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Tom
Big Wall climber
San Luis Obispo CA
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Nov 14, 2011 - 10:49pm PT
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This is from a few months ago. Now that BD is making their cams in China, it's completely relevant right now.
BLACK DIAMOND COMPANY UNDER NEW OWNERSHIP
What does the future of Black Diamond climbing equipment look like, now that it has a new owner?
First off all, the new owner, this character Warren Kanders, has a rather disturbing history with his last company, Armor Holdings. The whole story is available online, and from various other sources. Suffice to say, it played out as a tale of pure sordidness, comprising a veritable nosology of ethical dysfunction. Kanders sold Armor Holdings to BAE (a foreign arms company) for billions, and with some of the cash bought Black Diamond.
Now that Kanders owns Black Diamond, through a holding company, I would not expect different behavior from him. I would basically say that the corner was turned at the moment that Kanders assumed control of the company. That is not to say that BD gear is crap now, but BD is absolutely a different company now, and that could possibly mean that BD gear IS crap. Certainly, past BD quality can not be ascribed to the BD gear being made now, as if things are the same as before. In effect, BD gear now has to be treated the way you would treat gear from some new, unknown start-up company.
Would you trust "Whippo" brand cams that cost 66 bucks for a set of six at Wal-Mart? Would you trust those same cams, if they cost $66 each at REI? What if you knew that Whippo Cam Company was once associated with a famous climber, but not any more? What if Whippo cams lost a key employee, because he was able to cash out in a big way, when a new owner took over? Or if the key employee was forced out over "philosophical differences"? What if the new owner of Whippo cams was some rotund socialite guy in New York City, who can't even do one pull-up, and could never lead even a 5.0 pitch? What if Mr. Whippo's idea of "enjoying the great outdoors" is serving the reproductive organs of an endangered species to his high-society pals on the rainforest-timbered deck of his monster yacht, which burns 1000 gallons of diesel fuel per hour, generating a 20,000 horsepower shoreline-destroying wake, as it lazily cruises up the Hudson River Valley? What if that same company owner once pocketed a little extra money making shoddy life-protecting products, and many people were killed? And the resulting $30 million settlement was entered into his official accounting ledger as a "normal cost of doing business"? What if "Whippo" brand cams looked just like other cams that were known in the past to be safe?
The presence of Warren Kanders at Black Diamond is, and will remain, a wild card with respect to quality and safety issues. Kanders might officially declaim any of the day-to-day responsibility for running the Company (maybe as a tactic to insulate himself from personal liability exposure). And he might reassure the climbing community that so-and-so will be managing the company, and has a track record, etc., etc. But, at the end of the day, Kanders owns the company and controls what happens. And at the end of the day, the black cloud of his behavior at Armor Holdings is not going to go away, no matter what his press releases want you to believe.
I may have it all wrong about Warren Kanders. He may have found God, sold his piece of the military-industrial complex as part of his religious conversion, and has now dedicated his life to saving other people's lives by tireless work to make sure Black Diamond climbing gear becomes better and better, etc., etc.
But, at a glance, he doesn't present that sort of gestalt, at least not to me.
Second, Black Diamond is already having backpacks and softgoods made in China. It would be reasonable to extrapolate the trend to climbing gear. It would also be reasonable that the company would not be anxious to broadcast, "All our cams and carabiners are now proudly made in China." It would not be surprising to learn that a company would find a way to mislabel their gear, perhaps with "Designed in USA", as a marketing gimmick. Many companies have invoked the Barnum Imperative when dealing with their customers, and I see no reason why Black Diamond won't now be that type of company, given the documented track record of the new owner.
Reliable Chinese manufacturing requires a level of attention that is at direct opposition with what a typical bean counter fixates on: spending as little money as possible. This sort of MBA-drone exists to maximize corporate profits. It's what he does. It's all he does. And he simply will not stop until he has squeezed every nanocent of "waste" from a manufacturing process.
It's almost self-defeating for a corporation to outsource manufactured goods in China, and then pay a reasonable salary for a team of competent supervisors to ensure quality. If BD starts having climbing gear made in China, I would see that as a clear warning to any would-be users. The track record of unsupervised Chinese manufacturing speaks for itself. Will Black Diamond pay $100,000 a year each, to five or ten supervisors, to live full-time in China, and supervise the factory? Or will BD decide to simply pay a few "senior" factory workers an extra $10 per day and give them shiny, tin-plated "Quality Control" badges?
