# Quality Control Lately



## ZacharyBob (May 3, 2020)

460 Delta said:


> View attachment 170527
> View attachment 170528
> We recently purchased an air compressor for one of the plants, and ordered a 15HP 230 volt unit. We waited a good month and what we got instead was a 460 volt unit. No problem, I’ll just convert it to 230 I said. Good thing I did, as whoever did the makeup in the motor was sloppy beyond measure. I cut off Buchanan top hats and maybe half of the strands were in the crimp. Also one of the wires was crushed nearly through between the cover and base of the terminal box.


That is truly some hideous stuff. Quality control is no longer, now we do quality guarantees..
..as in "I guarantee there won't be any quality."


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## CMP (Oct 30, 2019)

You forgot to tell us what brand that quality unit was?


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## 460 Delta (May 9, 2018)

CMP said:


> You forgot to tell us what brand that quality unit was?


Well, I didn’t really forget to mention it as I have always had good service from them, but it is a Quincy.

Best guess is it’s a new poorly trained worker who is in a big hurry to get caught up.


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## ScooterMcGavin (Jan 24, 2011)

460 Delta said:


> View attachment 170527
> View attachment 170528
> We recently purchased an air compressor for one of the plants, and ordered a 15HP 230 volt unit. We waited a good month and what we got instead was a 460 volt unit. No problem, I’ll just convert it to 230 I said. Good thing I did, as whoever did the makeup in the motor was sloppy beyond measure. I cut off Buchanan top hats and maybe half of the strands were in the crimp. Also one of the wires was crushed nearly through between the cover and base of the terminal box.


Since it was wired for 480 you only need 1/2 the strands.


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## just the cowboy (Sep 4, 2013)

I said this before but QA people were always the ones that new the products, and paid for what they did and knew.
QC people now are low wage entry positions. 
As for work quality it is the same thing, entry level equal to fast food people, who can't even make a burger.


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## SWDweller (Dec 9, 2020)

Send the pictures to the salesman demanding a week of lunches for the crew. 
The next time he is on site ride him until he understands. 

To bad you do not have the pics when you started.


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## 460 Delta (May 9, 2018)

SWDweller said:


> Send the pictures to the salesman demanding a week of lunches for the crew.
> The next time he is on site ride him until he understands.
> 
> To bad you do not have the pics when you started.


Well the first picture shows the orange wire still connected to the black input wire after I cut off the plastic snap cap that was on the top hat. So it was kinda before I started. You can also see the Dutchmen cut out of the black wire if you look close. 

Unfortunately I bought this through an internet based compressor sales. I’m sure they couldn’t care less about my issue with quality.


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## nrp3 (Jan 24, 2009)

That said, you get nothing if you don’t ask. You may still get nothing too. Someone else may get a swift kick in the ass on the production line though.


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## micromind (Aug 11, 2007)

Quincy is usually a good company, I wonder if they farmed out the assembly......low bid, of course.........

Quincy pump, Baldor motor, some sort of a tank and other stuff all sent to some guys garage to be assembled.


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## paulengr (Oct 8, 2017)

micromind said:


> Quincy is usually a good company, I wonder if they farmed out the assembly......low bid, of course.........
> 
> Quincy pump, Baldor motor, some sort of a tank and other stuff all sent to some guys garage to be assembled.


Quality comes and goes. Baldor is not the same company since ABB bought them.


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## CraziFuzzy (Jul 10, 2019)

Did this company lose any money from the shoddy work? Since equipment selection is so often done by those with no field experience, this will likely not affect future purchases at all.


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## JRaef (Mar 23, 2009)

Went to a job site last year where they have 80 motors on evaporator fans run by VFDs, and 30+ motors have failed in the first 6 months. ABB/Baldor says it is a bad install on the VFDs, the contractor that did it is someone I have consulted for in the past on similar installs, he learned his lesson the hard way. There is nothing wrong with the way he did the VFD wiring this time and a scope shows almost no voltage spikes (a few at about 900V, which is fine for a 460V motor). Broke open the motor bell ends and there is no sign of insulation damage typical of VFD issues, but the rotor castings are absolute garbage, they didn’t even trim off some of the casting slag! I have no idea how these could have been properly balanced. Anyway, longer story short, Baldor finally admitted they might have had a problem with these 3/4 HP motors and replaced them all with 1HP, which meant changing the VFD programming to keep them from tripping, but it’s been almost a year now and no further failures. This isn’t the first time I have run into this EXACT same issue though, it’s happened two other times locally that I know of. The motors don’t say “Inverter Duty”, they say “Inverter Ready”, but really, they are just cheap junk motors that ABB/Baldor are having made in China under their name. They need to be careful about doing that, it can cost them their reputation.


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## micromind (Aug 11, 2007)

I wondered if Baldor would get cheapened by ABB. For many years, they were one of the best, if not the best. I bet Ed Ballman and Emil Doerr are turning in their graves..........


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## CraziFuzzy (Jul 10, 2019)

This is more an issue of small motor arrays. No one makes what i would call a 'quality' motor under 5hp. They are built to run until a short inevitable death. When i see somone describe a job with "80 motors on evaporator fans" i immediately think that this is likely a job that could have been done with fewer larger motors that would have far less maintenance requirements and far long lifetimes.
You don't want me to get started on the MANY issues with fan wall designs.



micromind said:


> I wondered if Baldor would get cheapened by ABB. For many years, they were one of the best, if not the best. I bet Ed Ballman and Emil Doerr are turning in their graves..........


