American manufacturing companies that are still here

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HemiEd

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I thought this article was very interesting, the irony of the chop sticks is pretty cool.

I will only be buying New Balance sneakers from now on!

It is much easier reading if you click the link, than reading my cut and paste.

yahoo article

For most of the last century, the United States dominated global manufacturing -- no country could compete with America's output.
In recent years, however, the news about domestic manufacturing has been discouraging, if not devastating. Industry surveys have shown a decline in most sectors as the US continues to lose its factories to cheaper labor markets overseas, and especially to China.

In 2010, the last remaining American flatware factory shut its doors. So did the nation's last sardine cannery. Recent years have seen the shuttering of America's last coat hanger factory, last button down shirt factory, and the entire sheetrock-producing town of Empire, Nevada -- which fell victim to the desiccated US housing market.

Surprisingly, however, there remains a handful of heroic holdouts. Bloodied, battered, but not yet down for the count, there are still pockets of US manufacturing scrappy enough to keep the lights on in the face of overseas competition. Here's a look at 10 survivors worth celebrating.

BOWLING BALLS: Modern bowling took off in the 1950s, kicked into a boom by the invention of the fully automatic pin-setter. By the mid-60s, there were around 12,000 bowling alleys across the U.S., mostly in working-class urban centers. But that was the industry's peak. Dogged by that blue-collar image, and dependent for much of their income on dwindling league play (see Robert D. Putnam's classic treatise Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community for the wider ramifications of this), bowling collapsed in the 1970s and '80s. By the late '90s there were less than 7,000 "bowling centers," (as the biz likes to call them now) in the country, and the decline has continued despite attempts to move the sport upmarket. Current estimates put the number of centers at less than 5,800.

Still, though league play continues to disappear and centers dwindle, there's some good news. The industry has managed to refocus itself as a family-recreation and special-event past-time, and seen the median incomes of bowlers increase. And while big players like Brunswick Corp. have moved most of their bowling equipment manufacturing overseas, plucky Ebonite International, located in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, is keeping it local. Along with its own Ebonite brand of balls and equipment, the company sells under several different names, including Hammer and, since a successful 2007 expansion, the Columbia 300, Track and Dynothane brands.

SPARKLERS: Few products say summer in America like the sparkler. But without Diamond Sparkler of Youngstown, Ohio, it would be a cold winter for domestic sparkler production. Diamond has been in Youngstown since 1985, when Phantom Fireworks operator B.J. Alan bought Chicago's Acme sparkler manufacturer and brought its operations to Ohio. At that point, cheaper Chinese sparklers had snuffed out all but three US producers. By 1999, Diamond would be the lone holdout that hadn't shifted to imports. Not because it found a way to profits, however. Besides a brief tariff-related windfall, Diamond Sparkler never been a moneymaker for its parent firm, whose owner said he bought the division because he couldn't "envision something as American as sparklers, with its association with the (Fourth) of July, not being made in this country."

Youngstown, a onetime steel center whose population has dropped to barely 40 percent of its peak as that industry melted away, can claim only 20 year-round jobs at Diamond's factory. (Another 40 are hired for the peak season.) But city leaders are grateful, saying those jobs provide a much-needed light in a corner of America where business has mostly gone dark. "Phantom Fireworks is a small big business to us," Thomas Humphries, local Chamber of Commerce chief, told American Way magazine. "They always seem to find a way to hold on to a great core of people."

COMPACT DISCS: The physical is dead, long live the download. That's what entertainment observers have been saying since the turn of the century and they're not wrong. Last year CD sales fell by 20% from 2009, marking the fourth year in a row of increasingly brutal decline. But despite this, Sony DADC this spring announced a $72 million expansion of its existing Terre Haute, Indiana, manufacturing plant, in which it makes compact discs, Blu-ray equipment, video games and other electronics, while employing some 1,312 people (the planned expansion will add another 100 jobs). Why? Well, partly, it's just consolidation. With the closing of its Pittman, New Jersey compact disc plant, Sony DADC is merely shifting operations east (and shedding 200 jobs – the Pittman plant employed 300 people). And partly, it's a question of demographics. You, future-embracing consumer that you are, may be eager to embrace the world of on-demand downloads or dodgy torrents, but Aunt Gertrude in Duluth is going to be hanging on to those newfangled CDs until the day she dies. And there are a heck of a lot of Aunt Gertrudes out there, with a good decade or so left in them.

