oddly enough my mom and i had this very discussion the other day, that being the lack of quality in some products these days
her bitch is about the little ford focus my folks bought used back in '08 (it was an '06 model)
it is one noisy little car... having no soundproof padding under the micron thick carpets.
she could not understand why they would not put that stuff in every car, especially after i told her it probably could have been done at the factory for less than 20 bucks for the good stuff.
my explanation went like this
this little car was likely sold in bulk by ford to a leasing/rental company, who puts out a bid for perhaps 5k cars of a certain size and the oem's all fight to cut all the fat out in order to get the bid... the end result is not much more than a shoebox sitting on a roller skate powered by a cox .049 engine. (yes she knows about shoeboxes/rollerskates and .049 cox engines)
its the same with everything these days, the manufactures in order to make sales have to cut the fat out of everything, so even though they have a good product the temptation is always there to trim out every penny possible in the finished product.
so we end up with leaking fuel caps, thin as paper electrical junction boxes, radiators made of aluminum thinner than chewing gum wrappers and bolts that are made from "india tempered lead" or worse.
it is likely that most of these engine's are sold in markets where repairs are a way of life, and it is cheaper to repair than it is to come up with the extra few dollars in first cost price... after all rewelding a frame is likely very cheap in mainland china where folks work for very low wages. lots of farmers have lots of time, but little money... making a rubber gasket to cob together a fuel cap seal is probably a fact of life that they give little thought to.. and it is possible that the rubber seal from a canning jar might be the same size there in that part of the world?
for what they sell the engine's for there in china, one has to wonder what a new fuel cap actually costs the consumer their in china? maybe a few cent's? likely less than a dollar if you live close to the manufacture. and fuel caps? maybe a dime? or less?
we don't understand the thinking behind their products or their marketing, but it is something that apparently not only works for them but is acceptable to them as well.
it might also be in a culture where you have to make do with very little money, you might just jump in and fix things without giving it much thought? whereas in our part of the world folks buy things expecting a reasonable lifespan without having to work on them, and as a result of having good products for decades many folks don't have the patience or ability, let alone the tooling or desire to fix things, and as a result i suspect it becomes a point of aggravation.
having worked for small farmers as a kid here in kansas years ago, i recall vividly one particular farmer who would give no thought to welding up the reel bars on his swather over and over again... there literally wasn't a clear foot of bar without a patch weld on any single bar... it never occurred to him to check on the price of a replacement or figure the true cost of having to leave the field, road back to the machine shed to effect weld repairs, and road back to the field... fuel and labor? he never thought about it... lost production costs? never calculated that either... at least up until the day i caught the mobile heston products salesman and asked him how much those 6 bars cost.
they were something like $6.25 each!
he probably had thousands of dollars in lost time, production losses, labor and fuel costs due to roading back and forth, etc. patching up the old reel bars!
i think it is just the cultural differences then and it is the same today with products form china or india.
iirc it was George B. of utterpower.com fame that said it best..
"buy the engine/generator, strip the radiator, fuel tank, tin box off the generator, and all the other crap, replace it with something you can trust and don't look back... you will then be happy with the product"
maybe to his list of crap we add certain internal bolts and fasteners?
i have found the chinese engine's to be very good quality, excellent design and an outstanding value, however the ancillary stuff mentioned is just plain crap in my opinion. in every instance it has failed to meet my needs and/or expectations. i find that if i follow George's advise, i remain very happy with the product.
bob g
ps: add to the list those engine riser stands that come with the mid and larger size engine's, never use them in a build! they were meant to be a means to support the engine in manufacturing and for mounting the engine into the crate and nothing more. if one insists on designing a system that relies on their use, sooner than later you will be very unhappy with chinese products.