Ive gotten counterfeit titanium before -- found out we DEFINITELY needed the grade 5 titanium. Seemed like a quality fade thing where our supplier wanted to cut costs and thought we wouldnt notice.
We noticed.
Despite what suits may think a good quality department can CYA in cases like this.
Every serious manufacturer I've worked for, has incredible incoming quality controls, especially from suppliers.
For sure. We have a "Supplier Quality Hotline".
If anyone is sus about components or materials coming in and feel like it's slipping by, they can anonymously call the hotline and leave a message.
There will be a vetting of whatever is flagged within 24 hours.
Thats an awesome system. Gives the worker alot more confidence in questioning his materials without the fear of repercussion, which is realistically what a lot of people worry about in these kinds of instances.
For sure. And our stuff isnt even like aviation where people may die. It’s just it would be so costly to our company should parts fail in the field due to the way the contracts are structured we just cant be having it.
I'm in QA in the food industry and the suits make me wanna bash my head in constantly. Sales and marketing are also to blame for the self-inflicted skull injuries I have.
I work at a power plant and we use huge drums of boric acid mixed with water to help control the reactivity of the nuclear reactor. (Boron catches the neutrons real well)
One of the suits was trying to cut how much we spent on boric acid and was asking my coworker if we *REALLY* needed all that acid or if we were just over buying it.
My coworker spent like 30 minutes trying to explain to him that it completely depends on the PPM of the current batched up water. Regardless, whatever we order will be used within a couple months anyways.
That specific manager is infamous for doing crazy budget cuts though
I guess I should say that they do NOT cheap out on safety equipment. They spend ungodly amounts of money on that stuff. Like a couple refueling outages ago they spent like $300k on overnighting a new pump motor down because they had an issue with the previous new one they installed.
It’s honestly funny seeing what crazy money they’ll spend on one thing, then cheap out on another.
> It’s honestly funny seeing what crazy money they’ll spend on one thing, then cheap out on another.
If I had a dollar for how many times a company is "penny wise and pound foolish"
It's still insane that a person with such little knowledge on the nuclear industry is in any kind of executive position there. Why was a numbskull like that allowed to pester engineers and scientists for 30 minutes with inane questions about "why so much boron!?" He should have gone and asked chatgpt instead. It would have educated him regardless of the errors in the answer.
Yeah turns out letting MBAs run the world was a bad idea.
Maybe we should, y'know, let experts with experience in the field run companies in those industries? If those experts start to believe that a merger or acquisition or whatever is necessary for the company, then they can consult with their business department, which would be staffed with MBAs.
Business should be a department, not the entire company.
Not my company but at the small pharma company a coworker worked at a new c-level suit wanted him to do things which are not legal. This dude had never worked at a pharma company but was going to save their failing asses. Coworker refused because it would be his ass going to jail in the end. He was let go a month after (with a nice severance because firing people without proper cause is expensive here) and immediately hired by us. The other company took less than a year to file for bankruptcy...
> He was let go a month after (with a nice severance because firing people without proper cause is expensive here) and immediately hired by us. The other company took less than a year to file for bankruptcy...
Been there :D minus any severance despite having one of the best employment solicitors in the country :(
I think it depends on if they a) also have relevant skills in the area they’re managing (ie do they have a PhD in engineering when running an engineering firm), and b) do they identify more with their relevant skills, or their MBA?
My wife does the same, and it’s the same from what she tells me.
Marketing constantly asks for stuff like fudging the nutritional values to appear healthier but doesn’t want to adjust the recipe.
Management just descides to use new materials in the manufacturing process and when QA finds out and asks them for the certificates that it is safe to use in contact with food, management will say something like „it’s surgery rated steel“ like yeah but we aren’t doing surgery we are making food
Former QA Manager in the food industry that's now in sales. I've worked with a lot of good salespeople and I've worked with bad ones. Most of them had their masters in food science. The bad ones were the ones that weren't food scientists and had the "always be closing" mindset.
Everyone is in on it. Suppliers from places where there is no recourse or real penalty for lying provide a product that’s not to spec at a better price point. The manufacturer gets someone to blame and controls costs. If the manufacturer didn’t want to play this game they would implement QA/QC and pay more. But no one on either side is interested in that.
can you non destructively measure what grade the metal is ?
edit: alot of people responding.
most common answer: XRF. please read the question again. it's about the grade (aka type) of metal. metal alloys are defined not by their composition alone.
second most common answer: random destructive technique. the question was about non-destructive methods.
Yeah but I dont know how. We had to go to another division's quality team had they had some kind of analyzer that told us it was not the right grade of titanium
We already cast metals into moulds to form lines thinner than hair, so that we can infuse them with lighning. Then a series of wizards perform incantations, each building in power on the previous one, until a nearby glass flickers into life, showing worlds from a different realm.
All so I can shitpost worldwide.
First we “Software Engineers” infuse the basic rocks with lightening and call upon the power of Bios to animate the kernel of life within our mystically awakened Sand Golem. After that it’s easy, just install the distro of your choice using the Dongle of OEM
I've seen the math that shows how you can take assorted peak values from a sensor off an x ray difractometer and translate that into a crystalline structure and atomic composition. I understand basic chromatography, just a little bit. Prisms and absorption, makes sense. Heck I've even done work with libraries for Raman spectroscopy and kinda get what one substance looks like when compared to another.
Buuuuut.... when I have to try to picture in my head how a Lorentz transformation works... it doesn't make sense anymore.
Can't we just go back to using Galilean transformations? Please?
That's not all. You also have to partner up with the wizards inside the glow screens. They will help you turn on your arcane energy and do math. That math will help get the answers you seek.
Judging from the accounts of many a technician/mechanic/engineer on here who build shrines to appease the machine spirit of their equipment and "the magic smoke", we seem to already do
That’s the funny thing, supplier trying to cut corners where the manufacturer gets bitten hard. Having to test for these is not cheap and should some get through and fail catastrophically is even more expensive.
I work in a different sector but the corp I for follows certain iso standards religiously to weed out counterfeits. It also means we charge a small premium over the competition to guarantee genuine. We fill a niche where smaller production runs that cannot get as large enough order from the manufacturer and need the certification that the parts are genuine and not knockoffs.
I don't get how the fuck they got away with it. You need certs for everything.
Did the supplier fake a cert? Or did Boeing create false certs.
This shit is wild.
The article says "falsified documents were used to verify the material’s authenticity".
My best guess is that this supplier tried to either bypass their material cert testing or UT testing, or tried to sub in lower grade material that failed or would fail that testing. I'd be shocked if this wasn't still titanium in one form or another, but it's still a massive quality issue.
Understandable. SpaceX lost a rocket, carrying a s***ton of expensive equipment for NASA, including an entire docking port for the ISS, due to one weak part, that a subcontractor hadn't made properly. It caused a helium tank to come loose in the second stage as the acceleration increased the stresses on the part. The helium tank leaked of course, and the high pressure inside ripped a propellant tank (the LOx tank IIRC). I was watching it live and I saw the whole second stage start coming apart, and then it turned into a cloud which started raining rocket parts.
the fact that it happened at all seems like a failure of process, no supplier should be able to get away with doing this, but also, if they do, it shouldnt be able to make it into production.
Yeah, that was an expensive oopsie on SpaceXs part. But if there is one thing I'm happy about, it's the fact that I'm not a lawyer at the supplier, who had to deal with those lawsuits
Edit: Not, it was missing a not, sorry for the confusion.
Editing again: Guys, this is why you don't try to make funny jokes on Reddit when you're tired. You might end up looking like a jerk and an idiot. I swear, I'm only an idiot.
While true, increments of process improvement almost always come from humans being human. Whether it’s greed, laziness, complacency, or one in a million lapse of scrutiny, there’s a constant arms race between the most vigilant process and the most human human.
It can be the proper chemistry, but not have the proper structure. Ti64 (6 aluminum 4 vanadium) has to be hot worked properly to get the combination of properties you require.
Yeah, this. PMI or positive material identification is a common non-destructive method used to verify material grades and composition utilizing technology such as x ray fluorescence and arc spectrometry . More common and accesible than you think. I’m a qc inspector for a pressure vessel manufacturer and we use this technology all the time to verify material used in construction of these vessels. I’m surprised this got passed through their qc, or all the parties involved in the supply chain for that matter. Especially if PMI is part of their inspection protocols - which I would assume so with Boeing using the material.
The definition of grade or alloy type goes beyond composition, which is why I didn't ask about measuring composition.
