I've been attempting to post but I've been busy. Trying to figure out taxes, should be helping my wife put the kitchen back together, need to make the house safe for my father to live with us, should be spreading fertilizer, have ground to work, need to make feed, need to put 30 one ton bags of peas into a large bin, and I'm planting for the neighbors.
I need to plant as it is income and if I say no to anyone then I lose the job.
The planting is not going as fast as it should. Bearings keep failing. It is unbelievable how terrible Chinese bearings can be. The no-till drill is a fairly high stress machine. Instead of v-opener bearings failing at about the time the discs are worn out, they are failing randomly. The American or Japan made press wheel bearings lasted at least 6,000 acres possibly 8,000 acres, (they outlasted the wheel mounted acre counter) the Chinese replacements have barely made 2,000 acres.
Wheel bearings are worse, the bearings I installed when I broke an axle last month are starting to fail.
There is not much of a difference in cost between Chinese junk (pun) and bearings made anywhere else. However, there is no choice, you can't get American bearings. At this point I'd take Indian bearings, they have done wonders with the Lister clones. Why don't Mexicans make bearings? A least that would be closer.
I wonder if the problem with China is not so much the Chinese, it is the whorish American companies that are bringing in poor quality products for pennies less than it would cost to make new products here. The company that imports the products could control the quality. Of course the Chinese are also buying up American name brands and then cranking out lessor quality products.
Of course my employee has some sort of personal problems which prevent him from coming to work. It could be serious, I didn't actually read the whole text. Crisis will happen and it would not be a problem but for the fact that he also didn't come to work all winter when he could come to work.
I need someone to come in and "guest manage" the farm to get us all back on track. Someone who could just send me off somewhere to work and then I would not have to make decisions or deal with people who are self-imposed "victims."
I'd put my nephews and daughter to work but I'm not home to supervise.
I'd put MuddyValley to work but then he would find out the vast sums of money I make and raise my rent.
Now I'm going to take may daughter to the bus.
Man, I have a lot of built up frustration from listening to that idiot Lars and other talk shows, but not enough time to write about it.
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"Lister clones"? From Red Dwarf? One of him is enough. Do they still import the diesel?
ReplyDeleteLots of people have tried to show me where to go in the past. But I'm still walking into limbs I though I'd pruned low enough, but didn't count on the weight of the fruit.
Too bad we bombed all those high quality, German, ball bearing factories out of existence in WW2.
I could put on my Curmudgeon cap and rant about how nothing is made of quality here anymore and it was better when I started farming 40 years ago. But I have a headache, feel like I have done a day's work already and it is not yet dinner time. So in true lazy farmer fashion I am going to take the rest of the day off. (I think)
ReplyDeleteMaybe babbitt will make a comeback and you can pour your own!
ReplyDeleteWe have a couple field rollers which need new babbitt bearings. If only my father remembered how to do it. And if only we still had the forge.
Deletei'm really bossy - i could manage you. ha! :-) get back to work, slackers! note: i subscribe to the Klingon Management System... get busy or else.
ReplyDeleteMy hometown has a great Japanese owned and engineered ball bearing factory, NSK. Their specialty is automotive, I don't know if they have products that would work for what you need.
ReplyDeleteI do think you are right that poor quality is not a Chinese manufacturing problem but an American marketer problem. Old Navy, where I used to buy jeans, has gone over to carrying only highly distressed and patched styles. I know it's because the style hides that they are passing off poor quality.
I think American companies set the standard for imports. Cut the quality, import it from China, blame the Chinese for the quality issue, pocket the difference in price. So when the Chinese buy a US company they essentially do the same thing. Go buy a new pair of Vice-Grips and compare them with an old pair. Anything Irwin makes is lower quality, they just brought a brand name for their own lower quality tool.
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