No Jorgensen Clamps or Vises in the new Lee Valley Catalog

[Adam Cruea]

Be sure to let us know which brand of dog food you prefer in your diet when you've tried living of poverty level wages... It's a vicious circle but making workers suffer on unsustainable wages isn't the way to bring prices down.

I used to live off of minimum wage just fine, thanks. Granted, I didn't have all the fun stuff I have now, but hey, mom and dad taught me to live within my means. I know, astonishing. . .making $6.25 an hour and actually being able to survive. *gasp* Why ever would I live in a cheap apartment, not buy expensive items, not use credit, and cut costs wherever I could? *gasp*

My God. . .I should go demand $100K+ now just for all my previous suffering and low wages. *gasp* However did I live before? *gasp*

*gasp gasp* Living within your means. . .how absurd.

[Jack Curtis]

OK, now pretend you'll earn minimum wage for your entire working life. Imagine how you'd pay for health insurance, get married, have children, buy a car, house, pay property taxes, pay for auto and home insurance, etc. Problem is that we tend to forget just how hard it was and how doubly hard it would be if those were our constraints forever.

[Andrew Joiner]

To get back on topic. I have both Asian Harbor Freight and Jorgensen USA handscrews. I don't reach for the Jorgensen first. However about 20% of the biggest Asian handscrews have a bit of backlash so they don't stay tight with first crank down. The smaller Asian handscrews don't do this. I think the Acme threads on USA handscrews may help with this or eliminate it.
Aside from this they both clamp fine once you take 2 seconds to tighten with a 2nd crank down on the Asian made clamps.

[george wilson]

The semi Acme threads will last a lot longer than regular V threads. Any backlash is due to looser tolerances either in the screws going through their nuts,or from the wooden holes that the round nuts go through being looser tolerance. An area I would try to make sure of is: Are the wooden handles well pinned to the screws,and are their metal ferrules made of metal too thin to take the pressure from the pins trying to twist as the clamps are tightened. It isn't possible visually to tell if the components are made from poor quality steel,either. You will find that out IF the screws start bending when the clamp is opened wide and clamped on something,or if the pins shear off.

I'm NOT saying that any of these problems may exist with Asian clamps,but be aware that these defects might turn up on real cheap clamps. They have cut corners somewhere.

I THINK I recall having some trouble with Craftsman hand screw handles in the early 60's. Their most annoying feature was that they worked exactly BACKWARDS to Jorgensons. I seldom ever use my old(but nearly new) Craftsman clamps for that reason. When I got Jorgensons,that was the end of the Craftsmans.

[Jonathan McCullough]

To continue the discussion about manufacturing costs, too, realize that there is another side of pressure that we don't see - and that is the retailers driving price decreases on their end. They may have paid 70% of retail for an american-made product, tying up a lot of capital. If they can get that product made overseas, they have more leverage to push the manufacturer down.

Most of the big box stores have the market saturated in terms of location. The only way for them to increase earnings is either to increase sales volume or increase margin. Getting someone to charge you 30-40% of retail instead of 70% of retail is an easy way to increase margin.

Hmm. Interesting. I've been reading a lot about margin compression in both the retail and industrial sectors. The abridged accumulation of my readings is that low central bank interest rates are funneling hot money into, and creating price distortions in, the commodities that industries need to create finished goods. In the context of wood working tools that would mean higher prices for tool steels and the energy needed to make, say, chisels. But the retailers who buy these finished products are discovering that as the economy deteriorates, the price discovery that should be in the commodities markets is occurring at the retail level when consumers balk at the price of finished chisels. Since the manufacturer and retailer have fixed costs in real estate, equipment, and administration, and their business model is based on moving inventory, zero or greatly reduced sales volume, even at a higher price per unit would be catastrophic. Rather than raising risking that scenario, retailers and manufacturers alike are being forced to compress their profit margins, in other words, "we'll lose money on every unit, but we'll make it up in volume!" Well, not quite but . . . . Problem is, some of that hot money is also distorting the equities market, so even as profitability goes down, the stock prices counterintuitively continue to rise.

