Chinese tat!

[mailee]

You have probably thought I had been quiet for a while but I have still been busy with work. At the moment I am working on a couple of cabinets what I can only describe as Chinese tat! This is another job for my local furniture company to get them out of the quagmire. I had originally quoted them for one of their customers to build these in AWO but the customer turned it down due to the price and opted to go for 'Made in China' as the furniture company could get it cheaper there. :roll: Well to cut a long story short they did and were not happy with the result. :lol: They have now been passed on to me to 'sort out' for the company. needless to say the customer refused the units and the company lost the sale so they are being 'bodged' so they can sell them. :roll: This first photo is the unit after I had fettled it a bit.

The doors were originally designed to be flush with each other with touch to open catches and fitted with concealed inset hinges. Now the problem was that the doors are 38mm thick and the inset hinges were designed for 18-22mm doors so they were binding. The top was made up from two 25mm thick boards to make a 50mm thick top but you could see the glue joint all the way along it! I had to plane it down and add a runner on the front and sides to cover this.

With the doors open you can see there is a drawer inside which would have been fine if they had allowed for the door thickness as the drawer hit the doors and wouldn't open! :shock: All of the wood is indeed AWO but some of the worst quality I have set eyes on. :roll: I lost count of the pieces of tear out on the sides and bottom.
I have ditched the cheap imitation soft close hinges and fitted all the doors on butt hinges. I had to add a runner between the left hand door to allow the hinges to be mounted so it would open correctly.
The second unit is a simpler one with just two doors fitted.

although I still had to fit some edging around the top and swap the hinges for butts. On both units the rear panel is made in 6mm ply veneered in........teak! :shock: and only one of them has the grain running the correct way. :roll: All of the doors were very carefully wrapped in bubble wrap so they didn't get damaged, but it was a pointless exercise as this was the quaility of the build.

Each of the doors had filler in the joints which didn't even match the colour of the wood!
I have no idea how he is going to sell these for a profit now as I am charging on an hourly rate for these. :lol: I did tell him that it would be worth more as firewood and it wasn't worth the effort! I also told him not to mention my name in association with them.

 

[No skills]

Wow, makes you wonder how much they brought them in for.

 

[Wood Monkey]

My father in law was proudly showing off his new 'solid' oak furniture when I visited last summer. Whilst I was there at Christmas he was asking if I could suggest any way to close up all the gaps that had opened up on every joint on the coffee table, book case and side board.

Basically we managed to get doors and drawers opening and closing smoothly but the joints were not budging. It seemed the tenons were still well stuck and the gap was simply shrinkage and no amount of winding my biggest clams was going to close them up. In the end I suggested he boiled a kettle in the lounge 3 times a day or better still moved the stuff into the shed where it should have been dumped in the first place.

He bought the stuff from a well known retailer who doesn't want to respond to his complaint. It was described as 'solid european oak' but the price and manufacturing quality clearly showed it was from India or China. All large components were 'engineered' with no effort to match grain or colour. I said at the time that you couldn't buy solid european oak to manufacture these at the price he's paid let alone make a profit on the manufacture and retail.

Mailee. Your work may double the cost of these pieces, but it'll quadruple the quality at the very least. Let the retailer find out the hard way.

 

[devonwoody]

And they supply the motorcar industry for engineer bits I believe, I wonder if any accident records are being kept?

 

[bugbear]

I had originally quoted them for one of their customers to build these in AWO but the customer turned it down due to the price and opted to go for 'Made in China' as the furniture company could get it cheaper there.

The problem here is not China, or Chinese craftsmen. It is the customer's expectation of price.

If dumb chinks (*) can make simple stuff like iPhones and hard drives, I'm pretty sure they can knock out tricky stuff like oak cupboards IF they're given the equipment, materials and time to do so.

If, OTOH, they're not, the results will be ... as you've shown.