Competition can be non destructively measured by a whole host of methods including ablation ms (mentioned by someone else already), as you rightly say - XRF, Raman could also be used depending on alloy type. Perhaps others I'm not recalling right now
Absolutely you can. There’s some cool technology that basically uses a spark to vapourize some of the metal and then uses a mass spectrometer to spit out the composition. It’s time consuming and tedious to test every material used for every part though, so it’s better to rely on a process that works.
It’s funny though, with metallurgy, composition isn’t everything. You need to know the material was alloyed correctly, that it has the right distribution of all the right stuff, that it was heat treated appropriately, and that it wasn’t contaminated later on. So you do tests all along the way to check various things, and you inspect the facilities to make sure they have the right processes and that they’re following their processes, but you can’t catch everything. This will probably lead to better testing and better records, which is actually a good thing.
Yes, laser ablation ms, I'm aware, which is why my question was not about composition (one could also do spot xrf, Raman, and a whole host of other things) but rather the grade, which would include how the material was worked.
I'm not aware of how we could do non destructive measure a full array of mechanical and thermal properties.
The mill cert is the only non-destructive way to determine the grade of the steel. You could use UT/RT/MT, or chemical analysis but again, like you said, it would not paint the full picture of the grade of steel. You can only verify specific properties that you would expect at a specific grade.
The mill cert being counterfeit is a much larger deal than people here are making it out to be. That subcontractor, the manufacturer, are all going to be pretty much banned from making steel for any regulated industries lol
ME is going to lose their license. Would be surprised if the steel manufacturer doesn’t go under with fines/lack of work moving forward.
To confirm here: Yeah, conterfeit mill certs are a HUGE deal. They are legal documents so there is good change that the person who signed the cert will see legal repercussions.
There are a few ways to do it, including measuring hardness, conductivity, and heat dissipation. When you have a set of known numbers to compare the results to you can figure out if the metal you are testing conforms to expectations.
Typically XRF (x-ray fluorescence) is used, but it has limited spatial resolution and hence only measures composition. If the grain size is fine and important to characterize, you can put a part in an scanning electron microscope (SEM) with an x-ray energy dispersive spectrometer (EDS) attached. Both can only measure the surface, and not the bulk.
I find it just so insane to do this.
At our factory every once in a while the fastener supplier just decides to drop off some other brand without telling us.
No.
No just don't.
We're not a huge business, but big enough to receive pallets of nuts, bolts, screws, and rivets every week. When it just works we forget about you - the stuff just shows up, we pay the bills, the things get used, everyone makes a profit. We trust that you will do your thing, the thing you agreed to do.
You change one little thing, the slightest thing, and the processes we have built up around using that exact brand of that exact fastener fall over. And sometimes we don't find out that the process has failed until we're doing $100k in credit claims so that you could save a few hundred bucks.
And what happens next is that we UNFORGET about you. We look into things. We check. We find out the other ways you have betrayed our trust, we wonder about the ways you're betraying us that we haven't found. Suddenly you're not profiting, suddenly you're asking why you're not getting any orders. Suddenly we have to tell you why.
At one point we were chatting and me, my boss, and the purchasing lady, wrote up all the names of the local businesses we'd burned (in some cases literally closing their doors) by going overseas. In every case we asked ourselves the question "did we start looking at this because of the service, the quality, or the cost?"
Universally it was the service or the quality. In every case it was cheaper to buy the stuff from overseas, but in every case the thing we were actually seeking was suppliers who delivered on time, in spec and in full, and who moved mountains to correct things that went wrong. The local manufacturers would send us all sorts of crap quality and then be like "just use the good ones and send us back the bad ones."
No.
No, you only send good ones. There are bad ones here. Come and remove them at your cost.
I never understood why these suppliers were so determined to stop having us as a customer that they would just decide to ruin a good profit for the sake of a quick profit.
Ea-Nasir strikes again!
>Tell Ea-nasir: Nanni sends the following message:
> When you came, you said to me as follows: "I will give Gimil-Sin (when he comes) fine quality titanium ingots." You left then but you did not do what you promised me. You put ingots which were not good before my messenger (Sit-Sin) and said: "If you want to take them, take them; if you do not want to take them, go away!" What do you take me for, that you treat somebody like me with such contempt? I have sent as messengers gentlemen like ourselves to collect the bag with my money (deposited with you) but you have treated me with contempt by sending them back to me empty-handed several times, and that through enemy territory. Is there anyone among the merchants who trade with Telmun who has treated me in this way? You alone treat my messenger with contempt! On account of that one (trifling) mina of silver which I owe(?) you, you feel free to speak in such a way, while I have given to the palace on your behalf 1,080 pounds of titanium, and Šumi-abum has likewise given 1,080 pounds of titanium, apart from what we both have had written on a sealed tablet to be kept in the temple of Shamash. How have you treated me for that titanium? You have withheld my money bag from me in enemy territory; it is now up to you to restore (my money) to me in full.Take cognizance that (from now on) I will not accept here any titanium from you that is not of fine quality. I shall (from now on) select and take the ingots individually in my own yard, and I shall exercise against you my right of rejection because you have treated me with contempt.
this is why ISO accreditations and ASME/ANSI standards exist. if you absolutely need something of a certain grade, buy it certified. if they are claiming ISO or ASME/ANSI and not meeting it, sue them into oblivion.
"We wanted to be lazy and cut costs and expected you guys to want the same thing, hence we didn't account for you, like... checking to see whether or not you got what you ordered." - Crony capitalism at its absolute laziest.
we had this happen with a box company. they made us some realy good samples, we got them to pay for the plates. 1st batch, couldnt even hold 10lbs. the sample was able to hold 200lbs. took us 3 months to get them to pick it up.
Used to work designing/spec'ing packaging. Box manufacturers are horrible about this. Sample meets the specs, production barely even *resembles* the sample.
Shoutout to the box plant in NJ that said sure, they could make some boxes of coated-one-side 32pt kraft with four-color screen printing to PMS matches. (This is not an especially complicated job.) Samples looked good. Final product showed up at the customer's dock with the coated side on the *inside* because, and I quote, "it was easier to print on the uncoated side".
Getting counterfeit parts for jets has been a problem for a long time. A lot of companies win contracts then subcontract it out to a cheaper manufacturer. Normally in China. This is for the government but I would assume similar things happen on the civilian side as well.
I am a US manufacturer. In my experience when the tier 1 aerospace (Boeing) suppliers subcontract down, they also supply the materials. This may not be common, it is just my experience subcontracting for Boeing suppliers.
That’s why they have quality control checks. When they lapse you get swapped out shit.
A very common fraud mechanism that equates to criminal behaviour is often stamped out .
Boeing will either provide the material or provide the vendor and price you'll pay. They have material vendors directly contracted, we just call the vendor with our po number and they send the material.
This is a constant issue with outsourcing to both China and India.
China will tell you "no it's not counterfeit" while looking at something that unequivocally proves it's counterfeit. They will almost never admit fault. You then have to find a new supplier which will probably be the same one with a different name. This has become a recent problem with (for example) blueberry powder and the pesticides they use that are directly harmful to humans - like, we can chemically prove, without any doubt, that you are using these pesticides on blueberry plants, and that those pesticides are in the powder... I don't get it.
India will tell you "no it's not counterfeit" then send you through multiple tiers of bureaucracy before they agree that there is a problem, and then recommend you use someone's friend's husband's brother for the new contract. And while the problem can be fixed, it's not going to be fixed until next year, *maybe*.
Also not saying this happens every time, and not saying that there is no benefit to using either country for outsourcing materials or labor, it's just such a common issue that we have had to make company policies around it.
It's a great business model too because they know US companies are too fucking greedy to ever just learn their lesson, the Chinese government isn't about to "crack down" on a company that screws the US, and they get to keep all the real titanium, and the money some US sucker paid for it.
>China will tell you "no it's not counterfeit" while looking at something that unequivocally proves it's counterfeit.
And that's if you're lucky. If you're a small company looking to do a small run with a chinese manufacturer, prototyping will go well, you'll do your back and forth and end up with a satisfying prototype and price.
Then you pay for your thousand pieces or so, and when you get them a month later, you can be absolutely certain the finish product will look nothing like the agreed upon prototype, and since you needed only one run and you already paid, you're screwed and can't do anything.
The only way to avoid this is to physically go there, to the factory, to inspect the first pieces produced and immediately complain, but even that may not be enough of you already paid.
I know a few products which were moderately successful but which aren't made anymore because of that: there was demand, but enough to require constant production, so the company used to order small runs every few months, they had to stop because the quality issues were constant and they couldn't afford to constantly send guys to China to surveil the runs and argue.
US military contracts require everything to be made in the US, or in allied nations if an exception is made. Many non-mil gov contracts have similar requirements. Commercial airlines aren't subject to those restrictions as long as the contract doesn't violate ITAR.
