Milwaukee = Ryobi?

[dpb]

I haven't bought a new DeWalt recently but have certainly been well pleased w/ the miter saw which was the last yellow tool. As far as one can tell simply looking, they appear to still be the same as then, and still got good ratings in last comparative reviews I've seen so can't say whether any degradation is an overall product line or a specific tool or line of tools or whether you just got unlucky on a particular tool...

And I note no one has yet taken the time to guess (or look up) the point of manufacture of the Milwaukee 18V hammer-drills before/after the TTI buyout. :) I did look at the (almost) brand new one to compare to one of vintage before for comparison... that I mentioned having looked at

[Chris Lewis]

According to dpb :

The point I was trying to make (perhaps not all that well) is that even if the same company makes Milwaulkee and Ryobi, it doesn't mean that the quality is the same. Regardless of plant location or even production line.

Eg: MTD owns about 5 different lawn/garden tractor brands. Cub Cadet is most definately not equivalent to "MTD branded" tractors.

Eg: Dewalt != B&D != Porter Cable != Delta. Yet, they're all B&D...

Nor should the location of the plants make any difference - the big three north american automakers dismissed japanese automakers for rather too long, and are still paying for it.

[dpb]

To me that goes w/o saying although I know that it isn't so for many. In essence then, we're agreeing but I surely didn't get that message from your previous posts--I certainly thought you were trying to make a case that Milwaukee wasn't producing anything in the US. So, if I misinterpreted, sorry, apparently I was also tilting at the wrong windmill... :)

BTW, the answer to the question of where the 18V hammer drills were _actually_ made is (surprising me) the Czech Republic. True for the old one and the very recently acquired one both...

[Chris Lewis]

I was trying to make the case that it's not clear how much they're manufacturing in the US, but it doesn't matter...

It happens to all of us ;-)

My father worked for a couple of years as a sales engineer for a heavy industry manufacturing group based in Czechoslovakia, _before_ the Soviet empire came apart, let alone before the Czech and Slovak republics parted ways. Rock crushers, pumps in the

100+ HP class etc (for mining industry etc). "Won't win beauty or engineering elegance prizes, but _tough_ and lasts forever".

Add a bit of engineering elegance and shift to retail, and you have Milwaulkee ;-)

[dpb]

Yes...in a former life I worked with a line of ash and elemental analyzers for online monitoring of coal. A fair amount of the heavy gear in the prep plants was of East European origin...

What surprised me was that one has become conditioned to offshore cheap manufacturing to mean SE Asia or, maybe, Mexico for those who jumped on the NAFTA bandwagon. That eastern bloc countries are for the most part also still in the cheap labor camp has pretty much fallen of the radar screen...

I thought it interesting that the decision had been made and the location selected obviously long before the takeover. My _really_ old red gear is, of course, labelled USA, but that's going back 50 years to most of it. I hadn't had any need for buying something I didn't already have for quite a long time and came to the high power battery drill _very_ late in the game so didn't have anything of intermediate age to try to compare with...

BTW, "Milwaukee" has only one (1) "L"... :)

[Chris Lewis]

The underlying issue on the "radar screen" front is the US bleedout on trade. The US had a $725.8 billion trade deficit in

2005 (>$200B with China alone, ~$70B with Canada). That's US dollars going over "there" (and some "here", to reference the other followup to my posting ;-) [Canada had a $55B total trade surplus in 2005. Last time the US had a trade surplus was in 1975.]

I wouldn't include the Czech Republic in the cheap labor camp. It's advantage comes from a long history of industrialization, good education, and relative stability (compared to many other eastern bloc countries). The standard of living there has been pretty comfortable for several decades, and wages are moderately high compared to other places in the eastern bloc.

The parts of Czechoslovakia that _didn't_ have as much of that went off on its own (relatively peacefully!).

With the Czech Republic, it's a shift of manufacturing with good education, infrastructure etc backing it up. Not _new_ manufacturing and all of the long-term education/infrastructure buildup that needs.

Yugoslavia had the same potential advantages, but the "going off on their own" bit was hardly peaceful and set them back decades. Tho there are sectors still doing well.

[clifto]

Supposedly, so does Chicago.