Hornby 75xxx mazak rot

[44558]

Has anyone experienced the good old mazak rot on these locomotives, or do I have and odd one?

[adb968008]

Do you have a picture / description ?

[Fireline]

Yes. Rear motor mount. Replace it, and it's fine. Part number is X9978.

[trevor7598]

There must a specification written down somewhere for the correct ingredients used in the production of Mazak.

Pre war Meccano products suffered badly from Mazak rot, but this was cured post war, ask any Hornby Dublo / Dinky collector.

That Mazak rot is now occurring on present day models suggests a lack of quality control / ignorance of the correct consist.

Model railway manufacturers are using Mazak more and more to add weight to locomotives, which is worrying as any

warranty will have long expired when our models start to break up.

 

And how much control do UK based model railway companies have over what goes on in remote Chinese factories.

[adb968008]

And how much control do UK based model railway companies have over what goes on in remote Chinese factories.

We = here

They = there

Over there is disparate, the factory putting the model in the box isnt neccessarily making the bits, just an assembly line / paint finishing line.

 

Its been said a few times mazak castings could start life in some remote village over a home made crucible., carried by yaks in loin cloth sacks over a mountain to a local chief, who use them to pay homage and recieve a gift of chickens. Once the winter is over those sacks are piled onto a mule train through a remote isolated desert terrain to a major city, where in a dark narrow alleyway the castings are traded for metals. There the castings are separated into wooden crates and carried in the back of canvas sided wagons and driven to a river port where a wooden sampan sails them to Canton. Once in Canton an army of small lorries, men on bicycles carrying stacks of boxes, izusu vans deliver then to concrete slab sided warehouses where they are unpacked in to plastic trays and stored until all the bits required to make a model are delivered from across the territory.

Once the parts are found, assembly begins, squeezing plastic and spray painting, finally fitting all those parts.

 

Ok ive embellished some parts of the story. but in general QA is hard to do at every step of the process unless the factory makes everything in house. In China generalising across all industrial manufacturing, Many factories source parts from elsewhere, and when in reality the parts really cost very little, its easier to forgoe the QA and order % extra and bin the bad ones.. i think that culture pervades all the way to the UK with the assembled model which is why i think mazak accidents happen.

 

I suspect often companies dont know where their suppliers source their parts from, i know one majot $bn US company was caught out with its IT hardware, when it turned out its internal components were being made by Chinese prisoners. Its our own fault, Europeans and Americans didnt move manufacturing from the West to the East for long term quality, it was because it was cheap, and companies tend to react to incidents than be proactive looking for them based on experience, its a learning curve that had to be re-learned in China.

 

Theres an element of deceptive front to it as well, i’m sure anyone going to Hong Kong has seen the rows of educated Indian Tailors who can make your suit expeditiously... he aint making it, the garment catalog number, and your measurements are telephoned to a warehouse in Shenzhen who mass produce them for all those shops and van them over the border overnight, thing is, same goes here with some establishments in the UK but instead they are air freighted in.

 

Oh, and the embelishment, it wasnt a Yak, but i did genuinely see an IT server delivered to a customer of mine by horse & cart, some years ago.. and bicylists stacked 10ft high with boxes does still happen in some cities.

Edited October 3, 2018 by adb968008

[34theletterbetweenB&D]

The formulation is well understood, and also the usual 'poison' which is solder or any similar alloy containing lead. The critical control point is the batch melt stage for a run of castings to ensure that no well meaning operative 'tidies up' and throws a piece of metal in the melt pot. (That's why it is always discrete identifiable batches of components that fail from this cause.)

 

It's a risk that has to be actively managed, and probably difficult to stay on top of in the Chinese environment. That's because reportedly staff turnover is very high (so your well trained operative flits away to take a different job) and the casting shop isn't the most attractive employment (so you don't get the shiniest pennies opting for this line of work in the first place, when so many alternatives are available in that swiftly expanding economy).

 

Positively, from the three manufacturers that have been active in OO long enough for the problem to develop and be recognised (Bachmann, Heljan, Hornby) all three have made replacement parts available when failure became evident. So risk to the customer is acceptable in my estimation.

[bike2steam]

You just cant win, if you produce the alloy in rot proof conditions the end result would be even more expense, construction should be an alloy of exact percentage mix, in temperature controlled ( and humidity) conditions - 'yer pays yer money yer take yer chance'.

Edited October 3, 2018 by bike2steam

[Horsetan]

We = here

They = there

Over there is disparate, ...

"Heaven is high, and the Emperor is far away."

[The Johnster]

We = here

They = there

Over there is disparate, the factory putting the model in the box isnt neccessarily making the bits, just an assembly line / paint finishing line.

 

Its been said a few times mazak castings could start life in some remote village over a home made crucible., carried by yaks in loin cloth sacks over a mountain to a local chief, who use them to pay homage and recieve a gift of chickens. Once the winter is over those sacks are piled onto a mule train through a remote isolated desert terrain to a major city, where in a dark narrow alleyway the castings are traded for metals. There the castings are separated into wooden crates and carried in the back of canvas sided wagons and driven to a river port where a wooden sampan sails them to Canton. Once in Canton an army of small lorries, men on bicycles carrying stacks of boxes, izusu vans deliver then to concrete slab sided warehouses where they are unpacked in to plastic trays and stored until all the bits required to make a model are delivered from across the territory.

Once the parts are found, assembly begins, squeezing plastic and spray painting, finally fitting all those parts.

 

Ok ive embellished some parts of the story. but in general QA is hard to do at every step of the process unless the factory makes everything in house. In China generalising across all industrial manufacturing, Many factories source parts from elsewhere, and when in reality the parts really cost very little, its easier to forgoe the QA and order % extra and bin the bad ones.. i think that culture pervades all the way to the UK with the assembled model which is why i think mazak accidents happen.

 

I suspect often companies dont know where their suppliers source their parts from, i know one majot $bn US company was caught out with its IT hardware, when it turned out its internal components were being made by Chinese prisoners. Its our own fault, Europeans and Americans didnt move manufacturing from the West to the East for long term quality, it was because it was cheap, and companies tend to react to incidents than be proactive looking for them based on experience, its a learning curve that had to be re-learned in China.

 

Theres an element of deceptive front to it as well, i’m sure anyone going to Hong Kong has seen the rows of educated Indian Tailors who can make your suit expeditiously... he aint making it, the garment catalog number, and your measurements are telephoned to a warehouse in Shenzhen who mass produce them for all those shops and van them over the border overnight, thing is, same goes here with some establishments in the UK but instead they are air freighted in.

 

Oh, and the embelishment, it wasnt a Yak, but i did genuinely see an IT server delivered to a customer of mine by horse & cart, some years ago.. and bicylists stacked 10ft high with boxes does still happen in some cities.

 

You have painted an embellished picture of a bucolic cottage industry which, while no longer accurate except in perhaps a few cases, does illustrate the difficulty of establishing an effective QC regime in the Chinese production model.  Everything is subcontracted and nobody is responsible for anything, and the components are probably manufactured to a CAD specification be people who have no idea what, or interest in, the thing they are making is so long as the next stage up the chain doesn't complain.

 

When all this is taken into account, they do remarkably well; the product is usually of a very high quality indeed.  Mazak is something I would prefer to see eliminated from model railway use, but that ain't gonna happen any time soon in an environment where costs are already rising as Chinese workers demand a decent standard of living (and why shouldn't they?).  I have been lucky so far...

[44558]

Glad it not just mine then. Parts ordered should be here in a week or two as im over the water.

[andyman7]

At least in this case it's a fairly straightforward replaceable part!