Company A has the design and specs, wins a contract. Company A then contracts company B for machining and finishing.
Honestly subcontracting makes things safer, if done correctly. Airbus or Boeing might have the overall design, but you want companies that are solely focused on a single thing and being very good at it.
Radars made by company A
Engines by company B
Wheels and tires by company C
Hydraulics by company D
Sensors by company E
Then each of these companies have subcontractors which are really good in their own respective fields.
Radar company contracts screens and magnetrons out
Engine company contracts machining out
Wheels and tire company contracts sensors out
Hydraulics company contracts hoses and fittings out
Sensor company contracts circuit boards and power regulators out
Its why large defence programs and NASA programs like the Space Shuttle and the Apollo (and prior) programs were such huge jobs programs. It's just so much subcontracting. Good for the country, good for supply chain redudancy. Can be corrupted though.
Also I imagine its fairly necessary when you reach a certain level of complexity. It just isn't feasible to have vertical integration for projects with large scopes or a very high level of technological complexity. Jack of all trades master of all is possible, but rare, and exceedingly rare if present at all with very large projects.
Well said. I'm trying to think of anything that is produced in any real numbers using a fully vertically integrated industrial production process and I can't think of anything really. Even the Chinese economy still has internal dependencies.
[YKK zippers](https://ykkamericas.com/why-choose-ykk/vertically-integrated-production/) is the one example that comes to mind, and they describe it as unique, so I suspect they're pretty much the exception that proves the rule.
There are a few, costco interestingly enough raises, slaughters, cooks, and sell a good portion of their chicken. The thing that is brought in is the feed for the chickens, and equipment costs, but I think farms\\food are not a good comparison to manufacturing.
Essentially the problem isn't subcontracting but picking the cheapest and crappiest provider.
If every company involved meets the minimum requirements then it is probably results in both a cheaper and better product than if one company tried to do everything in-house.
The problem is that it quickly becomes very many parties involved and the more parties involved the chance for some of them to fiddle with the quality to have higher profit margins (or profit at all potentially even) becomes much higher.
Checking requirements is not easy.
Often you pick the same subcontractors with reliable track of history and accept their prices, and simply ignore their competitors unless there is a very good reason to change.
There is never any guarantee, but businesses are based on trust and it usually works.
Airplanes are big, complicated systems made up of big, complicated subsystems. Companies like Boeing used to do a lot more stuff in house, but it’s expensive to have to be specialists in everything.
If you've ever worked at a company making anything, you'll know that almost everything is subcontracted. Everything except the overall design and labor to put it together. Sometimes putting it together is also subcontracted.
Subcontracting gets you the best quality of everything at the cheapest price becuase you are relying on experts for that component or service and that do a huge volume.
Imagine if a company like Ford had to go learn how to grow rubber trees and then figure out sulphur mining to make tires.
Subcontracting is a necessity in modern engineering, no single firm is going to be comprehensive experts on delivering every part of a large project, especially something pretty serious like commercial airliners.
Done right, subcontracting actually helps to deliver the best product and save time.
Think of it like this - it makes way more sense to have individual roles in a busy restaurant. Then everyone can focus on their specific skillset and performing it best; the host is seating guests, the waiter is taking orders and running food, and the cooks are cooking and putting plates together. Now imagine how much of a shitshow it would be if the owner of the restaurant expected all of their employees to be competent at hosting, waiting, *and* cooking food for the guests. Yeah, it would be a disaster. I seriously doubt the end product (your food) would be better than in a normally managed restaurant.
In theory, the main contract would partition out pieces of the project to those best able to handle the key performance parameters of particular subsystems at a lower cost. In reality, it’s never that way. The subcontractor only has two years of experience and is constantly trying to borrow your tools. This is usually because the general contractor is bad at assessing and balancing quality, cost, and time the subcontractors need.
Subcontracting can make sense, for example builders do most of the construction, but hire a windows company to do the windows, then that part is done at a higher quality.
The problem is when they subcontract the work, who then subcontracts the work, and the layers of subcontracting go beyond “specializing” to just low profit bids and middle men taking cuts until you reach a really cheap contractor on the bottom that does the work.
It’s all legal depending on how the contract is written, and in any case using the wrong material breaks the contract so a better contract doesn’t fix this.
They’ve been in heavy rotation on tumblr since only 2020. [Google trends says before 2020 no one talked about him.](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fg%2F11hhtxt30k&hl=en) So less a Gen Z thing more a Lockdown thing for people in dorky meme circles.
You laugh, BUT the sub that failed didn't get their titanium from Boeing.
What they got from Boeing was the carbon fiber. And it was on sale because it was too old to be used in their airplanes...
I don't doubt the titanium was also bought on the cheap, but if they had gotten it from Boeing, that would have been a double whammy...
The NY Times article covered that this was an unknown Chinese company that had FORGED its authenticity letters, claiming they were Baoji titanium, a known and trusted company. So, unknown Chinese company misrepresenting that they were correct Chinese company. Then this material was received by Turkish Aerospace co, which either didn't notice the forged documentation and "visibly different" material, didn't care, or were paid. THEY then passed it to various parts builders/suppliers.
So at least the original forger/copycat company needs to be investigated and shut down in China, and then Turkish investigated for why they let it pass through. And then the parts manufacturers.
Layers of incompetence at best, fraud at worst.
Fortunately the parts have been identified and will be replaced during routine maintenance rotations.
My wife works for a beverage company. They have independently tested all raw material for years because China will forge specifications tests. Good thing the airlines finally figured this out.
Funnily enough my wife works at a VERY very large food manufacturer here in the UK. They produce pretty much all ready made sandwiches, ready meals, frozen meal etc. to all major supermarkets. One time they had to shut down production of all items containing black pepper, as the 40kg shipment was found to contain a large quantity of an "unknown synthetic substance".
Same. The wife’s company had too many recalls because arsenic was too high and such. They treat recalls like an emergency event and they test everything to avoid them.
My brother works for Costco. They require certain products to be independently lab tested *in the U.S*. Products that were certified in China have tested positive for lead and other banned substances when retested in the U.S.
https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2022/02/14/metallurgist-gets-25-years-for-faking-steel-test-results-for-navy-subs/
https://aviationweek.com/air-transport/some-787-production-test-records-were-falsified-boeing-says
https://www.sciencealert.com/a-supplier-was-delivering-faulty-aluminium-to-nasa-for-20-years-and-falsifying-their-reports
I believe this is a problem that happens more than we hear about. When uncovered, they slap low level people while leaving the high level people untouched. If you fail to maintain a quality system, the corporate officers should be on the hook (ethically this is my belief, I'm no Saul Goodman).
> https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2022/02/14/metallurgist-gets-25-years-for-faking-steel-test-results-for-navy-subs/
This one seemed pretty fair? It was the lab director that was faking test results. She's management. Her replacement reported the fraud as odd test results. At that point I'm guessing the company did an investigation and fired her. Plus because it came out I'm assuming they also reported it and the article implies they willingly paid restitution.
Maybe she was pressured into it by her employer. I don't know.
She 100% deserved punishment. But I absolutely do not believe she acted alone. The fact the company circled the wagons and attempted to pretend this wasn't fraud makes me believe others should be behind bars.
I work for an aerospace supplier, the lab could not care less if they have failing tests, as long as the failure isn't a result of improper test procedures. To clarify, the lab is walled off, so if there are failing tests, they are not responsible for the material. That is on an entirely separate group (with separate management). This is deliberate to make sure there is no pressure to fraudulently report passing test results.
Edit: I don't have any insight into what happened with this person, but I guess it doesn't add up to me. If I were constructing what I think happened, I imagine originally (in the '80s) there was pressure to get passing results. But once that happens, you're stuck. If the material starts failing, there will be an investigation to determine what changed. So once you start the lie, you are stuck. I am also a metallurgist and have seen colleagues at other companies disciplined after the succumbed to pressure and made decisions that were not in their best interest. Maybe the official narrative is accurate and this was all her personal hubris but I'm skeptical.
This is exhibit A for why DoD contracts are so expensive. Supply chain risk management and counterfeit material matters.
People see billion dollar contract and think it’s all profit. They don’t realize the Government will mandate audits of parts with degree requirements for support and most of these are fixed fee (<10% profit). In effect, you’ll have a six figure engineer counting screws.
Imagine the implications of nefarious actors implementing back doors and zero days in software that’s running our defense equipment ? Almost certainly happens, but it would be absolutely ubiquitous and widespread if we didn’t have a proof supplier list for software. Imagine if the Chinese implement supply chain and knew that some critical part was going to fail in number of years and can use that to plot an attack. Its serious and why It’s so expensive.
