TBH, that reaction about the "fixed fuse" and that PSU is extremely valid. If someone wants to censor it, maybe they should try using that adaptor in their car first and see it for themselves how warranted swearing is in this instance
Yeah if I found that, I don't care who's in the room - I'm going to flip off! Then again "shizz" is less of a swear than "fark" and ootube is okay with a swear once in a while, just not all the time.
@@Vilvaran My thought as well, compared to what came across my lips Clive also kept his composure remarkably well. I guess he has seen too much stuff making those videos over time. But that really was undoubtedly a premium moment in a long time. Unbelivable...
@@andrew_koala2974 Not I, sir. But I shall be reminding myself of the etymology right now. (I fancy I've learned and forgotten this previously. Isn't the mind wonderful!) Also, interest piqued, I shall be researching my belief that "the C word" (rhyming with grunt) is also of Naval origin and a valid expression. Thank you.
And on very short research, I have to contest that you are incorrect and the true origin is from the old English "Scite" through middle English "Schitte". Not a great many ships around at that juncture so I suggest the Naval SHIT is in fact a "backronym". Further to that my second word of choice has it's roots, I believe, in the Latin Cuniculus (rabbit hole).
I once bought a 'Chlorine level detector' and it never worked from new. On opening it up, there was nothing inside! Nice little meter on the outside but that was it!
I know someone who made quite a bit of money visiting China for months at a time doing pre-shipping inspection of product. Three men on rotation, 100% inspection, and no issues escaping China. Accountants said "We're spending too much on these guys, drop them down to once every few months". Then product started to fail big time, someone in the warranty department looking at the claims did a quick check on the batch dates, and surprise surprise no claims on batches when the inspectors were on site, but loads when they were back in Europe. Chinese lost the contract, and a couple of small Europe based companies are rubbing their hands with glee after the accountants worked out that getting the product made in Europe was less expensive in the long run. (The European companies had been supplying all the warranty replacement product so they were already familiar with it.)
Accountants - don't you just love them? It reminds of the joke about a large oil tanker sailing up the English Channel. The Captain and his mate were on the bridge, and the mate commented on the loud noises in the body of the ship, followed by a large splash. "Oh, that'll be the company accountants - they're on board checking on efficiency". A little later , the accountants came up to the bridge and said that they had found a huge, noisy mechanical thing in the hull, which seemed to be consuming large quantities of oil which was hugely inefficient, so they took it out and threw it overboard. "but that was our engine - it makes the ship go!" "Well", said the accountant, looking out the window "we still seem to be moving forwards OK"
Yes I've seen an account of an American guy doing inspections on steel to be shipped back to the US. Same thing, accountants questioned why his price was so high (living in China and dealing with non stop scams didnt seem to be a good enough excuse). So they withdrew his services. Shockingly the very next shipment was all under specified dimensions!
Thing is, it's the accountants that have absolutely no connection to anything in the production chain. The accountants that actually work with the production chain understand the value of that person to be there.
Many years ago I worked for a small Diesel engine manufacturer and they, under the influence of their new asset stripping owners, were told to stop making camshafts in house and get them made in China. A 'reputable' supplier was approached and business proceeded along the usual lines, drawings and material specifications were sent out and we waited for questions and then, amazingly quickly, the product, supposedly made by the Chinese company arrived and went through first article inspection. I was somewhat surprised when the inspector called me up to ask why I'd sent one of our locally produced camshafts (he was asking me if I was checking up on him and his team). We pulled the manufacturing marks (foundry pattern marks) and tracked the part to one which had been supplied from the UK as a spare to one of the companies far east agents. Chinese companies can and do make really high quality products but if you are using generic manufacturing houses you have to put a supplier development engineer into the company to get them up and running and then not be too surprised when your parts appear on the open market, under cutting you. I believe it's known as 'fourth shift production'!
I review RC products and have seen that frequently the first batch of a product is excellent quality and performance but if it becomes popular the manufacturer frequently starts "shaving costs" and so a few months down the track they're shipping stuff that is nowhere near as good as the intial ones. This makes it very difficult to give a glowing review of a product because it could be that people will end up buying stuff that looks identical to the unit that was reviewed but has many internal differences that compromise its performance and/or reliability.
@@newscotlandtv thing is maybe they need to design things that can be built and sold while providing a living wage to the people who make it. We’ve grown accustomed to our products as they are, but it’s unfortunately not a sustainable process.
I used to work with an electrical engineer. Before he went to bed or left the house he would make sure that every battery charger and chargeable electronics (like laptops or phones) were powered down and unplugged. He never left a battery charging unattended.
I'm an electrical engineering student and I definitely do this with any circuits I make lol. I'm not as paranoid about consumer products, but maybe I should be.
I got up about 2am one morning, went downstairs for a cup of coffee and heard a loud crack and thought it was the fridge doing its auto defrost. When I looked in the hall I could see smoke. A small mains adaptor in a cupboard had melted and was in flames. I am SO lucky I could stop it. I am always cautious now.
Likewise, if I haven't seen the inside of a charger, it doesn't get left plugged-in unattended for any length of time. You simply cannot trust that they're made correctly.
i live in an apartment so its a nice feeling knowing how many people live below you, whos behaviors you cannot change even if the government came with nazis
This isn't really that surprising. I'd highly recommend the book "Poorly Made in China" if you're interested in how this happens. Basically, you send your design in and the first few runs they'll built it exactly to spec. And then they'll do something like take out a fuse to save a few pennies. Next thing use a cheaper plastic for the casing. Then they'll do what we see here where they literally remove just about everything except what is required to meet the bare minimum as to be defined as "functional". I'd imagine if that Chinese company had the contract long enough, eventually they'd release a version with absolutely no circuit board. No fuse. Just some insanely thin wire (with thick insulation to make it seem substantial enough) wired straight to the metal contacts. The reason why big companies can get away with making stuff and China while maintaining acceptable quality is that they send over employees to monitor production constantly. If you're a small business looking to manufacture in China... Well just don't unless you can afford to pay someone to live in China and monitor production. Otherwise they WILL be modifying your design in whatever way can make them an extra penny or two. And might end up destroying your products reputation.
My take on buying from the Chinese is that they consider quality and safety the same way we consider colour or size. Buy something without specifying colour and you just get a random colour. Buy something without specifying quality and maybe you get the real thing, maybe you just get a wire link and a bunch of resistors.
Better yet, test the "fuse" in the 12 volt adapter and watch the entire black plastic housing turn into a hot sticky pool of molten black plastic. Fred
Usually the small coil-spring in the nose of these sigaret lighter plugs will get glowing hot and stop making contact att a relatively low current. I guess that this spring will become limiting factor, as well as probably too thin wires from the plug, before the reinforced fuse can blow...
They took our design and manufactured it just fine. Then we found out our customer - the customer we specifically designed the product for - were buying the product from another supplier. When we acquired one of alternative units it had to be disassembled to tell it from ours. They had completely stolen our design including PCB layout, substituted a few parts, left out some safety parts, and sought out our customer to buy them instead.
I deal with Chinese machine shops all the time. The first item you get, they just throw the CAD model into their CAM software, let it decide how to machine it. Then they just hit go on their CNC after loading an appropriately sized blank. None of the tolerances or datums are taken into account. The second article they send you, when you reject the first, will use the general tolerances from the drawings, but no specific tolerances nor datums. The third article they send, when the second is rejected, follows the drawings fairly close. Most tolerances and datums are hit. You will still have surface finishing issues from worn tools or too high of a feed. And anodizing or powder coating is always a joke. They don't clean it well before hand, and skimp on the application. US manufacturers typically have a lead time 3-4 times longer, so even rejecting the first two parts, you still get your part more quickly. But, most US made parts hit all tolerances and datums, or they will contact you during the machining process if something is off slightly to see if it is acceptable. If not, they stop right there and start over. Finishes are done to spec or they refinish and push the delivery date back.
I had a random mailshot from a Chinese mould manufacturer (totally irrelevant as we are Electronic design), which said: "We make thousands of moulds per year. Many of them to our customers drawings"
I company I worked for got a short run of 1000 components machined from a Japanese company. Within the spec was an allowance for x% of out of spec components. They sent the box with 1000 components. They were all spot on at 20 degrees, there was a small box with a note.. 'These are the out of spec components you requested as per the original order.' They actually made some extra additional out of spec items to fulfill the out of spec allowance. Japanese engineering humor right there.
The wire over the fuse trick brought back a memory from a long time ago. It must have been in the early 1980s. I was doing a lot of work for a hire company mainly on diesel generators. The problem was that the generator in question had allegedly damaged the hirer's equipment. I disconnected their equipment and checked the generator and it appeared to be quite stable so I proceeded to check the load to find why it no longer wanted to work. I can't remember any details now but when I started pulling fuses to check them I found two HRC fuses had pieces of wire across them. I was very glad they weren't involved in the failure or the issue could have become quite incandescent.
my brother bought a very expensive audio amp in the 90's. ALL THE FUSE had wire across them. i was so dumbfounded, i keep wondering to this day how stupid somebody is to do this. fuse prevent sensible stuff from burning out, short-circuiting a fuse is just asking to turn your equipment into landfill material.
@@davidh.4649 I don't ever remember seeing any screw in fuses here in Australia. Domestic installations used porcelain wedges Commercial premises did the same with some use of "iron clad" switch/fuse units. The fuses in those units were often porcelain wedges but also HRC fuses. I remember seeing fuse wire wrapped on a blown HRC fuse. That could have made for some interesting pyrotechnics in the event of a fault.
This reminds me of a story my dad (an electronics engineer) told me many years ago. Back in the 70s, the company he worked for designed a phone and hired a small company in Japan to manufacture and populate the circuit boards. When the first batch of completed phones came in to the company, none of them worked. So my dad started pulling them apart to see what was wrong. There were parts in the wrong places, missing parts, broken parts, etc. So my dad took a trip to Japan to see how the boards were being populated. He ended up in a small room with one man sitting in a chair and a group of about 10 old women sitting on the floor in a circle with buckets of parts in the center. The man would take a part and hold it in the air for all to see and tell the women "Okay, this part looks like this and goes here on the board," and he would then place the part on the board. All the women would reach into the buckets (no two women would reach into the same bucket), grab a part, and place it in random holes on the board. Production was immediately moved back to the USA after that.
This is amazing to me. I have always held Japanese manufactured products in pretty high regard. Gosh, the majority of Japanese branded, consumer electronics from the early seventies (1970s) through to the eighties (1980s) were sold at every consumer electronics chain in the USA. Perhaps the Chinese learned from that one man and his circle of women assembling your dad's company's telephones and that is how this kind of crap can happen? Just amazing... Fred
@@electronicengineer In the 70s, Japan was not yet the industrial powerhouse it would become. About 10 years later they were beating us at almost everything.