Different processes can be used to create parts, and lead to different properties. Which is not exactly obvious. If 6061 aluminum lobes are punched out of a plate, there will be residual stresses. If the factory does not take this into account (i.e., heat treat the lobes) those parts will look exactly like parts cut with a CNC mill, but will have different structural behavior. Because stamping parts out of aluminum seems quick and cheap, a Chinese factory is going to want to do it that way. But, they are not going to want to use annealed 6061, punch the parts out, and then properly heat treat them. Hardened 6061 is more common, and any sort of heat treatment is an extra step that costs more money. In other words, "Parts look same. Must be same. Why pay more?"
By the way, I think BD might punch out their lobes now, maybe they have for quite some time. This is a perfectly valid way to make lots and lots of lobes. As long as the process was validated to produce the expected results, complete with testing, there would not be a problem. I would think that BD, in the past, would have been responsible enough to test and validate a new production process. But, I don't know if that would be true now. A foreign production manager might be able to spin a good story about how an alternative process will not make any difference. Why not do a faster, cheaper process to secure the cable loop? How about using Sooper-Gloo? Looks same - must be same.
Third, even if the manufacturer in China is competent, and adequate quality control exists at the factory, there is still the issue with quality assurance with the material. Specifically, the aluminum alloys must be competently produced. And, generally speaking, the less you pay, the less reliable the material. The typical MBA will want to reduce costs. And the typical MBA may not realize (or care) that "Looks Same - Must Be Same" metals may be seriously impaired, with respect to strength, ductility, etc. All aluminum alloys look about the same, but they are not the same. If a specification for alloy 6061-T6 looks like Greek to a purchasing agent, and he orders some different, cheaper "aluminum" material, the resulting cams might wind up in the Mountain Shop, violently broken in the Stove Legs, and lastly handled by lawyers seeking a wrongful-death lawsuit settlement (which might simply wind up in the Black Diamond accounting ledger as a "normal cost of doing business").
Finally, it is instructive to remember what happened when another climbing equipment company was sold, and changed ownership. The North Face, a manufacturer of backpacks, sleeping bags, tents and jackets, bought A5. A5 was founded by a serious climber, and was a bad-assed company that produced gear for hard-core, serious climbers. After buying A5, North Face sold t-shirts imprinted with a big A5 logo ("Look how bad-assed and hard-core I am!") and stopped making piton hammers, bird beaks, portaledges and all the other A5 climbing gear. Some bean counter calculated there was more money in selling t-shirts, than in selling climbing hardware. The clever bean counter also calculated that poseurs, perhaps tugging at bondo on a cruise ship's "climbing" wall, would pay good money to declare to the world,
Look how bad-assed and hard-core I am! I'm wearing a t-shirt that says, 'A5'! Do you know how rad it is to lead an A5 pitch?!? I'm a bad-assed MoFo by proxy - look at my A5 shirt!
A5 climbing gear is no longer available from North Face, which, from a safety standpoint, is probably for the best.
AFTERWORD: AN EXAMPLE OF A CHINESE-MADE METAL
My friend is a plumber, and he installed a new 2" galvanized steel natural gas line that would not hold pressure. When he installs a new gas line, he caps off the pipe, pressurizes it with air, and sees if the gauge drops over time. He found the small leak in the brand new, Chinese-made SCH 40 galvanized steel pipe, and swapped it out. When I sawed through the pipe at the leak, there was a conical, crater-shaped defect, all the way through the steel, that had left only a tiny hole on the outer surface. The hot-dip galvanizing (zinc plating) had almost closed off the hole, but not quite. Had the zinc galvanizing closed the hole, and the pipe pass inspection, it would have spontaneously developed a leak at some later date, producing an explosion hazard. The hole would have absolutely opened up, because the zinc is consumed in the process of protecting the steel against corrosion. The only question would have been, "When will the pipe start leaking?"
And that was just a piece of SCH 40 galvanized steel pipe, which is much easier to reliably produce than 6061 aluminum alloy.
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GrahamJ
climber
In the rain
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Nov 14, 2011 - 11:51pm PT
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I dunno man, I don't see a lot of fact in that letter. I see several anecdotal bits ("my friend the plumber", a note about a completely unrelated issue TNF and A5 for example) and whole lot of speculation. An awful lot of your statements begin with "if". All of which ignoring the fact that BD has a BD factory over there, not a contractor factory, and that they have quite rigorous quality control - namely in the form of ISO standards and 3 sigma ratings. That's Fact. It's also fact that BD has been producing hardgoods (cams, ice tools, etc..) over there for more than a "few months". Years I believe.
For anybody of reasonable intelligence to take a letter like yours seriously, you need to present facts and not speculation. Right now it's just an anti-China rant that happens to mention BD.