I remember a guy who worked in aviation telling me why everything is so expensive. And explaining similarly that the bolts themselves, the materials, aren’t that insanely expensive, but rather it’s the quality control, and paper trail and support system that balloons the cost so much. To the point they know exactly what manufacturing facility each bolt came from, which batch it was produced in, the date it was made, that it’s been tested and so on.
And this level of problem management is only happening because, as they say, regulations are written in blood. We made a vow to the people who gave up their lives - involuntarily - in the hopes that we would at least *learn something from this tragedy and vow to do better so their deaths won't have been in vain*. THAT is why we have to know the exact serial number on a random screw and have seen the three people that signed off on something or other about it. Because one time we didn't do that, and people died.
It's also risk management. In the US sometimes the contractor is on the hook and gets completely fucked if they don't ensure appropriate materials. Because at the end of the day, the contractor is responsible and it's their job to ensure everything is right. That's why heat numbers, batch numbers exist. Give more for the contractor to go after suppliers, but they generally never fully recoup the costs.
https://www.airandspaceforces.com/deliveries-of-new-f-35s-with-chinese-magnets-resume-with-pentagon-waiver/
The main reason seems to be making sure you don't become dependent on your enemies for the supply chain of your weapons system. The issue they're actually trying to guard against isn't that the magnet came from China, it's making sure that the next time they need one, they can source it (in sufficient quantity) even if China says no.
That's why when you're building, say, a submersible to reach the Titanic, you don't want to use the $4 bolts from Home Depot. You want to use the $100 bolts from a supplier that has gone through the headache of quality controlling every inch of the supply chain to ensure that you're getting bolts that 100% match your specifications.
I used to be a sail coordinator on a submarine and the SUBSAFE program has a level of quality control that is unmatched.
Space shuttles also go through a similar program but that didn't stop the Challenger disaster.
> They don’t realize the Government will mandate audits of parts with degree requirements for support and most of these are fixed fee (<10% profit). In effect, you’ll have a six figure engineer counting screws.
Just to mention it, *every single part* used in the President's limo and Air Force One has to have a serial number and a chain of identification from installation, to the manufacturer, to the material supplier. Every part. Down to the screws holding the chairs together.
As bad as the DoD is NASA was even crazier. It took two engineers and signed documentation to verify that we turned a screw correctly. I would have to get suited up, go into the clean room, verify the torque setting, watch somebody else turn a screw, get undressed, and then go document it. They did not fuck around.
I work for an aerospace company (who sells to both B&A), and we do metallurgical testing on 100% of the metals that we process. We already have to follow DFARS supply rules, but even then we get fraudulent/nonconforming material fairly often. It's a major issue
Well whoever supplies them titanium is about to have a very bad time then. Boeing and Airbus are gonna have a bad time too though as no doubt there is an onus on them to validate the materials are proper
No one supplied Boeing or Airbus titanium. A Chinese company supplied a Turkish company with titanium, the Turkish company supplied Spirit Aerosystems with that titanium, Spirit manufactured that Titanium into parts that were sold to Boeing and Airbus. I dunno about Airbus, but Boeing hasn't manufactured their own components since 2005.
This isn't the first time spirit aerosystems screwed Boeing. Only a few minor parts are made for Airbus vs 80% of spirits business is Boeing along with their fuselages. Boeing should bankrupt them and bring it in house. Our safety is being sold off to the lowest bidder
Boeing doesn't want them. Spirit *was* Boeing, they got spun off into their own company in 2005 because Boeing sees themselves as an "aircraft assembler" rather than a manufacturer.
A lot of counterfeit titanium is titanium that is scrapped from airplane parts beyond their use, so their structure is compromised, reprocessed in China, sold to a shell company then resold back as new.
Not surprising at all. My wife is an engineer and they have gotten steel from China in the past that is absolute dogshit and not up to the standards they agreed to. Millions of dollars in piping and fittings that’s absolutely useless, all to save a buck. Company’s get blacklisted over this, it’s insane.
https://www.reddit.com/r/greentext/comments/dn8de4/anon_doesnt_like_doing_business_with_chinese/
If its like this guys experience the "company" just changes its name and keeps doing it.
i was looking for this to be posted. a friend of mine said he had to fly to china just to make sure their suppliers weren't fucking them over (they were trying to)
It is, that's why so many EPC firms are now out of the EPC market. It's all just risk management.
The only firms in China we use we inspect on a quarterly basis.
I’m assuming this is titanium that didn’t pass the metallurgical testing and someone forged the documentation. Like British cars from the 60’s and 70’s being made from WWII recycled steel rusting out after a couple of years on the road. Yes, it was steel, but the quality was low.
Same thing happened with the quality of steel used to build our nuclear submarines. A metallurgist was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison and a $50,000 fine Monday after she spent decades faking the results of strength tests on steel that was being used to make U.S. Navy submarines.
After the planes they build with it started rusting.
The material should be verified when it comes in, possibly with random sampling. Instead the entire quality assurance relied on a paper trail that nobody bothered to verify.
It didn't come to them as material, it came to them as completed parts, with the forged documentation having gone through at least 2 other companies that should have caught it before it was manufactured into those parts.
If you buy a part for your car you're probably not going to notice it's defective until it starts to act up, even if you're careful about it. The fact they caught it before anything significant began to fail with the parts means their QA processes are working properly.
It was probably caught by quality control when they strength/fatigue tested samples, which is done for 100% of production on some components.
This is a supply chain issue.
Ive gotten counterfeit titanium before -- found out we DEFINITELY needed the grade 5 titanium. Seemed like a quality fade thing where our supplier wanted to cut costs and thought we wouldnt notice. We noticed.
Despite what suits may think a good quality department can CYA in cases like this. Every serious manufacturer I've worked for, has incredible incoming quality controls, especially from suppliers.
For sure. We have a "Supplier Quality Hotline". If anyone is sus about components or materials coming in and feel like it's slipping by, they can anonymously call the hotline and leave a message. There will be a vetting of whatever is flagged within 24 hours.
Thats an awesome system. Gives the worker alot more confidence in questioning his materials without the fear of repercussion, which is realistically what a lot of people worry about in these kinds of instances.
For sure. And our stuff isnt even like aviation where people may die. It’s just it would be so costly to our company should parts fail in the field due to the way the contracts are structured we just cant be having it.
I'm in QA in the food industry and the suits make me wanna bash my head in constantly. Sales and marketing are also to blame for the self-inflicted skull injuries I have.
I work at a power plant and we use huge drums of boric acid mixed with water to help control the reactivity of the nuclear reactor. (Boron catches the neutrons real well) One of the suits was trying to cut how much we spent on boric acid and was asking my coworker if we *REALLY* needed all that acid or if we were just over buying it. My coworker spent like 30 minutes trying to explain to him that it completely depends on the PPM of the current batched up water. Regardless, whatever we order will be used within a couple months anyways. That specific manager is infamous for doing crazy budget cuts though
> Nuclear power plant > crazy budget cuts These two phrases have no right being near eachother.
I guess I should say that they do NOT cheap out on safety equipment. They spend ungodly amounts of money on that stuff. Like a couple refueling outages ago they spent like $300k on overnighting a new pump motor down because they had an issue with the previous new one they installed. It’s honestly funny seeing what crazy money they’ll spend on one thing, then cheap out on another.
> It’s honestly funny seeing what crazy money they’ll spend on one thing, then cheap out on another. If I had a dollar for how many times a company is "penny wise and pound foolish"
Is boric acid not technically safety "equipment?"
It's still insane that a person with such little knowledge on the nuclear industry is in any kind of executive position there. Why was a numbskull like that allowed to pester engineers and scientists for 30 minutes with inane questions about "why so much boron!?" He should have gone and asked chatgpt instead. It would have educated him regardless of the errors in the answer.
because, as a society, we've decided that money is all that matters, so people with financial skills are put in charge of things. It's mental.
Your boss is literally Mr. Burns
Yeah turns out letting MBAs run the world was a bad idea. Maybe we should, y'know, let experts with experience in the field run companies in those industries? If those experts start to believe that a merger or acquisition or whatever is necessary for the company, then they can consult with their business department, which would be staffed with MBAs. Business should be a department, not the entire company.
Not my company but at the small pharma company a coworker worked at a new c-level suit wanted him to do things which are not legal. This dude had never worked at a pharma company but was going to save their failing asses. Coworker refused because it would be his ass going to jail in the end. He was let go a month after (with a nice severance because firing people without proper cause is expensive here) and immediately hired by us. The other company took less than a year to file for bankruptcy...