I worked for a company that had hundreds of products made in China. With us they would occasionally try cheaping out on materials. We had local QC sampling and would usually pick it up before it'd get to market. Then would come the negotiations to get refund or replacement...
Can confirm. It's a freaking nightmare riding herd on those people - you ask for certain gauge of metal, they can't resist swapping in something thinner.
that's cheating indeed... but in china, manufacturers only care about how much you put in the table. if you ask for a pen that doesn't work, they wont bother asking why you'd want such a thing, the same way if you want a pen that writes on every possible surface.
I've heard some really disturbing stories about local QC companies/staff being threatened or attempts to bribe them to stay quiet. I even heard a story about an attempted "honeypot" trap that backfired because two people had been sent out, a man and a woman, and they swapped rooms because the lady couldn't sleep in her assigned room due to light pollution issues, she came back to her room to find a young naked woman laying in the bed. 😳😳😅
Exactly the same with my business, manufactured product in Shenzhen. Trouble is negotiations never get very far as everyone just lies to your face. All you can do is trash the product and find another assembly house. There are so many...
I wonder how Clive kept his composure in comparison. I assure you that I not only cringed but let out some profanity which made my wife running to me to check if everything was ok.
I don't know why they go this way, fuses are dirt cheap, even in my country where we don't manufacture anything and mostly threw away broken stuff, fuses available for very cheap price less than ~10 cents.
Admittedly I've done it plenty of times, usually with 1 or 2 thin strands to roughly emulate the original current capacity, but to come like this directly from the distributor or the manufacturer is simply unacceptable and is a law suit just waiting to happen when some trucker's rig goes up in flames.
Right now I have a Hewlett Packard 8640B signal generator waiting to be serviced. I only did a quick visual check, pressed some buttons, turned some knobs and popped the fuse out. Surprise! The fuse had a wire soldered across it. The best case scenario I can think of is fried power supply. Anything fried beyond that point will likely turn it into a 20 Kg paperweight.
@@jamesplotkin4674 "Oh shit! What are we going to do with these 2 amp fuses?" "Just put a wire across it" This could have bewn done on the circuit board though and need less wire. Maybe next time, right?
On the other hand I've heard about a buyer saying "we expect a failure rate of about 1 percent" Japanese manufacturer: "Do you expect the failed units with the others, or should we pack them separately?"
I've read somewhere they shipped 99 working units and 1 unit labeled defective. Or something along those lines. I cannot find a source on this story, was it from IBM?
@Zen boiRyS That's a decades old story based on when the Japanese quality system was head and shoulders above everybody else. (Probably 1970s, before Motorola created six-sigma in the 1980s.) It compliments the Japanese.
I remember reading an article in one of the electronics trade papers back in the 70s. They compared Japanese semiconductors with U.S. made semis (same part no) and found the new U.S. parts had a 1-5 percent failure rate, while the Japanese parts had a zero percent failure rate. Apparently the Japanese where testing EVERY piece that went out the door. However, I've learned from experience that if I order electronic parts from China I should expect a 25 - 50% failure rate (always buy spares!)
The "Japanese manufacturer" must be Toyota to ask that question. Toyotas almost never have defects (and last forever, my mother put 300K miles on one in the early 1970's). Honda is pretty good, too (certainly much less than 1%), although not quite as good as Toyota at eliminating defects.
@@jfan4reva IDK about semiconductors but I know if I am doing something simple like patching up a cheap electric lantern I will go ahead and use a cheap part (usually a resistor -- I buy them 30 or 100 at at time for pennies per resistor shipped from Shenzhen since we don't have a local supplier anymore, I now have a nearly lifetime supply of 10, 20 and 100 ohm resistors). I haven't had one fail in that use. However, if it is expensive and mission critical I would be reluctant to use a random Shenzhen Shit Land part.
Wow, I can't imagine how hard it is to QC stuff with the large companies. It's crazy that all the extra work you'd have to do to make sure your product is still good is still cheaper than doing it elsewhere.
I've been saying for a while that the end customer is quality control anymore, cheaper to just send a replacement to somebody who has a "warranty" issue than actually check all your product going out the door.
Everyone knows that transistors are designed to blow first in order to protect the fuse. It's bad design to have to beef up the fuse because the semiconductors aren't burning out...
Very true Big Clive. Anyone who out sources the manufacture of a product needs to do regular audits of not just the end product, but also the factory making the product, the factories QC and QA systems, processes and documentation as well as that their certifications are current and real. Also that the manufacturer has regular training in place for their staff to ensure they are also current with their skills and knowledge. There are other things, however the ones I mentioned are critical If you don't, you could be out of business, loose everything or go to prison should a very bad thing happen.
This reminds me of that transparent circuit breaker/RCD you looked at. The transparent plastic would make obvious frauds much easier to detect. I know it might not always be pretty to look at, but maybe transparent plastic could be used when people don't care how the item looks (like circuit breakers or even some power supplies)?
We looked at outsourcing / offshoring twenty years ago… it’s like being a parent. You have to give very explicit specs and instructions,,followed by progress and final QA upon delivery. It’s not always negligence, but the third party may have no idea what you’re expecting. They’re merely putting square pegs in square holes. If they run out of square pegs, their under skilled workers will start using round pegs - so their piece work rate continues. Language, lack education, and no expectations/standards is a really fuzzy place to work. The boss still fills boxes and gets paid.
I think that we can forgive one swear word that happened spontaneously like that. I think I would have dropped a few F bombs had I discovered that fuse. Gotta love Chinese products. The entertainment value of them never ceases to amaze me.
A large number of things which say 24v/12v actually can't do 24v. Small aircraft often use a 24vDC system, including the cigarette-lighter sockets. I've had more than a few things release the magic smoke when I tried them in aircraft. Sadly, all of these went all smokey before I even cranked up the engines, so they were failing at 24v or less, not the 28vDC from the generators/alternators. Kind of sad, too... There was a nice Carbon Monoxide/2x USB charger that would have been ideal in airplanes, but every single one I tried choked on the 24v despite the labeled claims.
@@vgamesx1 One good option is to use a 30V+ rated buck converter to step it down to 12V and then use a decent branded car charger for the extra protections. I'm always nervous about cheap chargers which don't monitor the output in any way
The stubbornness of the "cigar lighter plug" has always amazed me. There is so much wrong and so few things right about this socket, yet no group of car manufacturers came together and decided to go for a better standard. Only recently, the USB socket became fairly standard, but that's not a perfect solution as even with USB-PD, you can't power things like a small tire compressor.
A mob I work for bought £20,000 of chinese parts, mechanical stuff rather than electronic. The pre delivery samples and photos were good. What arrived was horrendous !! Every single part needed to be 'corrected' by me. Took a month. Parts not to size, broken taps in blind holes, welds made of silicone and thickly painted to hide them, etc, etc. Never again.
Can confirm. Have friend with family in China. Says when something goes wrong, they would rather hide the defect in some way and cut corners than redo it. It's expensive and time consuming to maintain high quality. When they're already working at minimal margins, every bit counts so they'll cut corners if they think they can get away with it. What matters to them is pure volume. Push as much crap out the door as possible to make up for the abysmal profit margin per unit. If some foreigner asks them to make something, they'll take extra care to make the best possible showcase product to guarantee a sale. If they believe it's going to be a one-off order, they don't bother with QA. If they've been around for a while and you're a recurring customer, they will still try to save money but make sure each unit is at least usable.
I don't even bother getting pre-delivery samples from China anymore. They are always perfect. I also tend not to go with the cheapest but rather the one best capable of answering questions and giving an initial quote that meets the specifications. I had one recently for a order of about 1500 coax cables. I specified halogen free. Got the quote and the datasheet showed PVC jacket (PVC is halogenated) sent an e-mail back and got response back in 5 minutes with the same datasheet except the PVC photoshopped out and changed to PE.
We all know what AvE would say about these. “Pure Chinesium of the finest quality and aroma” though likely with significantly more swearing than your single utterance. 😉
...Ok, that 'fused fuse' just brought back a very faint memory. I do believe I recall having a (quite expensive for the time, but it was a 'gift' from my dad's employer) portable DVD player, and at one point there was an electrical issue and it wasn't getting power... my dad told me to check the fuse, and I could SWEAR it was bridged just like that. I didn't know that was a problem then, of course now I see the issue!
Sometime ago I ripped off this simple and cheap circuitry and soldered a long wire straight back in place without the circuitry. Now I have a 12v extension wire to use in the garage or around the car when needed. Don’t put those plugs in the bin, you still can make some stuff with them.
I got 2 of these a few days ago, this video made me jump up to see what car charger I got, thankfully I got two good ones, they also threw in 2x first aid kits and safety glasses, great bargain
to add to the fuse stories, in the 70's the Mirror reported that a reader had written in saying their son had the good idea of replacing a 13 A mains fuse with a sawn of 1/4" nail, just the right size. The paper strongly suggested removing the nail.
I guess a new (unblown) fuse would have cost the manufacturer too much money. Meanwhile your vehicle will go up in flames if the LiPo battery pack in the vest decides to give up the ghost... Your vehicle going up in flames would certainly dwarf the attention that the safety vest would afford you whilst wearing it, so maybe there is a method to their madness? Naa... I'm honestly shaking my head in disbelief... Fred
@@electronicengineer I think it was evident that there was no fuse that would fit the bill; that there was wrong with the circuit such that there is a surge of current and any proper fuse would blow. Bypassing the fuse isn't nearly as much a cheap-out - soldering on a wire is expensive on time - but rather the only way that they could ship a product that actually ostensibly worked out of the box!
One of my friends bought a large quantity of USB hard drives from china and was going to sell them all on ebay and make a tidy profit. He ordered loads of them and listed them all for sale in advance before he actually got hold of them. Unfortunately for him, most of them had been sold by the time they turned up and it was then that he discovered that these "USB Hard disks" were nothing more than the empty casings with a small flash drive hot glued inside of them together with a chunk of metal to make it weigh more!!! Obviously he had to refund everybody who had bought one which cost him a fair bit of negative feedback and I don't think he ever got his money back from the chancing sods in China!
@@FrontSideBus This is still current practice here in Indonesia. Plenty of hard drives on sale for unbelievable prices rate 4.8/5 because 95% of people plug it in, see that it reads, say, 2TB, with zero time used and they save a few files and everything looks great. A month later when it's suddenly full or throwing an error they discover a thumb drive inside. Unfortunately, the online platforms keep letting them sell.
