OptionXIII

I just want to vent a bit of an old man yelling at cloud style rant. It seems impossible to buy decent quality parts these days.

My friend at work came in today with a part he had bought for a project years ago - making his own ECU for a junkyard bound ZJ Grand Cherokee. To simplify things, he bought a standalone voltage regulator for an older Chrysler product. He never ended up using it and was going to offer it to my parts hoard before tossing it. While I was looking at it, I found the electrical potting to be not sitting level. Some gritty stuff came out, so we cracked it open.


Once I got a screwdriver in there and bent the bottom down, sand came pouring out.


Cracking the rest of the thing open revealed a modern style circuit board glued to the outer case and completely unprotected from the sand that was used to weigh it down and make it feel like a higher quality part, without actually spending the extra pennies on more potting epoxy.

I'm not even mad about the fact that the engineering and design of this board likely has nothing to do with what Chrysler engineered in the 70's and 80's. What I'm mad about is the intent to deceive that it is built to factory spec, by weighing it down with sand that will inevitably cause a failure of the electronics down the road.


A little light brushing removed the sand that was still stuck to the board.


Even Tier 1 supplier brands seem to be dropping in quality for anything they sell as an aftermarket replacement part. Years ago, I bought NGK replacement coils for my 2001 Miata while fighting some misfire issues that turned out to be unrelated to the coils themselves. 40k miles later, one went bad and actually became the cause of my misfire. I put the original 140k miles parts back on and have put probably 10k more miles on them since without issue.



I just replaced the Crank Position Sensor in my Jeep due to it having intermittent loss of power. I again went with NTK/NGK/NSK as they are the original supplier to both the Jeep and the Miata ignition and fuel systems, and I figured any Mopar replacement part would just be a repackaged NTK part. I'd bought it a few years ago before I had the Miata coils fail, and tossed it in the back of the Jeep as a spare as they're at the age where all of them are failing.

The wires on the new sensor were so much shorter than the original sensor that I could not use the christmas tree clip to hold the connector in place, and had to move its bracket out of the way. The wires are almost tight between the sensor and the wiring harness body. The sensor itself was noticeably less magnetic than the original - I'm not sure if that's by design/build, or if it's related to the fact that the original has been playing in a magnetic field for 25 years. I could barely get the CPS electrical connector to mate with the main wiring harness, it took several minutes and lots of close inspection to make sure it was the correct connector. I actually ended up checking the part number to make sure I'd bought the right one because three major differences between new and old is a red flag in my mind. It's working fine and the problem is fixed for now. But I'm not as confident as I'd like to be that I won't be replacing it again, and don't need to keep another spare sensor (and the 3 feet of ratchet extensions needed to replace it) in the Jeep on any long road trip.

Am I going to have to just start carrying essential spare parts for anything I've replaced that isn't what it rolled off the assembly line with? It's not just that cheap parts are built cheap these days. I'm okay with that. My issue is that I no longer have the option to get even a higher quality option for so many things.

It feels like enshittification and shrinkflation has hit everything. Houses. Internet search engines. Plane manufacturers. Car parts. Food. Everything has been squeezed to minimize costs and increase corporate profit margins. Are we ever going to see improving quality on things again? Or are we finally reaching the logical conclusion of a decades long push to make more profits by making cheaper products? I'm not an old man. I shouldn't feel like the good old days are behind us, with no light on the horizon.

Z_WAAAAAZ

Damn, that took a dark turn at the end, but I'm with you. I've got a buddy who

I wonder how much of this has to do with the fact that one can now go on Amazon, buy a cheap component for 1/5 the cost of OEM from HiSport or GoodHappyPart etc, and get it the next day with free shipping. I have to imagine that's causing the more reputable parts suppliers some grief, and pushing them to try and increase profit margins if their sales are dropping. All speculation, though. I don't have firsthand data on any of this.