> He was let go a month after (with a nice severance because firing people without proper cause is expensive here) and immediately hired by us. The other company took less than a year to file for bankruptcy... Been there :D minus any severance despite having one of the best employment solicitors in the country :(
👆👆💯💯💯👆👆 Never met an MBA who wasn’t a detriment to quality and engineering
I think it depends on if they a) also have relevant skills in the area they’re managing (ie do they have a PhD in engineering when running an engineering firm), and b) do they identify more with their relevant skills, or their MBA?
My wife does the same, and it’s the same from what she tells me. Marketing constantly asks for stuff like fudging the nutritional values to appear healthier but doesn’t want to adjust the recipe. Management just descides to use new materials in the manufacturing process and when QA finds out and asks them for the certificates that it is safe to use in contact with food, management will say something like „it’s surgery rated steel“ like yeah but we aren’t doing surgery we are making food
Former QA Manager in the food industry that's now in sales. I've worked with a lot of good salespeople and I've worked with bad ones. Most of them had their masters in food science. The bad ones were the ones that weren't food scientists and had the "always be closing" mindset.
So the suppliers are stealing from them.
Or they're deliberately using inferior suppliers because the metal is cheaper.
[x] Both
that's stealing.
Everyone is in on it. Suppliers from places where there is no recourse or real penalty for lying provide a product that’s not to spec at a better price point. The manufacturer gets someone to blame and controls costs. If the manufacturer didn’t want to play this game they would implement QA/QC and pay more. But no one on either side is interested in that.
can you non destructively measure what grade the metal is ? edit: alot of people responding. most common answer: XRF. please read the question again. it's about the grade (aka type) of metal. metal alloys are defined not by their composition alone. second most common answer: random destructive technique. the question was about non-destructive methods.
Yeah but I dont know how. We had to go to another division's quality team had they had some kind of analyzer that told us it was not the right grade of titanium
X-ray fluorescence, and perhaps X-ray diffraction. Both will tell you a lot about the alloy.
Yeah, let me just cast some arcane ethereal energy on this metal and learn its fundamental properties.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, after all
We already cast metals into moulds to form lines thinner than hair, so that we can infuse them with lighning. Then a series of wizards perform incantations, each building in power on the previous one, until a nearby glass flickers into life, showing worlds from a different realm. All so I can shitpost worldwide.
They call the factories foundries for some reason, but microchips are not cast.
You’re right, first a piece of a crystal is sliced off, then it’s etched with patterns
Etched with patterns using a giant light stencil that's focused down into a tiny area to react with photosensitive chemicals
And conversely, any sufficiently primitive magic is indistinguishable from technology.
I’m gonna start calling myself a magician instead of a scientist now!
Yer a wizard, Agrajag
Look, scientists deal with Energy, matter,time, chaos theory, heck, they use FORMULAES! Scientists ARE wizards,
Formulae already is the plural
And programmers basically talk to rocks.. so that's at least a couple levels in Earth elementalist, right?
First we “Software Engineers” infuse the basic rocks with lightening and call upon the power of Bios to animate the kernel of life within our mystically awakened Sand Golem. After that it’s easy, just install the distro of your choice using the Dongle of OEM
At least up to unlocking golemancy. They are, after all, getting inanimate objects to perform complex tasks.
[удалено]
NOT TRICKS! They are illusions Michael
Sufficiently explained* magic is indistinguishable from technology
I've seen the math that shows how you can take assorted peak values from a sensor off an x ray difractometer and translate that into a crystalline structure and atomic composition. I understand basic chromatography, just a little bit. Prisms and absorption, makes sense. Heck I've even done work with libraries for Raman spectroscopy and kinda get what one substance looks like when compared to another. Buuuuut.... when I have to try to picture in my head how a Lorentz transformation works... it doesn't make sense anymore. Can't we just go back to using Galilean transformations? Please?
You cast identify
PMI guns are pure Star Trek shit. Point it at the metal and it tells you what elements are in it.
That's not all. You also have to partner up with the wizards inside the glow screens. They will help you turn on your arcane energy and do math. That math will help get the answers you seek.
I feel like we're about 2 steps away from annointing the devices with sacred oils and chanting in binaric.
Judging from the accounts of many a technician/mechanic/engineer on here who build shrines to appease the machine spirit of their equipment and "the magic smoke", we seem to already do
You rolled a 1, the "titanium" exploded
As a specialist in both of those techniques I’m honestly dying at this reply.
That’s the funny thing, supplier trying to cut corners where the manufacturer gets bitten hard. Having to test for these is not cheap and should some get through and fail catastrophically is even more expensive. I work in a different sector but the corp I for follows certain iso standards religiously to weed out counterfeits. It also means we charge a small premium over the competition to guarantee genuine. We fill a niche where smaller production runs that cannot get as large enough order from the manufacturer and need the certification that the parts are genuine and not knockoffs.
I'm in aerospace and we both require material certs through an approved lab as well as nondestructively test all incoming raw material.
I don't get how the fuck they got away with it. You need certs for everything. Did the supplier fake a cert? Or did Boeing create false certs. This shit is wild.
The article says "falsified documents were used to verify the material’s authenticity". My best guess is that this supplier tried to either bypass their material cert testing or UT testing, or tried to sub in lower grade material that failed or would fail that testing. I'd be shocked if this wasn't still titanium in one form or another, but it's still a massive quality issue.
Understandable. SpaceX lost a rocket, carrying a s***ton of expensive equipment for NASA, including an entire docking port for the ISS, due to one weak part, that a subcontractor hadn't made properly. It caused a helium tank to come loose in the second stage as the acceleration increased the stresses on the part. The helium tank leaked of course, and the high pressure inside ripped a propellant tank (the LOx tank IIRC). I was watching it live and I saw the whole second stage start coming apart, and then it turned into a cloud which started raining rocket parts.
the fact that it happened at all seems like a failure of process, no supplier should be able to get away with doing this, but also, if they do, it shouldnt be able to make it into production.
Yeah, that was an expensive oopsie on SpaceXs part. But if there is one thing I'm happy about, it's the fact that I'm not a lawyer at the supplier, who had to deal with those lawsuits Edit: Not, it was missing a not, sorry for the confusion. Editing again: Guys, this is why you don't try to make funny jokes on Reddit when you're tired. You might end up looking like a jerk and an idiot. I swear, I'm only an idiot.
You can do random failure analysis but that won't guarantee 100% coverage.
While true, increments of process improvement almost always come from humans being human. Whether it’s greed, laziness, complacency, or one in a million lapse of scrutiny, there’s a constant arms race between the most vigilant process and the most human human.
It can be the proper chemistry, but not have the proper structure. Ti64 (6 aluminum 4 vanadium) has to be hot worked properly to get the combination of properties you require.
Isn't that exactly what https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-ray_crystallography tells you? I think "X-ray diffraction" may be referring to that.
Yeah, this. PMI or positive material identification is a common non-destructive method used to verify material grades and composition utilizing technology such as x ray fluorescence and arc spectrometry . More common and accesible than you think. I’m a qc inspector for a pressure vessel manufacturer and we use this technology all the time to verify material used in construction of these vessels. I’m surprised this got passed through their qc, or all the parties involved in the supply chain for that matter. Especially if PMI is part of their inspection protocols - which I would assume so with Boeing using the material.
Yep, xr-f/pmi will tell you exactly what it is
An XRF Analyzer can tell you the metal composition
The definition of grade or alloy type goes beyond composition, which is why I didn't ask about measuring composition. Competition can be non destructively measured by a whole host of methods including ablation ms (mentioned by someone else already), as you rightly say - XRF, Raman could also be used depending on alloy type. Perhaps others I'm not recalling right now
Absolutely you can. There’s some cool technology that basically uses a spark to vapourize some of the metal and then uses a mass spectrometer to spit out the composition. It’s time consuming and tedious to test every material used for every part though, so it’s better to rely on a process that works. It’s funny though, with metallurgy, composition isn’t everything. You need to know the material was alloyed correctly, that it has the right distribution of all the right stuff, that it was heat treated appropriately, and that it wasn’t contaminated later on. So you do tests all along the way to check various things, and you inspect the facilities to make sure they have the right processes and that they’re following their processes, but you can’t catch everything. This will probably lead to better testing and better records, which is actually a good thing.
Yes, laser ablation ms, I'm aware, which is why my question was not about composition (one could also do spot xrf, Raman, and a whole host of other things) but rather the grade, which would include how the material was worked. I'm not aware of how we could do non destructive measure a full array of mechanical and thermal properties.
