Milwaukee Tool Raises the Bar with New USA Factory
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Project Farm is a YouTube channel that reviews tools. I've noticed that most of the made-in-USA products are relatively simple - hand tools, drill bits, adhesives, lubricants, and so on. Any complex assembly that includes electronics is almost invariably made in Asia.
It feels like the remaining made-in-USA tools are those where the manufacturer doesn't need to do much more than maintain some old machines and keep them fed with raw materials.
Jackson, TN Air compressors
Hempstead, MD Drill and saw components
Charlotte, NC Cordless drills, screwdrivers
Greenfield, IN Grinder, recip saws, hammer drillsThere is no hope. America can’t even agree on giving community college to poor kids, let alone training a generation of toolmakers, electronic engineers, programmers, and every other profession involved in making things out of atoms more complex than a handtool or a radiator. This country is dying and wildly unstable politically.
So like Applied Materials, Lam Research, and KLA Tencor? The global leaders in semiconductor machinery are predominantly American, with honorable mentions for the Japanese (Tokyo Electron, Dainippon Screen) and Dutch (ASML, ASMI).
Most of the equipment is made stateside, e.g. Applied Materials manufacturing is in Austin.
> America can’t even agree on giving community college to poor kids, let alone training a generation of toolmakers, electronic engineers, programmers, and every other profession involved in making things out of atoms more complex than a handtool or a radiator.
The "America is doomed!" rhetoric is older than the hills and, while we are in decline as the global hegemon, economically we are still as vibrant as ever. Last year KLA Tencor opened a second headquarters in Ann Arbor, Michigan... not in China.
The first statement is an extraordinary claim for which extraordinary proof is required (especially as a direct response to a post explaining how the opposite is true).
Working on factory production lines does not require a bachelor's degree. Germany isn't assembling cheap power tools either. One reason is that labor costs are too high, and requiring low skill jobs have a college degree does the opposite of helping that.
> let alone training a generation of toolmakers, electronic engineers, programmers, and every other profession involved in making things out of atoms more complex than a handtool or a radiator.
This isn't true. USA has some of the best EEs and programmers in the world.
> This country is dying and wildly unstable politically.
You mean like how Standard's US factories makes automotive parts? https://youtu.be/JhqaaYNgCO4
1. Western companies moves production of components to China. 2. Chinese companies becomes good enough to produce their own products. 3. Western companies starts rebranding Chinese products. 4. Chinese companies buy western companies. 5. Chinese companies open factories in western countries.
Manufacturing isn't industry in itself and the growth of industry is orders of magnitude more in China. Most people just have no idea how supply chains work or how many R&D centers are opening up elsewhere. Many western countries are no longer great industrial economies but still far from real knowledge economies. Western countries don't really have the infrastructure, housing or education necessary and increasingly not alternative ways of competing either like creativity, influence or equality.
There is a documentary called "American Factory". It isn't the best but it is something.
Every so often I like to link this:
Tektronix: "The Spirit of Tek"
https://vintagetek.org/opb-oregon-experience-the-spirit-of-t...
The video can be found when one looks around some.
Tek, under the leadership of Howard Vollum, literally built the whole region around it up. People could walk in off the streets and end up designing products, in sales, even doing a startup that Tek would help to fund.
I am a product of that culture, and learned a freaking ton from that place and the people who were in and around it.
When Howard Died, the private equity game chopped it all up and it's a shadow of what it once was.
Investments in the local people, partnering with schools, other manufacturers, all add up.
Streaming version: https://watch.opb.org/video/oregon-experience-the-spirit-of-...
Why do non-Western elites send their kids to Western countries for university educations?
> increasingly not alternative ways of competing either like creativity, influence or equality.
Which non-Western countries are competing on creativity?
So that they can plug themselves and their kids into massive, powerful, prosperous, global alumni networks.
They aren't, that's the point. Countries like China, Japan and South Korea are very good at pulling everyone in the same direction by following rules, having hierarchies, exchanging favors, working long hours, handing out punishments and whatnot. Far better than any western country could because we aren't at that point in time (and maybe Japan isn't now either). What they end up lacking is things like creativity. The problem is that western countries are also increasingly lacking opportunities to exercise creativity. There is few ways these days to in good faith drop out of school and crash on someones couch to do something else you rather want. Which has to some extent been the foundation of new industries.
Elites. We have the best education for elites. Not for everyone, which is a large part of the problem.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_...
Even among high schools and prep schools the nation-wide US average might be mediocre in public schools but when it comes to the higher-end private schools the US is still easily #1
https://www.prepreview.com/ranking/world/high-school-ranking...
That's a whole different conversation.
As I see it, Asian economies like India, China, Japan, South Korea offer a reasonable competition to Western economies today.
1. Samsung is a very viable competitor to Apple in hand held + wearables creative space.
2. Indian fin-tech solutions IMO today are some of the best in the world. All I need is a phone to shop for things (from buying a car to paying for parking) and have not used a credit/debit card for a year now (I live in India). Same in Indian edu-tech space. A lot of kids have quit school and are learning at home. Full time. I have not seen this happen anywhere before.