PIANOS: A Steinway grand, consisting of over 12,000 parts, is handmade, constructed by 450 individuals over the course of a year. Small wonder then, that in the decades between 1870 and 1930 the most expensive item an American owned other than his house was generally his piano. Since the 1930s and the advent of electronic home entertainment, of course, the piano, once the must-have of any genteel parlor, has gone with the wind. The great US piano manufacturers – Chickering and Sons, Davis & Co., J.C. Fischer, Mason & Hamlin, and Baldwin, to name only a few-- are all ghosts, swept away by changes in taste and more affordable Asian-made brands.

Only a few, tiny boutique piano-makers such as Mason & Hamlin, based in Massachusetts, and grand old Steinway, based in Queens, New York, and purveyor of high-end state of the art models that retail between $50,000 to $120,000 as well as budget, overseas-built Boston and Essex brands, are left. They cater to the very rich looking for status symbols, and an ever-dwindling market of performers -- over 98% of all concert pianists play Steinways -- and musical institutions.

SOCKS: To get an idea of what's happened to the American sock industry, take a look at Fort Payne, Alabama. Until a few years ago, the town of about 14,000 billed itself as the "Sock Capital of the World." They weren't spinning a yarn, either: As late as 2007, according to the Hosiery Association, if an American put on a pair of socks, the odds were about 1 in 8 they'd be rolling a product of Fort Payne/DeKalb County onto their hooves. Most of the area's workforce was employed in its sock mills, which then numbered 125 to 150. Today only 20 remain, providing roughly 600 jobs, down from 8,000 just a decade ago.

The "Sock Capital" sign that greeted visitors off Interstate 59? Gone. There's a new sign, on the front door of the oldest hosiery mill in town, that hints at the industry's unraveling: "We are not hiring at this time. Thank you for coming."

What started pulling out the thread was -- you guessed it -- globalization. An influx of cheaper hosiery, imported from the likes of China, Pakistan, and Honduras, started around the turn of the 2000s. It flipped the American sock industry on its head faster than argyle came back and again went out of style. Domestically made socks went from three-quarters of US sales to one-quarter between 1999 and 2006.

Thanks to a quirk of national politics, Fort Payne caught a break in 2005, when then-President Bush needed to swing a single vote in Congress to get his Central American Free Trade Agreement out of deadlock. The city's congressman, Robert Aderholt, was a holdout against the deal, and he took the opportunity to hold the bill hostage with a single demand: Restore the tariffs, which had been lifted in 1984, against socks seamed in Honduras. The White House complied, and the duty returned at the end of 2007. The move had little effect in the long run, and sock factories are still fleeing Fort Payne for Honduras.

IRONING BOARDS: The fact that there's only one ironing board manufacturing plant left in the Unites States has nothing to do with changing tastes in laundry after-care, or the viral spread of track-suits and t-shirts, and everything to do with retail consolidation and globalization.

Located in Seymour Indiana, HPI Seymour, owned by Chicago-based Home Products International, has been around since 1942, when it started as a tool-and-engineering shop. In the 1950s it switched to ironing-board only mode, successfully marketing a range of high-end ironing boards around the world.

But today the plant, which employs 200 people (down from 400 in 2000) and pumps out 720 boards an hour, is fighting the same stiff winds that have wiped out so much of U.S. manufacturing, despite a market that sees some 7 million ironing boards sold every year. Big chains like Wal-Mart (WMT) and Target (TGT) are still customers and anti-dumping tariffs as high as 157% against its rapacious Chinese competitors have kept the lines rolling at the plant so far. But with the chains increasingly sourcing cheaper and cheaper products from Asia, and with the tariffs coming under pressure from observers who wonder if artificially high ironing board costs for 7 million consumers are worth 200 jobs in Indiana, HPI Seymour's 69-year-old history is probably nearing its end.

PENCILS: Without tariffs against Chinese imports, you might as well erase pencil manufacturing from the ledger of American industry. And even since the US government took anti-dumping action against Chinese exporters in 1993, China's dominance of the industry here has barely slowed: American companies in 2008 produced only 14% of pencils sold stateside, whittled down by half from just four years prior.

While the duties (running as high as 53%) provide some relief, the remaining nub of an American pencil industry just can't compete on price, especially when it comes to the familiar yellow No. 2, a school staple. Major US producers, like Dixon Ticonderoga and Newell Rubbermaid's Sanford, have closed plants that employed hundreds in the past few years as they shifted production to Mexico and elsewhere. Other companies largely retreated into specialty graphite utensils, like colored and drawing pencils. "The yellow pencil basically became a Chinese commodity," Jim Weissenborn, whose family has owned General Pencil for 150 years, explained to Bloomberg news in June. "We've had to become a very boutique type of business in order to survive."

