Quote:
Originally Posted by calewjohnson
Not talking to the Chinese tires....but I believe many other items are engineered to fail. There is no money to be made if you make it and it lasts forever...we are currently dealing with this in the Navy. We have aircraft that we only planned on flying for 6000 hours, so they were engineered to not last one hour longer...this saved us weight and costs. Now we are wanting to fly these planes for another 3000 hours to fill the gap to the next generation fighter and now we are spending some cash trying to re-engineer these parts to extend aircraft life.
Now, the Chinese junk is just that...junk...
Cale
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I had a Great Uncle that was a reliability engineer by trade. He worked for Hamilton Beach manufacturing in Wisconsin. We were up visiting them one summer and the battery in our old Dodge van crapped out. It was about 45 days past the warranty by date of manufacture. Uncle Victor paid the core charge so he could keep the battery and take it apart to see why it failed. He was like a little kid on Christmas morning.
I think with the improvements in computer modeling and materials engineering they now have the ability to engineer things much closer to a given life cycle. Which can be a good thing or a bad thing.
I do agree that some stuff is just pure junk, unfortunately when price is the primary requirement everything else goes out the window.
I have done a fair bit of reading on trailer tires. There are very few requirements for them as compared to truck tires and passenger car tires. YOU have to do your due diligence and get what is going to work for you. There is a reason that Maxxis tires cost 2-3 times what a set of Westlakes do.
Should the RV manufacturers be held accountable? I think so, but there is no mechanism in place to really hold their feet to the fire other than refusal to purchase something that doesn't serve your needs or requirements.
A few years back someone tried to file a lawsuit against one of the big RV companies under the truth in advertising laws, it got no traction. Seems that every time someone tries to file a class action suit against the RV companies it never goes anywhere. It also appears to me that when a company goes bad, the major players just move on and start up another company under a different name, or sell off to one of the behemoths. If you look at the management names and their job histories in the RV industry it is obvious that there is a lot of "inbreeding" going on. Every now and again someone new will come along, they will start something up, then it gets sold off or goes a way. The companies are all profit driven. While that in itself it not an issue, it becomes and issue when profits take place over everything else.
The company I work for has gotten too large and we have issues. We used to make a much better overall profit margin when we were smaller. Now we struggle sometimes with quality. Finding good, dedicated and well trained workers is almost impossible. Our overall work force is aging and the younger workers that want to actually work is a dwindling pool.
Ok... I will put the soap box away now...
Aaron