3. Toyota's are way more reliable than BMW's, Audi's and Ford's.
4. TSMC vs Intel is another good example.
I foresee a lot of innovation happening in Asia right now to go global in this and next decade.
Perhaps there is no such thing as a "knowledge" economy. At least not in a mass sense. Maybe instead the design knowledge which will drive automation is derivable from only a fraction of the population. That is only a small fraction of the population is capable or necessary for producing this knowledge. Perhpas the Utopia in which every child achieves a doctorate in engineering, medicine, etc was just a fantasy.
Perhaps the people who most perpetrated this story were motivated to. Because they were either complicit in the dismantling of the West's lower middle class economy or perhaps because they were apologists of untrestrained "free markets" and they needed a way to square their dogma without seeming cruel.
Perhaps the consequences of globalization minus the dogmatic fantasy of "everyone will be educated into being einstein" left the nagging uncomfortable suspicion that growth had its limits and someday we would have to admit that the only answer to making sure an equitable portion of wealth made its way into everyone's pockets wasn't an endless growth, every mom blasting their womb with Bach, an STM on every crib nerdocracy but instead gasp dare I say it? Redistribution!?
This is the key difference between the two ideologies. One side believes equity should be distributed equally regardless of achievement, the other believes equity distribution is directly correlated to productive measures of success.
"From those with the greatest ability, to those with the greatest need."
I'm not sure this is true. I think a lot of people including economics professors like to consider themselves fairly humanistic. And I think the idea of a mass of people permanently living near or below poverty bothers them.
And I think they take it somewhat for granted that their favorite economic theory has in our recent past effectively provided a middle class standard of living for many people. But when we start talking about dismantling the mechanisms which have created the large middle class and how it could decrease quality of life and increase poverty, they don't offer an honest assessment based on the fundamentals of their theory. That would be to say, "well yes such changes may induce pverty here."
Instead there is kind of a shrug. We'll become a service economy, nevermind making a comparison of the quality of the new service jobs against those being transplanted.
Or we'll become a knowledge economy, the great brain of global capital. Again never really contending with the question of whether that is even possible.
This allows them in my opinion to advocate politicies which harm people whilst shrugging off any guilt because instinctively they know to willfully empoverish people is wrong. It is this dishonesty that bothers me.
My gripe is not with those advocating against redistribution. Though my personal politics are for a mass ownership of property in some regard. My gripe is with people who have setup what might be a fiction (maybe it could be real too) as the answer to making choices which create suffering. And then for that image to have become a dogma we all expected to accept without questioning its basis in reality.
I'm willing to accept that I could be wrong. But I come from a working class background. I've known a lot of working class people over the years and the idea that most or even many of them are going to pivot into IT or what have you is just nonsense. The vast majority have pivoted into low paid service work without much social insurance of any kind.
And then you can export that Made in USA thing to Mexico or Canada and probably other places duty free.
> A majority of STIHL products sold in America are made in America of U.S. and foreign materials.
not buying it, sorry.
In my current company we make sunglasses a non-polarized pair of sunglasses will say made in USA and a polarized pair will say assembled in the USA because the polarized wafers are not domestically made. In both cases the boxes, stickers, and logos are non domestic but aren't counted because they "aren't essential". In my previous company anything that had electronics from overseas had to be "assembled" but electronics from NAFTA areas were "usa made"
In reality it doesn't make much sense to ever have a BOM 100% USA made as that fully negates the benefits of trade but we should have policies that still encourage companies that chose to conduct business here. When consumers are turned off by "assembled in" it drives business out of the country.
*I work as a product development engineer for consumer goods. My current role and previous company both had US MFG sites
Edit: here is a link to the requirements https://www.nist.gov/standardsgov/compliance-faqs-made-usa#4
Not sure which tools, other than some corded planers.
Milwaukee is TTI, which owns Home Depot's exclusive Ryobi and Ridgid brands, along with Empire (measuring devices), Hart (Ryobi but for Wal-Mart), and AEG (Ridgid but for Europe).
The other "big" one worth mentioning is Chervon, who own Flex, Skil (aside: their 12V stuff is surprisingly good!), and make Lowe's Kobalt tools.
The odd one out usually forgotten is Positec. They have a rather interesting history, and today make the Worx stuff...which honestly aren't bad tools.
I have since switched to all Milwaukee however. The battery tech smokes everyone else and the high prices are easily justified by quality and productivity.
The productivity, and subsequent quality of work, from the Fuel line are worth upgrading from down market stuff. If you do your own work (remodelling etc) there is no comparing to the bbq dad tools (or harbor freight).
The weed eater is stellar. The blower can be operated with two fingers (you can hold it with one finger). Damn thing tries to leave your hand though...lol
Smallest hammer drill, short work of any masonry (with decent bits). Done. Move on.
Circular saw lasts all day under heavy use (6 xc battery).
Impact driver...it is always out and ready. Used constantly. Driving tapcons, building decks, working on the truck, drywall. All effortless. Every screw and bolt driven perfectly without issue.
Literally an investment.