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mongrel
Trad climber
Truckee, CA
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Nov 14, 2011 - 11:58pm PT
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Mighty Hiker is probably right about lack of respect for intellectual property rights by U.S. manufacturers in the 1800s. But that is exactly the point: China is operating its commercial world much like ruthless businesses did in the 19th and early 20th centuries, while the rest of the world has moved on to what most of us would agree are more defensible and certainly more sustainable ways of treating society and the planet. That's EXACTLY why I think it's a bad idea to support regressing to 50-150 years ago by moving so much manufacturing and food supply to China.
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mike m
Trad climber
black hills
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Nov 15, 2011 - 02:14am PT
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Seems like we are shipping all of our jobs over there and the only thing that is coming back is our gradual decline to their wage rate.
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Srbphoto
climber
Kennewick wa
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Nov 15, 2011 - 02:28am PT
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Ok everyone time for the metaphorical boxer shorts test
Line up-hike up your unmentionables, flip the elastic and twist around to read the "made in" label. All those sporting something approximating USA, as you were. The rest, well, don't get your panties in a twist.
the particular pair of Pataguccis I am wearing are made in the USA!!!
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sandstone conglomerate
climber
sharon conglomerate central
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Nov 15, 2011 - 09:06am PT
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I had the pleasure of bouncing from job to job during the craze to send all of our labor overseas, mostly menial labor jobs that didn't pay sh#t to begin with. In every one of these places, and I mean every one of them, there was the push to get the operation cranking in China. The division between management and labor in this country is vast, especially considering that most people in management aren't qualified to be giving orders to a broom, let alone the person pushing it. They were, however very good and boot-licking and ass-kissing. The too-many managers would be laughing at the prospect of the chinese basically working for food. All the while, the people who actually did the soon-to-be-outsourced labor were wondering what was going to happen to their livelihood. A few more years, and few more cracks in the system, and all of this will begin to backfire. We haven't seen anything yet.
Too bad about BD. Yet another sell-out.
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Stewart Johnson
climber
lake forest
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Nov 15, 2011 - 09:09am PT
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see it all the time in the construction industry.
go buy something that you need, its from china . presto it breaks, requiring another trip to the store. creating wasted time. its all part of the plan.
its sad to lose a company we climbed up with.
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kunlun_shan
Mountain climber
SF, CA
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Nov 15, 2011 - 12:00pm PT
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This is slightly OT. Not directly related to BD, but on how in China concerns of safety and quality are sacrificed in a race for money. My Chinese friends in the US talk a lot about how their relatives in China worry they just don't know what they are eating nowadays.
A Chinese American buddy of mine, who travels to China for business every 2-3 months, says he never eats in the same restaurant twice and eats minimally while he's in China. A business colleague of his, with a wife and kids, died from drinking who-knows-what in a bar in Shenzhen. They think he ingested some industrial chemical that was used as a cheap substitute for alcohol. There was no investigation, and even if there was, no one would have been found guilty or charged. My buddy says he'll never go for a drink as its just too risky. He has been going to China since the late '80's. China is well known for hushing up safety scandals.
I'm sure this will generate some comments from the people who go to China and live there, that they haven't died yet :)
Thanks for posting your comments upthread, Tom. I'll be buying other brands instead of BD, especially when it comes to gear that my life could be hanging from. Its a real bummer the way many business values work these days.
China wrestles with food safety problems
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-china-food-20110627,0,5246485,full.story
In China, what you eat tells who you are
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-china-elite-farm-20110917,0,7521747,full.story
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Ghost
climber
A long way from where I started
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Nov 15, 2011 - 12:56pm PT
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I'm sure this will generate some comments from the people who go to China and live there that they haven't died yet :)
I spend time in China now and again, eat whatever is put in front of me, including street food, and don't worry about it any more than I worry about eating in the US.
Which is not to say that I don't worry about it, but rather that it is not a China-only issue. There are plenty of deaths from contaminated food in the US and Europe. Much of this is from unsanitary handling of fruits and vegetables, but some has the same root cause as what you accuse the Chinese of: Greedily going for profit and not caring about the consequences to those who eat what you produce. It was just a couple of years ago, for example, that a peanut company in Georgia was found to have continued shipping its products despite knowing they were contaminated. Nine people died, and over 22,000 became sick.
Should we therefore assume that food in the US is dangerous, and heap as much abuse as possible on the country?
Likewise with manufacturing. As someone pointed out, the production of Aliens has hardly been a shining example of US manufacturing quality. So why shouldn't we immediately dump all US-made gear and start buying Chinese? Can anyone on this forum post an example of failure of Chinese-made climbing hardware?
Shoddy work will be done anywhere that unscrupulous people believe they can get away with it. That certainly includes China, but it also includes every other country in the world. Does China need to work to ensure that products made there meet health and safety standards? Of course. And China is working on it.
