The problem with Chinese made tools (from a USA manufactuers’ point of view) is not that they produce garbage, but that they have the ability to turn out some pretty good tools.
If all they did was produce garbage, they would have gone by the wayside like products from India did in the 1960s. (They often had beautiful chrome plating but the parts would break).
From my experience, the Chinese do a credible job when the item to produce requires some serious expertise. When that happens, the Chinese manufacturers will often (but perhaps not often enough) hire western consulting firms to guide them. When that happens, they seem to do a credible job.
But if the job looks easy, and they go it alone, they often trip up.
The company I worked for used to produce welded steel D-rings for the tarpaulin industry (mostly trucking). We produced between 5 and 8 million D-rings per year.
We encountered a competitive situation (competing with a Chinese supplier) and we decided to import ourselves. We had a detailed manufacturing specification. The wire had to be C1008-1010. The plating had to be zinc with a clear chromate coating, and the weld had to hold a tensile strength of 250 pounds minimum.
The production arrived and the parts looked great. The welds showed full penetration (resistance welds) and the zinc plating was excellent. Note: Offshore plating often looks better than domestic plating because they can use chemicals that are banned in the USA.
The problem was that the welds all failed.
Our welds often exceeded the capacity of our tensile tester (600 pounds), but these welds were failing at about 100 to 125 pounds.
We sent the samples to a testing lab to determine what alloy steel was used. Our guess was that the carbon content was too high and it compromised the welds. We were wrong.
The problem was the high silicon content. We asked the lab what grade of steel was used. They replied, “As far as we can tell, they crushed some old farm vehicles, melted the steel and converted it to wire. It does not match up with any known alloy of steel.”
The entire load (about 500,000 D-rings) was rejected.
The item to be produced was seemingly very simple (it was) but working on their own, the manufacturer made some production choices that ruined every part they produced.
My suggestion is, if the job requires a lot of manufacturing expertise, you probably are OK to buy from a Chinese manufacturer. But if it is simply to make something that looks like a red anodized T-square with white markings, probably not so much OK.
I would sooner buy a digital vernier calipers from a Chinese source, than a red-anodized-look-alike copy of an domestically produced measuring equipment.