I'm honestly kind of glad, it means there's more better tools getting into people's hands now, but the color is an assault upon the eyes. I could've bought an R4560 probably two months before my 36-725T2, but I do woodworking because I like it, and I don't like "ORANGE!" being shouted at me every time I open the garage door.
Some have used Plastidip to blackout loud logos.
https://www.homedepot.com/p/RIDGID-10-in-Contractor-Table-Sa...
Stanley Black & Decker bought Craftsman several years back. Before the sale, Sears had contracted Stanley Black & Decker to make at least some of their Craftsman tools.
Craftsman = "V20"
Sears Craftsman = "20V"
Different incompatible brands, it's a bit deceptive.
https://toolguyd.com/craftsman-v20-sears-craftsman-20v-compa...
Note that article is four years old and there's a possibility related lawsuit since then.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/07/sears-is-sued-over-craftsman...
If you build something good, make it under your name and only your name.
Branding/rebranding/renaming smell like marketing gimmick and mean you are focused more on marketing trick than engineering.
They could have a Pro/home line of product for different segments and still keep honoring the brand.
SBD didn't invent DeWalt, they bought a company called DeWalt and expanded them to more tools.
I see so much effort spend on that kind of marketing (lying) and so little spend on improving the product, reducing the cost, increasing longevity, etc.
It’s everywhere, oven, fridge, tools, cars, etc.
At some point the confidence in the brand crumble and we just buy the cheapest chinese thing with a funny name.
IE: brand used to mean something
This is a result of decades of regulations and labour laws. Paying Americans 10x more to make similar quality tools is a terrible business decision. This cannot be fixed without government incentives/handouts (eg. Chips Act)
The individual business decision is sound, but the collective business decision is catastrophic. Not only does it create an economies of scale for adversaries instead of ourselves, but it gives them a lever to press to cause us pain. There is a national security disaster directly caused by the idea that paying Americans more is not a sound decision. Another country now has a say in what can be in our movies, and what our politicians, business persons, and celebrities can do or say. Add to this ambition, beligerance, and the prospect of war (a clear destroyer of value), and the picture gets even worse.
The answer is not handing out wads of cash to businesses like Intel that have failed to be productive by choosing business first (extract all the money possible) rather than values first (make the best products possible) practices, but to unburden our businesses with costs like healthcare and housing costs.
The minimum wage wouldn't have to be so high if there was cheap housing, good public transportation, abundant cheap healthy food, low debt policies, and government run health care. If you reduce the cost of living, you de facto reduce the cost of labor.
Housing policy that ensures limited supply and therefore high rents transfers wealth from laborers to owners, which is a transfer of money from businesses to landlords because the cost of rent is passed on to businesses in the form of wages.
Are you claiming that trade dependence between countries makes war between them more likely?
I am claiming that showing weakness by giving a powerful weapon (supply chain dependency) to an adversary invites them to see what they can get away with especially if they wish to conquer another country and you are their main blocker. Our supply chain dependency means China has a direct "cause pain" button they can push on America to cause political unrest or directly punish American involvement in China's "internal affairs." It is a tool they can use to try to make our elites present the Taiwan invasion, not as the conquering of a vibrant democracy, but as America's imperialist meddling in China's internal affairs. The supply chain can directly be used to extort our neutrality, just like Nord Stream was used to extort Germany's neutrality and corrupt Germany's elites. Is our defense posture better then that? Probably, but there is no denying Xi's China is getting more belligerent not less, which means they likely see the relative power shifts favoring them.
It is not the trade that I view as making war more likely, but the hard to replace dependency, namely Nord stream and the tech hardware supply chain.
Having the other side dependant on you in trade does give you a massive advantage.
Depends on the relative symmetry of trade—balanced, deficit or surplus—combined with other factors, of course.
This puzzle revolves around power. Power is the ability to execute force or inflict pleasure or pain. A CEO is clearly capable of painful force against their unskilled labor. A CEO can make it so someone has a harder time housing themselves, getting medical care, or feeding their children. But what power does unskilled labor have over their CEOs? Virtually none individually. So we see this reality reflected directly in wages. Unskilled labor gets paid the minimum because they have no power, and CEO's get incredible wages because they have the power to demand them.
This "agreement" is not mutual consent, but fundamentally exploitation. It's even more so exploitation when labor is sent to these poor countries.
Unions are the answer to the puzzle of "how does an unskilled laborer exercise power/prevent themselves from being exploited." Through collective action a union can cause the CEO pain and put a check on their otherwise unchecked power. In this way individuals are no longer powerless but have earned a seat at the negotiating table.
China did exactly this. They became exploited, nurtured dependence on the exploitation, and now use manufacturing's dependence on China as well as state level collective bargaining as a cudgul to execute their imperialist will on countries like Taiwan.
If you do not have the ability to commit great violence you are not peaceful, you are harmless. If you do not have the ability to execute power, you do not make agreements, you follow commands.
I personally don't understand how unions are not seen as American as the 2nd amendment. Unions are as important to preventing capitalist exploitation as guns are to preventing colonial/fascist exploitation.