I’m extremely jealous of your effortless presentation style you make it look so easy. Another great mix of education and entertainment. Thanks Clive best regards Chris
The wire soldered across the glass fuse is like the old "penny in the fusebox" trick that people did back when houses had fuses instead of breakers. That's crazy! 😲
The subtle changes in quality over time from Chinese suppliers has bitten some big companies in the past. I remember Aston Martin doing a recall on their plastic pedals because they were made of the wrong plastic. They looked identical but kept breaking. Chinese companies are very good at substituting cheaper, inferior materials into products.
I picked up two of these at £4 each, and both of them arrived with the legitimate 12V chargers, marked BDF1261A. I can confirm that they *do* work when fed 24V and output 12.6V as advertised. The LEDs are red when charging and turn green when the charge current drops below about 120mA. I did receive the vests rather than the harnesses Big Clive reviewed. I wonder what proportion have the fakes?
I grabbed one too. It's yet to arrive, but I hope to get a legit charger! I had planned to use the battery/charger combo for a project. I guess it's the luck of the draw! Clive got the Dusty Bin there with the wired up fuse! OMFG.
I received the same vests and chargers fitted with a 1Amp fuse, diffused LED and no mains chargers. They do appear to work correctly on 12 volts I don't have an inclination to try 24! . The charger case does not have dimples on the outside, it's smooth. The only annoyance is the switch is not that easy to actuate through the material. While I agree these would look stupid on a construction site I can see a great benefit at night, at the side of the road, changing a tyre. The LEDS provide illumination for the user allowing both hands to be free while the reflective strips handle visibility to on coming traffic.
The vests seem like a safer option than the harnesses, as well. As Clive pointed out, the battery in the harnesses is right at the front where it could easily get damaged while working. In the vests it's at the back.
Fascinating. Two of those were evidentially 'improvised' from recycled junk (left-overs and rejects from other production runs, perhaps?), when the third one was presumably what was actually ordered.
Not convincing. I spent years buying all sort of products directly from china. Never seen anything broken delivered. Some lower quality stuff sure but are usually the exception. My solar car charger has no regulator either. Nothing blowing up or catching fire so far - 1 year in, and permanent connection for 2 cars. The battery simply could not be charged to beyond 16.2v. It's a physical limit. I have too much water in the cells I want to get rid of. Not losing that either. The water level was raised from use of batt-aid for around 17 years.
I have been through a few of these chargers as many of us have, but always assumed they were built and working correctly. You just made me aware that the crap they sell in the dollar stores, while convenient, could ruin your day. I'll bet most of us have some of these items. Thank you for the heads up.
I took apart a switching power brick once and found what was obviously a reclaimed from scrap PSU, nipped off old leads, dust/grime and all. It was actually a pretty decent looking switchmode module so can't really complain.
@@bigclivedotcom I remember performing that process while working in manufacturing. We would get in returned power supplies and put them through the bench test and repair process. Once everything passed, we would then put them back into production.
Clive, put the fuse on your current-limited supply with a couple of volts and, say, 50mA at first, then slowly ramp it up and see what they uprated it too!
Mega dangerous fuse bypass, and such a variation in car 'chargers'. Jeez, you definitely take a chance with those. Mine arrived today, both jackets work, both car chargers are the legitimate type. Mains charger seems OK but I'm not 100% sure whether to trust it long term. Also came with 2 first aid kits and 2 pairs of safety spectacles. Maybe they included these for a reason? :-/
The MI company Behringer ended up building their own factories in China (well they call the latest one Music Tribe City as it has everything from the factories themselves, offices, workers accommodation, leisure facilities and healthcare facilities, plus a fleet of electric coaches to get employees to work) to overcome the swapped parts issue and have their own people from the UK/Germany running it out there. They also make whatever they can so that in the end the QC stops with them. It's also enabled them to move manufacturing of higher end devices to China without needing to worry about quality issues.
Strictly speaking it's the parent company that also owns the Midas and Klark Technic brands that has the factory complex. In the early days Behringer had their own engineers embedded in the factories they used, but once Music Group/Music Tribe started acquiring other brands it made sense to setup their own facilities.
@@farmersteve129 Sort of, they had people in China to monitor factories and when they decided they didn't want to do that anymore they opend the Eurotec factory, this was before they had acquired MKT, there's a factory sound video on it. And if you're ever in the area they welcome anyone to visit and have a tour around the factory.
It was the first time I heard him swearing. And badly enough, my daughter was next to me and she said: “ he just said what you say sometimes” and I thought, I have to stop saying this. But when you see things like this…
Thank You Clive for showing us what to look for so getting safe electronics isn't a "Crap Shoot". (No, that is not swearing!) Great Video, times three.
That wire over the fuse must have taken more time to do and cost more than simply using a higher rated fuse... To say the Chinese are all about honor, the crap they turn out is truly shocking...
@@firepower9966 well some westerners are so easy to fool. They read the name on the box and they don’t bother checking the contents. They make and sell a fuck of a lot for non capitalists. And they own more gold than the USA
This reminds me of the TV I recently pulled apart which, somewhere on the hot side, had two small polarized electrolytic caps with *both* pounds connected to the same ground plane... **shrug** lol
I talked to a guy who worked for McDonnell Douglas when they were doing their "trunkliner" program for the MD90. They spun up an assembly line in Shanghai. He was on the team responsible for QC. Very long story short, the second they turned their backs, the production shortcuts would start. Missing rivets, wrong fasteners used when doing dissimilar metals, wiring not routed appropriately, just nonstop corner cutting. IIRC, those planes were basically re-checked as soon as they landed back in the US to ensure nothing was missed. ~15 years later, you see Comac come out with the ARJ21 with parts obviously ripped off from the MD90 design. Can't imagine where they got those blueprints or tooling from..
Clive. It is a bit more complicated than you think. I read the label on the battery, but I was unable to find any specs for a model YSD12250 "Super Rechargeable Li-Pol Battery Pack". However, some points can still be made. 1. This is a lithium polymer battery, the least safe type of lithium battery. It is also the cheapest and highest power and energy density of common lithium types. It is very common, but usually used where energy density and high power output are important. Lithium ion and lithium iron phosphate are safer. 2. At 12.6V this has to be a 3 cell pack in series, a very common voltage. 12.6 is the absolute maximum voltage on the cells (4.2V each) when they are totally full. The label says 12.6V in and out which is very unusual. More likely it will be 12.6V in and closer to 10.5V when discharged. 3. In fact, since this is a car type charger, the input voltage will be up to 14.5 volts. Assuming car alternators work the same way in Britain as in Canada. 3. I do not see a balance connector, and all lithium batteries MUST have a balance system or they will eventually catch fire. So the pack must have a built-in battery management system (BMS). I am assuming fire is a bad thing to be avoided. 4. A BMS will include circuitry to manage current in an out, not allowing it to get too high. It will also limit charge voltage and will balance the cells so they never get above 4.2V each. It will shut off the charge when the battery is full and it will also shut off the battery if the volts get too low in discharge. 5. The BMS MAY allow up to 24V input safely if it is designed for this. It also may not. I can't tell as there are no specs. If it does not, then an off board voltage limiter is indeed required. A nominal 24V system will be be closer to 28-29V when charging. 6. It is also possible that the BMS boosts the output to 12.6V regardless of battery voltage. I don't have one to test. However, the batteries will definitely drop to under 11V when discharged. 7. The BMS means that there is no need for current or voltage limiting in the charger (up to the maximum the BMS can handle). Simply passing 12.6V-14.5V to the battery is good enough. Any more circuitry is over kill as the BMS takes care of the rest of charge safety. A cheap charger is fine if the BMS is well designed and built. 8. None of this is defending Chinese QC!! I would be more concerned with the quality of the BMS. If is is good, the rest of the defects are not that important. Opening up the battery to see what is inside would be very interesting. 9. Bypassing the fuse is clearly a huge safety breakdown as that is the last-line-of-defense safety device if the BMS fails. 10. The web URL www.light-vest.com on the label is for sale. So whoever made the battery is no longer around.
Thanks, Clive. Caveat Emptor indeed! Reminds me of the internet meme of a 13A plug wired up backwards with a live .22 bullet in the fuse holder! 😮😮👍👍🤣🤣
This is why in the UK we have a job being competitive on this type of product when then just blatantly cheap. Thanks for showing but didn't we all know what we were going to see.
I can't get into specifics in case anyone knows me and which retail electronics company I happen to work for (I have contractual obligations against social media), but even waaay down the bottom, in one of more than a hundred stores, I often pull products apart and spot check them for reckless engineering. There have been a few cases I've taken problems through the appropriate channels, and of those a few I've gone around the appropriate channel. One I've taken outside the company because it _really_ shits me when USB plugs are misused for battery test probes, so some twit could put 5V power straight to a lithium battery if they decided to plug the probes into their computer...
This is one of the rarest moments where I find you so in awe of how bad the thing you're opening is... 4:00 If I wasn't already subscribed this is one of the moments it'd happen.
Our shop once had a wiring harness completely burn up. It was traced back to 15A ATO fuses that were made in China. When load tested, these fuses would carry 75 amps, melting the insulation on 14 gauge wire.
I thought I was quite clever buying some cheap auto fuses on eBay, I took full advantage of all sizes and the many styles now as well. Tried the first one on a fuel pump that was acting up, only to learn that now the fuse box was melting that spot out and it developed a more serious fuel supply problem because of it. Took a standard dial micrometer to it and it was measurably thinner in the spade contact region just to save on metal. That's pretty dam cheap, I tossed them all and bought from the local NAPA store where they don't have these kinds of bright ideas to beat the competition. It has to be of some use one would think, but there is another thunk coming when it's from china.
@@leebarnes655 I believe that the metal used for the spade lugs is also the material of the fuse link. The composition of this metal, length of the link and thickness of material is crucial to proper and safe performance of the fuse. I would not doubt it if the metal used is scrap from some other local industry. Even if the metal is thinner, it will not work as a fuse if it does not melt at overload.
A prime example of total disregard for intellectual property. That fuse and varied embodiments thereof is fully described in my patent titled "Lifetime Fuse with Passive Shunt Network"
Funnily enough I just re-watched the other video after receiving my vests, recounting what I got... :P Just took all four of my car chargers apart, and they seem to be the real ones, with the actual control circuitry rather than those, er, well, deathdapters with the non-wiring scariness... :S
3:40 A fuse with a wire soldered over it and a leftover fragment for a circuit board! I would've said a lot more than _"shit"._ That car charger was designed worse than a 5th grader's science project. They should be ashamed and banned from distributing such rubbish. Thanks for sharing. 😉👌🏻
Clive is that one that's been returned by a disgruntled customer and put back into stock.. Perhaps those 2 duff car charger adaptors were also returned with it to show the seller its not working and were not part of the original package..That might explain the dodgy soldered fuse as well . Amazon is famous for putting dodgy returns back into stock as it is with some on Ebay too..
