WONDERFUL! Aluminum Chinese Wire

[MEXICOWANDERER]

They did it. Small items may have tiny single-strand aluminum battery power leads.

25 50 SMD LED plate lamps. The furnished wire extensions with plug have single-strand aluminum wire leads.

STRIP

SCRAPE

Not copper? Avoid using the entension.

Honorable Chinese lack of ethics...

[atreis]

MEXICOWANDERER wrote:
"look for a company selling a better product (it could even have been made in the same factory, but to a higher quality specification)"


Lesee, three thousand for airfare. Say a grand or so for hotels, six seven hundred dollars for chop suey, rice and fish, a few hundred for taxis, and don't forget to tip the interpreter...

Totally blind are purchases. Total mysteries, are parts purchased until packages are opened and items tested.
...

Can't say I've ever visited the factory where the item I was intending to buy was made, along with the competitors' factories, before making the purchasing decision. Yet, the purchases have rarely been blind.

There are ways to figure out what's good and what's not that don't involve personally visiting the factory (where I wouldn't know what to look for anyway):

- Product reviews on Amazon, and elsewhere. (Amazon has inexpensive LED lights that work in trailers, some with very good reviews, some less so.)
- For some things, Consumer Reports. (Not LED lights for trailers though. 🙂 )
- For other things, there are other places where people leave reviews. Googling specific models numbers will often turn something up. If it doesn't, then I either don't buy, or buy knowing that if I get junk it's because I was being overly cheap - shame on me.

If the price is significantly lower than most competitors, it's a fair bet corners were cut somewhere. (For LED lights it's usually the color - warm white is more expensive per lumen than cool white (bluish). The wire is a new one though.)

[coolbreeze01]

I hope my imported solder and shrink wrap works.

[MEXICOWANDERER]

"look for a company selling a better product (it could even have been made in the same factory, but to a higher quality specification)"


Lesee, three thousand for airfare. Say a grand or so for hotels, six seven hundred dollars for chop suey, rice and fish, a few hundred for taxis, and don't forget to tip the interpreter...

Totally blind are purchases. Total mysteries, are parts purchased until packages are opened and items tested.

Sellers HAVE NOT A CLUE as to what they are peddling.

But aluminum MUST BE tin plated, not tin flashed, not passed by a building where tin cans sit on a shelf, but plated and copper wire that interfaces with tin plated aluminum should be tin plated as well.

How much does it cost to tin plate a hundred million meters of 24 gauge wire?

This is and was meant as a heads-up to not asssssssssssssume that silver colored wire is tinned plated copper or aluminum. Check and verify...Bare copper to bare aluminum is a really stupid move...

[CKNSLS]

atreis wrote:
Most (new) house supply feeds are aluminum. Aluminum wiring in houses got a bad rap because people mixed aluminum wire with copper fixtures and got fires as the end result. It can work though, if the fixtures are made to not react with aluminum wire. It has higher resistance, so you need a larger diameter, but is still less expensive even so, which is why it's used for feeders.

As far as stuff made in China being junk - my laptop isn't. My phone isn't. My sister's iPhone isn't. They're all made in China. Chinese factories will make products to the quality level requested by the company they're making them for. Don't blame the factory, blame the company selling the product and look for a company selling a better product (it could even have been made in the same factory, but to a higher quality specification).

THIS POST MAKES TOO MUCH SENSE!!!! 🙂

[atreis]

Most (new) house supply feeds are aluminum. Aluminum wiring in houses got a bad rap because people mixed aluminum wire with copper fixtures and got fires as the end result. It can work though, if the fixtures are made to not react with aluminum wire. It has higher resistance, so you need a larger diameter, but is still less expensive even so, which is why it's used for feeders.

As far as stuff made in China being junk - my laptop isn't. My phone isn't. My sister's iPhone isn't. They're all made in China. Chinese factories will make products to the quality level requested by the company they're making them for. Don't blame the factory, blame the company selling the product and look for a company selling a better product (it could even have been made in the same factory, but to a higher quality specification).

[MEXICOWANDERER]

With regard to the They Came Over Here And Kicked Our Tail...

Yeah and 200,000 years ago Ooog crept over to Nhagh's, cave, thumped him over the head and stole his daughter. The 3 to the sixth's power descendents of Nhagh are still festering over this. No wonder. A saber tooth tiger ambushed the kid on the way home and he threw the girl at the tiger and ran...