Unionization has brought about some very beneficial improvements in working conditions and worker benefits and rights. But unions that get too big and powerful are often just as bad in different ways. They tend to make pay increases and promotions based solely on seniority instead of any measure of actual skill or work ethic, demand adherence to finicky rules about exactly who is allowed to do what work when, lose interest in representing individual workers when they don't fit the mold exactly, be just fine with driving business into bankruptcy or non-competitiveness with international competition, and generally foster an adversarial relationship between workers and management.
In the list, just about every bad union behavior corresponds to an equally bad or worse corporate behavior. Bad behavior correlates with unchecked power.
The nature of workers and management is adversarial. Working for a company is trading your stress/time for money. The company tells you it's bad to share your wage because that creates upwards pressure on wages, while they go behind your back to ADP and buy your wage history[1] so they can pay you less than you're worth/what they budgeted to create downward pressure. That sure seems adversarial to me.
I do agree that international non competitiveness is a worry, but that's also an argument in favor of letting big un-regulatable monopolies run wild (the counter argument being that monopolies kill/acquire innovation). I suspect parents who work at sweat shops tend to raise more poorly educated mentally worse off children, which then hurts the next generation of engineers/innovaters and society as a whole.
I think I would be most worried about agents (corporate or nation state) agitating small disagreements into big ones or directly compromising and harming industry via agents emplaced in union leadership.
Honestly I wouldn’t want to work at a company (of any size) where the CEO was only worth 10x what the lowest paid janitor makes.
I actually value the work a janitor does more than some of my colleagues, in terms of cleaning vs. creating messes.
Having 10 skilled people and 100 robots do what 1000 people would otherwise do isn't some defeat, it's fantastic. Productivity is what makes people rich in the long term.
Automation is far from unpaid. At very least it expects you to give it food (electricity, gasoline, etc.), shelter, and healthcare (repairs and maintenance). Generally the same things that humans expect from you.
Automation is significant not because it is unpaid, but because it can often do much more work for the same amount of pay.
The problem with automation is it is very hard to make it, but once it is made you can use it cheap. So you need to make many parts before it is worth it. 30 years ago it's was cheaper to pay a skilled lathe operator to turn a drawing into a single part, but if you needed 1000 it was worth writing CNC code to automate it. Today the state of CAM is such that many drawings can be turned into parts CNC directly, but assembly of those parts into a tool is often still manual unless they sell a lot of parts. (I don't know what Milwaukee is doing, but I expect cordless drills are assembled automatically, but their cordless bandsaw which is much less in demand is manual)
It's mostly just a big initial capital investment it seems.
It’s too late to tear down the current reality because there is no political will to build a new one. Perhaps giving away the long term professional knowledge core of the US to foreign countries so that capitalists could become richer and laborers could have cheaper goods will be what historians point to as the root cause of the decline of the American empire.
Mercantilism and protectionism were never a good idea.
It's common to blame Chinese manufacturing for cheap tools, but this gets the causation backwards. We wanted cheap tools and sending production overseas was the only way to get them. In fact because less is spent on labor, a better quality product can be had for the same price.
So bringing it back here without increasing the cost to the consumer means altering the design to make it cheaper to build, or banking on supply chain efficiencies to make it worthwhile.
Anyway, he mentions country of origin for a lot of tools and there's a clear trend towards better results for items made in the USA.
Obviously China is perfectly capable of producing high quality products, but regardless of the details of the causes, the end result is that "made in the USA" is a reliable signal for higher quality products.
In most western countries and other countries, like Japan, selling counterfeit or barely functional products is seen as somewhat shameful. But in China it’s often seen as being clever or cunning.
Chinese consumers are used to this and are very cautious about what they buy and from whom, and of course negotiating a reasonable cost for the goods being sold.
In the US and most of the west, consumers feel entitled to a basic standard of quality, even at the lowest prices.
This leads to consumers being confused in the west when they buy very cheap goods from China and the quality is crap. Well, yeah, you got what you paid for.
(Of course, Chinese companies can do the same when they sell to foreigners.)
Trying to play fraud off as a cultural difference and misunderstanding is frankly bullshit victim blaming.
It's only deliberately selling nonfunctional products that would meet the definition of fraud.
For example, if I knowingly buy a knock-off, nobody is being defrauded.
(You can claim that Prada as a company gets damaged in the process somehow, that's probably fair. But it's not fraud.)
We should be striving to expand this to more industries not the other way around.
Not everyone shares your preferences.
If the ones he bought from China is 1/4 the price it seems a bit unfair to expect the same quality.
If the average of the product he reviewed from China is cheaper than the ones from US, then they should be inferior in quality as well - it's a (mostly) free market and you get what you paid for.
But, big companies don't really have that excuse, because they should know what they're doing.
> Bernie was disturbed by the finger-in-bottle exchange, when I told him about it. “I hope they are washing their hands, at least,” he said. Since the bathrooms had no soap, I told him that it was not likely.
> I explained to Sister how this could be a problem. She told me that she understood and would address the situation.
> “I will tell the workers not to put their fingers in the bottles when you are at the factory,” she said.
....
> The hair gel that we produced at the factory was green. One day, I noticed that the worker who filled the gel bottles had a skin condition. His hands were covered with the slick formula, and beneath the green, shimmery layer, I could see that the skin on his hands was peeling. Small, raw patches of flesh were exposed, and you didn’t have to be a dermatologist to see that his skin was infected.