Interesting. I've noticed that it seems that if rechargeable batteries in devices seem to lose some charge if you leave them connected after the the charging stops. So I try to disconnect the charger as soon as the charging light goes out. (Or on, depending how it indicates the battery's done charging).
Slo-Blo fuse! I remember growing up in central Australia where old Bushmen would need to make repairs on old cars to keep them running. A .22 calibre Magnum bullet would be a good substitute for the 3 AG style fuses located under the dashboard, drivers side. It was occasionally known that when the electrical fault reoccurred the ‘fuse’ would quickly overheat resulting in detonation and possible shrapnel injuries from the shell casing. Another fix commonly used was wrapping the fuse in foil cigarette packet wrappings.
My brother had a dc/ac inverter in his car with “Made in Chain” printed on the label. The company that made it was either so incompetent that it couldn’t get simple English right or it was a message from a disgruntled employee about the sweatshop working conditions.
It could add a fun little game to your work day. Charger tombola. You stick your hand into a bag of all 3, pull one out and plug it in and if it doesn't set your van on fire, you win!
Clive : you know your audience wants to see what happens if you use charger 1 or 2 to charge that battery pack. Haven't you got a car you don't mind if it blows up? :p Thank you for the videos. Utterly fascinating.
Thanks for clicking the swearing checkbox. Wouldn't want any consumer electronics manufacturer's ads next to this particular video. :D Also, your reaction at 4:00 is heart warming.
its ok clive i find it quite refreshing that you let one go means this is real and not scripted im glad you cussed shows how flat dangerous some junk an be A+ sir bravo!
This reminds me of a phone charger I had like 18 years ago. I was heading down the road and smoke started pouring out. As my infant son was in the car, I just chucked it out the window instead of trying to save it for a proper post-mortem.
I had a cheap Chinese charger start smoking. I had to break it apart because they had used an old fuse that was blown and just soldered a wire across it and out some heat shrink on it... They need to change laws so these manufacturers can be criminally charged!
China is a fascist country. There is no means not justified for the end of them reclaiming the spot of #1 world superpower like they (the leaders) believe they are meant to. Though they have made some mild efforts to curtail crap that is at this level of offensiveness.
I was genuinely floored when Clive dropped an S-bomb...and then did it again! And the whole time I was looking at that fuse and thinking to myself, are you effing kidding? For reals?
That second car charger is the e-waste special, clearly they got to the bottom of the barrel and found: 1x smashed casing with a broken PCB inside, 1x good casing with something failed inside, 1x blown fuse. I'm all for reusing things, I mean most of these car chargers get thrown out anyway, but this is just scamming people.
They won't throw something away if it can be sold and they realise they will never be held responsible if that device causes a fire or injures somebody ! They see safety as the choice of the user not the responsibility of the maker, "if you want cheap stuff you take your chances" ! They will never understand the Western obsession with safety when it costs money and produces useless waste, to the Chinese that's ridiculous !
I know one content creator who would rate that as *Very Dodgeeeeee!* The Raspberry Pi guys had the chinese manufacturer swap out a specified component for a cheaper one of their choice. I believe Raspberry Pi sent the whole 10,000 trial back to get rectified with the contract specified part.
I believe that it was USB or Ethernet connectors without 'magnetics' which had been used instead of the specified items. That initially caused a bit of head scratching I can bet. Personally I learned a thing there as I had always looked at such connectors as plain vanilla devices. So very wrong.
@@ianleitch9960 Ethernet IIRC. Chinese manufacturers are so stupid. They could have kept selling us mediocre but working crap forever but they want to save a cent or two extra on each item for more profit. As a result we just get sick of it and I hope we will go back to manufacturing the stuff in our own countries again until our manufacturers get greedy and ship the jobs overseas again. China has lost a massive amount of industry already and soon it's really going to hurt. Japan subsidised there companies to move out of china. Samsung is moving a lot of manufacturing out. Taiwanese businesses are moving plants to India because the labour is cheaper there. It's a shame that china has gotten Trillion of $$$ of free R&D technology from the west or they would still be in the manufacturing stone age.
I recently uncovered some old car LCD panels (for portable DVD players) my girlfriend owns... The "power supplies" for them say 12v input, 12v 1.5A output.... But when I plugged one into the car and hooked up the meter, it showed the full car cigarette lighter socket voltage (around 12.9 at the time because the car was off, but went to 14.4v when I turned it on). Considering the screens say 9v input, I'm surprised they actually still work 😂
They can do this because most electronics with a CPU of some kind have their own built in voltage regulators. Same thing most AC electronics with Switch Mode PSU can operate on straight DC at much lower voltage with no modifications.
...the situation definitely called for a swear word or two, but no matter. I have encountered fake USB vape pen chargers... They had a little bit of circuitry to turn the LED from red to green when it achieved 4.2 volts but no circuitry to actually shut off the power- so the device would deliver the full 5 volts... which is bad. now I tend to open up any similar products that I get to make sure they really are what they purport to be... I haven't found any more fake products unless you count this one incident- I opened up a cell phone and it had in it no circuit board, just a small slab of steel... I thought the thing seemed a little heavy but I figured that was just because it was a good one... You know the old saying "if it's heavy it's expensive". a friend of mine tells me it was probably just a "display model"... he's probably right, but it was weird. peace and love.
I had someone give me a USB 3g dongle they couldn't get to work. I opened it up, and it just had a chunk of steel in it. I asked them where they got it.. 'from the phone shop', yeah, five finger discount of the display one..
I've run into 'chabuduo' Chinese corner-cutting before, but jesus mary joseph that takes the cake. Another advantage of onshore manufacturing of critical components is that those companies are within firing range of legislative cannons, right? Assuming regulatory capture hasn't occurred, of course.
Someone at a manufacturing plant somewhere in the world committed one of the "seven sins in electrical engineering"! Good thing Clive's here, taking things to bits all day long with a camera rolling!
TBH, that reaction about the "fixed fuse" and that PSU is extremely valid. If someone wants to censor it, maybe they should try using that adaptor in their car first and see it for themselves how warranted swearing is in this instance
Yeah if I found that, I don't care who's in the room - I'm going to flip off!
Then again "shizz" is less of a swear than "fark" and ootube is okay with a swear once in a while, just not all the time.
No shit!
@@Vilvaran My thought as well, compared to what came across my lips Clive also kept his composure remarkably well. I guess he has seen too much stuff making those videos over time. But that really was undoubtedly a premium moment in a long time. Unbelivable...
@@andrew_koala2974 Not I, sir. But I shall be reminding myself of the etymology right now. (I fancy I've learned and forgotten this previously. Isn't the mind wonderful!) Also, interest piqued, I shall be researching my belief that "the C word" (rhyming with grunt) is also of Naval origin and a valid expression. Thank you.
And on very short research, I have to contest that you are incorrect and the true origin is from the old English "Scite" through middle English "Schitte". Not a great many ships around at that juncture so I suggest the Naval SHIT is in fact a "backronym".
Further to that my second word of choice has it's roots, I believe, in the Latin Cuniculus (rabbit hole).
I once bought a 'Chlorine level detector' and it never worked from new. On opening it up, there was nothing inside! Nice little meter on the outside but that was it!
I know someone who made quite a bit of money visiting China for months at a time doing pre-shipping inspection of product. Three men on rotation, 100% inspection, and no issues escaping China. Accountants said "We're spending too much on these guys, drop them down to once every few months". Then product started to fail big time, someone in the warranty department looking at the claims did a quick check on the batch dates, and surprise surprise no claims on batches when the inspectors were on site, but loads when they were back in Europe. Chinese lost the contract, and a couple of small Europe based companies are rubbing their hands with glee after the accountants worked out that getting the product made in Europe was less expensive in the long run.
(The European companies had been supplying all the warranty replacement product so they were already familiar with it.)
Accountants - don't you just love them? It reminds of the joke about a large oil tanker sailing up the English Channel. The Captain and his mate were on the bridge, and the mate commented on the loud noises in the body of the ship, followed by a large splash. "Oh, that'll be the company accountants - they're on board checking on efficiency". A little later , the accountants came up to the bridge and said that they had found a huge, noisy mechanical thing in the hull, which seemed to be consuming large quantities of oil which was hugely inefficient, so they took it out and threw it overboard. "but that was our engine - it makes the ship go!" "Well", said the accountant, looking out the window "we still seem to be moving forwards OK"
Yes I've seen an account of an American guy doing inspections on steel to be shipped back to the US. Same thing, accountants questioned why his price was so high (living in China and dealing with non stop scams didnt seem to be a good enough excuse). So they withdrew his services. Shockingly the very next shipment was all under specified dimensions!
Thing is, it's the accountants that have absolutely no connection to anything in the production chain. The accountants that actually work with the production chain understand the value of that person to be there.
@@steveknight878 Moving - towards Dover?
This is also how the generic drug market works.
Many years ago I worked for a small Diesel engine manufacturer and they, under the influence of their new asset stripping owners, were told to stop making camshafts in house and get them made in China. A 'reputable' supplier was approached and business proceeded along the usual lines, drawings and material specifications were sent out and we waited for questions and then, amazingly quickly, the product, supposedly made by the Chinese company arrived and went through first article inspection. I was somewhat surprised when the inspector called me up to ask why I'd sent one of our locally produced camshafts (he was asking me if I was checking up on him and his team). We pulled the manufacturing marks (foundry pattern marks) and tracked the part to one which had been supplied from the UK as a spare to one of the companies far east agents. Chinese companies can and do make really high quality products but if you are using generic manufacturing houses you have to put a supplier development engineer into the company to get them up and running and then not be too surprised when your parts appear on the open market, under cutting you. I believe it's known as 'fourth shift production'!
This is one of those new hybrid vests. It can provide illumination both by electrical power and by external combustion. Very flexible design.
LOL 🤣🤣
I review RC products and have seen that frequently the first batch of a product is excellent quality and performance but if it becomes popular the manufacturer frequently starts "shaving costs" and so a few months down the track they're shipping stuff that is nowhere near as good as the intial ones. This makes it very difficult to give a glowing review of a product because it could be that people will end up buying stuff that looks identical to the unit that was reviewed but has many internal differences that compromise its performance and/or reliability.
Didn't just outsource the product, outsourced the quality control, too.
Hah small world Bruce! How good is Clive's channel!!
