The Krenn Hrubec West Virginia Project: Hecho en USA

I bought a pallet fork attachment for the front of the B21 tractor from EveryThingAttachments.com. It had to be custom built because all tractors are a little bit different and also ours is a bit on the old side. I carefully provided the engineering measurements they needed to three place precision in hopes that they could build this thing accurately. It was finally ready four weeks after the promised delivery date. When I went to attach it to my tractor I was surprised to find that it did not fit. It wasn't that it was wildly off the measurements I gave them, it was more that they were so sloppy in the implementation of the construction that things did not align like the should. First of all, the spacing between the bosses for the pins was too small in one of the four pin locations because when they welded the hubs into place they did not take care to make them flush with the frame of the support. Even more unforgivable was the fact that the two bosses on either side of the frame were not collinear. What this means is that I could not pass the support pin through the two hubs. This is ridiculous. What kind of crap quality control does this outfit have? If you cannot fit a pin through the holes, the entire unit is useless. I wanted to send the whole pieces of junk back to RIck Reinhart with a nasty-gram saying how unimpressed I was, but I needed the darn thing immediately so I set about repairing a BRAND NEW piece of equipment. I ground and filed the bosses down flush to the frame so that the swing arm of the tractor could fit between. The misalignment of the two holes of the bosses was a bit more problematic. If I were home in my shop I could have milled and lapped the ferrules into alignment. But I was 120 miles from my shop in the woods! I "solved" the problem by using some very old worn out pins that I had on hand. With a little creative filing I could get the old worn out pins through the brand new misaligned bosses to make the thing work. It's a bit wobbly but it functions.

A personal note: I really, really want to buy stuff made here in the USA. I try all the time to find good domestically made stuff. However, I see no reason why I should pay top dollar for domestically made equipment if it is not going to be any better than the crap that comes from China or Mexico for less money. Come on guys! If we are going to be real players in the economic future of the world we got to be a lot better than the guys getting paid 50 cents an hour in the third world. If we don't, pretty soon we too will be guys getting paid 50 cents an hour in the third world - and we'll have to learn Chinese or Spanish as well.