People from the Middle East hold grudges like what was written. You know the really high IQ type. Centuries old, generations old feuds. "May the fleas of ten thousand camels infest your crotch" and other bits of wisdom...

[mlts22]

Building on CKNSLS's post, I'd probably say that the world has changed. Europe may turn their nose up at we Americans, similar with Japan... but we all are in the same boat.

I was worried about Japan back in the late 1980s/early 1990s, because around then, they were all but unstoppable, with US workers being told that they were not getting jobs due to being lazy compared to their Japanese counterparts (now, they are being told they are not getting jobs due to being lazy compared to their Chinese counterparts... same message, just with another country that is cheaper to make stuff in.) Now, Japan is being menaced by China constantly. Were it not for the US acting as a mitigating power in the Pacific Rim keeping the peace, that whole area would have gone nuclear, and gone nuclear winter long ago.

[MEXICOWANDERER]

With regard to "quality". Taiwanese and Korean "overseers" add an unhealthy surtax on top of what supervised products cost. A three thousand dollar Honda inverter generator costs Honda a little over a thousand dollars, cash and ship to Japan, according to Lin. China cannot manufacture the electronics, yet.

But I am not going to pay twenty-five dollars for a ten dollar imported-from-China item just because a USA distributor ships it from the USA. The confusion is ABSURD these days. Products manufactured anywhere in the 3 NAFTA countries can brag "Made In USA" or "Made In Canada"

What is killing this country are SPECULATORS. Another name for "Louie The Louse" who tack on unhealthy amounts of money onto the pricetag and who are WORTHLESS. They produce nothing. They do not lift a finger. Maggots.

[MEXICOWANDERER]

I purchased 100 of the plates and have long since lost the vendor. Chinese vendors don't even know which of 10,000 small factories in Gaosedong province makes their lights.

The lamps came with adapters for cob lights, 1156 etc. It's the adapter wires that have single strand 26 gauge aluminum wire. The connection failed at the plug where aluminum met copper pins.

[SaltiDawg]

Charlie D. wrote:

mlts22 wrote:
If aluminum wires did work, houses wouldn't be targets for copper thieves.

I think at this point you are correct BUT the additional use opf aluminum would probably drive up its cost. We save aluminum cans more for the environment but recently sold 72 pounds of cans for 36 dollars!! That is 50 cents per pounds

Every home I've owned for the past fifty years had aluminum wire for the underground service to the house. (I only owned one home with aluminum and copper clad aluminum interior wiring. Kept connections tight - never had an issue.)

[Charlie_D_]

mlts22 wrote:
If aluminum wires did work, houses wouldn't be targets for copper thieves.

I think at this point you are correct BUT the additional use opf aluminum would probably drive up its cost. We save aluminum cans more for the environment but recently sold 72 pounds of cans for 36 dollars!! That is 50 cents per pounds

[time2roll]

Mex do you have a link to the failed product?

Not sure I understood if the aluminum wire failed or the light itself.
Or were you modifying the item to suit your needs?

[mlts22]

The Chinese factories just do what they are told. Spec cheap junk, they will be happy to make it for you. Spec quality, and you will get it.

The ironic thing is that if a company is willing to pay for decent quality goods, then the advantage of having it made in China disappears.

A while back, I was doing research to have an IT product made which required some intricate robotics. If I wanted it done right, the cost was pretty much the same if it was made in the US, Germany, Japan, Austria, Australia, China, Canada, Sweden, Russia, or France. If I wanted it absolutely dirt cheap... China was the "go to" country.

I wonder how it would sell making a US company that did basic, high quality wiring (and other electrical parts) production, and had an attitude of "this stuff is for the cool kids, and not for you." I wouldn't be surprised to see the smug attitude actually sell decent quality wiring products in large quantities, to the point where people were basing their buying decision for houses on a haughty brand name that gives the middle finger to everyone, but makes decent products.

[MEXICOWANDERER]

Camper93 wrote:
No wonder our economy is taking so long to recover, we keep buying Chinese******for the sake of saving a few pennies vs. buying products made right here at home. At the end of the day, what have you saved when you have to replaced it more often.
Sorry for the rant.

This is what I see. USA company. Vends product but product made in China
Price is 300% of eBay price. I do not have enough pension to keep a 300/K yr suit & tie in the level of lifestyle to which they are accustomed. These porkers live by the mantra WHAT'S IN IT FOR ME?" I shall do the same.