I’m having what seems to be an especially terrible month with respect to online shopping.
Today’s setback – defective eye screws.
I ordered some stainless steel USA-made eye screws from McMaster Carr, and this is what they look like. Where are the threads?
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Here’s another one. They’re all like this!
Something went wrong – it happens.
I bought a smaller size of eye screws too, and apparently they’re defective too. This one is the best of the bunch.
All of two boxes of different sized eye screws are completely useless with zero holding power.
This is what the eye screws are supposed to look like.
Here’s a same-size Everbilt zinc-plated eye screw from Home Depot’s website. Eye screws usually have flatter threads than typical wood screws, but not even the best fasteners in either box looked anything like this.
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McMaster responded to my email inquiry in record time, which I always appreciate. This isn’t their fault, but their supplier’s.
I’ve seen one-off random defects, such as machine nuts without any threads, or a washer missing a nibble from an edge, but this kind of defect is new to me. Hopefully the manufacturer sorts things out.
I wonder what happened – perhaps machinery malfunctioned and a couple of batches of hardware went out before being caught by quality checks?
Steve
Unfortunately, I have seen this before, but it has been a while. You’d think there would be better quality control and you hate to see this from a USA made product. Makes me wonder if made in the USA has any foreign consumers thinking it is not good quality like some foreign brands do for us? I’m sure there is always a few dissatisfied people out there, but I sure hope that’s not the overall feeling of people who live outside the USA and that this is a one off case for the brand above…
Eric
I wonder if they’re using a camera system to check for defects. Maybe a weird incident where the camera system and something with the manufacturing process failed at the same time.
Bonnie
I’ve seen $500/piece specialty screws fail simple magnet tests. There are infinite ways QA can miss even obvious defects or packaging can screw up and mix up product grades, etc.
Luke
That must be one special screw to run $500. Is there a computer inside? Or is it made of black rhino horn?
Bonnie
Custom sized titanium screws for scientific instrument parts. Technically they were only $300 each from the supplier, it cost $500 a pop when the company I worked for started making them in-house rather than risk a bad screw making it through testing and damaging a multi-million dollar microscope.
Bonnie
Made in the USA has never been a perfect indicator of top quality. Plenty of crap has come out of American factories.
fred
I grew up in a “GM buyer” family. My dad drove Buicks and I started buying Chevy’s in the 1960’s – but then I had more misses than hits with the GM vehicles that I bought starting in the 1970’s. I Had two Buicks that were real lemons and a Chevy truck that was in the shop on a regular basis. I know that my experience might have just been bad luck, but I finally switched to Ford for pickups and to Japanese and European makers for cars. GM seems to be still doing OK. So, I’m hoping that they have gotten their act together regarding quality – but they lost me as a customer long ago.
Ted
Same experience here Fred!
Mark. Scardino
Yeah after two Buick Riveras and expensive repairs I gave up on American vehicles also. Only purchase Japanese cars and after numerous vehicles and reliability I’m still in the Japanese made vehicle camp.
I was guessing that the screws were Chinese made but guess I’m wrong.
Tommy N
There is no law or rule saying that “USA made” products can’t be junks. There are many example of it. It’s all about what one is paying for, and whether the workforce the companies using are skilled or not. Not to mention if those people were treated fairly by the companies.
Franco
Those that believe MIUSA is best and made in China is crap are brainwashed or talking for the sake of talking
They have premium quality tools, who’s going to pay top $$$ (once made and imported) for premium China made tools in the US, or fasteners when the MITUSA is the same price…or possibly cheaper?
Those that believe that Chinese metal is inferior are again talking out of their a**. We get all the cheap Chinese stuff because that is what our market dictates.
Do you believe that they use inferior grade metals on their space program? Their nuclear arsenal? Maybe you believe they buy Snap On tools because they are not capable of making their own premium tools? Or you believe they have American engineers hidden in bunkers making their space & nuclear technology because no one in China is qualified or educated enough?
We get cheap metal and cheap tools, and cheap products because that particular MFR is trying to reach a price point to sell something at a cheap price. AND we buy it because we want cheap!
Stuart
Please try to stay on topic.
Franco
You are right, my bad
tiny
Yes to your question – from the UK certainly my perception of ‘Made in America’ is not a badge of quality. (Japan and Germany stand out as high manufacturing quality in my mind – although in an age where much manufacturing is the assembling of components sourced all over the world it is increasingly hard to define where something is made)
I applaud the desire to keep buying from US and am sure some of the brands are excellent – I have the same desire in the UK. But sadly neither the Union Jack nor the Stars and Stripes are synonymous with quality in my mind
Dave P
Just more post-Covid junk…
Chris I
What is the basis of an assumption/generalization like this? Honestly.
