Builders
Yesterday I drove 100 miles to an aerospace machine shop I have worked with for 20 years. The picture below are the parts I received, arranged on my living room floor. While the great majority of experimental engines are made of imported parts, and a lot of it from China, The stuff I sell has always been, and will always be, Made in America.
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Pictured above, 13 #2501-B Short Gold Prop Hubs, 25 #2601-S Standard Gold Oil Filter Housings, and on the right upper side, are 6 #2601-R Housings, the mirror image models we use on Sonex and Waiex airframes. There are 24 High Volume Oil Pump housings, these go into #HV-2000 rear old cases. This is roughly $20,000 in inventory. It is just four of the part numbers in my catalog which has more than 70 items in it. I have the motor mount tubing kits CNC machined in Canada from US tubing, and I have two small subcomponents which are made in Mexico, and I do sell Rotec carbs, which are from Australia. These are small exceptions.
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Yesterday, when I went through the CNC shop, they were operating at full employment. I stopped to look at one of the machinist’s personal tool boxes. In the top cover was several pictures of him, his wife and three kids. When you buy a part from me, you are directly making sure that guy has a job, and has a stable home for his family. I could have any of the items in my catalog made cheaper in China, and who knows, they might actually work, but I’m not going to find out. If someone can’t design affordable parts, which are a good value for builders, even when the fair cost of American labor is included, they are lazy, greedy, or both.
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It’s an election year, and friends and neighbors will prove that the right to fee speech doesn’t require the speaker to have anything intelligent to say. Perhaps the dumbest things said is commentary on what is wrong with America, coming out of the mouths of people who try to defend their compulsive need to buy imported things. Personally, I think of China as the largest Police State the world has ever seen, without civil nor human rights. I regard anyone who profits from sending them our manufacturing jobs or defends their “culture” in the same light as I would regard anyone who advocated investing in 1937 Germany. Your life, your money, your ethics. Not important to most people, Very important to some people.
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The median age of the very poor in Florida may be as low as 12 years old. You can’t wave a magic wand and make that go away, but if you want to attack it, you do something that provides a good job for that kid’s parents, preferably in manufacturing. You don’t need a PhD is sociology to understand that domestic violence and substance abuse go down when employment goes up. People say the family is the fundamental element in the country, and I agree, but a family where people can’t work, take care of themselves and have basic dignity is a disfunctional family, and your fellow countrymen deserve a better shot in life than that. Employment is a moral issue. There is no discretionary consumer good I need enough for a 12-year-old American to go hungry so I can save a buck on it.” – ww. 2016
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