More Bad Chinese Metal-Model A Spring Clip Bars

His wife threatened to divorce him if he didn't call off the goons.
His life history is pretty interesting for sure.

 

And he was sure as hell quality oriented. One hiistorical study contrasts him vividly with the GM types like Sloan: HF was product/car oriented (AND fascinated with the social effects), while GM, in close paraphrase, was not in the car business...it was in the money business.
Ford had to be fought back by his accountants when setting down to features of the Model A because he wanted to forge even stuff like carb levers, and was also a metllurgical pioneer in developing the first practical cast cranks...not because they were cheaper but because they allowed full balance distribution and were stiffer.
Socially he was both regressive and progressive, at least never dull.
And...look at the survival rate of Fords versus anything else 1910---1948...
Advanced metallurgy, insistence on strength, and leading development of close manufacturing tolerances...all far ahead of the industry.
As soon as he died, new management of mostly GM background was brought in to drop product costs that were due to higher than competing industry standards.

 

Henry marched to a different drummer. He valued durability, but he embraced odd concepts too willinglly - the V8 was a 'hail mary' when his preferred 'X-engine' failed - and clung to old ones too readily - he had to be dragged kicking and screaming away from thermosiphon cooling, mechanical brakes and solid axles to name just a few. And you can get away with a Harry Bennett only so long.

Yeah, Durant was a bit of a grifter and Sloan 100% flinty-eyed bean-counter, but GM did a lot more innovating in the decade before the war than Ford. And postwar Ford was in catch-up mode, really, until the 1980s.

Historically it's really, really odd that folks revere the tri-5 Chevys since, at the time, it was the one time Ford caught up and outsold them. The low-and-finned '57 Ford was a much more modern piece than the chunky '57 Chevy. There's a '57 Ford wagon somewhere about on the middle of the first page of my want-to-do projects, not that I'll ever make it that far down the list.

On Chinese parts - you can get whatever you want out of China. You want aerospace-quality stuff cheap? Sure. Just make sure you've got folks (the kind not easily bribed) on site there, checking the raw material as it comes in and the finished products as they go out. Some suppliers are more conscientious than others, but the fundamental rule is you must, absolutely must, do your own QC and it's got to be more stringent than you'd need in most places. There's a term of art for why the prototypes are great but the 100000th item off the production line is crap - it's called 'quality fade'.

Oftentimes the cost of that QC matches or exceeds what you save in production, but the fact is that for regulatory and other reasons there often just isn't the supplier base to do stuff in the US now, particularly in small quantities - China's the default choice because they've got the raw materials and the facilities and the tooling and we don't.

Of course, if the issue is that you let them cast a part that should have been a forging, that's the customer's problem, not Shenzhen Iron Works Ltd.

 

Since when ?


The additional tooling, machinery, and labor costs
to produce a forging are substantial.

Which explains why the street rod aftermarket
wants to use cast I-beam axles.

Some parts, simply can not be produced by forging.
Things like blocks and manifolds.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Bennett

 

same holds true for auto part stores.

 

Made from melted down toyotas.............

4TTRUK

 

me too buddy, back at ya. i was just amazed at the crap i was catching. after all the ,"my cast __________ broke" threads with everyone asking " where are the pics of proof" i tried to be as detailed as i could and include as many good quality pics as i could. maybe there was a full moon or something, lol. take care and i will keep everyone posted on the out come.

 

Got an email and phone call from the Ford Rep. Here's what he said:

Scott,

Don Snyder addressed the issue direct w/ the supplier and we are all in agreement the material and process is incorrect. They are correcting. Only last batch was affected.​

<!-- Converted from text/rtf format -->Thanks.
Dennis Mondrach
Ford Component Sales
Restoration Licensing & Performance Parts Manager

 

The last sentence of the response sure raises further questions.

 

take them back and get your money back if everyone did this it would kill there profits.and thats where it hurts.

 

Ah...oh...really?

This is textbook 'quality fade'.

Supplier subs the part out to someone else. His nephew the office manager had lunch with his girlfriend's brother who said he could do them cheaper and would kick him back 20% of the contract. Slipped a few into the last shipment and no one complained, so this time he shipped all crap parts and got caught.

 

Once upon a time I had a discussion with our supplier of transmission gears in India about quality. The gear blanks were forged items, he said, and as proof sent photos of the tooling and the "drop" forge. It pictured a primative machine with a walkway around it just above the forging "deck". Around the walkway were various sizes of sledge hammers. In the background was a large furnace with a lovely bellows about 6-8 feet wide and tall. These folks were making the worlds supply of transmission parts for WWII Jeeps for the last 30-40 years, as well as for the Model As of the world.