> “We should probably do something about this one,” I said to Sister, trying to sound calm, while in my head alarm bells were ringing.
> Sister did not see the point. “Why?” she asked.
> “It might be a health issue?”
> “But the worker has done nothing wrong. It’s just an allergic reaction.”
> Trying to press the matter, I suggested that the worker might contaminate the product.
> Sister twisted around the argument. “How can he harm the product when it was the product that caused him the harm?”
etc.
Otherwise we will just engage in 'No True Scotsman' fallacies.
And if you find any issues, you test the whole shipment.
And then you compare the results to the outgoing QA test results.
And if any results can't be explained by failures relating to shipping, then you fire your supplier.
You let them know ahead of time that this is the procedure you'll apply, and then they'll do proper QA testing.
You should probably run with multiple suppliers in the first place, so it's easier to switch between them? Of course, that extra overhead probably will eat into your cost savings.
No major medical company wants to risk recalling defective product by using a disreputable Chinese manufacturer. Unknowingly selling counterfeit product is a pretty bad look to the FDA and consumers.
This is the main reason why many procurement departments have a no China policy.
This isn’t as protective as one would imagine. Unscrupulous floor managers will still swap materials, run the crap and sell the good stuff.
As they say, heaven is high and the emperor is far away.
Many things are this way - you don't pay premium price for a budget brand even if they end up performing the same as premium brand.
Also you don't outsource production to China to get better quality, you outsource to cut cost - that always leads to worse products down the line.
Counter point: Apple, they seems to be doing just fine.
China is not a magical place where there is boundless supply of cheap labor and bad product quality. Execution matters.
There's a lot more to production quality than just product design. Quality of materials, manufacturing tolerances, heat treatment, surface cleanliness, quality control procedures, tooling wear, order of operations, assembly jig design, and so on. Some of those may be affected by the country in which it's made, and some may not. While you may say those are "design" in that the designer specifies the material they want, whether their product really gets made the way they envision is not always up to them.
And even when it comes to just design, I'll say one thing: I have a lot more confidence in the designs produced by designers whose desks are within walking distance of the production line.
In theory yes, but in practice it doesn't seem to ever pan out that way. When was the last time a company that moved its manufacturing from the US to China to increase profits didn't also cheap out on materials, quality control, and customer service?
But yes, it seems very rare.
And this is AFTER they fixed the infamous design flaw on mine:
https://thenextweb.com/news/what-hell-apple-butterfly-keyboa...
Nearly always it's poor design of the battery chemistry or battery management system.
The point isn't about quality, the point is about having manufacturing capacity to turn these places from making tools to making aircraft parts in a pinch when shit hits the fan.
Having domestic manufacturing capacity of the shittiest tools is far better than only having designers that'd twiddle their thumbs in war time, not knowing how to setup high volume manufacturing capability quickly.
Most people here do not understand how difficult it is to make literally anything in high volume. Take the simplest thing like a puck of aluminum. Now, try establishing a manufacturing chain that can make 8 million of these per week. You'd be on your knees trying to make 1k a week, let alone 8 million. We're note even talking about having SPC or other systems that monitor quality. HVM is the most underappreciated aspect of engineering by far and it is trivialized by clueless media. Even the most educated people appreciate design over manufacturing.
That being said, not every plant makes every type of steel. Higher end steels are the types of steels that western manufacturers can compete on, so it is often what they specialize in.
This is a certifiable fact.
In general I'd say that some companies do this.
I did a quick search and found a few well-published incidents:
Kobe Steel (Japan)[1]
Japan Steel Works (Japan) - although this was faked inspection on manufactured components not raw steel[2]
Ossen Innovation Materials (China)[3]
Unsubstantiated reports of issues with companies from China, Germany, Italy and the US[4]
Le Creusot (France). Fake materials used in nuclear reactors[5]
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-kobe-steel-scandal-ceo-id...
[2] https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14617459
[3] https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/307694/steel-supplier-ha...
[4] https://www.eng-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=304464
[5] https://www.steelavailable.com/en/counterfeit-steel-big-worr...
As much as I like some Klein tools that are made in the USA, they have a few that are cheaper-quality when compared to their cheaper-price Chinese alternatives.
If I can’t find USA, I’ll at least look to Taiwan, having spent time there and seen how hard the people work.
I don't think you've read all the posts by people with actual experience in manufacturing. Give the same "design" to two different factories and you get two different results. Manufacturing matters.
As an example, manufacturing in southern Italy vs norther Italy might be rather different, too.
Apple has shown exactly this: you get what you pay for in China, just like everywhere else. If you want quality and consistency, you can get it in China. It just costs more than low-quality from China.
I have to disagree with this. The quality of consumer-grade hand tools is a function of who controls the manufacturing process and quality control procedures. It has very little to do with who writes the specs, approves the engineering drawings, or selects the materials. The quality depends on how closely the whole process was monitored and controlled by the entity who is attempting to have the tool produced. If they can't or don't closely watch the process and have robust reject/accept criteria then the tool can appear in the package to be fully up to spec without actually hitting any of the design specs.
