The incredible incompetance of some so-called "Engineers" is absolutely staggering. I worked with Mechanical Engineers who couldn't calculate the shear strength of a bolt.No Shit. We did that in first year College,where do these Fucking Idiots come from? The factories design Shit so it's cheap to manufacture and assemble.Once it's out the door,as long as they don't get their Asses sued,too Fucking bad. Money now is worth more than money later.
Hey, Machinos...an interesting story about power windows... I read in Forbes a few months ago about a guy who had problems with the power window on his new Lincoln, so he took it to the dealer to get it fixed. The problem came back a few more times, so finally...in frustration, he pulled off the door panel to see if he could do anything about it himself. Having never messed with a power window mechanism before, he wasn't sure what to expect...but when he saw how the unit was made, he was sickened that such a horrible piece of crappy engineering could EVER have made it into production. He set about to come up with a better, simpler and more reliable power window mechanism himself. The result is that he was able to design and patent a slick new power window regulator that should start showing up in some production vehicles in the next couple of model years! As always...it takes a pissed off Joe Average consumer to fix what some over-paid asshole engineer fucked-up to begin with! Only in THIS case, the consumer in question was industrious enough (and financially well off enough!) to offer his backyard soloution to the auto industry so that EVERYONE could benefit from his design! We'll see if his way becomes the new standard or not. After all...things like power window complaints provide lots of work for General Technicians in our nation's dealerships!!!
This one is on the 32 and is the one with 15-20,000 miles on it. The one pictured above is unused for the most part - new project and all that. Note in the photo above of the throttle pedal the large hole in the firewall. This to allow the rod some vertical and potentially horizontal latitude - although the motor mounts I use on both of these cars doesn't allow for much horizontal movement and the vertical movement is due to what the carb arm requires during it's travel. Anyhoo ... the 32 throttle seal is different from the 31. Instead of a flat-back aluminum plate on the engine side, it has an aluminum plate with a step machined in it. The step is deep enough by .020 - .030 or so over the required .125 Teflon thickness to allow the Teflon to float within the machined step and also rub against the larger Teflon piece that is the same diameter as the aluminum plate. Obviously you're gonna need a lathe to do the machined step bit, but the flat-back aluminum plate on the 31 could be easily duplicated by using a drill press, hole saw, mandrel and file. Said mandrel being nothing more than a headless bolt with a couple of flat washers and nuts so you can bolt the hole sawn aluminum flat-plate to it and then chuck it in the drill press for finish filing to a nice smooth round shape. Some fine grade emery and then a 3M abrasive pad puts a nice brushed finish on it. If shiny is desired it doesn't take much to buff it to a smooth and high shine after the 3M pad. I use the medium grade which comes in maroon most times.
[ QUOTE ] Quality was shit canned when we allowed China to copy everything. [/ QUOTE ] don't blame the chinese blame the companies that order and want to pay so little as possible, i bet they could do much better quality if they got paid for quality
Quality died along with Honor, Integrity and Loyalty. There are still glimmers of all four but you have to search for them.
[ QUOTE ] ...it takes a pissed off Joe Average consumer to fix what some over-paid asshole engineer fucked-up to begin with [/ QUOTE ] Don't kid yourself that the engineers are getting a slice of the pie! they're overworked, underpaid, misused in their specialties and get even shittier a deal than the American blue collar worker when it comes to compensation for such things as overtime. Talk shit about WalMart!??! Corporate greed in major mfg has the people who design the shit by the balls too. For cryin out loud, we got Elect. Eng's doing floor layout while someone with less exp. does the job they'd be perfect for and Mech Eng's doing supervisory of hourly personnel. "Planned Failures" are as easily described as after the sale cash flow generators as they would be by noting the improper application of talent within industry. Except that there wouldn't be so many safety recalls if ANY of it was intentional. Remember "Fight Club", dude worked as a Crash Annalyst who "applied the equation" of how many people get or could get hurt Vs. how much a recall would cost. Remember it was a burnt Lincoln he was lookin over? Not to mention that there's a BIG ego presiding over each dept's aspect of product design who already signed off that the current design was "Good ta Go". Ya think he's gonna admit that he was more worried about leaving early to pork his girly before his wife got home from the club than looking over a young and hard working underling's plans? HELL NO!!! Fuck up a career? That's more work for "SERVICE"!!! Here's a good one, it cost us over $50K to do an eng. change to an O-ring in a common fitting to several products. The new O-ring cost several cents less each offering a yearly profit potential of tens of thousands of dollars. There was NO mention(idea?) of how this new O-ring would react in application, other than it wouldn't cause product failure in and of itself. Yet, the NEW O-ring was incorrectly assembled do to the rings different expansion and frictional properties than the previous(something us line monkeys shouldn't know about anyhow), unforeseen until mass assembly which cost over $100K to fix. And the customer never saw a single defective piece. Years of savings blown on a poor launch. Did I mention what it costs to change a single thing such as an O-ring within a multi faceted part? How many people have to sign off on it? What it really takes? Dont' Blame the Engineers, they do what they can with what they have, the same as the rest of us, some fuck ups cost more than others. Know Who COULD have the World by the BALLS? Wal-Mart Employees. Like was said here previously, what're they gonna do, ship their jobs to Mexico? Stupid fucks won't unionize though, man. A national Wal-Mart agreement would help bring some of the rest of this country back up.
