A Rant

[pgandw]

IMHO many of the model railroad industry buy outs are not about making good products, it is eliminating the competition so prices will increase. I'm at the stage in my life where I could buy a few more locomotives or cars, but after replacing gears on many old Athearn and "lifetime guaranteed" P2Ks I think I will just install decoders in them and be done with it. Walther's bought Lifelike, and now that people need replacement parts, whether for "warranty" replacement or not they should make them available. I read somewhere that they haven't got the Life Like replacement parts unpacked. Geeze guys, it's been 5 years or better. Of course if I have a locomotive that needs a $2 part that I can't get, I'll rush an order in to Walther's for a new locomotive (not). I hope they don't hold their breath.

I'll have to disagree. The buyouts seldom have anything to do with prices, or product quality for that matter. Buyouts in model railroad production are almost always about expanding your offerings without having to go through the complete product development cycle.

Unfortunately, quality almost always goes downhill immediately after a buyout. If the previous owner had any inkling he was getting out of or selling his business, the remaining good stock is sold off. The new owner doesn't want to move all the remaining stock if it can be avoided. And selling off remaining good stock has the highest profit margin. The molds and tooling typically do not get the extra work they need to be ready for the next run of an item. So the new owner gets a couple of truck loads of unusable parts, molds and tooling that need refurbishing, and probably a busted supply chain for the components that went into the acquired product. The parts, and everything else have to be sorted and stored, which is a fair amount of labor for the 2-3 person companies that are typical of model railroad production.

Restarting production in a new location is not simply turning on a switch. In most cases, a year or two later, quality and quantity are back to where they were before the sale. But that year or two is brutal.

As for Walthers buying out Life-Like, Walthers had to make the purchase for self-preservation after Horizon Hobbies got both Athearn and MDC. Horizon Hobbies distributes their own product, which cut Walthers out of a good chunk of their distributorship business. Remember, that when Walthers bought Life-Like, Life-Like had 2 product lines - the acclaimed Proto 2K and the junk train set level stuff that was mostly produced from old Varney molds and tooling. The Proto 2K was/is produced in China, with the same set of rules that apply to all the Chinese plastic importers - batch run with minimal (if any) spare parts provisioning. For Chinese production, the importer rents a slot in the production line to produce, say 3,000 items, from one of a handful of Chinese manufacturers. The manufacturer orders the components like motors and gears and wheels, with just enough extra to cover defects uncovered during assembly. The importer holds back a small percentage of finished product to settle warranty claims. So I doubt very much Walthers has a bunch of Proto 2K parts waiting to be discovered.

To get replacement gears for the defects that have happened with various Chinese products is not a simple chain either. First, the cause of the defect has to be analyzed and found. For cracked gears, it has normally been too tight a fit on the shaft that caused the gears to eventually crack after the plastic shrank. Bachmann and Roundhouse have had the opposite problem with their Chinese gears - too loose a fit that causes the gear to slip on the shaft under load. Apparently, production tolerances are very small to maintain the correct fit over time as plastic shrinks ever so slightly.

Anyway, once the problem is found, a new of set of gears must be ordered and manufactured with a slightly larger (or smaller) bore. Or a different gear material with less shrinkage must be used.

Of course, conspiracy theories make for better reading and ranting.

Fred W