>It's common to blame Chinese manufacturing for cheap tools, but this gets the causation backwards.
This is not true. Blaming Chinese or Indian etc manufacturers is actually pinning the tail in the correct spot on the donkey. As mentioned by at least one other respondent, Chinese manufacturers will substitute inferior materials and violate other specs at will unless you have eyes on the process and the right to test and reject everything out of spec.
>We wanted cheap tools and sending production overseas was the only way to get them. In fact because less is spent on labor, a better quality product can be had for the same price.
Don't include me in that "we". I had no part as a consumer in the decision to send production overseas. In fact, whenever "we" would go out to buy a new tool or tool set we would always consider where the product was made in the purchasing decision precisely because we had previously bought a tool from a company that had moved production to China or India and later had that tool prematurely fail in normal use. The production location is a strong indicator of quality.
Price only comes into the equation when you are purchasing a tool that you may only use once. In that case you are taking a chance that the product will last long enough to finish your task. Harbor Freight mostly sells tools made in China and other foreign countries. Tradesmen take their business to HF because the return policy is lenient enough that if a tool fails you can take it into their store and walk out with a new one in a few minutes after describing the nature of the failure and the reason for the return. Hand tools like drill bits, screwdrivers, allen wrenches, hand wrenches, etc tend not to be as durable as an equivalent 50 year old Craftsman, Proto, S-K, Snap-On, etc. tool. I have watched HF drill bits untwist while trying to drill a hole through a pine 2x4. That is a quality control failure.
The false idea that spending less on labor gives the consumer a better product for the same price ignores the reality that it simply doesn't work like that and sounds like something that a person who had never owned or used hand or power tools would say. You might have a career in marketing if you can get enough potential customers drunk enough to believe that shit.
>So bringing it back here without increasing the cost to the consumer means altering the design to make it cheaper to build, or banking on supply chain efficiencies to make it worthwhile.
One can also alter the production method by using improved tools or techniques and materials.
At the end of the day though when your job pays for the tools you will use and requires you to do certain tasks day in and day out then you will find that the employer will frequently have a short list of approved tool vendors so that you will have to pay for a tool that is not on the approved list. This helps insure that techs have durable tools that are fit for purpose and have a proven history of performance so that the company and the techs will not have to constantly replace tools that would not have failed had they chosen more expensive, more reliable brands.
Tool branding is everything and people who use tools absolutely care about where they are made and who owns the company making them. Reputation is everything with some things.
Good chart of tool company owners, https://www.protoolreviews.com/power-tool-manufacturers-who-...
> It may surprise you to know that only a handful of power tool companies own your favorite tools. That’s right, most tool brands fall under a parent company that also controls additional power tool manufacturers and brands.
At this point, reputation and branding needs to be separated out to the level of tool lines or even model numbers, e.g. Ridgid tools, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32453919
> After signing the deal in 2003, TTi took over the production of Ridgid power tools. These tools are licensed for sale only at The Home Depot, and all of these tools are produced by TTi, not Emerson. However, TTi does not own Ridgid or the rights to the brand name. Rather, TTi has a licensing agreement with Emerson that allows them to produce and distribute the tools under the Ridgid name.
While most Ridgid power tools are made in China by TTI, the well-regarded Ridgid shop vacs are made in Mexico by Emerson.
Ridgid toolboxes are made in Israel by Keter, which also makes enclosures for Milwaukee Packout and Home Depot's Husky brand.
I think the licensing of a manufacturer name without that manufacturer being involved in production, quality control, or maintenance has probably cost consumers more money than just about any other market change.
There are too many products carrying a brand name associated with quality that are actually entirely produced, sold, and serviced by unrelated entities on licensing agreements. Many of those products are low quality "consumer grade" examples of things like lawn mowers, outdoor grills and kitchen equipment, power tools, yard tools, etc and are sold through stores like Lowes and Home Depot. A consumer buys one of these products thinking they have a high quality item and then later when it fails they find themselves in service limbo since the brand owner has no connection to the product and the manufacturer makes it difficult to reach any customer service information or punts the consumer to the brand owner people.
They have essentially purchased a license to a reputation for their products and have free reign to operate with no intention of maintaining the good will that reputation has among consumers. I don't understand why a company will license their reputation in a situation like this. The money must be great.
What OP is talking about is that good tools are the ones with better design. OP mistakes the technical term "quality" with "good design". Quality is producing things as per specifications and allowable tolerances.
Exactly. Quality Control is verification of the fact that things were produced to spec with correct materials to allowable tolerances.
I think quality is the part where many offshore manufacturers are willing to cut corners and quality control is sporadic or absent. Thanks for this.
Cheap tools were pushed on the majority of people.
How are cheaper tools pushed on people? There's a broad range at the hardware store and generally staff will encourage you to purchase premium brands.
They came into many towns, built huge stores, pushed cheaper products which crushed the competition (who sold good tools) then pushed cheap junk on most people which just ends up in landfill.
These stores didn't just sell tools, they helped DIY people know which tools to buy.
That is how.
