Long Term Impact of Trade War on Woodworking Tool Prices

[TGW]

Living in Finland and being at the lower end of the income scale I cannot understand why Americans are afraid of loosing cheap chineese imports.

There is so much secondhand stuff floating around in a modern consumerist society that I really don't buy much from China. All my stationary machines are either secondhand or home made. There are lots and lots of good pre-1980 machinery being sold off as industry modernizes.
Most of my hand tools are either secondhand or home made. Worn out files and beech offcuts scavenged from a stair factory makes good profile planes for instance.
What remains to be bought new is a few hand held power tools and some drill bits and saw blades and cutter knives and other more or less consumable items which anyway must be better quality than the substitutes that come from China.

Outside woodworking the basic principles are much the same.
At the moment me and my girlfriend are setting up our first home. A significant part of kitchen utensils are secondhand. All the furniture is secondhand except the home made bed. A significant portion comes from an assortment of diseased relatives whose stuff has been kept in store until someone in the family needs it. The clother hanger has belonged to and was made by my great-great grandfather. I got my aunt's dough mixer when she died and I have already rebuilt it. Several of her frying pans came from her grandmother who in turn had inherited them. Her linen cabinet came from her aunt's inlaws. Plenty of stuff comes from flea markets........ and some was even snatched out of dumpsters.

Buying chineese shoes is not financially sound. European shoes are several times more expensive but I have very wide feet (said to be more common in the Nordic countries than elsewhere) and the only way of maintaining healthy feet (which is an important asset for earning money) is to have ergonomic shoes. European shoes last much longer than their Chineese counterparts so the cost per walked kilometre is hardly higher than for chineese shoes.

What remains is clothes and other textiles. There is no affordable alternative to far east import but as I tend to use my clothes until they are too worn to patch anymore I really don't buy much clothes.

I have never owned a new mobile phone. Old mobele phones are almost free. However I buy chineese replacement batteries for my outdated phines. Currently a Nokia 3510.

My car is 35 years old and I have had it for 19 years. Rising prices on new cars would not make too much of a difference.
However I am forced to buy chineese parts for my car as those bastards at General Motors have quit making and supplying parts.

My tractor is 48 years old. There is no reason to buy one of those ATVs or compact tractors to maintain our woodland. Old tractors are much cheaper and fairly plentiful. However a significant portion of the spare parts nowadays come from China and not from Coventry.
The log trailer is well over 50 years old and the loader is 33 or 34 years. All of it perfectly functional.

For those whose incomes don't suffice for this secondhand based lifestyle I think the best way to do is to start national labour unions and run nationwide strikes demanding increased wages so you can buy the little new stuff you need either from US manufacturers or from Chineese manufacturers who pay the tariffs....... and start a political party demanding better coverage for those who are too old or too unhealthy to work.

[Admiral]

Living in Finland and being at the lower end of the income scale I cannot understand why Americans are afraid of loosing cheap chineese imports.
..............................
For those whose incomes don't suffice for this secondhand based lifestyle I think the best way to do is to start national labour unions and run nationwide strikes demanding increased wages so you can buy the little new stuff you need either from US manufacturers or from Chineese manufacturers who pay the tariffs....... and start a political party demanding better coverage for those who are too old or too unhealthy to work.

A lot to be said about your perspective..... except that it's not the manufacturers who pay the tariffs, its the consumer.

[Handplanesandmore]

Living in Finland and being at the lower end of the income scale I cannot understand why Americans are afraid of loosing cheap chineese imports.

Good that you can live the kind of "secondhand" life you described.

I, for one, would rather spend money on new or modern products (regardless of where they are made) than time to look for and assess the second hand market. I will buy a second hand tool, but won't actively search it. Some enjoy refurnishing an old plane, I buy premium planes so I can so use them right away. I am a woodworker, not a tool maker.

You quoted an old car as an example, which is a bad one in my opinion, because not only does it lack the modern safety features (important to me), but it is also a very expensive option as borne out by my experiences. After 13 to 14 years (about 99000 miles to 100000miles), my Japanese cars crumbled down and the repair bills cost me $500 to $1200 each time. (My experiences with GM and FORD were even worse!). I won't buy any second hand cars.
Simon

[TGW]

Good that you can live the kind of "secondhand" life you described.

I, for one, would rather spend money on new or modern products (regardless of where they are made) than time to look for and assess the second hand market. I will buy a second hand tool, but won't actively search it. Some enjoy refurnishing an old plane, I buy premium planes so I can so use them right away. I am a woodworker, not a tool maker.

You quoted an old car as an example, which is a bad one in my opinion, because not only does it lack the modern safety features (important to me), but it is also a very expensive option as borne out by my experiences. After 13 to 14 years (about 99000 miles to 100000miles), my Japanese cars crumbled down and the repair bills cost me $500 to $1200 each time. (My experiences with GM and FORD were even worse!). I won't buy any second hand cars.
Simon

Thanks to people like you there are good quality secondhand stuff on the market for people like me. It is a great thing that you buy the sort of premium stuff that I cannot afford. Stuff that over the coming two centuries will advance down the food chain towards people like me. The only part of the proclaimed trickle down effect that is really proven to work for us at the lower end.
Neither you nor me is really very dependant on the sort of low quality disposable goods that makes up the bulk of the Chineese export. Clothes being the exception but they usually come from other countries in the east.