But negotiating with suppliers whether foreign or domestic isn't the only way to make money in the tool market. One of the worst developments in business in the past decades has been in education, namely that someone with a formal business education can be parachuted into any business and expected to create profits based on whatever the management fad du jour happens to be. The model appears to be one of mergers & acquisitions, followed by liquidation of redundant assets and a search for efficiencies of scale, which in turn create profits for the principals if not the shareholders. But since these managers have nothing beyond a superficial understanding of their host company's history, position in the industry, or more fundamentally, the processes that make the products, many of their business decisions are counterproductive or even destructive. Witness Eastman-Kodak, which fired all its best-paid workers. These guys were no slouches; they had read the writing on the wall, formed their own companies and filed a bunch of patents for digital photography while management back at EK was running around looking for cheaper raw materials and firing anything that moved. An institution is only as good as the actual people who comprise it. Another thing that never shows up on a balance sheet, and doesn't seem to me to be the subject of any serious discussion at board meetings, is consumers' ill humor when confronted by higher prices for inferior products, poor or nonexistent customer service, and an increasingly cynical view of what were formerly identifiable as US companies.

Which is a roundabout way of getting back to the tool business. The other way to make money is to set money aside for R&D, and bring high-quality, innovative new products to a niche market. Your best bet to do that is to hire from within and have a stable staff of committed, capable, and competent employees with a combined experience of decades in the tool making and marketing business. And excellent customer service. Ring any bells? Sounds a lot like our favorite hand tool companies to me.

[Mel Fulks]

I have found that the unwinding often means there is oil or wax on the threads. Fixed a number of them by spraying brake cleaner and winding them in both directions a little,then spraying again. Let us know if it works. Sometimes on these topics we never get "the rest of the story". To the "people of the future" searching for answers it is helpful to know what works. I have no idea why oil is a problem on the clamps.

[Jim Belair]

I have had trouble with the clutch plates on cheap clamps not gripping the bar. Threw them out.

[george wilson]

If you mean oil on the threads of hands crew type clamps,Jorgensens use a double pitch thread on their screws,which makes the screw threads incline at a steeper angle so they can be adjusted faster. The faster the thread angle,the easier they can give way and "back up". I have not ever had this problem with a hands crew myself,but can see that it could happen. I never oil or grease my screws(or let them get rusty,either!)

Jim,if you'd buy a checkering file from Brownell's,you could easily remedy the plates slipping by quickly filing multiple small grooves across the tops of your clamp bars. I think a square thread restoring file would work also. You can get one at an auto parts store. Use the finest thread available on the file.

Somewhere I saw that some maker is putting these little grooves on their bars.

[Mel Fulks]

I once caused that problem myself by scraping off a lot of accumulated glue and then treating the wood with beeswax disolved in turpentine. The cause and effect was immediately obvious ,thus the brake cleaner treatment. Years later came across a big stack of clamps all marked with a sharpie X because they were "broken" and was able to "fix" them. It might be that the foreign clamps are being oil sprayed for shipping. Most of us are so used to seeing oil on threads it just does not immediately seem to be the cause of a malfunction, good point on the thread pitch. Never noticed it.

[David Weaver]

Hmm. Interesting. I've been reading a lot about margin compression in both the retail and industrial sectors.

I'm sure there is some compression, but in the case of the chinese products, perhaps that increases the price (on something common where a spec commodity doesn't need to be used) to 25% of the retail price instead of 15% or 20%. That would be a huge increase in percentages in the cost, but as a percentage of retail, it's not that big.

Most of the metallic items made in china, are probably made of steel made in china. Mujingfang is a good example.. the retail for a mujingfang high speed steel blade (last I could get them for my plane) was about $12. As far as I can tell, they are similar to M2, I don't know exactly what they are, though. I couldn't get the bar stock to make one for that, but if I had access to chinese high speed steel, I would imagine I'd find the price a whole lot different.

For the more common tools, like chrome vanadium steel (with no specified content, just described as such) and pot metal rods, and plastic jigs, the raw materials are probably still a pretty small part of the price. A much different situation that it would be if someone was using starrett bar stock to make everything. The plastic and steel will cost more in china, but how much margin compression is really happening due to the price of a good made in china when the margin was already enormous?

The effect is probably a lot more pronounced in something like plastic porch furniture or dishes or cheap metal cookware like you'd find hanging at a discount store, where something requires a lot of raw material for the retail price it commands.

Hopefully the consumers will be around in large enough numbers to follow a company like is described in your last paragraph.

[George Gyulatyan]

I have a feeling if you came up here to DC and watched many of my co-workers, you'd realize that Americans really have no work ethic and love to complain about getting paid too little. I got admonished for saying "money isn't everything" in a meeting.