BugBear

(*) (c) BNP

 

[AndyT]

Thanks for posting this. A good reminder of how deceptive photos on websites and adverts can be. I was never tempted to buy any of that dirt cheap imported furniture and now I know why!

It's a shame to see such a waste of materials and energy.

 

[Sawyer]

Poetic justice! They should have gone to a decent craftsman (you) in the first place, Mailee.

 

[Reggie]

Actually, apple are moving a lot of their production back to the good ole us of a.

Price was clearly a factor in the buyers choice but also so was the look of the unit from the pictures that they had seen too I suspect. Whatever you expect for the price, you don't expect broken or ... I'm trying to think of the right words to describe the drawer, oh I've got it, you don't expect plain stupid, a drawer has 2 functions and is defunct if either of the functions fails.

China is pretty insane when it comes to business, some things they do really well, other things it really beggars belief how they actually make money and in others it's a wonder houses don't burn down. It's quite common at least with electronics, for a company to spec out a product, send it to the fabrication company, fab quotes for parts in BOM, price gets agreed, factory builds electronic product, company receives product, examines it and finds bits missing or replaced with an inferior part. Now the product may still work as intended but may fail the local standards systems for the intended market.

This practice may not necessarily be a bad thing if the company involved was part of the process that removed bits, it's common practice to have hardware revisions where they streamline the parts count or find a better way to do things but when they don't know about it it's either stupidity or because the fab plant is trying to chisel extra money from the deal, so you've really got 2 choices when dealing with chinese products, you either have to know and trust the company you're buying the product from or you take your chances. I still buy some of my electronics from china and I'm pretty sure that all my american branded telescopes came from china too.

 

[bugbear]

Actually, apple are moving a lot of their production back to the good ole us of a.

A quick google reveals :

http://www.imore.com/apple-investing-mo ... on-line-us

"Next year we are going to bring some production to the U.S. on the Mac."

I'm not even sure "the Mac" is a major Apple product any more.

BugBear

 

[JustBen]

I see this as a good thing.

The more stuff that gets ruined by cheap Chinese production, the more likely people are to dig deeper and pay for handcrafted English products.

It was great in the beginning when people could get stuff from china for pennies but now I think it's wearing thin.

People don't have the money to keep replacing stuff and want things that will last. This does come at a price but my experience has shown that people are starting to sway that way.

It can only help small uk businesses who are willing to stick their neck out and build the high quality products that they wish they always wanted to make but demand and competition has stopped so far.

That's my thought on it.

 

[SteveB43]

+1 for benjimano's comments! =D>

Hopefully the tide IS turning, and folks are going to want proper solid wood products that they recognise the value and longevity of..
Just like the cheap 'furniture' with the wood photo effect, sentiment for low ££ is indeed wearing thin!!

 

[Phil Pascoe]

A few years ago I bought a "Buck" pocket knife in Changi airport, even after it's being in a sale I paid a small fortune for it. When I got home I read the bumpf that came with it, about how it was a product of superlative American knife making skills using only the finest materials known to man, and how Buck supported real American industries etc. - when I looked more carefully at the knife, there on the blade was the legend "made in China". It is actually a very good knife, but I still feel a little defrauded. I suppose on higher value stuff they have to be a bit more careful on the quality control front.

 

[JakeS]

The more stuff that gets ruined by cheap Chinese production

The problem with this is that - as Bugbear hinted at earlier - the 'cheap' in that sentence is far more relevant than the 'Chinese'. If there's any sort of movement wherein consumers preferentially buy things "Made in Britain", all it will do is have all the companies who make cheap products start producing cheap products in the cheapest area of Britain they can find, still with the same poor materials, design and quality control, and consumers will rapidly become disillusioned with the idea that "Made in Britain" means "quality" after all.

If you need any evidence of this, take a trip to the US and see some of the tat which proudly declares that it's "made in the USA"!

 

[Phil Pascoe]

Back in the '70s If you saw "made in Britain" on anything, you wouldn't touch it with a bargepole.