Now my salary is significantly higher and I deal with significantly less BS
Can you expand on this? What industries, what components, and at what volume? How many jobs is this?
Made in the US is fine/good/whatever, but what I want to see from them is tools that are just good in their own right. I want to see their hand tools top Project Farm charts like their battery stuff. Time will tell.
Not sure it is exactly worth the premium, but the ones I have are very nice (just get them on sale is all).
Should i buy a dewalt or makita or bosch battery power tool knowing that i can add other common tools in future or should i go Milwaukee and enjoy better battery choices, and a far far wider selection of power tools for future purchases?
If i hadn’t started out with team blue, I’d be buying team red. I might switch when i need to replace batteries next.
Fairly limited tool selection though. I think I have almost all of them, maybe a dozen.
I'm thinking of starting to switch to a new brand, just to get more tool selection. I love the Milwaukee, but I'm not sure I can justify the price for DIY use.
So I'm thinking about the Ryobi One+. Lots of tools there...
I got a few tools that I needed before there was a Milwaukee version and now I'm slowly swapping them for the Milwaukee version. The latest was a Metabo pin nailer. The Metabo one is slow (it needs to build up some compression when you try to fire the nail), it breaks the nail strips, it jams about every 30th nail requiring disassembly, and the anti-dry fire mechanism kicks in with ~15 nails left. The Milwaukee version is better in almost every single way (the only exception is that Metabo's safety ensures the tip is pressed against something; Milwaukee has a dual trigger safety).
Cost and accessory compatability. Here's a real world example: if your 18v tools are Bosch and you want to add a track saw to your arsenal, then the Bosch track saw is excellent (it's made by Mafell) and it has the best rail system - specifically the joiners are more reliable than the Festool/Makita/others style. It'd seem a no-brainer to buy the bosch 18v track saw then?
Rationally, the Festool track saw is the better purchase: it's cheaper (even allowing for purchasing 2 festool batteries + a dual charger), it has a deeper straight and bevel cut depth, and Festool tracks are a defacto standard for track accessories - accessories that would not be available to you on Bosch/Mafell style tracks.
Mind you, this was around when their second or third generation M18 line came out, which was quite a bit better than the other things on offer. Today that has likely all shifted around two or three times.
Go to one of the cheaper bands (which they probably own) and you may regret it.
I hope this means a Domino and proper track saw competitor in the works.
And I am just a home gamer. I can't imagine a pro whose living depends on reliable tools rely on hacks like these. These guys buy absurdly expensive Hilti tools because this is a brand they can count on, they can spend a couple hundred bucks on a pair of proper batteries.
https://www.madeinamerica.gov/
> When the U.S. government spends your tax dollars on American goods, we ensure our future is made in America. “Made in America” policies are designed to increase reliance on domestic supply chains and ultimately reduce the need to spend taxpayer dollars on foreign-made goods ... Various laws and regulations establish requirements for U.S. government procurement and assistance to support American manufacturing.
https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/complying-ma...
> The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is charged with preventing deception and unfairness in the marketplace. The FTC Act gives the Commission the power to bring law enforcement actions against false or misleading claims that a product is of U.S. origin.
April 2022, https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2022/04/ftc-charg...
> FTC charges battery maker in first case under Made in USA Labeling Rule ... the order prohibits them from making unqualified U.S.-origin claims unless they have proof that the product’s final assembly or processing – and all significant processing – takes place in the US and that all or virtually all ingredients or components are made and sourced here ... The order further requires that any qualified Made in USA claims include clear disclosures about the extent to which the product contains foreign parts, ingredients, or components, or involved foreign processing.
Some ecommerce tool sites have reliable CoO metadata and search filters.
Techtronic Industries bought them from the Swedish company Atlas Copco in 2005.
Here's an article on who owns what in power tools [1].
With some of the licensing deals, the same brand might actually come from two different companies. Emerson owns RIDGID and makes tools under that name, but also licenses the name to Techtronic. Emerson seems to make the non-powered RIDGID tools and Techtronic makes the powered ones.
It looks like maybe 6 companies cover pretty much every power tool brand that most people in the US are likely to find at Home Depot, Lowe's, ACE, Walmart, and so on.
I just wish that they would get together and agree on battery standards for their cordless power tools, so that batteries could be interchanged.
My first lithium battery cordless tool was a bundle from Black & Decker of a weed whacker and a hedge trimer. Since then I've added a B&D drill and a B&D impact driver. I now need a cordless leaf blower and although it looks like some other brands would fit my needs better than B&D I'll probably go with B&D just to avoid getting another battery system (and will probably by the tool only since I have enough B&D batteries and chargers already--I don't use enough tools simultaneously to need more than the three batteries and charges I already have).
There are some adapters to allow mixing batteries, for example this one allows using Black & Decker 20V batteries on Bosch 18V tools [2], so it might be feasible to branch out from B&D without having to deal with a different battery system.
[1] https://www.protoolreviews.com/power-tool-manufacturers-who-...
[2] https://powertoolsadapters.com/products/black-decker-20v-to-...
Paging the EU regulators who mandated USB-C for smartphone chargers.
