actually manufacture parts but acquire them through a sometimes lengthy distribution chain that can involve more than one source please tell us how you determined the country of origin of those rotors. In which countries was the steel compounded and poured into ingots, formed into rotors and finally finished. Could be a different country for each step.

The links to wikipedia and popular mechanics articles on foreign auto production are interesting. But my original comments dealt more with the mistaken perception of americans about the quality of post WWII japanese goods. The german and american photographic and optics industries made the mistake of assuming japanese companies were not capable of producing quality goods in the early 1950's and they never recovered from that decision. The american auto industry was poised to copy that mistake in the late 1950's. It took them a decade to recognize the threat and their subsequent responses seemed to be more reactions than well thought out designs.

Very true. Japan came from total junk to equal American junk in a relatively short time. Then they began to surpass the sleeping American industry. Detroit has made some improvements, but suffers from many ailments.

American buying patterns seem to confuse Detroit..While some opt for the better German and Japanese cars, there is that other side which is driven by styling and appearance rather than quality. The SUV craze still confuses me a little....they, in general, are considerably less safe than some other types of vehicles, tend toward being gas guzzlers, and really are not so very big on the inside...we must, however, keep up with the Jones.

Unfortunately, it would appear that decades of poor mangement has left some of the American giants with legacy problems that is driving them to the poorhouse.

maybe just me, but i would blame the stupid white guy, who is trying to scam me by pawning off substandard parts and making a quick buck. are you actually suggesting that the chinese business person actually feel bad about using synergies he can find to come up with a more efficient product development strategy?

all the "substandard chinese products" in the US are voluntarily imported by "stupid white guys". there is no sense in expecting the chinese to turn away business, but there should be no tolerence for the american businesses/corporations that comprimise on quality to improve their profit margins...

since when did it become american to allow corporations to faust off their responsibility and claim immunity because they were stupid?

irax.

Daniel J. Stern wrote:

Actually the SUV craze was really a reaction to the CAFE standards imposed on car manufacturers. The CAFE standards had a big impact on the SUV predecessor - the station wagon. The big wagon was horrible on gas milage, but many of use need something to haul our stuff and people around. The CAFE standards meant the car makers could no longer include many of those big VistaCruisers in inventory so they had to find a loophole. Truck-based vehicles were exempted from CAFE, and the SUV was born. Instead of hauling our stuff around in low riding station wagons we haul our stuff around in high riding station wagons that have been rechristened SUVs.

So you wore 2# of metal off the cheap ones before they warped? Not sure that it proves anything to compare a worn part to a new one in that context.

Pete C.

Pls note, I did not claim it proved anything. I was simply sharing an observation. Any conclusions you draw are your own.

American manufacturers have done everything possible (and sometimes inadvisable) to get the weight down. On some cars, 2 lbs per disc would be 8 pounds total, not an insignificant amount when compared to engineering plastic manifolds and suchlike.

It has been discussed here before that some OEM rotors have little or no excess to allow truing, and I suspect that the weight bugaboo is the reason for this type of engineering...that, plus a bit of planned obsolescence and service expectations.

One of the problems with cast iron, as you all know, is intergranular cracking. It is hard and brittle, but can hold up well IF it is of good consistent quality. ( The Titanic was not only a victim of an iceberg, but of crappy steel quality)

I would suspect that parts which were not considered safe in their metallurgy would not be importable and saleable. (Rose colored glasses, perhaps). The legal liability would be potentially high.

Of the Chinese products I have bought, some from Harbor Freight, most were okay. Cheap Chinese electrical goods are not on my menu. Drill bits ?? they are okay for a couple of uses, often break, so what.

Didn't the Titanic steel plates they brought up from the wreck have too much sulfur in them?Instead of giving a little under stress they were too brittle and cracked on impact.