To get back to the original post above, your gas pedal is prominently featured right now in a Lokar ad on the back cover of "American Rodder", itself a badly debased consumer product proudly displaying its staff's ignorance of old cars in this issue. The Ad proudly proclaims "Amelican quality" or some such.
Just because it's a well known company doesn't mean it will have good quality. I have been in the quality field for 20 years and in different companies. I now work for a very well known company but not car related. I am here to tell you that absolutely none of our American companies spend any time or concern over quality. Minimal time is given to properly start a new project and evaluation is nil. It's now all about getting the product on the shelves to compete and satisfy the Walmarts in the world who have all the choices in the world to use a different product that may be cheaper. The American companies are cutting off almost all support staff and have stopped evaluatiing practices before,during and after production. Its the rising costs of health care and ,when you compare our wages to China, you have to say our wages too. They simply set back, collect their profits until some consumers decide they have to return the product. Only when the Walmarts of the world give them a kick in the pants will you see any changes to the product. But the sad thing this is how it's done. They never learn from these mistakes, on the next product it the same scenario. Always reactive, never proactive.
By the looks of it they plug welded through a 1/4" hole with a TIG. Probably would have held forever if done right, but there was only about 1/16" of that 1/4" weld that was actually attached. In other words they just filled up the hole, instead of doing it right and making sure of penetration.
I've been in the quality field for a few years too. The mentality of some very large companies would surprise you. I worked for a very large medical manufacturing company that moved assembly to Mexico. We (QA/QC) were seen as the neccesary evil. PeteJoe is dead right about always reactive instead of proactive. They would pay me 45 g a year to analyze data. I would create reports and management would "file" them. Potential recalls were dismissed as I was "new" to the game and "probably didn't have all the facts or was over-reacting". We had the FDA set up camp for a week and I was sent to 3rd shift to "problem solve a potential line problem". We ended up having a recall on a device that I had warned management about and lost quite a bit of consumer confidence (aka. Market Share). How did we manage the problem? Throw more people at it by way of operators, inspectors, tightened inspections....all good SHORT term fixes that have a nasty side effect... add cost to a product. The Root Cause/Corrective Action was weak and the FDA knew it and told them so in the way of fines. It wasn't until the FDA spanked them did they take things serious...did we learn from our mistake? No! similar issues popped up in otherplaces and they short term fixed them also...which in turn pushed unit costs up again. They moved the assembly to Mexico to exploit the "cheaper labor" never realizing that money up front instead of what I call "Reaction money" would have saved us from pushing our unit costs up and thereby reducing our need for cheap labor.It was ther own short term fixes that drove unit costs up and made us no longer a contender in that particular product line. Our consumers, who are on a budget, went to other suppliers. We still had the best product in the world but 3-4 other companies made a similar product that was cheaper. I visited a local hospital and aked what the criteria was for ordering supplies. I looked at the supplies and I asked why so many of the same equipment and so many different suppliers. Answer was. "We order from whoever was the cheapest when we placed the order..they're all about the same". I'm on the otherside of the coin and going to school to be a nurse. I use products manufactured by my old employer all the time. Do I feel confident using them? Probably not as much as I should but then the competitors brands have issues too.
Edward Demming tried to instill Quality Assurance into the American manufacturing process many years ago, nobody wanted to listen, so he went to Japan and made them the power house they once were. It's come full circle and now we are preaching that we are ISO 9000 compliant, which in theory, brings the QA procees back into control, just more bull shit. The days of the true craftsmen in this country are history, now, it's all about money. The few of us that refuse to ammend our values, will obviously die poor! Shoe
ISO 9000 is a joke. Designed by a guy who wanted to sell his services. All it is in a nutshell is your business plan. Period.