I wouldn't say that I enjoy repairing and rebuilding everything but economically speaking that gives me access to good quality goods on a cost level which I can afford without going into unecsessary debth.
My Opel Kadett car har now run 320000 kilometres (somewhere near 200000 miles) and it hasn't crumbled yet though it is approaching the crumbling point at the moment. The crank bearings and the timing chain and the oil pump are consumables after all and rebuilding the cylinder head and the carburator wasn't too costly either as I did a significant part of the work myself. The body is welded in 5 or 6 places and quite a few areaes are sand blasered and repainted. Wheel bearings and drive shaft joints and of cause new brakes half a dozen times. Nothing too costly.

My bandsaw is another example.
I rekon it was manufactured at some point between 1910 and 1918. I got it cheap enough to justify spending some time and money rebuilding it and modernizing it and now it is equal to a new industrial grade bandsaw yet it was less than half the cost of a such. Ready for another century or two.

[Handplanesandmore]

I wish I had the skills to do car repairs like you. This in yesterday from the garage:

Quote to fix key not going into the ignition- $350!

Simon

[RKMBrown©]

A lot to be said about your perspective..... except that it's not the manufacturers who pay the tariffs, its the consumer.

If consumers choose to not buy the product with said tariff, there is no sale, and the consumer did not pay. Typically prices are lowered until sales are made. Manufacturers are certainly impacted if they loose gross sales / profits.

So it's not as simple as saying the consumer pays.

[Handplanesandmore]

Everybody pays:

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/03/us-china...riffs.html

Simon

[JimDaddyO]

A factory is a factory no matter where in the world it is located.  They make things according to the specifications on the print, no more.  The quality control is mandated by the contract.  If brand X specs out a piece of junk, it's not the factories fault that it's a piece of junk, that blame is the brand.  Manufacturers don't make money by giving their customers more than what they ask for.  They give them exactly what they ask for.  Cheap Chinese junk is a product of the specifications handed to them, not because it is Chinese, but because that's what they were told to make.

[Admiral]

Everybody pays:

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/03/us-china...riffs.html

Simon

After reading this, in the short term it sounds more like tariffs are a new tax, on importers, retailers and the consumer.  I'm glad I already replaced my washing machine 2 years ago, and that I won't need a new TV for several more years......  I'm not all that much of a consumer....

[TGW]

A factory is a factory no matter where in the world it is located.  They make things according to the specifications on the print, no more.  The quality control is mandated by the contract.  If brand X specs out a piece of junk, it's not the factories fault that it's a piece of junk, that blame is the brand.  Manufacturers don't make money by giving their customers more than what they ask for.  They give them exactly what they ask for.  Cheap Chinese junk is a product of the specifications handed to them, not because it is Chinese, but because that's what they were told to make.

The economists  say so...... but I rekon that to be a myth.

Here in Finland we have the former East Bloc as our closest neighbour so we have seen the reality behind the myth.
After the Iron curtain opened up many companies tried to locate their production in former east bloc countries where labour was cheap. After some east bloc countries joined EU companies from those countries started sending their cheap workers to work in Finland.
In both instances it was proven beyond even the tiniest trace of doubt that workers who aren't accustomed to producing quality items are unable to do so. Especially when working within the same business or team or hierarchy that formerly produced low quality products.
It takes at least a decade in a new environment under new bosses to reteach workers who have previosly made junk to make proper products. Once retaught they have also learned to organize labour unions and demand decent wages so then there is much less money to be made by outsourcing production.

We are also well aware that Czeckoslovakia which was the only East Bloc country which had significant and quality oriented machine builders before the introduction of bolshevism had the same problems adjusting their habits the other way. Though there was a trend towards lower quality throughout the bolshevik era and though there were plenty of officials doing their best to force Czeckoslovakian machine builders to comply with the new production goals at the cost of compromized production quality and inferrior designs they couldn't change their old habits overnigh. This was to a lesser degree the case in East Germany too but the East German  industries had largely been destroyed during and after the war and had been rebuilt from the bottom up under the new system so their old habits were easier to change.
Therefore most Czeckoslovakinan machinery and a significant part of East German machinery from the bolshevik era is actually usable and some of it very good. Which is a world away from most other East Bloc machine makers.

You can specify whatever you desire when ordering a machine or a component from a subcontractor. On the paper you can always pretend that you got what you wanted. Though in reality you cannot afford a quality control that takes apart every delivered machine and checks the measurements and metal quality of every single part. In reality the production of quality items must start from the bottom up with quality oriented workers in a quality oriented organisation.
Which hardly exists in China........ with a very few precious exceptions.