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Go to stores for tooling in Canada?

DPittman said:
Well alot of us have a pretty tight hobby budget and there is actually some good value in SOME Chinese stuff. Unfortunately we sometimes get burned with poor quality crap and do in fact have to buy twice. Overal, I have a lot of cheap Asian made tooling that works that I would not be able to afford otherwise if it was north American made. And yes I have had some garbage also.

HOWEVER if I were buying tooling to run a machinery business I would lean strongly towards the good quality the majority of the time.
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I totally get having a tight budget, heck I have been out of work for almost a year now. I am not saying the quality of the tools are crap. I am saying the way the government treats its citizens, the poor handling of COVID coming from that country and a bunch of other political reasons I would rather support any other country then then China right now. (have you seen the news lately??) Our house hold strictly stays away from Chinese products. If we need something and cant find it made in any other country, and can only find chinese we will buy second hand. (Cell phones, computers ect) I would much rather purchase used american tooling then pay for Chinese. But it is hard to find used end mills (decent ones) and I desperately need some too...

Edited to say, the Chinese are also well know to have stolen technology by manufacturing products for the North American market. (how many manufacturing facilities are there in North America now?! and yes I know about economics. This is a discussion for a different time) North American governments need to bring back manufacturing to this content. We are way to dependent on China (look at this pandemic, were are the majority of face masks coming from that are selling in North America? cha ching for the CCP)
The CCP don't care about its citizens, they are looking at world domination and are trying anything to achieve that. The less support we give them the better for Canada, and the USA.
 
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Rotaxxx said:
I totally get having a tight budget, heck I have been out of work for almost a year now. I am not saying the quality of the tools are crap. I am saying the way the government treats its citizens, the poor handling of COVID coming from that country and a bunch of other political reasons I would rather support any other country then then China right now. (have you seen the news lately??) Our house hold strictly stays away from Chinese products. If we need something and cant find it made in any other country, and can only find chinese we will buy second hand. (Cell phones, computers ect) I would much rather purchase used american tooling then pay for Chinese. But it is hard to find used end mills (decent ones) and I desperately need some too...

Edited to say, the Chinese are also well know to have stolen technology by manufacturing products for the North American market. (how many manufacturing facilities are there in North America now?! and yes I know about economics. This is a discussion for a different time) North American governments need to bring back manufacturing to this content. We are way to dependent on China (look at this pandemic, were are the majority of face masks coming from that are selling in North America? cha ching for the CCP)
The CCP don't care about its citizens, they are looking at world domination and are trying anything to achieve that. The less support we give them the better for Canada, and the USA.
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I'm totally with you on this score! I actually prefer to buy second hand, high quality, good condition, stuff, but it isn't always possible. The thing is, it is so damn difficult to avoid stuff made in China these days especially when we are on a tight budget. Even American brands are now often just rebranding stuff made in China.
 
There's something else about this that has always puzzled and bothered me. Try buying something from a North American company and the shipping is expensive. If it has to cross the border the shipping can make the final cost double if not triple. Buy something on Ebay from China and odds are good the shipping is free or at the very least negligible.
 
Canadium said:
There's something else about this that has always puzzled and bothered me. Try buying something from a North American company and the shipping is expensive. If it has to cross the border the shipping can make the final cost double if not triple. Buy something on Ebay from China and odds are good the shipping is free or at the very least negligible.
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I think its mostly China not playing fair with the Universal Postal Union. The UPU is agreement on how countries handle international mail. Its not my area of expertise so I can't verify, but the story goes like this. If you mail from say Canada to Germany, Canada Post is supposed to charge a reasonable rate representative of the cost of getting to Germany. Most if not all of the postage stays with Canada Post, and German Post deliverers and makes very little if anything....but they make it up on the flip flop. Not much of a flip flop with China, but the real problem is China Post deeply discounts the postage in contravention of the UPU. Instead of being a reasonable fee its heavily subsidized and Canada Post is stuck delivering it for next to nothing. Great for us consumers, but horrible for business.....A Canadian or US business could charging the same price for an item as but the cost of shipping is 4 or 5x that of the Chinese competition
 
Mcgyver said:
I think its mostly China not playing fair with the Universal Postal Union. The UPU is agreement on how countries handle international mail. Its not my area of expertise so I can't verify, but the story goes like this. If you mail from say Canada to Germany, Canada Post is supposed to charge a reasonable rate representative of the cost of getting to Germany. Most if not all of the postage stays with Canada Post, and German Post deliverers and makes very little if anything....but they make it up on the flip flop. Not much of a flip flop with China, but the real problem is China Post deeply discounts the postage in contravention of the UPU. Instead of being a reasonable fee its heavily subsidized and Canada Post is stuck delivering it for next to nothing. Great for us consumers, but horrible for business.....A Canadian or US business could charging the same price for an item as but the cost of shipping is 4 or 5x that of the Chinese competition
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China is classed as a "Transitional" country by the UPU which means that it is permitted to charge a lower rate to ship to countries such as the US and Canada. in 2011 the US Postal Service established a new shipping service called "ePacket" which allowed discounted shipping from China and Hong Kong. As of April 2020 ePacket service is now available to 35 44 other countries including Canada.
 
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David_R8 said:
China is classed as a "Transitional" country by the UPU which means that it is permitted to charge a lower rate to ship to countries such as the US and Canada. in 2011 the US Postal Service established a new shipping service called "ePacket" which allowed discounted shipping from China and Hong Kong. That service is now available to 35 other countries including Canada.
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ePacket is a USPS service? That should make it a pretty good AliExpress shipping option.
 
I received an order of some small electronics parts from AliExpress the other day. I opted for an additional charge to use the AliExpress preferred shipper (about $5.00 instead of free or a couple of dollars). The package arrived in a week and most of that time was getting from Vancouver to Calgary. That is compared to the 30-60 days for the default shipping. For comparison, the same thing from Amazon would have been about twice as much with a delivery time of two weeks. In both cases the products would have come from China.

In future if I buy other stuff from AliExpress I'll be looking at the additional cost of using the preferred shipper.
 
boilerhouse said:
I don't think anyone has mentioned Grainger Canada. More of a higher end industrial supply, they have locations from Que. to BC.

Website- https://www.grainger.ca/en
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Grainger will come up occasionally on some searches I do for products and almost always the exact same product from them is astronomically higher priced than what I can get from multiple other sources. So I don't try them for much.
 
I liken Grainger to Fastenal. — similar experiences


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
Hmm maybe I talked with Bill and you talked with dick!
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Maybe different Fastenal stores have different policies. In my case it was my local Fastenal in Hamilton ON. They were very adamant that they were not a retail operation that served the general public.
 
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