Ronnie Sullivan
Member
How the heck is China leading the world in manufacturing when they make absolutely rubbish machinery (and I'm holding back on the epithets for rubbish)
I suppose I know the answer - cost. But this is the third time in 2 years I have been called to install/commission a new machine from China that I could hardly believe how bad the quality of workmanship was.
This was a 'roller shutter door' making machine.
A huge (2 ton) coil of flat steel is uncoiled through a perforating stamping press, then through forming rollers and then to a length cutting machine and stacker.
It had a Mitsubishi plc and an HMI ( I don't know the make of HMI as it was all in Chinese) and a few Siemens inverters. I can't say for sure but something just didn't look right with those components - the printing on them was not straight and looked like they had been put on with transfer paper. Almost certainly fakes.
The HMI made me laugh. It was a big colour touch screen 12'X12' (maybe bigger) with only 1 page (everything crammed onto the 1 page) with a nice picture of pagodas as a background?? And you had to hold your finger on any button for about 3 seconds before it would respond.
There was only 1 emergency stop and that was on the main panel with no safety relay and they must be short of wire in China as the links between buttons etc were so tight you could play a middle C on them.
There was a box of 'stuff' (it said 'stuff' on the box) full of electrical parts (limit switches, photocells etc that said 'fit to machine when installed' with no further instructions. Just a row of unused terminals in the panel with Chinese letters on them.
As is our job - I slowly worked out where each switch should go and what terminals to connect to. (with absolutely no documentation)
Then we came to the first switch on.
I tentatively pressed start with my hand over the stop button and 2 hydraulic motors started with a very bad noise, did I hit that stop button fast.
Two hydraulic oil tanks had no oil in them. I had to go buy 8 25L (5 imperial gallon) barrels of hydraulic oil. It nearly broke my back filling the tanks. We don't sweat much us sparkies but it was dripping off me by the end.
They loaded a 2 ton coil of steel on to the 'uncoiler/feeder and it was tipping over until they pushed it right on with a fork lift. Then they pressed the hydraulic grippers and there was a very loud mechanical bang from inside.
Four huge bolts had to be unscrewed to get the side panel off (All were made from mild steel and rusting already) to see what had happened.
All four bolts were cross threaded and skew whiff (lol) and the bolt-holes in the thick steel panel had been cut out with an acetylene torch. They had to use a monkey wrench to unscrew the bolts as the edges quickly 'rounded'
A weld had broken inside under pressure - I say a weld, a load of molten metal without the slag being knocked off. (bird s41t welding as it is called here) and the connecting (rusting) steel rods had all twisted.
So that part is useless until they get a welder/engineer to replace everything.
So next the stamping press (it perforates the steel to make the shutters see through) A huge flywheel with no guards whatsoever struggled and buzzed to get to speed. It worked when they tried a test piece but what a noise - well above any acceptable decibel level.
The list of unbelievable things goes on; the test pieces got stuck in the forming machine every-time because the rollers were out of line; the measuring device (for piece length) was an encoder with a roller laid on the formed metal and it slipped - not to mention the overrun when length was reached.
And as a finale, when the hydraulic cutters actuated, the hydraulic pipe came off at the crimp squirting a jet of oil across the factory.
It's left like that at the moment until they get some engineers to repair everything....... this is a brand new machine from China.
Oh, I lied, there was documentation. In a brown envelope that came with the machine was an 8GB mini memory chip taped to the inside.
On that chip there was just one file - a video file of the machine working taken from someones phone with a Chinese commentary. (it wasn't discovered until all the above had already happened) and even if I spoke chinese I wouldn't have known what to do as most of it was drowned out by the noise of the press.
Do they import Chinese machines in the USA?
I suppose I know the answer - cost. But this is the third time in 2 years I have been called to install/commission a new machine from China that I could hardly believe how bad the quality of workmanship was.
This was a 'roller shutter door' making machine.
A huge (2 ton) coil of flat steel is uncoiled through a perforating stamping press, then through forming rollers and then to a length cutting machine and stacker.
It had a Mitsubishi plc and an HMI ( I don't know the make of HMI as it was all in Chinese) and a few Siemens inverters. I can't say for sure but something just didn't look right with those components - the printing on them was not straight and looked like they had been put on with transfer paper. Almost certainly fakes.
The HMI made me laugh. It was a big colour touch screen 12'X12' (maybe bigger) with only 1 page (everything crammed onto the 1 page) with a nice picture of pagodas as a background?? And you had to hold your finger on any button for about 3 seconds before it would respond.
There was only 1 emergency stop and that was on the main panel with no safety relay and they must be short of wire in China as the links between buttons etc were so tight you could play a middle C on them.
There was a box of 'stuff' (it said 'stuff' on the box) full of electrical parts (limit switches, photocells etc that said 'fit to machine when installed' with no further instructions. Just a row of unused terminals in the panel with Chinese letters on them.
As is our job - I slowly worked out where each switch should go and what terminals to connect to. (with absolutely no documentation)
Then we came to the first switch on.
I tentatively pressed start with my hand over the stop button and 2 hydraulic motors started with a very bad noise, did I hit that stop button fast.
Two hydraulic oil tanks had no oil in them. I had to go buy 8 25L (5 imperial gallon) barrels of hydraulic oil. It nearly broke my back filling the tanks. We don't sweat much us sparkies but it was dripping off me by the end.
They loaded a 2 ton coil of steel on to the 'uncoiler/feeder and it was tipping over until they pushed it right on with a fork lift. Then they pressed the hydraulic grippers and there was a very loud mechanical bang from inside.
Four huge bolts had to be unscrewed to get the side panel off (All were made from mild steel and rusting already) to see what had happened.
All four bolts were cross threaded and skew whiff (lol) and the bolt-holes in the thick steel panel had been cut out with an acetylene torch. They had to use a monkey wrench to unscrew the bolts as the edges quickly 'rounded'
A weld had broken inside under pressure - I say a weld, a load of molten metal without the slag being knocked off. (bird s41t welding as it is called here) and the connecting (rusting) steel rods had all twisted.
So that part is useless until they get a welder/engineer to replace everything.
So next the stamping press (it perforates the steel to make the shutters see through) A huge flywheel with no guards whatsoever struggled and buzzed to get to speed. It worked when they tried a test piece but what a noise - well above any acceptable decibel level.
The list of unbelievable things goes on; the test pieces got stuck in the forming machine every-time because the rollers were out of line; the measuring device (for piece length) was an encoder with a roller laid on the formed metal and it slipped - not to mention the overrun when length was reached.
And as a finale, when the hydraulic cutters actuated, the hydraulic pipe came off at the crimp squirting a jet of oil across the factory.
It's left like that at the moment until they get some engineers to repair everything....... this is a brand new machine from China.
Oh, I lied, there was documentation. In a brown envelope that came with the machine was an 8GB mini memory chip taped to the inside.
On that chip there was just one file - a video file of the machine working taken from someones phone with a Chinese commentary. (it wasn't discovered until all the above had already happened) and even if I spoke chinese I wouldn't have known what to do as most of it was drowned out by the noise of the press.
Do they import Chinese machines in the USA?