Working at a Ford dealership, however, I can say that Motorcraft replacement parts don't seem to be actively declining in quality. Yeah, there's certain parts that have a high failure rate (evap purge valves out the wazoo), but I don't have any parts on my short list that seem to be failing more after replacement than they used to. Just one datapoint, though, since I don't have much else to add.

LeoNA

The silica was most likely used as an insulator to protect the potting resin.

OptionXIII

Seems like some of your post got cut off.

Fully agreed on the impact of extra low cost junk on generic auction sites serving to drag down the whole market by setting the price floor so low.

Just curious, what is the typical age of a car your working on? I believe theres laws in place about needing parts support for 10 years after production ends, which probably helps lift the quality. I'm guessing that for my bad experience with NTK and other Tier 1 suppliers, it's due to changing factories once the part is no longer ordered in volume by the OEM. But that's just my hunch.

I've seen my current employer make supplier decisions that no one liked. Now we're dealing with the consequences of poor documentation, support, and quality controls. My previous employer just fired every person on my former team working on a product designed, built, and sold primarily in the US. When I was about to leave they were moving heavily to outsource work to South America and other low cost countries. My current employer won't hire more engineers for one of our major projects, they're just outsourcing the design to yet another low cost country. Both of these companies used to have a rock solid reputation for quality engineering.

Well, my coworker is an electrical engineer and he's never seen such a thing. From my understanding the entire point of potting is to limit any movement of the electronics, and loose sand would seem to be possibly conductive, and definitely likely to... Sand through things in an engine bay full of vibrations.
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Z_WAAAAAZ

Damn, that’s a shame my post got cut off because I can no longer remember how I was going to continue that sentence haha.

If I were to ballpark it, I’d say the mean age of all the cars we get in is probably ~2018. Total range is mostly 2010-2024. Yes, Motorcraft keeps all parts available for a vehicle model for a minimum of ten years, but parts with a regular failure rate will see support for 15-20 years. Certain stuff you’re SOL on after that 10 year range, though. Certain parts with a low failure rate make sense (fuel tanks, evap canisters, EGR valves) but there’s some common failure points on certain vehicles that we have to go aftermarket on and it’s a PITA because we can’t warranty the labor if the part fails. 2004-2008 was a bad year for Ford PCMs and you can’t buy a new one from Motorcraft anymore. I’ve had multiple instances where an aftermarket supplier shipped us at least two faulty PCMs before I actually received one that worked. Never got paid for the additional labor required to install and flash three separate PCMs. These situations are generally pretty rare, though.

That’s a bummer to hear about your previous employers. I’d imagine, among all else, the move to outsource labor to low cost countries probably quells your enthusiasm to work there too.

Satisaii

In a previous life, I worked as a QC engineer in the automotive supply chain. We supplied flexible printed circuit boards to a major manufacturer of sensors, who did all of their manufacturing here in southern California. They employed ~1500 people here. In ~2007, they were bought out by a large multinational electronics manufacturer who proceeded to move all of their operations to Mexico. They started by letting go of 50 people a month (something about government regulations and reporting limits the number of people being laid off without having to make some sort of announcement) while telling the remaining employees that their jobs were secure. They also stopped doing business with all of their US based suppliers. The last I heard from my QC contacts there told me that the Mexico factory had a 50% scrap rate and that they were having to do 100% pass/fail testing (instead of random sampling) in order to get Ford/GM etc to accept their parts. But it was still cheaper than making parts here in the US. I am sure they got that straightened out eventually, but I won't buy one of their sensors for any of my projects.

Padlock

I'm not shy on admitting that I work for Harley-Davidson right now. Our customers expect domestic manufacturing and our marketing team likes bragging about how we are a quintessential American-built brand. Our customers also will simultaneously complain when our pricing is perceived as high compared to our competitors (who source a huge majority of their product overseas). As a customer, you can't expect to have that cake and eat it too. As a business, HD has to play that line between costs/quality/location very carefully to keep our value high compared to the competition that is trying hard to steal our market share.

I'm not sure there's a right or wrong answer for the best way to run a business, but from my design engineering perspective in this OEM space, I sure do like working with domestic suppliers.