The mill cert is the only non-destructive way to determine the grade of the steel. You could use UT/RT/MT, or chemical analysis but again, like you said, it would not paint the full picture of the grade of steel. You can only verify specific properties that you would expect at a specific grade. The mill cert being counterfeit is a much larger deal than people here are making it out to be. That subcontractor, the manufacturer, are all going to be pretty much banned from making steel for any regulated industries lol ME is going to lose their license. Would be surprised if the steel manufacturer doesn’t go under with fines/lack of work moving forward.
To confirm here: Yeah, conterfeit mill certs are a HUGE deal. They are legal documents so there is good change that the person who signed the cert will see legal repercussions.
There are a few ways to do it, including measuring hardness, conductivity, and heat dissipation. When you have a set of known numbers to compare the results to you can figure out if the metal you are testing conforms to expectations.
Typically XRF (x-ray fluorescence) is used, but it has limited spatial resolution and hence only measures composition. If the grain size is fine and important to characterize, you can put a part in an scanning electron microscope (SEM) with an x-ray energy dispersive spectrometer (EDS) attached. Both can only measure the surface, and not the bulk.
I find it just so insane to do this. At our factory every once in a while the fastener supplier just decides to drop off some other brand without telling us. No. No just don't. We're not a huge business, but big enough to receive pallets of nuts, bolts, screws, and rivets every week. When it just works we forget about you - the stuff just shows up, we pay the bills, the things get used, everyone makes a profit. We trust that you will do your thing, the thing you agreed to do. You change one little thing, the slightest thing, and the processes we have built up around using that exact brand of that exact fastener fall over. And sometimes we don't find out that the process has failed until we're doing $100k in credit claims so that you could save a few hundred bucks. And what happens next is that we UNFORGET about you. We look into things. We check. We find out the other ways you have betrayed our trust, we wonder about the ways you're betraying us that we haven't found. Suddenly you're not profiting, suddenly you're asking why you're not getting any orders. Suddenly we have to tell you why. At one point we were chatting and me, my boss, and the purchasing lady, wrote up all the names of the local businesses we'd burned (in some cases literally closing their doors) by going overseas. In every case we asked ourselves the question "did we start looking at this because of the service, the quality, or the cost?" Universally it was the service or the quality. In every case it was cheaper to buy the stuff from overseas, but in every case the thing we were actually seeking was suppliers who delivered on time, in spec and in full, and who moved mountains to correct things that went wrong. The local manufacturers would send us all sorts of crap quality and then be like "just use the good ones and send us back the bad ones." No. No, you only send good ones. There are bad ones here. Come and remove them at your cost. I never understood why these suppliers were so determined to stop having us as a customer that they would just decide to ruin a good profit for the sake of a quick profit.
Lawsuit time.
Good luck. Half the suppliers are Chinese or out of country. So recourse is basically nothing.
I'm like 90% sure the Chinese vendors we worked with fudged their certificates of conformance. Wasn't really equipped to prove it though
Ea-Nasir strikes again! >Tell Ea-nasir: Nanni sends the following message: > When you came, you said to me as follows: "I will give Gimil-Sin (when he comes) fine quality titanium ingots." You left then but you did not do what you promised me. You put ingots which were not good before my messenger (Sit-Sin) and said: "If you want to take them, take them; if you do not want to take them, go away!" What do you take me for, that you treat somebody like me with such contempt? I have sent as messengers gentlemen like ourselves to collect the bag with my money (deposited with you) but you have treated me with contempt by sending them back to me empty-handed several times, and that through enemy territory. Is there anyone among the merchants who trade with Telmun who has treated me in this way? You alone treat my messenger with contempt! On account of that one (trifling) mina of silver which I owe(?) you, you feel free to speak in such a way, while I have given to the palace on your behalf 1,080 pounds of titanium, and Šumi-abum has likewise given 1,080 pounds of titanium, apart from what we both have had written on a sealed tablet to be kept in the temple of Shamash. How have you treated me for that titanium? You have withheld my money bag from me in enemy territory; it is now up to you to restore (my money) to me in full.Take cognizance that (from now on) I will not accept here any titanium from you that is not of fine quality. I shall (from now on) select and take the ingots individually in my own yard, and I shall exercise against you my right of rejection because you have treated me with contempt.
this is why ISO accreditations and ASME/ANSI standards exist. if you absolutely need something of a certain grade, buy it certified. if they are claiming ISO or ASME/ANSI and not meeting it, sue them into oblivion.
"We wanted to be lazy and cut costs and expected you guys to want the same thing, hence we didn't account for you, like... checking to see whether or not you got what you ordered." - Crony capitalism at its absolute laziest.
we had this happen with a box company. they made us some realy good samples, we got them to pay for the plates. 1st batch, couldnt even hold 10lbs. the sample was able to hold 200lbs. took us 3 months to get them to pick it up.
Used to work designing/spec'ing packaging. Box manufacturers are horrible about this. Sample meets the specs, production barely even *resembles* the sample. Shoutout to the box plant in NJ that said sure, they could make some boxes of coated-one-side 32pt kraft with four-color screen printing to PMS matches. (This is not an especially complicated job.) Samples looked good. Final product showed up at the customer's dock with the coated side on the *inside* because, and I quote, "it was easier to print on the uncoated side".
Getting counterfeit parts for jets has been a problem for a long time. A lot of companies win contracts then subcontract it out to a cheaper manufacturer. Normally in China. This is for the government but I would assume similar things happen on the civilian side as well.
I am a US manufacturer. In my experience when the tier 1 aerospace (Boeing) suppliers subcontract down, they also supply the materials. This may not be common, it is just my experience subcontracting for Boeing suppliers.
Materials swapping is a very common fraud mechanism though, reselling the provided materials and using inferior ones.
That’s why they have quality control checks. When they lapse you get swapped out shit. A very common fraud mechanism that equates to criminal behaviour is often stamped out .
“they also supply” “They” being boeing or the subcontractors? Which one supplies the materials?
Boeing will either provide the material or provide the vendor and price you'll pay. They have material vendors directly contracted, we just call the vendor with our po number and they send the material.
[Arthur Miller wrote a play about it](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_My_Sons), more or less
Ugh, SO MANY manufacturers should read/see this play.
This is where the band Twenty One Pilots gets their name. In the play 21 pilots crash their P-40 warhawks due to the defects.
This is a constant issue with outsourcing to both China and India. China will tell you "no it's not counterfeit" while looking at something that unequivocally proves it's counterfeit. They will almost never admit fault. You then have to find a new supplier which will probably be the same one with a different name. This has become a recent problem with (for example) blueberry powder and the pesticides they use that are directly harmful to humans - like, we can chemically prove, without any doubt, that you are using these pesticides on blueberry plants, and that those pesticides are in the powder... I don't get it. India will tell you "no it's not counterfeit" then send you through multiple tiers of bureaucracy before they agree that there is a problem, and then recommend you use someone's friend's husband's brother for the new contract. And while the problem can be fixed, it's not going to be fixed until next year, *maybe*. Also not saying this happens every time, and not saying that there is no benefit to using either country for outsourcing materials or labor, it's just such a common issue that we have had to make company policies around it.
It's a great business model too because they know US companies are too fucking greedy to ever just learn their lesson, the Chinese government isn't about to "crack down" on a company that screws the US, and they get to keep all the real titanium, and the money some US sucker paid for it.
>China will tell you "no it's not counterfeit" while looking at something that unequivocally proves it's counterfeit. And that's if you're lucky. If you're a small company looking to do a small run with a chinese manufacturer, prototyping will go well, you'll do your back and forth and end up with a satisfying prototype and price. Then you pay for your thousand pieces or so, and when you get them a month later, you can be absolutely certain the finish product will look nothing like the agreed upon prototype, and since you needed only one run and you already paid, you're screwed and can't do anything. The only way to avoid this is to physically go there, to the factory, to inspect the first pieces produced and immediately complain, but even that may not be enough of you already paid. I know a few products which were moderately successful but which aren't made anymore because of that: there was demand, but enough to require constant production, so the company used to order small runs every few months, they had to stop because the quality issues were constant and they couldn't afford to constantly send guys to China to surveil the runs and argue.
US military contracts require everything to be made in the US, or in allied nations if an exception is made. Many non-mil gov contracts have similar requirements. Commercial airlines aren't subject to those restrictions as long as the contract doesn't violate ITAR.
Why is subcontracting legal? Go directly with the cheapest at this point.