Luke
I think there’s just this massive mental shift among consumers that witnessed corporations use covid as an excuse to collectively push the bounds of what consumers will tolerate. We’re years down the road now and it’s clear the quality reductions and temporary price hikes are permanent.
Michael
Totally agree. Covid led a change and corporations have elected to keep it as a bottom line enhancement. Covid is no longer a reason. Unfortunately same with employees at times .
BigTimeTommy
Expect to see more of this. Quality of everything is becoming exponentially worse but people aren’t becoming less eager to buy garbage.
James+C
You must have ordered iScrews. You’ll need to upgrade to a premium plan to unlock full threads.
eddie sky
Those were the imScrewed assortment.
BMak
Best comment I’ve seen in a long time !
Chaz
aye eye aye
Blocky
Looks like tooth was chipped or worn waaay down on the thread cutter and then they went through the dip as normal.
Wonder how many went through before QC kicked in. End-user QC is the second worst.
Chris
These threads are rolled rather than cut. Most likely, the thread rolls weren’t aligned and caused the smashed threads.
Bonnie
Which is odd since the product image definitely looks like cut threads. Wonder if the entire SKU got mixed up.
its_jake
The good news is usually if you tell mcmaster there is a problem, they have replacements on the way to you before you hang up the phone
Stuart
I asked for a refund and was instructed to discard them.
If it happened to two boxes of different sizes, who knows how many boxes of each size is affected.
I don’t have the patience for back-and-forth, I’m already doing that with another company that keeps sending me precision instruments with shock damage from single later baggie packaging, chemicals with old lives, and mis-picked products.
Bonnie
“Once bit, twice shy” as they say.
Franco
Or fool me once, shame on you…fool me twice, shame on me.
mark
I work in manufacturing as an engineer and a production manager at various times. I don’t think people realize how much COVID impacted manufacturing. The people who make these items tend to make low wages ($11-12/hour entry level was going rate around COVID time for me). Suddenly gov gives them $1200 check. They work a mind numbing job that’s hard to enjoy for a MONTH for that much money. A lot of the workforce just checked out. They didn’t quit, but they stopped caring in a new way I hadn’t seen before. This was true all the way up the ladder. CEO doesn’t come into office on COVID fears but all mfg employees are back in the plant 1 week after March 2020 “pandemic shutdown”. The ppl they take orders from are working at home now with their kids interrupting meetings in background. (They get to be with their kids and I’m stuck in here risking COVID??) These laborers lost the illusion that they were valued. They aren’t bought into the system the same way they were before COVID. The sense of worth in working these jobs went away and didn’t come back. They realized they don’t need the job the job needs them and they realized it’s not worth the pay. Mfg. Hasn’t been able to respond to things like Target paying $15/hour starting. Why work a hazardous mfg job for $13/hour when you can go put stuff on a shelf in a nice a/c building that’s well lit for better money. IMO I’ve seen a lot of commodity type products that typically didn’t have quality issues now just completely failing their inspections and shipping anyways like this.
Robert
I inspect business & factory operations and I back up Mark’s observations. Anecdotally, I overheard a construction worker at my optometrist bragging that he makes nearly as much from government money, so when you throw in the price of gas, why bother working?
Mark
Exactly. Can’t blame them. When you barely make enough money to buy essentials, you aren’t worrying about stuff like consistent income to save for a house or something. The gov gives you a bunch of free money & makes it easier to stay on unemployment and not pay rent and you start thinking its not worth the time effort and (at the time) health risk to go into work. Further bolstered by the inability to replace anyone at the time. I never saw these issues improve much before I myself left my job 2 years after start of covid.
Jim Felt
In my decades of threaded SS purchases I’ve not yet seen (or noticed?) this to such fatal level. Fortunately we’ve three significant in city full stocking sources for such purchases that I pass by nearly daily. Not surprisingly none are chains. (Though they also sell them)…
Jared
I was also thinking that may be the worst hardware defect I’ve seen. It’s not THAT unusual to find small defects unfortunately, but often it’s just a piece or two in a box, not the whole thing, and it’s rarely so bad the hardware is nonfunctional.
I often get bad hardware with items I buy and have to assemble myself. E.g. I recently bought a small wheeled welding cart that came with bolts and nuts with threads so poorly cut they couldn’t screw into each other. While annoying, I assembled it with a higher-grade hardware I had on hand (being a welding cart, I also contemplated just welding it together).
Benjamen
That’s been my experience too. Every once in a while you’ll get a defective screw in the box, but not the whole box! Common things I’ve seen are a blank screw without threads, or the head isn’t cut deep enough to engage with the bit.
Dave in VT
Worst I’ve seen, I think.