@@D4NS80 I've been a regular watcher for years... I like Clive.
@@newscotlandtv thing is maybe they need to design things that can be built and sold while providing a living wage to the people who make it. We’ve grown accustomed to our products as they are, but it’s unfortunately not a sustainable process.
@xjet I remember your review on the USB hub 8 years ago Bruce, it was equally bad quality. Yikes!
I used to work with an electrical engineer. Before he went to bed or left the house he would make sure that every battery charger and chargeable electronics (like laptops or phones) were powered down and unplugged. He never left a battery charging unattended.
I'm an electrical engineering student and I definitely do this with any circuits I make lol. I'm not as paranoid about consumer products, but maybe I should be.
I got up about 2am one morning, went downstairs for a cup of coffee and heard a loud crack and thought it was the fridge doing its auto defrost. When I looked in the hall I could see smoke. A small mains adaptor in a cupboard had melted and was in flames. I am SO lucky I could stop it. I am always cautious now.
Likewise, if I haven't seen the inside of a charger, it doesn't get left plugged-in unattended for any length of time. You simply cannot trust that they're made correctly.
@@LN997-i8x So how do we (as electrically trained people) check the inside of modern sealed chargers without compromising the isolation?
i live in an apartment so its a nice feeling knowing how many people live below you, whos behaviors you cannot change even if the government came with nazis
This isn't really that surprising. I'd highly recommend the book "Poorly Made in China" if you're interested in how this happens. Basically, you send your design in and the first few runs they'll built it exactly to spec. And then they'll do something like take out a fuse to save a few pennies. Next thing use a cheaper plastic for the casing. Then they'll do what we see here where they literally remove just about everything except what is required to meet the bare minimum as to be defined as "functional".
I'd imagine if that Chinese company had the contract long enough, eventually they'd release a version with absolutely no circuit board. No fuse. Just some insanely thin wire (with thick insulation to make it seem substantial enough) wired straight to the metal contacts.
The reason why big companies can get away with making stuff and China while maintaining acceptable quality is that they send over employees to monitor production constantly. If you're a small business looking to manufacture in China... Well just don't unless you can afford to pay someone to live in China and monitor production. Otherwise they WILL be modifying your design in whatever way can make them an extra penny or two. And might end up destroying your products reputation.
A sadly fascinating book... now how cold is it in Chicago in the winter?
My take on buying from the Chinese is that they consider quality and safety the same way we consider colour or size. Buy something without specifying colour and you just get a random colour. Buy something without specifying quality and maybe you get the real thing, maybe you just get a wire link and a bunch of resistors.
I keep having to remind people that "Tested" does not mean "Passed" unless *_that_*_ is specified_ in the contract.
Would love to see you test what current this new and improved fuse blows at
Better yet, test the "fuse" in the 12 volt adapter and watch the entire black plastic housing turn into a hot sticky pool of molten black plastic. Fred
Usually the small coil-spring in the nose of these sigaret lighter plugs will get glowing hot and stop making contact att a relatively low current. I guess that this spring will become limiting factor, as well as probably too thin wires from the plug, before the reinforced fuse can blow...
What temperature does the solder melt at? What current is required to get to that temperature?
That is your answer.
@@katbryce 340 degrees F, and the bulk resistance of solder is pretty low. Better to use a gum wrapper.
Photonicinduction style - until it pops
They took our design and manufactured it just fine. Then we found out our customer - the customer we specifically designed the product for - were buying the product from another supplier. When we acquired one of alternative units it had to be disassembled to tell it from ours. They had completely stolen our design including PCB layout, substituted a few parts, left out some safety parts, and sought out our customer to buy them instead.
I deal with Chinese machine shops all the time. The first item you get, they just throw the CAD model into their CAM software, let it decide how to machine it. Then they just hit go on their CNC after loading an appropriately sized blank. None of the tolerances or datums are taken into account. The second article they send you, when you reject the first, will use the general tolerances from the drawings, but no specific tolerances nor datums. The third article they send, when the second is rejected, follows the drawings fairly close. Most tolerances and datums are hit. You will still have surface finishing issues from worn tools or too high of a feed. And anodizing or powder coating is always a joke. They don't clean it well before hand, and skimp on the application. US manufacturers typically have a lead time 3-4 times longer, so even rejecting the first two parts, you still get your part more quickly. But, most US made parts hit all tolerances and datums, or they will contact you during the machining process if something is off slightly to see if it is acceptable. If not, they stop right there and start over. Finishes are done to spec or they refinish and push the delivery date back.
I had a random mailshot from a Chinese mould manufacturer (totally irrelevant as we are Electronic design), which said:
"We make thousands of moulds per year. Many of them to our customers drawings"
@@JC-jv5xw lol!
I company I worked for got a short run of 1000 components machined from a Japanese company. Within the spec was an allowance for x% of out of spec components.
They sent the box with 1000 components. They were all spot on at 20 degrees, there was a small box with a note..
'These are the out of spec components you requested as per the original order.'
They actually made some extra additional out of spec items to fulfill the out of spec allowance. Japanese engineering humor right there.
The wire over the fuse trick brought back a memory from a long time ago. It must have been in the early 1980s. I was doing a lot of work for a hire company mainly on diesel generators. The problem was that the generator in question had allegedly damaged the hirer's equipment. I disconnected their equipment and checked the generator and it appeared to be quite stable so I proceeded to check the load to find why it no longer wanted to work. I can't remember any details now but when I started pulling fuses to check them I found two HRC fuses had pieces of wire across them. I was very glad they weren't involved in the failure or the issue could have become quite incandescent.
Sort of like the old penny behind the screw-in fuse trick ... when one didn't have a proper replacement for a blown fuse. 😁
my brother bought a very expensive audio amp in the 90's. ALL THE FUSE had wire across them. i was so dumbfounded, i keep wondering to this day how stupid somebody is to do this. fuse prevent sensible stuff from burning out, short-circuiting a fuse is just asking to turn your equipment into landfill material.
Oh, so you found the "battle shorts" that are used to ensure continued operation under all circumstances. No extra charge!
@@davidh.4649 I don't ever remember seeing any screw in fuses here in Australia. Domestic installations used porcelain wedges Commercial premises did the same with some use of "iron clad" switch/fuse units. The fuses in those units were often porcelain wedges but also HRC fuses. I remember seeing fuse wire wrapped on a blown HRC fuse. That could have made for some interesting pyrotechnics in the event of a fault.
@@Francois_Dupont accompanied by some exciting pyrotechnics. There are too many cases of a little bit of knowledge being dangerous.
This reminds me of a story my dad (an electronics engineer) told me many years ago. Back in the 70s, the company he worked for designed a phone and hired a small company in Japan to manufacture and populate the circuit boards. When the first batch of completed phones came in to the company, none of them worked. So my dad started pulling them apart to see what was wrong. There were parts in the wrong places, missing parts, broken parts, etc. So my dad took a trip to Japan to see how the boards were being populated. He ended up in a small room with one man sitting in a chair and a group of about 10 old women sitting on the floor in a circle with buckets of parts in the center. The man would take a part and hold it in the air for all to see and tell the women "Okay, this part looks like this and goes here on the board," and he would then place the part on the board. All the women would reach into the buckets (no two women would reach into the same bucket), grab a part, and place it in random holes on the board. Production was immediately moved back to the USA after that.
Superior Japanese engineering!
They weren't making phones, they were covertly building parts for a super big robot!
This is amazing to me. I have always held Japanese manufactured products in pretty high regard. Gosh, the majority of Japanese branded, consumer electronics from the early seventies (1970s) through to the eighties (1980s) were sold at every consumer electronics chain in the USA. Perhaps the Chinese learned from that one man and his circle of women assembling your dad's company's telephones and that is how this kind of crap can happen? Just amazing... Fred
Sounds a lot like how my company develops software.
@@electronicengineer In the 70s, Japan was not yet the industrial powerhouse it would become. About 10 years later they were beating us at almost everything.
always gotta be extra careful with tech startups
I worked for a company that had hundreds of products made in China. With us they would occasionally try cheaping out on materials. We had local QC sampling and would usually pick it up before it'd get to market. Then would come the negotiations to get refund or replacement...
Can confirm. It's a freaking nightmare riding herd on those people - you ask for certain gauge of metal, they can't resist swapping in something thinner.
@@jpdemer5 Not thinner - cheaper.
that's cheating indeed... but in china, manufacturers only care about how much you put in the table. if you ask for a pen that doesn't work, they wont bother asking why you'd want such a thing, the same way if you want a pen that writes on every possible surface.
I've heard some really disturbing stories about local QC companies/staff being threatened or attempts to bribe them to stay quiet. I even heard a story about an attempted "honeypot" trap that backfired because two people had been sent out, a man and a woman, and they swapped rooms because the lady couldn't sleep in her assigned room due to light pollution issues, she came back to her room to find a young naked woman laying in the bed. 😳😳😅
Exactly the same with my business, manufactured product in Shenzhen. Trouble is negotiations never get very far as everyone just lies to your face. All you can do is trash the product and find another assembly house. There are so many...
Oooof I cringed when I saw the wire over the fuse that’s actually terrifying
I think that's the nastiest thing I've ever seen when Big Clive took a component to pieces.
⚠️
I wonder how Clive kept his composure in comparison. I assure you that I not only cringed but let out some profanity which made my wife running to me to check if everything was ok.
Is when you think thats heading for a vehicle dashboard to charge the batteries!
I've seen the fuse replaced with just a longer spring before, but to solder a wire to the outside of a fuse. That's just insanity.
I don't know why they go this way, fuses are dirt cheap, even in my country where we don't manufacture anything and mostly threw away broken stuff, fuses available for very cheap price less than ~10 cents.
@@مقاطعمترجمة-ش8ث because the fuse kept blowing from the broken circuit board!
Admittedly I've done it plenty of times, usually with 1 or 2 thin strands to roughly emulate the original current capacity, but to come like this directly from the distributor or the manufacturer is simply unacceptable and is a law suit just waiting to happen when some trucker's rig goes up in flames.
Right now I have a Hewlett Packard 8640B signal generator waiting to be serviced. I only did a quick visual check, pressed some buttons, turned some knobs and popped the fuse out. Surprise! The fuse had a wire soldered across it. The best case scenario I can think of is fried power supply. Anything fried beyond that point will likely turn it into a 20 Kg paperweight.
Where labour is so cheap as to be negligible. 😳
I actually guffawed at the wire on the fuse. That's amazing.
Quite ingenious, really, when they needed a 10-amp fuse, they made one ;-)
@@jamesplotkin4674 "Oh shit! What are we going to do with these 2 amp fuses?"
