Unions and bad management and unrealistic wages and benefits created a price vacuum, and the Chinese filled it. That's the sad truth. We brought this on ourselves. You can have lawyer wages and Cadillac benefits and a cushy pension, and you can resist automation and efficiency, OR you can have a company that stays in business. You can't have both. The free market is like the laws of physics; it always wins in the end.
When I started shopping for big tools, I heard the "buy American" and "old iron" lines, and like an idiot, I listened. I ended up spending $3,000 to put a 40-year-old Clausing lathe with "very light use" (the dealer's phrase) in my garage. It looks like they rolled it here, end over end, from the New England dealer's place.
The seller was a revered machine dealer, whose name I will not mention. He sold me a machine with the wrong motor. He also sold me a bunch of Japanese mikes which were ruined, and when I tried to get them replaced, he hid like a scared kid, refusing to answer my calls and emails. I got no warranty. I got no accessories, except for a live center and a chuck. The lathe was belt-driven instead of the variable speed model the seller advertised.
I started looking for things like follower rests and steady rests. The prices for this old junk are beyond belief, and it shows up on Ebay once in a blue moon. Some machine dealer offered to sell me some metric gears for the Clausing. He wanted hundreds of dollars. I told him to forget it. For that kind of money, I could get an electronic lead screw and do ten times what his ancient, hard-to-use gears would do.
If I had bought a Grizzly, I'd have a 17" swing over a gap, instead of 12" all the way down. I'd have a warranty, lots of accessories, and customer service. I wouldn't have had to buy a VFD.
When I looked for a mill, I found Ebay and the online dealers to be a waste of time. The best deal I could find around here was a Bridgeport that looked like it had been hit by a bomb. The price as $4950, and they were not interested in negotiating (which is probably why they still have it). They also had a bare-bones Millrite, which would have been only slightly overpriced had they thrown in delivery. With the $400+ cost of delivery added, the price was too insulting to pay.
I ended up paying a few hundred dollars more for a Taiwan-made, Chinese-assembled meehanite mill with a big table, a DRO, power feed, and a variable speed head. My vise is Taiwanese. My rotary tables are Taiwanese. Most of the other stuff is Chinese. I love it.
I'd be happy to pay 20% more for an American product. But three times as much? Five times as much? I'm not willing to do that. This is a hobby, not a job. If I had to pay that kind of money for my tools, I wouldn't buy them at all. A lot of people who would otherwise be unable to get into metalworking and woodworking have been able to buy in because of the low cost of foreign tools.
Chinese stuff is getting better and better. A lot of it is as good as or better than American, and it's going to keep improving. A few years from now, you'll be able to buy a quality Chinese car for half the cost of a Ford. The companies already exist, and one of them is run by a guy who makes Thomas Edison and Henry Ford look like morons. He already beat Toyota in the Chinese market! If people are crying about routers and lathes, wait until the car industry gets hit. The UAW and the Big Three will either cease to exist or take drastic cuts.
We should have been preparing for this with automation and reform. Instead we buried our heads in the sand and told each other Americans were the master race. Unfortunately, Asians have better educations, work harder, accept lower wages, and take more pride in their work. It's amazing that they didn't bury us years ago.
Cry "Havoc," and let slip the dogs of bench.
I was socially distant before it was cool.
A little authority corrupts a lot.
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Originally Posted by Pat Barry
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