Recently, I installed an oil catch can in my engine compartment. The machining on the device was impeccable, including the breather installed on top. It came with two self-tapping screws to mount the bracket, for which I drilled the proper-sized holes. Well, when I *gently* tightened the second screw, the head sheared off level with the hole I had drilled. It’s the only location where this thing can go, so I’m going to have to drill out the defective screw and qo one larger.
Ben
I think they’re lying and these are made in china.
Stuart
The box is branded; this isn’t one of those products where they grab hardware from a bulk bin.
Mark
I worked in USA mfg for close to 15 years now. Directly with Mcmaster carr and many other distributors in Quality Engineering and management positions. Trust me things like this get made, and shipped, at USA factories all the time. Some tool or inspection camera fails, and the machine operator has been faking the inspections for a long time bc of the inspection frequency being too demanding/the design is too difficult for the mfg process to make repeatably/they aren’t invested in the quality of the process. They pack the parts anyways and they ship to mcmaster. Companies like McMaster establish the the suppliers are responsible for the quality of the products in their supplier agreements. They do not want to take on the burden of opening and re-packaging shipments just to perform inspections on millions of different parts they don’t design or make.
The mark of a good distributor is how quickly and easily they resolve your issue, not whether or not you have an issue in the first place. On the back end the distributor penalizes the manufacturer for the issue.
The mark of a good manufacturer is the ability to produce a good for the least amount of cost while fulfilling all of the needs of the application. Not to make flawless products every time, IMO. You could create a process that insured this issue never occurred again the next 20 years. The cost of a single screw here would be $30.
Stuart
Very good points!
ITCD
I think there’s another way inspection can be too demanding, and it’s not in frequency but in the specifics of how data is collected. When I first started where I am it was paper sheets. Some people had sheets to mark off how far off nominal something was dimensionally, others had some sort of visual to check or something to verify with a gage but it was just do the check mark it on the sheet and get moving, sometimes you had both sheets.
We switched to an electronic system and quality cratered. In theory it should work better, it has collection plans tailored to each individual workstation, and utilizes statistical process control. But the program is so doggedly slow and was set up with so many questions to answer that people do just like you said and fake the checks just to not got bothered by QC folks, who themselves don’t seem to take advantage of the SPC tools available to them to act on the data coming from people who actually do take the time to answer truthfully and instead just don’t seem to care as long as a check was done no matter if the data was in or out of control specs.
And management’s tactic to try getting people to get invested in quality lately has just been “we’re tired of hearing customer say this” or “muh profits” when I think it might work better to take an angle of personal pride in producing good stuff. It’s at the bottom with the workers on the floor, at the top with the people directing those workers. Quality needs to be ingrained in their very blood and a company anywhere in the world that wants to put out a quality product needs to have systems in place to build that up or you’ll get stuff like these eyebolts. And to that end people who rely solely on COO as the end all be all of quality are setting themselves up for disappointment. It can be an indicator sure, but it’s not the defining one.
Brandon
Yeah sometimes you have to really watch things on online marketplaces like Amazon. We got Milwaukee M12 batteries on Amazon not so long ago and the listing proclaimed and showed genuine oem batteries. The ones that arrived said Milwaukee on them but were obviously not. One failed 5 mins into first use and on closer inspection we noticed that the word Milwaukee was a different font than our others. When we looked the part number up on the sticker it was not anything Milwaukee sells. We should have read and heeded the product reviews because it sounded like a lot of other people had the same experience. Next time I’ll go to Home Depot and get my batteries.
Bonnie
McMaster Carr is generally a big step above Amazon… But seems like that may no longer be the case if two separate products ended up like this.
Stuart
It’s not McMaster’s fault.
Wayne R.
Brandon’s talking about Amazon’s issues. McMaster doesn’t use random/unknown vendors like Amazon does, right?
Stuart
No. McMaster tends to be very curated, usually with one supplier per unique product.
Shocked
Don’t discount the possibility that these eyebolts (and the box labels) could be counterfeits that were slipped into the delivery system. Given McMaster’s reputation, I don’t think for a second that they would knowingly ship the bad hardware you received. Used to work at a facility that carefully inspected many items before use – fasteners, hardware, metals, fuses, circuit breakers, wire and cable, and even complete equipment – and we frequently discovered counterfeits. Some fakes were so good on the outside that even the manufacturer of the copied product had a difficult time determining the fake item from the real without doing detailed and sometimes destructive testing. Everyone in the chain loses except the counterfeiters. Also, this is a good reminder to make at least a cursory check of items before you use them.
David E Munson
McMaster is at fault. They selected the supplier, vetted the supplier. There are product managers who must know about this or should be fired, buyers, receiving agents, part stockers, part pickers any that could have stepped up and put a quality flag on it. But none did. That part don’t look cut but looks cast. Cast stainless?
Don’t let McMaster off the hook. They are entirely at fault.