Regarding the capacitors that failed, I doubt that it was counterfeit parts, but contaminated dielectric. The capacitors were made in the US and purchased directly from the manufacturer. They were leaded monolithic chip capacitors. I suspect that the dielectric was contiminated during the making of the chip, or by the rosin used in the soldering, or even by the cleaning after soldering, or maybe even by the epoxy coating.
Of course, the chips may have been made overseas and purchased by the US capacitor manufacturer for fabrication into the leaded package, but in that case, the US manufacturer would have purchased them directly from the factory and not through an agent or distributor.
Regardless of the cause of the failure, it was costly for me to replace thousands of capacitors mounted on double sided board, with most capacitors soldered through a ground plane!
For a number of years, I worked for a company whose top management and founders came out of the aerospace industry. The president was a former "jet jockey" test pilot. He had a simple rule that saved us all a lot of grief: "Glue always fails eventually. Never use glue where its failure causes a product defect."
That may certainly be the case, Cadman-LT. Many companies end up using counterfeit parts without knowing it. But there seems to be a lot of other reasons products are failing to last. Shifting manufacturing to Asia sees to run coincidentally with lower quality products.
Cadman-LT, counterfeit parts take a number of shapes. Generally, they are inferior. Many of them are stripped from electronic products that get shipped from the U.S. to developing countries. Poor families, strip out the components and the parts are flushed back into circulation. This also causes health hazards for the familites stripping the parts.
Rob, I had no idea that was going on. All I ever heard was good companies here in the US were buying parts from ...say China...and they were counterfeit.
Battar, those parts may have gone to the external market as well, in which case they were good parts, but counterfeit nonetheless. I once did an article that discussed that some of the counterfeits (such as in this instance) were actually good parts. That statement caused quite a few fires out there in the parts distribution world.
Why do the counterfeit on the night shift? Daylight is good, too. Our former CEO once worked for a company which outsourced production to a nameless country (whose national flag is mostly red in color), and on a visit to the factory they discovered that alongside parts being produced with the company logo, identical parts were being produced with no logo. They probably went to the internal market, not export.
It seems obvious in hindsight that the reason for the really good price on the speakers was that they had a hidden flaw, which was discovered after the horse had left the barn.
If it seems too good to be true, it usually is.
Buyer beware etc. etc.
Q.C. and testing on a limited budget are hit and miss when you don't know what you're looking for. I'm sure in the future, any speakers will be tested for magnet retention.
For 3D printing to make the jump from rapid prototyping to manufacturing, engineers will need to find easier ways to move products from their CAD screens to their printers.
Gigabit and PoE are two networking technologies moving ahead in tandem as industrial users power remote Ethernet devices such as IP security cameras at 1,000 Mbps over existing CAT5 cable.
New versions of BASF's Ecovio line are both compostable and designed for either injection molding or thermoforming. These combinations are becoming more common for the single-use bioplastics used in food service and food packaging applications, but are still not widely available.
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