SNEAKERS: New Balance is the only major player in athletic footwear that still operates American factories, and it's hanging on by a shoestring as free-trade negotiations with Vietnam loom. The privately held Boston company has 1,000 US workers in its five New England plants, whose $10-and-up hourly wages are a quaint holdover in an industry that imports 99 percent of its product. "The company already could make more money by going overseas, and they know it," 35-year-old floor leader Scott Boulette told the Washington Post. "So we hustle."

But all the elbow grease in Norridgewock, Maine, won't keep New Balance competitive if an expected agreement with Vietnam eliminates the tariff on imported shoes, typically around 20%. The region's legislators are trying to carve out an exemption to keep New Balance's factories open. The firm's competitors like Nike and Reebok, though, seeing an opportunity for higher profits on imports and, displaying little sympathy for the scrappy northeastern holdouts, have banded together to fight the duty – or "shoe tax," as they call it. "For products that are no longer produced here and haven't been produced here for decades, there's no sense for consumers to be paying it." said Nate Herman, of the industry's lobbying group.

The US footwear industry now employs about 12,000 people, less than half what it did a decade ago, and a mere shadow of the quarter-million jobs it provided in the 1950s. That makes a third-generation Norridgewock shoemaker like Michelle Witham, 40, a rarity in the US. "When I started, people would say, 'Oh, you don't want to work there. They're not going to be around for long. They ain't got a chance,' " Witham told the Post. "But I've been here 20-something years now."

If New Balance lacks allies within the footwear industry, at least it has fans among domestic manufacturing cheerleaders. Scott Paul, head of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, says his closet holds 10 pairs of New Balance sneakers.

ELECTRICAL RELAYS: The last U.S.-based manufacturer of electrical relays and controls, Struthers-Dunn was founded in Philadelphia in 1923, and moved to South Carolina in the mid-1980s. It specializes in building customized relays -- basically electrically operated switches for controlling high-powered devices in industry and military operations -- for factory automation, elevators, cranes, traffic controls and power generation and distribution. Its 219 series of industrial relays, developed in 1958, is still used today as a crucial element of modern nuclear energy plants. During World War Two, Struthers-Dunn became the first supplier of electrical relays to the U.S. military.

After being purchased and reorganized by a series of parent companies in recent years, the company, now specializing in custom-built industrial controls, is once again a privately-held firm. Where's the rest of the industry? Overseas, naturally, and mainly concentrated in India and other Asian locations.

CHOPSTICKS: Sometimes globalization brings an ironic twist that actually helps American manufacturers. In the case of chopsticks, it was a double-dose of irony that made Americus, Georgia, a center of wooden utensil production for China. The huge, fast-growing powerhouse, which seems to export the bulk of Americans' everyday consumer products, produces most of the world's chopsticks, about 63 billion pairs annually. It's a simple product that serves a huge market -- a third of the world's population uses the sticks to pluck morsels from their dishes. When China's several hundred manufacturers started running short of wood, though -- remember, that country is building furiously, and it's not heavily forested to begin with -- an opportunity arose for a US company to turn the international-trade tables. Enter Jae Lee, the Korean-born American who in November 2010 founded Georgia Chopsticks to take advantage of China's shortfall and rural Georgia's abundance of wood.

Before long, Americus (fitting name, isn't it?) was processing a few million pairs of chopsticks daily, slapping Made in the USA labels on them, and exporting China's favorite utensil to Chinese. Lee is ramping up production as fast as he can order machinery, and intends to churn out 10 million a day by year's end. At full capacity, the company plans to have around 150 hires. Not bad for a town with a 12% unemployment rate, in a country supposedly burdened by sky-high labor costs.

The irony isn't lost on the workers. "Everywhere you see in America 'Made in China,'" new hire Susan White told Voice of America, "and you wonder if, in China, they ever see 'Made in America.'" They do now.
 
I saw that and thought it was very sad.......

We make Bowling Balls, Sparklers, and Socks.

BIG.................... deal.

It is sad, very sad. But we do have a chance to do something about it on some scale.

If we all quit buying Nike etc. and buy the known USA made products, it would force the others to come back.