"Just put a wire across it" This could have bewn done on the circuit board though and need less wire. Maybe next time, right?
What I would like to know, is how you made your comment on this video 10 days ago!?
@@Quickened1 Video released to Patreon and TH-cam members early.
@@gorillaau ah... didn't realize Clive released them that far in advance! Thanks...
On the other hand I've heard about a buyer saying "we expect a failure rate of about 1 percent"
Japanese manufacturer: "Do you expect the failed units with the others, or should we pack them separately?"
I've read somewhere they shipped 99 working units and 1 unit labeled defective. Or something along those lines. I cannot find a source on this story, was it from IBM?
@Zen boiRyS That's a decades old story based on when the Japanese quality system was head and shoulders above everybody else. (Probably 1970s, before Motorola created six-sigma in the 1980s.) It compliments the Japanese.
I remember reading an article in one of the electronics trade papers back in the 70s. They compared Japanese semiconductors with U.S. made semis (same part no) and found the new U.S. parts had a 1-5 percent failure rate, while the Japanese parts had a zero percent failure rate. Apparently the Japanese where testing EVERY piece that went out the door.
However, I've learned from experience that if I order electronic parts from China I should expect a 25 - 50% failure rate (always buy spares!)
The "Japanese manufacturer" must be Toyota to ask that question. Toyotas almost never have defects (and last forever, my mother put 300K miles on one in the early 1970's). Honda is pretty good, too (certainly much less than 1%), although not quite as good as Toyota at eliminating defects.
@@jfan4reva IDK about semiconductors but I know if I am doing something simple like patching up a cheap electric lantern I will go ahead and use a cheap part (usually a resistor -- I buy them 30 or 100 at at time for pennies per resistor shipped from Shenzhen since we don't have a local supplier anymore, I now have a nearly lifetime supply of 10, 20 and 100 ohm resistors). I haven't had one fail in that use. However, if it is expensive and mission critical I would be reluctant to use a random Shenzhen Shit Land part.
Wow, I can't imagine how hard it is to QC stuff with the large companies. It's crazy that all the extra work you'd have to do to make sure your product is still good is still cheaper than doing it elsewhere.
I've been saying for a while that the end customer is quality control anymore, cheaper to just send a replacement to somebody who has a "warranty" issue than actually check all your product going out the door.
@@alexb.1320 I work for an automatic door rebuild company, DCU, and EVERYTHING goes through QC before hitting the door
Everyone knows that transistors are designed to blow first in order to protect the fuse. It's bad design to have to beef up the fuse because the semiconductors aren't burning out...
The flame indicator in the battery is also much easier to see than a tiny broken fuse wire. Great for people with impaired vision!
Wouldn't want to damage the fuse
What semiconductor - the LED?
@@paulstubbs7678 Probably _half_ of those cheap resistors actually conducts.
@@raycert07 The fuse is probably the most expensive component.
Very true Big Clive. Anyone who out sources the manufacture of a product needs to do regular audits of not just the end product, but also the factory making the product, the factories QC and QA systems, processes and documentation as well as that their certifications are current and real. Also that the manufacturer has regular training in place for their staff to ensure they are also current with their skills and knowledge. There are other things, however the ones I mentioned are critical If you don't, you could be out of business, loose everything or go to prison should a very bad thing happen.
This reminds me of that transparent circuit breaker/RCD you looked at. The transparent plastic would make obvious frauds much easier to detect. I know it might not always be pretty to look at, but maybe transparent plastic could be used when people don't care how the item looks (like circuit breakers or even some power supplies)?
There's also those of us who really like clear plastic on our electronics...
We looked at outsourcing / offshoring twenty years ago…
it’s like being a parent.
You have to give very explicit specs and instructions,,followed by progress and final QA upon delivery.
It’s not always negligence, but the third party may have no idea what you’re expecting. They’re merely putting square pegs in square holes.
If they run out of square pegs, their under skilled workers will start using round pegs - so their piece work rate continues.
Language, lack education, and no expectations/standards is a really fuzzy place to work.
The boss still fills boxes and gets paid.
I think that we can forgive one swear word that happened spontaneously like that. I think I would have dropped a few F bombs had I discovered that fuse. Gotta love Chinese products. The entertainment value of them never ceases to amaze me.
I know the word I said when I saw the wire soldered across the fuse was worse than the one Clive used.
Sure we can. But it's the TH-cam algorithms he has to worry about.
He could have easily bleeped it out but he kept it in anyways.
A large number of things which say 24v/12v actually can't do 24v. Small aircraft often use a 24vDC system, including the cigarette-lighter sockets. I've had more than a few things release the magic smoke when I tried them in aircraft. Sadly, all of these went all smokey before I even cranked up the engines, so they were failing at 24v or less, not the 28vDC from the generators/alternators. Kind of sad, too... There was a nice Carbon Monoxide/2x USB charger that would have been ideal in airplanes, but every single one I tried choked on the 24v despite the labeled claims.
I'd much rather have a substandard device fail during pre-flight than at altitude.
That is a special "self test" feature reserved for the 24V (and premium cost) version when ordering.
Well, you could always modify one or take it to bits and 3D print your own using a 24v rated buck converter.
@@vgamesx1 One good option is to use a 30V+ rated buck converter to step it down to 12V and then use a decent branded car charger for the extra protections. I'm always nervous about cheap chargers which don't monitor the output in any way
The stubbornness of the "cigar lighter plug" has always amazed me. There is so much wrong and so few things right about this socket, yet no group of car manufacturers came together and decided to go for a better standard. Only recently, the USB socket became fairly standard, but that's not a perfect solution as even with USB-PD, you can't power things like a small tire compressor.
Awe, that's nothing, we used to put pennies in place of a blown fuse when we ran out. 😜
Then we'd blow those! 🤣
All the Best, Chuck
I am reminded of the Guide To Fuse Replacement, where the 350A Fuse (With Audiovisual Auto-Alert) was - I believe - a 7.62x51 rifle round.
@@ProfessorYana A .22 lr fits nicely in the old style automotive fuse holders. Those also provide an audiovisual alert, but at a lower current.
Our preferred solution was the extra length cut off from a steel potentiometer shaft.
We did this to watch T.V., so could this have been the first "Pay Per View"? 🤦♂️
If so, a penny a "Pop" or "View" was cheap! 😂
All the Best, Chuck.
A penny’ll start a fire
A mob I work for bought £20,000 of chinese parts, mechanical stuff rather than electronic. The pre delivery samples and photos were good. What arrived was horrendous !! Every single part needed to be 'corrected' by me. Took a month. Parts not to size, broken taps in blind holes, welds made of silicone and thickly painted to hide them, etc, etc. Never again.
Can confirm. Have friend with family in China. Says when something goes wrong, they would rather hide the defect in some way and cut corners than redo it. It's expensive and time consuming to maintain high quality. When they're already working at minimal margins, every bit counts so they'll cut corners if they think they can get away with it. What matters to them is pure volume. Push as much crap out the door as possible to make up for the abysmal profit margin per unit. If some foreigner asks them to make something, they'll take extra care to make the best possible showcase product to guarantee a sale. If they believe it's going to be a one-off order, they don't bother with QA. If they've been around for a while and you're a recurring customer, they will still try to save money but make sure each unit is at least usable.
I don't even bother getting pre-delivery samples from China anymore. They are always perfect. I also tend not to go with the cheapest but rather the one best capable of answering questions and giving an initial quote that meets the specifications. I had one recently for a order of about 1500 coax cables. I specified halogen free. Got the quote and the datasheet showed PVC jacket (PVC is halogenated) sent an e-mail back and got response back in 5 minutes with the same datasheet except the PVC photoshopped out and changed to PE.
The mafia sure has changed their business plans
@@slightlyevolved yes. Ps5 made in China have a Coil Whine issue. The PS5 made in Japan do not.
@@nyetloki We don't need no stinkin' varnish on that coil!
We all know what AvE would say about these. “Pure Chinesium of the finest quality and aroma” though likely with significantly more swearing than your single utterance. 😉
Rotting durian aroma for sure
Straight from the big rock candy mountain
The Teenage Engineer In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
You never change your socks
And the little streams of alcohol
Come trickling down the rocks
I don't get how there's an overlap of viewers with AvE and coherent channels like this and ToT.
@@stefflus08 its sad seeing him descend like this
...Ok, that 'fused fuse' just brought back a very faint memory. I do believe I recall having a (quite expensive for the time, but it was a 'gift' from my dad's employer) portable DVD player, and at one point there was an electrical issue and it wasn't getting power... my dad told me to check the fuse, and I could SWEAR it was bridged just like that. I didn't know that was a problem then, of course now I see the issue!
made separate comment
Sometime ago I ripped off this simple and cheap circuitry and soldered a long wire straight back in place without the circuitry. Now I have a 12v extension wire to use in the garage or around the car when needed. Don’t put those plugs in the bin, you still can make some stuff with them.
I got 2 of these a few days ago, this video made me jump up to see what car charger I got, thankfully I got two good ones, they also threw in 2x first aid kits and safety glasses, great bargain
First aid kits are cheaper than new chargers. ;D
2 free first aid kits and safety glasses sounds like a very ominous portent to me. Double-check the regulator chip isn't made of plasticine.
Saline eye wash solution is probably just the literal sweat of some poor buggers back.
to add to the fuse stories, in the 70's the Mirror reported that a reader had written in saying their son had the good idea of replacing a 13 A mains fuse with a sawn of 1/4" nail, just the right size. The paper strongly suggested removing the nail.
Copper tubing has less resistance.
Learning something new every day.
I hate that we have to rely on companies selling crap like this!
They shipped a fuse *with a bypass wire soldered to it*. Holy shit indeed.
I guess a new (unblown) fuse would have cost the manufacturer too much money. Meanwhile your vehicle will go up in flames if the LiPo battery pack in the vest decides to give up the ghost... Your vehicle going up in flames would certainly dwarf the attention that the safety vest would afford you whilst wearing it, so maybe there is a method to their madness? Naa... I'm honestly shaking my head in disbelief... Fred
cue Xzibit meme "hey man i heard you like fuses fuse so we put a fuse on a fuse so it can fuse when it fuses"
@@electronicengineer I think it was evident that there was no fuse that would fit the bill; that there was wrong with the circuit such that there is a surge of current and any proper fuse would blow. Bypassing the fuse isn't nearly as much a cheap-out - soldering on a wire is expensive on time - but rather the only way that they could ship a product that actually ostensibly worked out of the box!