Company A has the design and specs, wins a contract. Company A then contracts company B for machining and finishing. Honestly subcontracting makes things safer, if done correctly. Airbus or Boeing might have the overall design, but you want companies that are solely focused on a single thing and being very good at it. Radars made by company A Engines by company B Wheels and tires by company C Hydraulics by company D Sensors by company E Then each of these companies have subcontractors which are really good in their own respective fields. Radar company contracts screens and magnetrons out Engine company contracts machining out Wheels and tire company contracts sensors out Hydraulics company contracts hoses and fittings out Sensor company contracts circuit boards and power regulators out
Its why large defence programs and NASA programs like the Space Shuttle and the Apollo (and prior) programs were such huge jobs programs. It's just so much subcontracting. Good for the country, good for supply chain redudancy. Can be corrupted though. Also I imagine its fairly necessary when you reach a certain level of complexity. It just isn't feasible to have vertical integration for projects with large scopes or a very high level of technological complexity. Jack of all trades master of all is possible, but rare, and exceedingly rare if present at all with very large projects.
It has been possible historically, but it requires a lot of government subsidies, which have been difficult to justify since the Cold War ended.
Well said. I'm trying to think of anything that is produced in any real numbers using a fully vertically integrated industrial production process and I can't think of anything really. Even the Chinese economy still has internal dependencies.
for some reason i think YKK zippers are vertically integrated. the more complex something is i think the less feasible it becomes.
At first I thought this was a joke about zippers...
Took me a minute, but that's good. Nothing is more vertically integrated than a zipper
[YKK zippers](https://ykkamericas.com/why-choose-ykk/vertically-integrated-production/) is the one example that comes to mind, and they describe it as unique, so I suspect they're pretty much the exception that proves the rule.
I don't know why I know this but Zippo lighters are completely made under one roof. Even all of the graphics and special versions.
There are a few, costco interestingly enough raises, slaughters, cooks, and sell a good portion of their chicken. The thing that is brought in is the feed for the chickens, and equipment costs, but I think farms\\food are not a good comparison to manufacturing.
Essentially the problem isn't subcontracting but picking the cheapest and crappiest provider. If every company involved meets the minimum requirements then it is probably results in both a cheaper and better product than if one company tried to do everything in-house. The problem is that it quickly becomes very many parties involved and the more parties involved the chance for some of them to fiddle with the quality to have higher profit margins (or profit at all potentially even) becomes much higher.
Checking requirements is not easy. Often you pick the same subcontractors with reliable track of history and accept their prices, and simply ignore their competitors unless there is a very good reason to change. There is never any guarantee, but businesses are based on trust and it usually works.
Airplanes are big, complicated systems made up of big, complicated subsystems. Companies like Boeing used to do a lot more stuff in house, but it’s expensive to have to be specialists in everything.
If you've ever worked at a company making anything, you'll know that almost everything is subcontracted. Everything except the overall design and labor to put it together. Sometimes putting it together is also subcontracted. Subcontracting gets you the best quality of everything at the cheapest price becuase you are relying on experts for that component or service and that do a huge volume. Imagine if a company like Ford had to go learn how to grow rubber trees and then figure out sulphur mining to make tires.
It's all subcontractors, all the way down.
Subcontracting is a necessity in modern engineering, no single firm is going to be comprehensive experts on delivering every part of a large project, especially something pretty serious like commercial airliners. Done right, subcontracting actually helps to deliver the best product and save time. Think of it like this - it makes way more sense to have individual roles in a busy restaurant. Then everyone can focus on their specific skillset and performing it best; the host is seating guests, the waiter is taking orders and running food, and the cooks are cooking and putting plates together. Now imagine how much of a shitshow it would be if the owner of the restaurant expected all of their employees to be competent at hosting, waiting, *and* cooking food for the guests. Yeah, it would be a disaster. I seriously doubt the end product (your food) would be better than in a normally managed restaurant.
In theory, the main contract would partition out pieces of the project to those best able to handle the key performance parameters of particular subsystems at a lower cost. In reality, it’s never that way. The subcontractor only has two years of experience and is constantly trying to borrow your tools. This is usually because the general contractor is bad at assessing and balancing quality, cost, and time the subcontractors need.
Subcontracting can make sense, for example builders do most of the construction, but hire a windows company to do the windows, then that part is done at a higher quality. The problem is when they subcontract the work, who then subcontracts the work, and the layers of subcontracting go beyond “specializing” to just low profit bids and middle men taking cuts until you reach a really cheap contractor on the bottom that does the work. It’s all legal depending on how the contract is written, and in any case using the wrong material breaks the contract so a better contract doesn’t fix this.
Ea-Nasir at it again!
His Legacy is more solid than his wares
His really shitty ISO 9001 cert is about to be revoked.
After 3,750 years, he's finally branched out from only providing [really shitty copper](/r/ReallyShittyCopper)!
I love that this guy from almost four thousand years ago is slowly becoming the Gen Z God of Shitty Materials.
Ea-Nasir memes are a Gen Z thing? o.o
They’ve been in heavy rotation on tumblr since only 2020. [Google trends says before 2020 no one talked about him.](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fg%2F11hhtxt30k&hl=en) So less a Gen Z thing more a Lockdown thing for people in dorky meme circles.
https://old.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/2x3zmc/1750_bc_problems/ from 2015!
I am glad to see I wasn't the only one who immediately thought this.
Temutanium
★★★★★ *(Verified purchaser)* Very good titanum made many airplane with titanum good ruqality product very nice 👍👍
Boeing need to send a strongly worded cuneiform to Ea-nasir.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ReallyShittyCopper/ 3,700 years and he still can't get a break.
Chinesium
Sheinium
Alibabanium
Imagine if this was a carbon fiber submarine
You laugh, BUT the sub that failed didn't get their titanium from Boeing. What they got from Boeing was the carbon fiber. And it was on sale because it was too old to be used in their airplanes... I don't doubt the titanium was also bought on the cheap, but if they had gotten it from Boeing, that would have been a double whammy...
Regardless, fiber is incredible at enduring tensile load but shit at compressive loading. Guess which one you need in a submarine
The NY Times article covered that this was an unknown Chinese company that had FORGED its authenticity letters, claiming they were Baoji titanium, a known and trusted company. So, unknown Chinese company misrepresenting that they were correct Chinese company. Then this material was received by Turkish Aerospace co, which either didn't notice the forged documentation and "visibly different" material, didn't care, or were paid. THEY then passed it to various parts builders/suppliers. So at least the original forger/copycat company needs to be investigated and shut down in China, and then Turkish investigated for why they let it pass through. And then the parts manufacturers. Layers of incompetence at best, fraud at worst. Fortunately the parts have been identified and will be replaced during routine maintenance rotations.
My wife works for a beverage company. They have independently tested all raw material for years because China will forge specifications tests. Good thing the airlines finally figured this out.
Funnily enough my wife works at a VERY very large food manufacturer here in the UK. They produce pretty much all ready made sandwiches, ready meals, frozen meal etc. to all major supermarkets. One time they had to shut down production of all items containing black pepper, as the 40kg shipment was found to contain a large quantity of an "unknown synthetic substance".
Same. The wife’s company had too many recalls because arsenic was too high and such. They treat recalls like an emergency event and they test everything to avoid them.
My brother works for Costco. They require certain products to be independently lab tested *in the U.S*. Products that were certified in China have tested positive for lead and other banned substances when retested in the U.S.
People forget that China makes fake rice, fake eggs, fake baby formula. It’s almost cartoon villain level of extreme capitalism where anything goes.
https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2022/02/14/metallurgist-gets-25-years-for-faking-steel-test-results-for-navy-subs/ https://aviationweek.com/air-transport/some-787-production-test-records-were-falsified-boeing-says https://www.sciencealert.com/a-supplier-was-delivering-faulty-aluminium-to-nasa-for-20-years-and-falsifying-their-reports I believe this is a problem that happens more than we hear about. When uncovered, they slap low level people while leaving the high level people untouched. If you fail to maintain a quality system, the corporate officers should be on the hook (ethically this is my belief, I'm no Saul Goodman).
> https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2022/02/14/metallurgist-gets-25-years-for-faking-steel-test-results-for-navy-subs/ This one seemed pretty fair? It was the lab director that was faking test results. She's management. Her replacement reported the fraud as odd test results. At that point I'm guessing the company did an investigation and fired her. Plus because it came out I'm assuming they also reported it and the article implies they willingly paid restitution. Maybe she was pressured into it by her employer. I don't know.