I would like to think so anyway, because our kids/grandkids are going to need some jobs to pay for all this debt we are passing on to them.

I must say though, I refuse to eat with chop sticks!:D
 
ACE makes playing cards here still, Walgreens has them. I refuse to send playing cards to our Soldiers that say MADE IN CHINA on them.
 
Blame the EPA and OSHA for making it so tough to compete with places like China that has little regulations. Its not the unions, not the "lazy" US workers, not our sightly higher wages but all the red tape and rules business need to follow.

Look back how the 1950's-60's were, we had good paying jobs, more workers belong to unions, life was good. Then all this safety and clean air rules came down and look what happen, other countries like China and Mexico were then able to make goods cheaper than the USA. Now we are told we are lazy, overpaid workers, not that it was the government own fault.

Factories need to have each job set up so anybody can do it. This was to get women in the factories doing any job the men could do. How nice, great idea but it drove costs sky high.

I like to see the EPA, NASA budgets cut by 50% or more.
 
Sad fact is too many people, including politicians and business heads, have forgotten the fact that it was the manufacturing might of the United States that won World War II. No other country could match our manufacturing capacity and the ability of a lot of smaller manufacturing facilities to rapidly change from their normal product to produce a component of something else that eventually was used by the military.
Doesn't anybody have the foresight to wonder what we're going to do when the vast majority of manufacturing is sent offshore and we lose to capability of supporting ourselves?
One of the first things I look for on anything I buy is where it's made. I only buy foreign-made products if it's the only option I have.

I've worked in the aerospace industry for a number of years, always for a product manufacturer. Twice now I've been 'downsized' when the company I was working for was purchased by an offshore-based company and production moved. I'm currently with a small niche-market company that is privately held and doesn't seem to be interested in selling out.
 
Lots of excellent points being made in this thread. 12 years ago, over 90% of our business was based on a local cell phone manufacturer, then they announced their move to China.

Even though their CEO said at the time, it was due to the lazy American workers, the real reason was they wanted to participate in the much bigger emerging market. To heck with the U.S.

It has been a rough 12 years, we have had to totally reinvent ourselves, and still carry no foreign made products.

I agree with the OSHA, EPA and general Government facilitation to the problem.
 
Blame the EPA and OSHA for making it so tough to compete with places like China that has little regulations. Its not the unions, not the "lazy" US workers, not our sightly higher wages but all the red tape and rules business need to follow.

Look back how the 1950's-60's were, we had good paying jobs, more workers belong to unions, life was good. Then all this safety and clean air rules came down and look what happen, other countries like China and Mexico were then able to make goods cheaper than the USA. Now we are told we are lazy, overpaid workers, not that it was the government own fault.

Factories need to have each job set up so anybody can do it. This was to get women in the factories doing any job the men could do. How nice, great idea but it drove costs sky high.

I like to see the EPA, NASA budgets cut by 50% or more.

The govenment played a major role in manufacturing being sent overseas with all these free trade agreements. There should be no free trade with anyone, it should be reciprocal. The proponents of free trade say that the people of America wouldn't be able to afford the items if they were made in the US, but if they were made in the US that means the people would have jobs so the could afford to buy them. It doesn't matter how cheap we can buy things, if all the jobs are sent overseas we won't be able to buy them anyway. The bottom line is we need to cut all this free trade and bring manufacturing back to the US. The price may rise some in the beginning, but like everything else it will settle. Tax everything coming into the US to bring prices on par with US made products and use that tax money to subsidize building US manufacturing facilities. That will stabilize product end cost, create jobs, and bring the US back to the industrialized nation that we once were.

We need to stop people like the "wonderful" Harry Reed who wants to give subsidies and tax breaks to a chinese company to build a solar farm in Nevada. Those subsidies and tax breaks were supposed to be for a US company, but I wonder how much Mr. Reed is getting kicked back by the chinese. They're not even using US manufactured parts, they're bringning everything from china.

And of course we need to get Ram trucks back from Mexico and Chrysler back from Italy.

Okay I'm done......for now:protest:
 
The government played a major role in manufacturing being sent overseas with all these free trade agreements. There should be no free trade with anyone, it should be reciprocal. The proponents of free trade say that the people of America wouldn't be able to afford the items if they were made in the US, but if they were made in the US that means the people would have jobs so the could afford to buy them. It doesn't matter how cheap we can buy things, if all the jobs are sent overseas we won't be able to buy them anyway. The bottom line is we need to cut all this free trade and bring manufacturing back to the US. The price may rise some in the beginning, but like everything else it will settle. Tax everything coming into the US to bring prices on par with US made products and use that tax money to subsidize building US manufacturing facilities. That will stabilize product end cost, create jobs, and bring the US back to the industrialized nation that we once were.

