China is now an economic superpower. The wait is for the time that China buys Rotterdam, Schiphol and Drempt. Because China now buys the whole world.
That is not bad for a country that has never done more than providing cheap labor. And cheap stuff.
Quality has its price
In the meantime, China is building engine blocks for BMW and there is nothing wrong with that in terms of quality. But China is still the country where the cheapest things come from. Chinese people are merchants. They want to sell. Literally at any price. And if the customer does not want to pay a realistic purchase price? Then he gets the stuff for what he wants to pay. With the corresponding quality.
The assortment box
Who has never bought one: such an assortment box with rings, bolts and nuts, O-rings, circlips, things ... You name it. At every fair there are always different to many suppliers with cheap Chinese tools and with that kind of assortment boxes. Very handy. You will never miss.
The learning moment
Recently, neat work was done when working on a classic. Shiny new M6 bolts and bite rings were taken from such a Chinese assortment box. The entire rebuild of the engine had gone so well that it was just those new bolts that finished the business in style. And that they were invisible after assembly? We only thought about that when we heard them ...
A ticking, scraping sound
If you hear something like that, you pull the clutch in and let the vehicle roll out. If you accelerate during that rollout, you know whether the sound is speed related. If the sound changes as it lays out, it is speed related. That way you know pretty quickly whether there are problems before or after the coupling. The noise was speed related.
To make a long story short
There is a kind of crank disc near the cardan. A stupid tin thing. In more carefree days we would have simply left it out. The disc was mounted with three M6 bolts. New M6 bolts with new eating rings. One of the three had run loose and continued to bump its head against the alloy casting in the gimbal case: Tap-Tap- Tap Tap !. The other two bolts were also loose.
Because we were sure that this was not a matter of negligence or a key 'plural', the attention went to the food rings. A few of those things briefly went to a friendly metallurgy. He would look at it sometimes. After a few days, an e-mail arrived: "Your bones were from pancake dough."
Still positive
All in all, no bad word about shiny things that cost nothing. "All where is his money" and such. So it is certainly not that the locally available assortment boxes are all tipped in the container. We have only decided to only use the bolts, nuts and washers in places where it doesn't matter.
And to be on the safe side, it has been decided to use structural locking fluid to prevent loosening of threaded connections. No cheap deposit fluid from a trade show offer. But just real - expensive - LockTite
Never seen numbers on the head of a bolt?
What do you think they are for ?! ?
Dg jP. There were even neat figures on the unique exhibition offer. Of course not on the bite rings, but on the bolt heads. But that says about as much in this segment as a turbo sticker on the butt of an old VW Golf 🙁
Well, a realistic purchase price. For example, I was recently at a car parts store with the initial letter B and the rest of the rezan to get some real Locktite. That is forty euros, sir. I thought I misunderstood, I only need a jar, not a whole box! But no, it remained € 40.- for 1 game. I really needed the stuff. I know you do quite a long time with it and a year before or so I found € 14.- quite a lot because that is about 30 in old money, while before that it was 14.- in guilders.
Anyway, € 40.- for 1 jar was a bit too much for me and then I only got a mini-bottle from Bison at the hardware store, it also works.
Now I see that the stuff is also for sale at Aliexpress. It is called slightly different but the jar looks like Locktite. Costs € 5.- I have ordered something .. Just like Dolf, first try on the outside.
As a consumer, you have to be careful. But that can make him profit. Good luck!
Eh… the port of Rotterdam is already largely Chinese owned…
nice column from Dolf. Perhaps a 12-year-old gym enthusiast would have the spelling checked for publication?
Dear Yuri, The gym enthusiast was just doing his newspaper district even
“Key fold”…?
It can't be clearer, right?
Is Locktite also made in prc? A moment apart from the zest for work. ? (What, by the way, is an Apeldoorn-based (NL) company that makes shovels of NL quality. But maybe already in Chinese hands. Without espionage.)
China buys the world and makes and delivers everything between high-tech and filling. But the Chinese deliver. At any price. A Dutch entrepreneur played the price battle so hard that he still got his container with Christmas lights for his price. Only the lights were not on a cord but on a clothesline.