Quote Originally Posted by Euclid440 View Post
I posted about this once before in another thread a few years ago.

I have a friend who is a water filtration expert and was hired by a California company to design a globally marketable water filtration system. He designed the system and made working prototypes.

Then they hired a well-established Chines manufacture to produce the filter, it did not work. They disassembled it to find out most all the tolerances were off.

He went to China to observe the process and found that they had to be watched constantly and it got to the point he was living 2 weeks in China, 2 weeks in California. Each time he returned, the person or persons he had trained had left the company and gone across the street to make a penny more.

Each time he returned to China, they had lost ground and parts were junk. As soon as he turned his back, they would farm out production and at times to multiple vendors each of which cut corners and specs went out the window.

After 2 years the US company gave up on production. It is a systemic problem as the workers will leave a company for another literally for a penny more, and each vendor will modify materials to save a penny even if it means altering specs. And not saying anything about intellectual theft.

While the steel may be “sophisticated” in design and even in some production, they will eventually cut corners, you see it now in the finish and grinding already.

So, it will always be a Kit Razor, cause like the box of chocolates, you never know what you are going to get.
Quite correct. The concept of "Good Enough" is overriding all other considerations in Chinese mass manufacturing. They are CAPABLE of making good products. Take the Astra IIIb sextant, for instance. But getting them to strive for excellence is an epic task. Anyway I just verified this. The Titan razors are made in Taiwan, not China.

I have tried and tried to get the folks at GD to make a razor with the proper bevel angle and a heel that does not swell outward into the stabilizer. I haven't had much luck. As long as they can sell razors at a profit they don't care, and you get what you get. This is typical. There is no Master Grinder. Just factory slugs for whom razormaking is absolutely not a career. The best that they are willing to do is their P81 model which you really ought to try someday. It's no Tanifuji, but it hones and shaves a lot easier than the classic models. When I run out of all the others, this will be the only one I will continue to sell.

Perhaps the biggest fault with Chinese copycat manufacturing is they copy a picture, not the item, and certainly they don't capture the full functionality of an item that they are cloning. This dimension, that dimension, irrelevant. They don't show up in the ebay or alibaba listing, so not important. Looks like the real thing? Good enough.

Unfortunately because of buyer ignorance, the business model is very profitable.

If attention to detail and tolerances is a requirement, China is generally not the place to source from. They only do what they have to do to sell the product, and usually that means selling it for 1/10 what the real deal would cost made in USA or Europe or Japan. And to sell that cheap, they have to cut corners and treat their workers like dogs and unlike dogs, they are not still loyal even after getting kicked around by their masters.

When you can live with Chinese standards, the price is unbeatable. When you don't know any better, you will learn the difference between value and price.