China Visit Sept 2010

Originally I had planned to visit China when I was in Taiwan in May this year, but with so much happening and flights not connecting I had to put it off to now. Having been to China many times I am amazed at how quickly  roads, buildings and general progress happens, far quicker then Australia.

The main purpose of this trip was to check out our chuck manufacturing  and associated products. Many products for woodworking companies are now made in China,some are very good ,others are not so good.

I flew form Brisbane to Hong Kong then flew to Qingdao in Northern China, a very beautiful city with  some major German settlement in the early 1900's, this is evident in the older part of Qingdao , with church's houses etc built in european design.

Once I arrived in Qingdao it was straight to business visiting factories in the afternoon then having dinner with sales managers. As most people know I just love the asian food and always try to sample as much local food and drinks as possible. Qingdao is very famous for its beer ,the brand is  Tsingdao Beer

Day 2 and an early start   to visit factories in Yantai area, because of the large area  a car  and driver is necessary  and sometimes we only visit 2 factories which was the case today,We visited a  woodworking and metalworking factory today, both very big and modern. As can be seen in the pic a lot of cast iron parts have been aged for 12 months then bought into the machine shop to be machined and ground for planers and jointers.This factory has tripled in size in the last 3 years and now has  the very latest machining centre's etc.

Day 3 we visited about 8 factories making mainly small woodworking machinery which we sell, here is a pic of the production line of the MC900 ,this run was for a few well known european brands. We do not sell this particular model, but it was interesting to see the production line and the volume of the orders.

Chisel Mortisers   (left)                                                                                       Router Table (right)