We need to stop people like the "wonderful" Harry Reed who wants to give subsidies and tax breaks to a Chinese company to build a solar farm in Nevada. Those subsidies and tax breaks were supposed to be for a US company, but I wonder how much Mr. Reed is getting kicked back by the Chinese. They're not even using US manufactured parts, they're bringing everything from china.

And of course we need to get Ram trucks back from Mexico and Chrysler back from Italy.

Okay I'm done......for now:protest:

But all of this makes sense, we can't have any of that, can we?
 
the only way to get America on her feet again is to become an isolationist country...

make those jobs come back to the USA and limit heavily the amount of imported goods...

now granted we couldn't do it over night but if we just started person by person, day by day, only buying US built/grown/made items, the unemployment rate would drop due to available jobs!
 
Canada economy is doing far better than the USA. Its more social also. Have a kid you get $100 each month to help raise the child, you get subsides daycare, you get free health care. So its not all the D's fault. Canada does try more to keep it jobs in Canada, it has more regulations on its banking. I thought Obama would look to Canada as a role model but no, when it came to taxes, wars he was right with the R's.

I'm not sure what is the right answer, America needs a war on poverty rather than a war on terror. All those billions wasted overseas where here in the homeland so many folks are hurting. NASA and their 8 billion Web telescope that is years past due. We got little to no public transportation but we can shoot off the scape shuttle every so often, for what ? Just to line the pockets of companies like 3M. Do you see Canada shooting off billion dollar rockets, heck no, they spend their money on things that help everybody and their economy.

I hope the tide changes soon and things start look up but its scary to think that maybe the worst is still to come.
 
But all of this makes sense, we can't have any of that, can we?

What was I thinking, I forgot what country I was in :banghead:

Canada economy is doing far better than the USA. Its more social also. Have a kid you get $100 each month to help raise the child, you get subsides daycare, you get free health care. So its not all the D's fault. Canada does try more to keep it jobs in Canada, it has more regulations on its banking. I thought Obama would look to Canada as a role model but no, when it came to taxes, wars he was right with the R's.

The problem here is you have people popping out kids just to get the money and neglecting the kids. They're already doing it. As far as a role model, its all about greed no matter what party you're a part of. Obama wants to raise $1billion for his campaign, but he only spent half of that on his first campaign. So why does he need so much for this one? Its not like he has to try that hard to get his name out there, he's the president. He's just gearing up to lose the next election because they get to keep whats left in their campaign account after the elections are done. So if he spend another $500million on this campaign, he makes off with $500million as a "parting gift".....along with his salary for the rest of his life. Plus the more time he spends of the campaign trail, the more of our tax dollars he's spending on is campaign. Where ever he goes, he travels on government paid planes and buses. And he always has the secret service with him paid for with out tax dollars. :wack:
 
we all say the same thing (for the most part) and are government does not do anything we talk about. whats wrong with this picture.

everybody needs to stop righting on all these forums and start righting there congressman and senators how you feel and if they do not change they will be voted out. i also feel all of them should be term not in for life. we the people need to be herd and need to take are country back.


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Same with GWB, he still gets secret service protection where ever he goes.

Obama is not getting my vote a 2nd time, he blew it far I as care. I can't see myself voting for some R, I might skip next election..that Michele Bachmann sounds OK but me voting for a female president, ha ha..expect we just had our first black president, why not let a female get a shot at it?

Oh I agree, too many folks are having too many kids. There is not enough jobs for all of them and too many folks don't raise their kids right. I never fathered a kid and don't see me doing so. I have a tough enough time supporting myself let alone some kid. I'm sure the heck not gay and likely one of the few straight guys in their 40's who has yet to have 1 kid yet, oh well. I got my old Dodge, ha ha
 
Canada economy is doing far better than the USA. Its more social also. Have a kid you get $100 each month to help raise the child, you get subsides daycare, you get free health care. So its not all the D's fault. Canada does try more to keep it jobs in Canada, it has more regulations on its banking. I thought Obama would look to Canada as a role model but no, when it came to taxes, wars he was right with the R's.

The problem here is you have people popping out kids just to get the money and neglecting the kids. They're already doing it. As far as a role model, its all about greed no matter what party you're a part of. .