One of my friends bought a large quantity of USB hard drives from china and was going to sell them all on ebay and make a tidy profit. He ordered loads of them and listed them all for sale in advance before he actually got hold of them. Unfortunately for him, most of them had been sold by the time they turned up and it was then that he discovered that these "USB Hard disks" were nothing more than the empty casings with a small flash drive hot glued inside of them together with a chunk of metal to make it weigh more!!! Obviously he had to refund everybody who had bought one which cost him a fair bit of negative feedback and I don't think he ever got his money back from the chancing sods in China!
Memory cards with far less capacity than advertised are also quite common.
New SSD drives are literally just flash memory, so I don't see how your friend's product differed.
@@ElectroDFW Well when you are supposed to be selling a 1tb external hard drive and it just has a very slow 16gb thumb drive inside it...
@@ElectroDFW This was also years and years ago when usb flash drives were *really* slow...
@@FrontSideBus This is still current practice here in Indonesia. Plenty of hard drives on sale for unbelievable prices rate 4.8/5 because 95% of people plug it in, see that it reads, say, 2TB, with zero time used and they save a few files and everything looks great. A month later when it's suddenly full or throwing an error they discover a thumb drive inside. Unfortunately, the online platforms keep letting them sell.
I’m extremely jealous of your effortless presentation style you make it look so easy. Another great mix of education and entertainment. Thanks Clive best regards Chris
The wire soldered across the glass fuse is like the old "penny in the fusebox" trick that people did back when houses had fuses instead of breakers. That's crazy! 😲
The subtle changes in quality over time from Chinese suppliers has bitten some big companies in the past. I remember Aston Martin doing a recall on their plastic pedals because they were made of the wrong plastic. They looked identical but kept breaking. Chinese companies are very good at substituting cheaper, inferior materials into products.
you missed the key word ... cheaper
Springs on GM ignition switches.
"oh sht, oh I swore." idk why but your reaction was the absolute best haha
I picked up two of these at £4 each, and both of them arrived with the legitimate 12V chargers, marked BDF1261A. I can confirm that they *do* work when fed 24V and output 12.6V as advertised. The LEDs are red when charging and turn green when the charge current drops below about 120mA. I did receive the vests rather than the harnesses Big Clive reviewed. I wonder what proportion have the fakes?
I grabbed one too. It's yet to arrive, but I hope to get a legit charger! I had planned to use the battery/charger combo for a project.
I guess it's the luck of the draw! Clive got the Dusty Bin there with the wired up fuse! OMFG.
I received the same vests and chargers fitted with a 1Amp fuse, diffused LED and no mains chargers. They do appear to work correctly on 12 volts I don't have an inclination to try 24! . The charger case does not have dimples on the outside, it's smooth.
The only annoyance is the switch is not that easy to actuate through the material.
While I agree these would look stupid on a construction site I can see a great benefit at night, at the side of the road, changing a tyre. The LEDS provide illumination for the user allowing both hands to be free while the reflective strips handle visibility to on coming traffic.
The vests seem like a safer option than the harnesses, as well. As Clive pointed out, the battery in the harnesses is right at the front where it could easily get damaged while working. In the vests it's at the back.
I'm glad you swore, as it really emphasises just how bad it is, what they've done!
That bypassed fuse is clearly an upgrade for the "fast-charge" version.
Fascinating. Two of those were evidentially 'improvised' from recycled junk (left-overs and rejects from other production runs, perhaps?), when the third one was presumably what was actually ordered.
Not convincing. I spent years buying all sort of products directly from china. Never seen anything broken delivered. Some lower quality stuff sure but are usually the exception. My solar car charger has no regulator either. Nothing blowing up or catching fire so far - 1 year in, and permanent connection for 2 cars. The battery simply could not be charged to beyond 16.2v. It's a physical limit. I have too much water in the cells I want to get rid of. Not losing that either. The water level was raised from use of batt-aid for around 17 years.
I love the unfiltered raw reaction to the soldered fuse.
Woow! That wire across the fuse! It's like those UK plugs that seem to have a fuse, but do not use it at all! :D
I don't get why the build it into the plugs of things people skimp on
You should take apart one of the mains chargers and see what they are like as well - be interesting to see if they are dodgy as well.
I have been through a few of these chargers as many of us have, but always assumed they were built and working correctly. You just made me aware that the crap they sell in the dollar stores, while convenient, could ruin your day. I'll bet most of us have some of these items. Thank you for the heads up.
Clive's reaction to the 2nd fuse made me pause from laughing
A terrifying start to my day clive , thanks for this - this should be compulsory viewing - for anyone.
I took apart a switching power brick once and found what was obviously a reclaimed from scrap PSU, nipped off old leads, dust/grime and all. It was actually a pretty decent looking switchmode module so can't really complain.
That very common. And they're usually pro-grade PSUs.
@@bigclivedotcom I remember performing that process while working in manufacturing. We would get in returned power supplies and put them through the bench test and repair process. Once everything passed, we would then put them back into production.
Clive, put the fuse on your current-limited supply with a couple of volts and, say, 50mA at first, then slowly ramp it up and see what they uprated it too!
I would be tempted to take photos and send them the design-company in charge. So many burnt nuts just witing to happen. great video 2x👍
whatd that achieve? id assume they'd have a very hearty chuckle between the employees
Mega dangerous fuse bypass, and such a variation in car 'chargers'. Jeez, you definitely take a chance with those. Mine arrived today, both jackets work, both car chargers are the legitimate type. Mains charger seems OK but I'm not 100% sure whether to trust it long term. Also came with 2 first aid kits and 2 pairs of safety spectacles. Maybe they included these for a reason? :-/
The MI company Behringer ended up building their own factories in China (well they call the latest one Music Tribe City as it has everything from the factories themselves, offices, workers accommodation, leisure facilities and healthcare facilities, plus a fleet of electric coaches to get employees to work) to overcome the swapped parts issue and have their own people from the UK/Germany running it out there. They also make whatever they can so that in the end the QC stops with them.
It's also enabled them to move manufacturing of higher end devices to China without needing to worry about quality issues.
I didn't realise they had gone so big. Their stuff isn't too bad.
Strictly speaking it's the parent company that also owns the Midas and Klark Technic brands that has the factory complex. In the early days Behringer had their own engineers embedded in the factories they used, but once Music Group/Music Tribe started acquiring other brands it made sense to setup their own facilities.
@@farmersteve129 Sort of, they had people in China to monitor factories and when they decided they didn't want to do that anymore they opend the Eurotec factory, this was before they had acquired MKT, there's a factory sound video on it.
And if you're ever in the area they welcome anyone to visit and have a tour around the factory.
That "modified fuse" fully deserved a bit of fruity language!
It was the first time I heard him swearing. And badly enough, my daughter was next to me and she said: “ he just said what you say sometimes” and I thought, I have to stop saying this. But when you see things like this…
Thank You Clive for showing us what to look for so getting safe electronics isn't a "Crap Shoot". (No, that is not swearing!) Great Video, times three.
That wire over the fuse must have taken more time to do and cost more than simply using a higher rated fuse... To say the Chinese are all about honor, the crap they turn out is truly shocking...
Communism has no honour.
@@firepower9966
You know China is capitalist and has been for decades, right?
@@scragar I am sure the CCP is Chinese Communist Party, not Chinese Capitalist Party
@@firepower9966 well some westerners are so easy to fool. They read the name on the box and they don’t bother checking the contents.
They make and sell a fuck of a lot for non capitalists. And they own more gold than the USA
😠
This reminds me of the TV I recently pulled apart which, somewhere on the hot side, had two small polarized electrolytic caps with *both* pounds connected to the same ground plane... **shrug** lol
I talked to a guy who worked for McDonnell Douglas when they were doing their "trunkliner" program for the MD90. They spun up an assembly line in Shanghai. He was on the team responsible for QC. Very long story short, the second they turned their backs, the production shortcuts would start. Missing rivets, wrong fasteners used when doing dissimilar metals, wiring not routed appropriately, just nonstop corner cutting. IIRC, those planes were basically re-checked as soon as they landed back in the US to ensure nothing was missed.
~15 years later, you see Comac come out with the ARJ21 with parts obviously ripped off from the MD90 design. Can't imagine where they got those blueprints or tooling from..
Clive. It is a bit more complicated than you think. I read the label on the battery, but I was unable to find any specs for a model YSD12250 "Super Rechargeable Li-Pol Battery Pack". However, some points can still be made.
1. This is a lithium polymer battery, the least safe type of lithium battery. It is also the cheapest and highest power and energy density of common lithium types. It is very common, but usually used where energy density and high power output are important. Lithium ion and lithium iron phosphate are safer.
2. At 12.6V this has to be a 3 cell pack in series, a very common voltage. 12.6 is the absolute maximum voltage on the cells (4.2V each) when they are totally full. The label says 12.6V in and out which is very unusual. More likely it will be 12.6V in and closer to 10.5V when discharged.
3. In fact, since this is a car type charger, the input voltage will be up to 14.5 volts. Assuming car alternators work the same way in Britain as in Canada.
3. I do not see a balance connector, and all lithium batteries MUST have a balance system or they will eventually catch fire. So the pack must have a built-in battery management system (BMS). I am assuming fire is a bad thing to be avoided.
4. A BMS will include circuitry to manage current in an out, not allowing it to get too high. It will also limit charge voltage and will balance the cells so they never get above 4.2V each. It will shut off the charge when the battery is full and it will also shut off the battery if the volts get too low in discharge.
5. The BMS MAY allow up to 24V input safely if it is designed for this. It also may not. I can't tell as there are no specs. If it does not, then an off board voltage limiter is indeed required. A nominal 24V system will be be closer to 28-29V when charging.
6. It is also possible that the BMS boosts the output to 12.6V regardless of battery voltage. I don't have one to test. However, the batteries will definitely drop to under 11V when discharged.
7. The BMS means that there is no need for current or voltage limiting in the charger (up to the maximum the BMS can handle). Simply passing 12.6V-14.5V to the battery is good enough. Any more circuitry is over kill as the BMS takes care of the rest of charge safety. A cheap charger is fine if the BMS is well designed and built.
8. None of this is defending Chinese QC!! I would be more concerned with the quality of the BMS. If is is good, the rest of the defects are not that important. Opening up the battery to see what is inside would be very interesting.
9. Bypassing the fuse is clearly a huge safety breakdown as that is the last-line-of-defense safety device if the BMS fails.
10. The web URL www.light-vest.com on the label is for sale. So whoever made the battery is no longer around.
He examines the battery pack with the rest of the vest in a previous video: th-cam.com/video/SgPw1Ig2jYQ/w-d-xo.html
It's now www.lightvest.com
Thanks, Clive. Caveat Emptor indeed! Reminds me of the internet meme of a 13A plug wired up backwards with a live .22 bullet in the fuse holder! 😮😮👍👍🤣🤣
This is why in the UK we have a job being competitive on this type of product when then just blatantly cheap. Thanks for showing but didn't we all know what we were going to see.