I heard the same thing from a former AMC engineer "planned obsolescence". too bad their old computers couldn't do a better job of modeling when the parts would fail. We could all be driving PT Ramblers. Demmings "quality" processes are being perverted and applied to the financial end, not production. they lower the COST of production, but don't raise the quality of the part produced. Demmings ideas are based on the premise that no worker wants to do a bad job. But if you are TOLD to produce a part of inferior quality, you are doing a good job. How many people would refuse a paycheck because they felt they were producing a poor quality product, unless their name was attached to that product?
One of my favorite quotes from W. Edwards Demming: "95% of all problems are the fault of management." And I'm constantly amazed by the number of people,in the quality field,who have never heard of Demming. My favorite quote is from Scott Landis,on the differance between Leadership and Management: "Leadership is the art of convincing other people to do the right things for you. Management is the art of waiting for the right things to happen so you can take credit for it." The ones who are so eager to take credit when things are going well,should step to the plate and show us how good they are when things are not going well. Bunch of Fucking White Collar Weasles.
Thanks C9, I'm sure lots of people got a good tip on those! [ QUOTE ] Yeah, I dunno if I'll ever buy a real late model car because of crap like this. At least until I'm filthy rich and can pay some guy to do it for me without worrying about the price. My car isn't very reliable right now because everything is worn out, but let me tell a story about my mom's car. It has about 140k miles on it, she bought it at about 110k.... [/ QUOTE ] Machinos, I'm not a big fan of today's "throw-away-cars" either but you do realize that by 110,000 miles most '50 Chevy's had already had two valve jobs, a couple of clutches, new second gear sincro, a couple of brake jobs and were resting in a stack three high in the local junk yard, don't you? You didn't by a "new car" you bought a mostly-used-up car, so what did you expect? All these "great old cars" that the guys on this board are resurrecting from the oxides are most of the time having to be rebuilt from the ground up. Well, at 110,000 miles, that car is in the same need of rebuilding, regardless of the number of decades it has or hasn't seen.
DrJ, you're right up to a point. I think that fantastic strides in power and reliabity were made in the early '50s. As an example I'll push forward my pal's '59 Biscayne (see classifieds) with 280,000+ miles on the never rebuilt engine that is still going strong. The Powerglide was rebuilt for the first time at 260,000 miles and the rear axle at 280,000. The front suspension has been rebuilt a few times, but the thing's been a lowrider for 12 years! Even all the electrics work! The power steering still worked, but leaked a little too much for cosmetic's sake, so we swapped that out. Anyway, this quote appeared in AV8's Speedway vs Tardel post. It applies to this conversation too. I think it's a good rule of thumb written by a properly educated and artistic fellow: QUALITY.. Its unwise to pay too much, but its worse to pay too little When you pay too much, you lose a little money. Thats all.. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little & getting a lot...it cant be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run. And if you do that, you will have enough to pay for something better. John Ruskin (1819-1900)
[ QUOTE ] Bunch of Fucking White Collar Weasles. [/ QUOTE ] Gong to remember that one Unkl - sounds like you have experienced these types first hand, Reminds me of a book titled something like "everything you need to know in business you learned in kindergarden" It is so true
[ QUOTE ] like "everything you need to know in business you learned in kindergarden" [/ QUOTE ] Some people didn't learn those lessons too well. I think they learned how to lie,cheat,steal,and be selfish Bullies. That would explain how they could turn a $50 Million a year company into a $25 Million a year company,in a growing market,in just 5 years. And then throw honest hardworking people out in the street,because they have to "cut costs". Fuckers !
[ QUOTE ] they learned how to lie,cheat,steal,and be selfish Bullies. That would explain how they could turn a $50 Million a year company into a $25 Million a year company,in a growing market,in just 5 years. And then throw honest hardworking people out in the street,because they have to "cut costs". Fuckers ! [/ QUOTE ] THE NEW AMERICAN WAY... You may be in Canada, I've worked for Canadian's and they're almost worse. We're All Fucked till we quit shoppin for cheap shit at Wal-Mart and demand quality...
[ QUOTE ] THE NEW AMERICAN WAY... [/ QUOTE ] Our company was taken over by American Beancounters,Wannabe Experts, Sales Wealsles,and Self Taught Geniuses. They didn't like the way things were being done;so now they do things their way. Too bad they don't understand the product,the customers, the manufacturing process,or the market. Now they have twice as many Sales managers,half as many employees, and half as much sales;in a growing market. The competition is very happy. Money Talks. Hahahahaha !
The Jalopy Journal
