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Re: Chinese made products
Our company was forced to have some of our lower end product ( battery backup systems) made in China. We fought the directive for some time, but our competitors were seriously under pricing us, so we finally agreed to source that product line in China. One of our engineers had worked for Cobra (CB, etc) and had spent a lot of time in China working with their suppliers. He stated that the Chinese companies will build very good products as long as we forced them to continue using exactly the same parts that the original design and qualification tests were derived from. Our contracts were very explicit and our parent company would spend time in the Chinese plant verifying that nothing was changed. We would get requests to change an electronic part due to costs or availability and when we did our engineers would validate the new part or refuse to allow the change. Under those circumstances we were able to get units built as well as we had been doing in the US. with the same excellent
reliability. Hopefully Goodyear and other tire companies are following President Reagans advice regarding Russia: Trust but verify. I suspect that in a lot of cases they are not doing enough verifying and too much trusting.
We had three of our original Mission tires go bad way before they should have. I became convinced that Missions were being built using worn out school erasers as their primary rubber component.
I've always been intrigued as to why Michelin (NOT MISSION) is not in the ST tire business. Maybe they feel that it's a no win business both from the selling price and from the nature of 5th wheel environment. Meanwhile the beat goes on and tire problems continue and continue and continue.
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