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## macmikeman (Jan 23, 2007)

Quality Control? The device screws on most all the switches and receptacles I have put in for the last 5-10 years are so soft now , made of the cheapest metal , they strip rather than feed in all the way tight. And then are twice as hard to remove once they are stuck halfway in and both screw guns or hand turning from start doesn't matter, they will still strip out halfway to being tight and flush. Code or no code, I just toss em right away now and substitute a drywall screw instead, which works dandy.


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## NC Plc (Mar 24, 2014)

JRaef said:


> Went to a job site last year where they have 80 motors on evaporator fans run by VFDs, and 30+ motors have failed in the first 6 months. ABB/Baldor says it is a bad install on the VFDs, the contractor that did it is someone I have consulted for in the past on similar installs, he learned his lesson the hard way. There is nothing wrong with the way he did the VFD wiring this time and a scope shows almost no voltage spikes (a few at about 900V, which is fine for a 460V motor). Broke open the motor bell ends and there is no sign of insulation damage typical of VFD issues, but the rotor castings are absolute garbage, they didn’t even trim off some of the casting slag! I have no idea how these could have been properly balanced. Anyway, longer story short, Baldor finally admitted they might have had a problem with these 3/4 HP motors and replaced them all with 1HP, which meant changing the VFD programming to keep them from tripping, but it’s been almost a year now and no further failures. This isn’t the first time I have run into this EXACT same issue though, it’s happened two other times locally that I know of. The motors don’t say “Inverter Duty”, they say “Inverter Ready”, but really, they are just cheap junk motors that ABB/Baldor are having made in China under their name. They need to be careful about doing that, it can cost them their reputation.


What an absolute nightmare. We use Baldor motors, have you noticed quality issues in their larger motors? Some of the motors we use are very large and a failure like that would not be acceptable.


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## splatz (May 23, 2015)

JRaef said:


> They need to be careful about doing that, it can cost them their reputation.


It just did.


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## 460 Delta (May 9, 2018)

splatz said:


> It just did.


It’s not just Baldor, it’s the gamut. With my proclivity to use my favorite SH, I buy a lot of used and NOS components. In as short of period of time as say 20 years, craftsmanship is measurably less.
Take for instance some NEMA combo starters I bought a couple years ago. The brand new Siemens units were assembled with the fuse holder in the wrong position, but was an easy fix, and the door hinges were bent and the door was tweaked, another easy fix but really? The steel was sheared with either a dull or misadjusted shear as the edges had sharp flash.
To finish the job, my favorite SH had a mix of NOS and used units marked Furnas, Siemens Energy and Automation, and likely made with the exact same machinery back when the shear knives were sharp, and in Batavia by Illinois citizens.


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## JRaef (Mar 23, 2009)

NC Plc said:


> What an absolute nightmare. We use Baldor motors, have you noticed quality issues in their larger motors? Some of the motors we use are very large and a failure like that would not be acceptable.


No, not really. I think this situation is one where they (ABB/Baldor) were trying to capture, or recapture, an OEM market that was going to or had changed to cheap Chinese junk motors, so they entered into the cheap junk market. The motors they use cannot be found in their regular catalogs, they are something they sell only to these evaporator OEMs, maybe others, looking for the same low cost as the Chinese junk but with a better name recognition.


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## mburtis (Sep 1, 2018)

The question is, even if they ruin their reputation, does it really matter. As an end user, we have no control over who the OEM buys motors from, and the OEM is going buy based on price. I doubt Quincy or Ingersoll-Rand or any other mega-million company is going to give a damn what some plant electrician thinks of their products, same would go for ABB. And typically that plant electrician isn't going to have a say in what gets bought anyway. It may have been different when it was your name on the side of that piece of equipment going out the door, but now the board of directors can barely remember who Mr. Quincy or Mr. Lincoln or whoever was and really don't care as long as the profit numbers keep going up.


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## NC Plc (Mar 24, 2014)

JRaef said:


> No, not really. I think this situation is one where they (ABB/Baldor) were trying to capture, or recapture, an OEM market that was going to or had changed to cheap Chinese junk motors, so they entered into the cheap junk market. The motors they use cannot be found in their regular catalogs, they are something they sell only to these evaporator OEMs, maybe others, looking for the same low cost as the Chinese junk but with a better name recognition.


Oh, okay. We haven't had any issues with their large motors so I hope they keep things as they are with those. If we had a 350HP motor failure due to something like that it would be nuclear.


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## 460 Delta (May 9, 2018)

mburtis said:


> The question is, even if they ruin their reputation, does it really matter. As an end user, we have no control over who the OEM buys motors from, and the OEM is going buy based on price. I doubt Quincy or Ingersoll-Rand or any other mega-million company is going to give a damn what some plant electrician thinks of their products, same would go for ABB. And typically that plant electrician isn't going to have a say in what gets bought anyway. It may have been different when it was your name on the side of that piece of equipment going out the door, but now the board of directors can barely remember who Mr. Quincy or Mr. Lincoln or whoever was and really don't care as long as the profit numbers keep going up.


It's funny you mentioned I-R compressors. I always considered them pretty low quality as they are are usually a V-twin design that just can't run smoothly, think Harley-Davidson. The W-triples were somewhat better but not anything that trips my trigger regardless. When they switched to a Indian manufacturer, it went downhill massively. When they were still foundry cast in I believe Pennsylvania, the cooling fins were uniform and neat looking with what appeared to be minimal core shift. When the foundry and machining went to India, the cooling fins were thick and thin, short and long, with core shift apparent due to the base bolts close on one side, and farther on the other. If they cant cast a simple item like a open ended cyl, jug, what else is crummy inside?

Full disclosure here, while I'm not a foundryman, I do play one on TV. All kidding aside, I applied twice and turned down twice job offers a foundry. The black-lung life was NOT for me.


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