Besides popping out kids ... have you checked out the tax rate to pay for it? I know 53% of my income is spent on taxes every year. Then politicians get raises :banghead:
 
Yeah you might spend 53% of your income on taxes but your home prices are still RISING, not FALLING. You get more benefits, I gotta pay $95 each time to see my doctor and that is before costs of tests, meds, etc. The value of your dollar is going up not down. Your wages have not been cut by 30--40% or more.

Its a smokescreen the US low tax rates. My home is worth 40% less than 5 years ago--and that is above many other places. 5 years ago $80 US got me $100 Canadian, now $100 costs me around $110 after fees.

I should have sold everything and moved to Toronto back in 2000, believe me I kick myself in the butt for not doing so. Now I am stuck in the USA--guess its better than being stuck in Iraq, lol
 
Good article.Simply said, everyone that got put in a position of political or financial responsability takes the easy way out.If even half of the politicans would put aside party politics,and loosen up regulations here in the Us,we might be able to fix things.
 
Its not the unions, not the "lazy" US workers, not our sightly higher wages but all the red tape and rules business need to follow.

Factories need to have each job set up so anybody can do it. This was to get women in the factories doing any job the men could do. How nice, great idea but it drove costs sky high.

Factories need to have each job set up so anybody can do it for a few reasons.

The operator who "owns" that job may not always show up everyday. They get sick, are entitled to their vacation time (part of their benefits), and sometimes call in sick sometimes when they don't feel like coming in. On these days someone has to fill in for their jobs. You have to make the job so anybody can perform it so the quality does not suffer on those days that the "regular operator" is not there. the substitute operator needs to be able to perform the job correctly until they get settled into the job.

Each part of the assembly line is split up into "sections". Each section has a supervisor that is responsible for that section. If there is a bad day and let's say 7 - 12 of his 30 - 40 operators call in sick, he/she has to find people to cover those jobs that are short their regular operator and get the line started up on time. They usually have to do this in 15 - 20 minutes or less and can't be on the line training all of these people at the same time when the line starts moving.

To help with this training situation they usually have a certain amount of operators they call "floaters". They are substitutes that are used to fill in for the jobs missing regulator operators. The supervisors have these people train for these jobs with the regulator operator and fill in for them for short periods of time prior to the regular operator being absent. This way they are already trained for that particular job before for when the regular guy can't be there.

But there are times when there are more people absent than they have "floaters" for. Then the supervisor has to call to other departments and see if he can borrow operators to fill in the short jobs. This is when they are "trained on the fly" or thrown on the job to "sink or swim"...

This is why the jobs have to be designed so that anybody can fill in and do them.
 
I remember growing up in the 70's. When you saw "made in USA" on a product it was a quality part/product and would last. Now many of these products are made in China or Mexico and are junk!

I have bought two different sets of wheel dollies to help move my cars around my garage and we get to use them literally once or twice before they are damaged/bent and I have to throw them out. Extremely frustrating at $50 per pair. I have bought a set from Pep Boys and Harbor Freight and both sets same thing. We used the Pep Boys set to move my son's Valiant in the front garage. Then take them to the back garage to move his 72 Challenger and they bend/break while moving the Challenger...WTF???

I go to Harbor Freight and buy these 4 wheel dollies (similiar to the furniture dollies you get at Home Depot). These dollies are supposed to hold 1000 lbs. We go to set a big block 400 engine and trans on them and they crumble. they are blue plastic with a black reinforcement bar going the long way under the two longest sides. We broke two of these "pallets" with that engine and trans which do not weigh 1000 lbs. What POS!

My point is that these products are made out of the country and are peices of ****. It's frustrating that a product makes these claims and can't live up to it. If it was made in the USA back in the 70's it would have held up. Back then "Made in USA" meant something - quality. They had quality and we had pride that our country made quality products that held up.

Not today.

And that's all I have to say about that...
 
The only problem I have with seeing "Made In USA" these days :
How many of these U.S. employees are in the U.S. legally????

Raw materials come from China , too . How many steel mills and or foundries has one encountered lately ?

Don't get me started on unions ...

Once all of the bullshit regulations are either dropped or fine tuned into reality , then we can start rebuilding "our" country .

 
Bought some stick on Velcro yesterday at the Wally World. While
waiting in the checkout line I noticed that it was "Made in The U.S.A."

That really surprised me....I might add, it was good stuff.
 
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