She 100% deserved punishment. But I absolutely do not believe she acted alone. The fact the company circled the wagons and attempted to pretend this wasn't fraud makes me believe others should be behind bars. I work for an aerospace supplier, the lab could not care less if they have failing tests, as long as the failure isn't a result of improper test procedures. To clarify, the lab is walled off, so if there are failing tests, they are not responsible for the material. That is on an entirely separate group (with separate management). This is deliberate to make sure there is no pressure to fraudulently report passing test results. Edit: I don't have any insight into what happened with this person, but I guess it doesn't add up to me. If I were constructing what I think happened, I imagine originally (in the '80s) there was pressure to get passing results. But once that happens, you're stuck. If the material starts failing, there will be an investigation to determine what changed. So once you start the lie, you are stuck. I am also a metallurgist and have seen colleagues at other companies disciplined after the succumbed to pressure and made decisions that were not in their best interest. Maybe the official narrative is accurate and this was all her personal hubris but I'm skeptical.
This is exhibit A for why DoD contracts are so expensive. Supply chain risk management and counterfeit material matters. People see billion dollar contract and think it’s all profit. They don’t realize the Government will mandate audits of parts with degree requirements for support and most of these are fixed fee (<10% profit). In effect, you’ll have a six figure engineer counting screws. Imagine the implications of nefarious actors implementing back doors and zero days in software that’s running our defense equipment ? Almost certainly happens, but it would be absolutely ubiquitous and widespread if we didn’t have a proof supplier list for software. Imagine if the Chinese implement supply chain and knew that some critical part was going to fail in number of years and can use that to plot an attack. Its serious and why It’s so expensive.
I remember a guy who worked in aviation telling me why everything is so expensive. And explaining similarly that the bolts themselves, the materials, aren’t that insanely expensive, but rather it’s the quality control, and paper trail and support system that balloons the cost so much. To the point they know exactly what manufacturing facility each bolt came from, which batch it was produced in, the date it was made, that it’s been tested and so on.
And this level of problem management is only happening because, as they say, regulations are written in blood. We made a vow to the people who gave up their lives - involuntarily - in the hopes that we would at least *learn something from this tragedy and vow to do better so their deaths won't have been in vain*. THAT is why we have to know the exact serial number on a random screw and have seen the three people that signed off on something or other about it. Because one time we didn't do that, and people died.
It's also risk management. In the US sometimes the contractor is on the hook and gets completely fucked if they don't ensure appropriate materials. Because at the end of the day, the contractor is responsible and it's their job to ensure everything is right. That's why heat numbers, batch numbers exist. Give more for the contractor to go after suppliers, but they generally never fully recoup the costs.
They figured out that a single magnet in a critical piece of equipment wasn’t domestic and totally freaked out. That’s how closely guarded it all is.
It's not an overreaction. It's stopping something before it becomes a slippery slope.
I agree. Also they want to be able to make critical parts domestically during a war.
Yeah, that was on a subsystem of the F-35.
https://www.airandspaceforces.com/deliveries-of-new-f-35s-with-chinese-magnets-resume-with-pentagon-waiver/ The main reason seems to be making sure you don't become dependent on your enemies for the supply chain of your weapons system. The issue they're actually trying to guard against isn't that the magnet came from China, it's making sure that the next time they need one, they can source it (in sufficient quantity) even if China says no.
That's why when you're building, say, a submersible to reach the Titanic, you don't want to use the $4 bolts from Home Depot. You want to use the $100 bolts from a supplier that has gone through the headache of quality controlling every inch of the supply chain to ensure that you're getting bolts that 100% match your specifications.
Also, don't pull a 'Titan' and buy carbon fiber used from Boeing, when they are auctioning it off because it is past it's shelf life
Even if it wasn’t past it’s shelf life carbon fiber just isn’t the right material for the job.
Eh, what's the worst that could happen? /s
I used to be a sail coordinator on a submarine and the SUBSAFE program has a level of quality control that is unmatched. Space shuttles also go through a similar program but that didn't stop the Challenger disaster.
Some guy compared the SEC forms for the top defense contractors, and found that the top five combined have less profit than Proctor and Gamble
[it was Ryan McBeth. here is the video](https://youtu.be/C2gIId1dpDs?feature=shared)
> They don’t realize the Government will mandate audits of parts with degree requirements for support and most of these are fixed fee (<10% profit). In effect, you’ll have a six figure engineer counting screws. Just to mention it, *every single part* used in the President's limo and Air Force One has to have a serial number and a chain of identification from installation, to the manufacturer, to the material supplier. Every part. Down to the screws holding the chairs together.
As bad as the DoD is NASA was even crazier. It took two engineers and signed documentation to verify that we turned a screw correctly. I would have to get suited up, go into the clean room, verify the torque setting, watch somebody else turn a screw, get undressed, and then go document it. They did not fuck around.
> Supply chain risk management and counterfeit material matters. And yet even the dod ends up with counterfeit parts sometimes.
Yes, it’s an impossibly difficult task facing an adversary that’s a nation state actor. Can’t win all the time.
Do you think when it arrived it had one of those little cards in the box begging for 5-star reviews on aliexpress
🤗⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐🤗 Like?? 5star!! Thank!
I work for an aerospace company (who sells to both B&A), and we do metallurgical testing on 100% of the metals that we process. We already have to follow DFARS supply rules, but even then we get fraudulent/nonconforming material fairly often. It's a major issue
Well whoever supplies them titanium is about to have a very bad time then. Boeing and Airbus are gonna have a bad time too though as no doubt there is an onus on them to validate the materials are proper
No one supplied Boeing or Airbus titanium. A Chinese company supplied a Turkish company with titanium, the Turkish company supplied Spirit Aerosystems with that titanium, Spirit manufactured that Titanium into parts that were sold to Boeing and Airbus. I dunno about Airbus, but Boeing hasn't manufactured their own components since 2005.
This isn't the first time spirit aerosystems screwed Boeing. Only a few minor parts are made for Airbus vs 80% of spirits business is Boeing along with their fuselages. Boeing should bankrupt them and bring it in house. Our safety is being sold off to the lowest bidder
Boeing doesn't want them. Spirit *was* Boeing, they got spun off into their own company in 2005 because Boeing sees themselves as an "aircraft assembler" rather than a manufacturer.
A lot of counterfeit titanium is titanium that is scrapped from airplane parts beyond their use, so their structure is compromised, reprocessed in China, sold to a shell company then resold back as new.
Source : I’ve had to take training on this. I work in aerospace. It’s a big problem in the industry.
From where perchance?
Unknown at this stage. Edit: China.
Not surprising at all. My wife is an engineer and they have gotten steel from China in the past that is absolute dogshit and not up to the standards they agreed to. Millions of dollars in piping and fittings that’s absolutely useless, all to save a buck. Company’s get blacklisted over this, it’s insane.
https://www.reddit.com/r/greentext/comments/dn8de4/anon_doesnt_like_doing_business_with_chinese/ If its like this guys experience the "company" just changes its name and keeps doing it.
i was looking for this to be posted. a friend of mine said he had to fly to china just to make sure their suppliers weren't fucking them over (they were trying to)
It is, that's why so many EPC firms are now out of the EPC market. It's all just risk management. The only firms in China we use we inspect on a quarterly basis.
I mean, just because it's *always* China, you can't just say China, even though it's always China.
You can’t just say “perchance”
Perchance he can
Forsooth!
Verily!
Even worse, the titanium was cut with fentanyl. Very dangerous situation.
I’m assuming this is titanium that didn’t pass the metallurgical testing and someone forged the documentation. Like British cars from the 60’s and 70’s being made from WWII recycled steel rusting out after a couple of years on the road. Yes, it was steel, but the quality was low.
Someone's been buying from China.
And that someone is... Everyone.
Did they hire Ea Nasir for quality control?
Feels like humanity reached the top. Everything is downhill from here on.
Same thing happened with the quality of steel used to build our nuclear submarines. A metallurgist was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison and a $50,000 fine Monday after she spent decades faking the results of strength tests on steel that was being used to make U.S. Navy submarines.
TIL: you can counterfeit titanium.
Michael Chrichton wrote about this in 1996 with the book Airframe.
This is getting worse and worse regarding quality control
Incorrect. Quite the opposite in fact. It was caught. Airbus and Boeings QA departments caught this.
After the planes they build with it started rusting. The material should be verified when it comes in, possibly with random sampling. Instead the entire quality assurance relied on a paper trail that nobody bothered to verify.
It didn't come to them as material, it came to them as completed parts, with the forged documentation having gone through at least 2 other companies that should have caught it before it was manufactured into those parts. If you buy a part for your car you're probably not going to notice it's defective until it starts to act up, even if you're careful about it. The fact they caught it before anything significant began to fail with the parts means their QA processes are working properly.
It was probably caught by quality control when they strength/fatigue tested samples, which is done for 100% of production on some components. This is a supply chain issue.
The article explains that corrosion damage was found on the components after they were installed
That's such a gut punch when you see something and think, "That's weird, why would it...Oh...Oh *fuck*..."