That "shit!" was my best bigclive moment ever. 🤣
I can't get into specifics in case anyone knows me and which retail electronics company I happen to work for (I have contractual obligations against social media), but even waaay down the bottom, in one of more than a hundred stores, I often pull products apart and spot check them for reckless engineering. There have been a few cases I've taken problems through the appropriate channels, and of those a few I've gone around the appropriate channel. One I've taken outside the company because it _really_ shits me when USB plugs are misused for battery test probes, so some twit could put 5V power straight to a lithium battery if they decided to plug the probes into their computer...
This is one of the rarest moments where I find you so in awe of how bad the thing you're opening is... 4:00 If I wasn't already subscribed this is one of the moments it'd happen.
Our shop once had a wiring harness completely burn up. It was traced back to 15A ATO fuses that were made in China. When load tested, these fuses would carry 75 amps, melting the insulation on 14 gauge wire.
I thought I was quite clever buying some cheap auto fuses on eBay, I took full advantage of all sizes and the many styles now as well. Tried the first one on a fuel pump that was acting up, only to learn that now the fuse box was melting that spot out and it developed a more serious fuel supply problem because of it. Took a standard dial micrometer to it and it was measurably thinner in the spade contact region just to save on metal. That's pretty dam cheap, I tossed them all and bought from the local NAPA store where they don't have these kinds of bright ideas to beat the competition. It has to be of some use one would think, but there is another thunk coming when it's from china.
@@leebarnes655 I believe that the metal used for the spade lugs is also the material of the fuse link. The composition of this metal, length of the link and thickness of material is crucial to proper and safe performance of the fuse. I would not doubt it if the metal used is scrap from some other local industry. Even if the metal is thinner, it will not work as a fuse if it does not melt at overload.
Fuses save lives... buy good ones.
There is nothing better than a proper fuse. Glad you revealed it.
I used to have to send those (%*#$&* fake-chargers back because my boss was so cheap... UGH! That wire across the fuze is very, very common.
Not fair. I never find any of these completely fake products to enjoy dismantling. Great video as usual BC!
A prime example of total disregard for intellectual property. That fuse and varied embodiments thereof is fully described in my patent titled "Lifetime Fuse with Passive Shunt Network"
i have to admit i laughed out loud when you popped that fuse out 🤣 i bet no one was expecting that.
Funnily enough I just re-watched the other video after receiving my vests, recounting what I got... :P
Just took all four of my car chargers apart, and they seem to be the real ones, with the actual control circuitry rather than those, er, well, deathdapters with the non-wiring scariness... :S
The soldered wire across the fuse with the broken pcb is just, absolutely perfect. Oh my God.
3:40 A fuse with a wire soldered over it and a leftover fragment for a circuit board! I would've said a lot more than _"shit"._ That car charger was designed worse than a 5th grader's science project. They should be ashamed and banned from distributing such rubbish.
Thanks for sharing. 😉👌🏻
Clive is that one that's been returned by a disgruntled customer and put back into stock.. Perhaps those 2 duff car charger adaptors were also returned with it to show the seller its not working and were not part of the original package..That might explain the dodgy soldered fuse as well . Amazon is famous for putting dodgy returns back into stock as it is with some on Ebay too..
Interesting. I've noticed that it seems that if rechargeable batteries in devices seem to lose some charge if you leave them connected after the the charging stops. So I try to disconnect the charger as soon as the charging light goes out. (Or on, depending how it indicates the battery's done charging).
Yeah, some chargers have very simple circuitry that drains the battery slowly if they're unplugged. The charge status LED usually lights up.
Slo-Blo fuse! I remember growing up in central Australia where old Bushmen would need to make repairs on old cars to keep them running. A .22 calibre Magnum bullet would be a good substitute for the 3 AG style fuses located under the dashboard, drivers side. It was occasionally known that when the electrical fault reoccurred the ‘fuse’ would quickly overheat resulting in detonation and possible shrapnel injuries from the shell casing. Another fix commonly used was wrapping the fuse in foil cigarette packet wrappings.
I remember the Mythbusters tested that. They weren't able to make the bullet go off.
My brother had a dc/ac inverter in his car with “Made in Chain” printed on the label. The company that made it was either so incompetent that it couldn’t get simple English right or it was a message from a disgruntled employee about the sweatshop working conditions.
It could add a fun little game to your work day. Charger tombola. You stick your hand into a bag of all 3, pull one out and plug it in and if it doesn't set your van on fire, you win!
Clive : you know your audience wants to see what happens if you use charger 1 or 2 to charge that battery pack. Haven't you got a car you don't mind if it blows up? :p Thank you for the videos. Utterly fascinating.
Thanks for clicking the swearing checkbox. Wouldn't want any consumer electronics manufacturer's ads next to this particular video. :D
Also, your reaction at 4:00 is heart warming.
No shame! I'm shocked lol. Those chargers are sketchy for sure. I hope nobody has encountered any scary incidents caused by these fake chargers...
Super dodgy!
its ok clive i find it quite refreshing that you let one go means this is real and not scripted im glad you cussed shows how flat dangerous some junk an be A+ sir bravo!
This reminds me of a phone charger I had like 18 years ago. I was heading down the road and smoke started pouring out. As my infant son was in the car, I just chucked it out the window instead of trying to save it for a proper post-mortem.
I hope that you at least slowed down a bit when you threw your infant son out the window.
@@ThumpertTheFascistCottontail 😁
@@ThumpertTheFascistCottontail Of course, I'm not a total monster!
Haha that reaction when you saw the wire across the fuse was amazing.
I had a cheap Chinese charger start smoking. I had to break it apart because they had used an old fuse that was blown and just soldered a wire across it and out some heat shrink on it...
They need to change laws so these manufacturers can be criminally charged!
China is a fascist country. There is no means not justified for the end of them reclaiming the spot of #1 world superpower like they (the leaders) believe they are meant to. Though they have made some mild efforts to curtail crap that is at this level of offensiveness.
Chineseium rated no blow fuse.
@@assassinlexx1993 Anything becomes a fuse if you pass enough current through it.
@@rocketman221projects
Q: why does Elton John not like lettuce?
A: because he's a Rocket Man!! 🤣🤣
I was genuinely floored when Clive dropped an S-bomb...and then did it again!
And the whole time I was looking at that fuse and thinking to myself, are you effing kidding? For reals?
That second car charger is the e-waste special, clearly they got to the bottom of the barrel and found:
1x smashed casing with a broken PCB inside, 1x good casing with something failed inside, 1x blown fuse.
I'm all for reusing things, I mean most of these car chargers get thrown out anyway, but this is just scamming people.
They won't throw something away if it can be sold and they realise they will never be held responsible if that device causes a fire or injures somebody ! They see safety as the choice of the user not the responsibility of the maker, "if you want cheap stuff you take your chances" ! They will never understand the Western obsession with safety when it costs money and produces useless waste, to the Chinese that's ridiculous !
Another worthy PSA from Big Clive.
I'm not sure how many "post-it" pads I'd get through in a day, but I do appreciate your system. 👍
More than ever this reinforces my habit of tearing down all cheap products before use.
I know one content creator who would rate that as *Very Dodgeeeeee!*
The Raspberry Pi guys had the chinese manufacturer swap out a specified component for a cheaper one of their choice. I believe Raspberry Pi sent the whole 10,000 trial back to get rectified with the contract specified part.
Think the other phrase is "You've got to be kidding me"
I believe that it was USB or Ethernet connectors without 'magnetics' which had been used instead of the specified items. That initially caused a bit of head scratching I can bet. Personally I learned a thing there as I had always looked at such connectors as plain vanilla devices. So very wrong.
@@ianleitch9960 Ethernet IIRC. Chinese manufacturers are so stupid. They could have kept selling us mediocre but working crap forever but they want to save a cent or two extra on each item for more profit. As a result we just get sick of it and I hope we will go back to manufacturing the stuff in our own countries again until our manufacturers get greedy and ship the jobs overseas again. China has lost a massive amount of industry already and soon it's really going to hurt. Japan subsidised there companies to move out of china. Samsung is moving a lot of manufacturing out. Taiwanese businesses are moving plants to India because the labour is cheaper there. It's a shame that china has gotten Trillion of $$$ of free R&D technology from the west or they would still be in the manufacturing stone age.
We don't need no stinkin' magnetics!
That disassembly was a true "Oh Shit Moment". So you are forgiven. Do you have a swear jar?
I recently uncovered some old car LCD panels (for portable DVD players) my girlfriend owns... The "power supplies" for them say 12v input, 12v 1.5A output.... But when I plugged one into the car and hooked up the meter, it showed the full car cigarette lighter socket voltage (around 12.9 at the time because the car was off, but went to 14.4v when I turned it on).
Considering the screens say 9v input, I'm surprised they actually still work 😂
They might not work for long 😂
They can do this because most electronics with a CPU of some kind have their own built in voltage regulators. Same thing most AC electronics with Switch Mode PSU can operate on straight DC at much lower voltage with no modifications.
For 12v output I expect a straight-through plug without an adapter lump.
Your colourful exclamation was very fitting.
...the situation definitely called for a swear word or two, but no matter.
I have encountered fake USB vape pen chargers... They had a little bit of circuitry to turn the LED from red to green when it achieved 4.2 volts but no circuitry to actually shut off the power- so the device would deliver the full 5 volts... which is bad. now I tend to open up any similar products that I get to make sure they really are what they purport to be... I haven't found any more fake products unless you count this one incident- I opened up a cell phone and it had in it no circuit board, just a small slab of steel... I thought the thing seemed a little heavy but I figured that was just because it was a good one... You know the old saying "if it's heavy it's expensive". a friend of mine tells me it was probably just a "display model"... he's probably right, but it was weird.
peace and love.
I had someone give me a USB 3g dongle they couldn't get to work. I opened it up, and it just had a chunk of steel in it. I asked them where they got it.. 'from the phone shop', yeah, five finger discount of the display one..
They make the pink USB charger look top spec !
I've run into 'chabuduo' Chinese corner-cutting before, but jesus mary joseph that takes the cake.
Another advantage of onshore manufacturing of critical components is that those companies are within firing range of legislative cannons, right? Assuming regulatory capture hasn't occurred, of course.
Someone at a manufacturing plant somewhere in the world committed one of the "seven sins in electrical engineering"! Good thing Clive's here, taking things to bits all day long with a camera rolling!