Just out of curiosity, how many of the posters on this thread who talk about shoddy Chinese goods, dangerous Chinese food, and inhumane Chinese slave labor have actually spent any time in that country?
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kev
climber
A pile of dirt.
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Nov 15, 2011 - 01:39pm PT
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So does this mean they'll now have lead lobes?
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kunlun_shan
Mountain climber
SF, CA
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Nov 15, 2011 - 02:05pm PT
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Just out of curiosity, how many of the posters on this thread who talk about shoddy Chinese goods, dangerous Chinese food, and inhumane Chinese slave labor have actually spent any time in that country?
Ghost, I spent a couple years there, mostly in the '80's. Travelled all over the country, mostly in the more remote west (Xinjiang, Qinghai and Tibet). I went to a Chinese university for awhile. Speaking of slave labour, I passed through an asbestos mine where prisoners were doing reform through labour (in the most west corner of Qinghai), but didn't realize what was happening until later. I spent 8 years in Asia. Haven't been to China since 1997. I thought it was polluted before, am sure glad I don't live there now. Was an Asian studies/Chinese language major once upon a time.
My comments about food safety are based on what Chinese are telling me.
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Tom
Big Wall climber
San Luis Obispo CA
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Nov 15, 2011 - 04:31pm PT
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FortMental has the right idea above. The main problem with BD gear in the future is not a factory in China. The problem is Warren Kanders and his partner Robert Schiller. These two ran Armor Holdings through a whole string of "business decision" moral lapses that did, indeed (FACT: GrahamJ) lead to unnecessary deaths. They are now chairman and vice-chairman of Black Diamond, Inc. and they control the company.
Those two were able to endanger the lives of many people through their business practices at their U.S. factories. They didn't have to go to China.
Are the new cams even marked, "Made in China"? Or does that only appear on the throw-away hang tag?
How will people in the future be able to tell a pre-Kanders cam from the other ones?
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couchmaster
climber
pdx
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Nov 15, 2011 - 05:04pm PT
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Just out of curiosity, how many of the posters on this thread who talk about shoddy Chinese goods, dangerous Chinese food, and inhumane Chinese slave labor have actually spent any time in that country?
Here. However, I understand from Expats who live, work and play there (and capably speak the lingo) that it is significantly worse that you would see passing through or on a cursory trip or visit. Significantly worse. For myself, I just eat and drink everything figuring that ignorance is bliss. I mean, there are few places in the world can you pick up a beautiful, real gold, Patek Philippe watch for less than 50 bucks. In France they're often over $100,000 US dollars.
Real gold ...uh huh. The watch works though.
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Stewart Johnson
climber
lake forest
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Nov 15, 2011 - 07:43pm PT
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i have been to china 5 times,for a total time of 16 months.
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frog-e
Trad climber
Imperial Beach California
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Nov 20, 2011 - 11:24am PT
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Been to China on Business. Manufacturing sporting goods. Selecting a quality vendor, in China, is the same as selecting a quality vendor, here.
QA/QC is supposedly lower..in China?
Would Gucci or DKNY make suits jackets and all kinds of expensive bags there, if quality was poor? Lol.
BMW makes their awesome motorcycles (dual sport) in China. The bikes are used all over the world, and seem great. Better than their cars!
Does US manufacturing in China negatively effect our economy in multiple ways?
Yes.
When will this change?
When we (US citizens) boycott those products, and not until.
For crying out loud, making climbing hardware, has to be one of the lowest margin, high overhead things one could make. If you are going to go on a tangent about made in Asia, then go after the freaking clothing companies...
You will always find the worst labor infractions in the clothing business.
Does making climbing gear in China make it less reliable? No.
Does making Camalots in China mean trigger failure? NO, that's bad design. Easy to confuse.
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steve shea
climber
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Nov 20, 2011 - 11:50am PT
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I once had a delicious dinner of tibetan mastif served over sticky rice by our honorable hosts the Han Chinese military. This was at a garrison near Tingri. They did not cut any corners and bred the dogs especially for our UNICEF exped. Can't comment on BD, Metolius for me
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Toker Villain
Big Wall climber
Toquerville, Utah
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Nov 20, 2011 - 12:56pm PT
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I like that line Luke Askew has about his horse in Culpepper Cattle Co. about not naming anything that he might have to eat.
frog-e is right BOYCOTT BLACK DIAMOND.
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frog-e
Trad climber
Imperial Beach California
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Nov 20, 2011 - 01:46pm PT
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^^^ LOL
Well Ron, sorta. What I mean is, it seems we 'vote' w/ our discretionary income. So vote how you feel.
FWIW, I see more justification building climbing gear in Asia, than I can see for the specialty outdoor clothing business.
The clothing business is much bigger volume wise, much more lost revenue, lost jobs, etc.
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