Another comment mentioned that DRM is coming to tool battery platforms.
DeWalt, Craftsman, Porter Cable, Black and Decker, and probably another brand or two that I can't recall at the moment all use very close to the same batteries. The pins are in a different order and there's small plastic tabs in certain places so you can't swap brands but with a little bit of work you can charge a Craftsman battery in a Porter Cable charger and use it to power a DeWalt drill. Don't attempt to modify these batteries and chargers unless you have an understanding about what you're doing, though.
> [German] Chairman Horst J. Pudwill, a former Volkswagen executive ... co-founded the company in 1985 as a maker of rechargeable battery packs for cordless tools. It then made tools for do-it-yourselfers on a contract basis for Sears Holdings Corp.'s (SHLD ) Craftsman brand, among others. Then it bought control of brands, including rights to the Ryobi name outside Japan, Royal vacuum cleaners, and Homelite garden tools. The big move was the $626 million purchase of Milwaukee Electric Tool and Germany's AEG Power Tools -- both premier brands used by professionals -- from Atlas Copco.
> Techtronic can also take new tools from the conceptual stage to production in as little as six months, thanks to 24/7 collaboration among designers in Asia and Techtronic's "concept centers" in Hong Kong, South Carolina, Germany, and Britain.
But I fail to see that 'this changes everything'. That tone of the article just feels patriotic. What will change, exactly? Did I miss some facts?
As for quality, regardless of whether it's with or without power, I doubt there is a big difference in US, German, Japanese, Australian tools -- it's a matter of preference and workshop organisation (e.g., for cordless power tools, the batteries should fit what is already there). One company may have a slightly better circular saw (Festool?) the next has a slightly better plunge router (Triton?) -- whatever. But most of that is marketing and branding policy (DeWalt is for the tough and sweating man and Festool is for the clean and thoughtful engineer -- but is there a quality difference in their cordless drills?) Milwaulkee is good and in the same league and I don't see changes coming by this.
The tag said "Made in Upstate New York"
The only true change to the product that could happen is either a design change, or a change in available resources. Some multi-axis CNC machines are apparently not legally available everywhere in the world, so that could be a locality factor. On the other hand, plenty of companies design assemblies with complex components manufactured in various places around the world to be integrated elsewhere later on.
I bought a couple USA-made Milwaukee carpenter squares a couple years ago and found the quality (accuracy) wanting, unfortunately. I hope whatever strides they make with manufacturing in the USA keep quality at the forefront and don't just end up eroding trust in the idea that USA-made means it's going to be a quality product.
I ended up trying a number of bad squares from them at the hardware store and finally found a couple I was willing to buy because I like them and wanted to make it work.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MilwaukeeTool/comments/jmv52u/squar...
Home Depot and several others have tried to clone it with their own cheaper house brands which are kinda okay, but not as good as the original.
There's tons of stuff in the pipeline for it, too.
The other "good" modular storage systems are made by the same subcontractor in Israel it seems.
Though I find packout easier to disconnect compared to toughsystem2 and the systainers are nice but a bit fragile.
There's a ton of cheap Chinese tools for sale in Japan. Makita is a nationally-recognized Japanese brand. If you want a quality tool for long-term use, one would often select a made-in-Japan Makita. The higher price is justified by the longer warranty, etc.
https://www.garagejournal.com/forum/threads/craftsman-hand-t...
Latest was published 4 hours ago.
For anyone interested, apparently Craftsman also just opened a huge hand tool plant in Texas.
Nice to see a little resurgence in locally sourced stuff.
Almost all the power tools are made in china, though.
I got the impression from the article that they would only be making hand tools in this new factory, not power tools. Those will still be made in China. And like I said, it's not difficult to find US-made hand tools in stores today. So Milwaukee will be competing with the likes of ChannelLock, SK, and Snap-On. (And maybe Craftsman? I don't know where they are made anymore.)
- supply chain is moving to US (ex. Korean conglomerates, TSMC, Japan)
- cost of goods is rising as result of Made in US
- increased number of articles justifying this for improvement in quality
Kidding, and Icon tools are quite decent.
The things they offer lifetime warranties on keep getting better. Some things I wonder about though. Their 200amp multi process mig welder is only $200 less than a Hobart or Lincoln-- but who knows how long HF will sell replacement parts, their warranty process for OOS items and what will actually break, so the gamble to save 10-20% doesn't seem worth it.
Apex (Crescent/Gearwrench) are mostly TW and come in a little higher than HF's 2nd tier, but are solid quality for most of their hand tools.
Edit: Sorry, I should add a bit more. I certainly have not used all (or even most) Harbor Freight tools, but for the work I do, the tools I've bought from Harbor Freight, they just don't last. For a backyard mechanic or Average Joe Homeowner, they're probably just fine.
Toolguyd has an active community (e.g. 100+ comments on this post) with real-world experience, challenging claims made by the blog.
I find him to be pretty reliable overall, and I believe he’s drawn ire from some manufacturers due to his honesty.
He also has a PhD (in materials science IIRC), FWIW.
It is a bit fawning, and the sans font looks like a cheap blog. The content itself doesn't feel bot-driven.