Sounds like you're working at the wrong company

The other side of the coin is gross income disparity. When a CEO is making 50 times more than the average salary of non-management to middle management employees, there is a problem. The problem isn't just about "fairness", as one can argue both for and against it, but rather structural. This creates an economy where you have a population that no longer has any meaningful purchasing power to sustain an economy because wages haven't kept up with inflation. Every American would LOVE to buy "Made in USA" products at Made in USA prices. Unfortunately most can't.

[George Gyulatyan]

Hard for me to believe someone is truly happy paying 60% to any government.

That depends on what it buys you. If you get healthcare, education, utilities, etc paid for by tax dollars, can get 2 month vacations, and don't have to worry about retirement, and have money left to live with a middle class type lifestyle, then some people might be happy with it.

[David Weaver]

Sounds like you're working at the wrong company

The other side of the coin is gross income disparity. When a CEO is making 50 times more than the average salary of non-management to middle management employees, there is a problem. The problem isn't just about "fairness", as one can argue both for and against it, but rather structural. This creates an economy where you have a population that no longer has any meaningful purchasing power to sustain an economy because wages haven't kept up with inflation. Every American would LOVE to buy "Made in USA" products at Made in USA prices. Unfortunately most can't.

This is an argument that's brought up all the time, but there aren't enough CEOs to make a material difference. If you took their salaries and spread it among employees and retirees, it wouldn't really do anything in real terms regarding lifestyle or real income. It does create a perception issue, which is a much bigger problem to explain than the perceived real reduction in most employees' wages due to CEO pay. That's also not a one to one comparison, because it's a lot more likely the CEO's foregone earnings would be distributed to shareholders.

At any rate, the real gap in the wages is between the workers with rare or specific and valuable skills and the workers with common skills, and finally the works who are unskilled. That gap has always been there (litigators, physicians, venture capitalists, options makers have always existed). The issue now is that they are becoming a greater segment of the economy than they ever were, and it skews the disparity between mean and median income.

Whether a CEO deserves as much as they get on average (and not talking about picking anecdotal evidence out of the newspaper and applying it to all CEOs, as most don't make as much as the anecdotal few, and even moreso, reducing their disclosed compensation to actual cash paid in the year reported, and not accrual of non-guaranteed amounts), that's one thing, but whether or not CEOs themselves are responsible for the income disparity in a country where there are 300 million people, and how many highly paid CEOs? 1500 maybe? The impact isn't what people would like to make it out to be to sell advertising space in a magazine or on a blog. The real impact is the difference between workers with aptitude and drive and workers without it, which has a lot more to do with third world countries trying to make it to first world and doing the "easy to figure out" work.

[Jack Curtis]

The other side of the coin is gross income disparity. When a CEO is making 50 times more than the average salary of non-management to middle management employees, there is a problem. The problem isn't just about "fairness", as one can argue both for and against it, but rather structural. This creates an economy where you have a population that no longer has any meaningful purchasing power to sustain an economy because wages haven't kept up with inflation. Every American would LOVE to buy "Made in USA" products at Made in USA prices. Unfortunately most can't.

Exactly, to say nothing of how willing underpaid skilled workers to work overtime when said overly paid manager trots off to have fun in his gated "community" while they slave away. I'm too old to get any joy from our society. About 30 years ago I denied them ownership and started my own company. Didn't do great, no vast piles of money, but enough to get up every day and do it again.

I think you're right about European socialism, George. It would have been real nice to have had health insurance when 9/11 killed my business. And this maniacal race to the bottom will eventually turn around and bite these corporations. That will put us in a real pickle, assuming any of them are still in the US.

[Rick Fisher]

All my Bessey clamps are made in Germany and oddly the USA ?

What is really changing is the market. In the old days, Western Europe and North America where the consumers .. We made the stuff and consumed it .. Simple. Then we started making the stuff in places like China, Brazil, India etc..

Consumption however has really changed in the world.. Gone are the days of needing to be in the USA or Western Europe to sell your goods.. China is the hot market for selling cars and cell phones now .. Oil producing nations have loads of money and huge emerging middle classes.. Brazilians are flying to Miami for shopping weekends.. Its a different planet and a different market than even 25 years ago ..

Woodworking manufacturers sell clamps in China, Brazil .. all over the world. Think of where most of the furniture is made now . . Its a huge, growing market ..