Beyond Toys, Lead Paint, and China

December 11, 2008

Daniel L. Twarog
President
North American Die Casting Association
Wheeling, Ill.

There’s little doubt that quality-control problems continue to plague China. While recent problems with tainted infant formula and toys with lead-based paint attract most of the headlines, parts and components OEMs purchase from offshore suppliers are also subject to scrutiny. At the heart of this issue is the reliability of offshore suppliers in meeting OEM specifications and the effect this has on production costs.

For die casters, quality begins with the material being used — and the ability to assure the OEM that the alloy specified is the one delivered. Die casters should follow the latest ASTM standards which tightly control alloy quality. Further, suppliers should thoroughly check materials at key production stages, backed by a certification process, and have in-house spectrometers or easy access to nearby resources for the latest technology. Members of the North American Die Casting Assn. (NADCA) meet all these requirements.

NADCA also publishes product standards developed by die casters for best performance. These standards are recognized as the most comprehensive in the world and cover dimensional tolerances for average and high-precision castings. We continually update these standards based on the latest university research. Design engineers can draw upon the expertise of NADCA members who can advise them on how to meet these tolerances to produce castings economically.

With more than 100 years of experience in North America, OEMs have come to trust their domestic die casters for accurate certifications and casting performance. That long history of building trust with OEMs adds value through timely delivery of quality, well-designed parts.

Manufacturers considering offshore sources will find the ability to communicate with the supplier extremely important. This goes beyond speaking the same language and understanding the culture. If your supplier has difficulty understanding the complexity of the assignment and lacks shop-floor experience, than it becomes difficult or impossible for the supplier to offer innovative solutions based on new technologies — such as rapid prototyping — that significantly speed the design and production process.

NADCA members and their suppliers can also refer OEMs to companies knowledgeable about machining die castings. This is a highly specialized area that impacts the way you design a die, so it demands close coordination. The advice OEMs receive regarding design and production will significantly affect costs, so experience with similar projects matters.

Finally, our free enterprise system rewards service-oriented suppliers that provide quality parts and economical production. Likewise, the free market punishes bad performance through lost customers and lost sales. Countries that subsidize their emerging die-casting industry often make no distinction between quality suppliers and subpar performers, awarding both with government support and acting as a disincentive for quality. If you are an OEM vetting suppliers, keep in mind the many added value advantages of local partners.

NADCA promotes research, innovation, and education among casting manufacturers and users.

Edited by Kenneth Korane

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© 2012 Penton Media Inc.

Comments

Statistics for Experimenters

On January 17th, 2009 John Hunter (not verified) says:

Here is a link for more on Statistics for Experimenters.

reply

Toxicities of lead, arsenic, and other contaminate from nature

On January 5th, 2009 Catherine (not verified) says:

Major scientific problems with Arsenic research, which also leads to problems with lead "scientific" research

In the past I have worked with and talked to many researchers about their methods of designing their research and experiments on arsenic, mercury and lead toxicity. There are some major problems with the basic methods and scientific "assumptions" that these people have made.

This is a response to the research done by Dartmouth College on arsenic (and on the lack of cancers in the residents of Armagosa Valley, CA, that has very high arsenic content in its drinking waters):
http://www.wateronline.com/content/news/article.asp?docid=90e36731-f6ec-...

There are major experimental design questions here:

Just what is the concentration of the arsenic used in the experiment? Was this equivalent to the concentration found in normal human blood after drinking water with groundwater arsenic? Too often experimenters in the past have made the As ionic concentrations way too high for what is found in humans (blood and urine and other types of samples), after they drank groundwater with high arsenic content.

Was the CHEMISTRY of the experiment truly equivalent to the chemistry found in human blood after groundwater ingestion AND the resulting biochemical interactions that take place in the digestive tract, blood, arteries, etc.?

We have seen many other experimenters use arsenic tests that did NOT have the same blood chemistry and did NOT have concentrations found in human blood after ingesting.

They used "tissue samples". But are these conditions truly equivalent to what humans have in terms of the tissues that receive their ions from blood and plasma through the arteries and other biochemical processes within the human bodies?

See also the problems with biological models
http://www.the-scientist.com/article/home/53306/

Recently there has been controversy over the change in arsenic (As) standards and in Mercury (Hg) standards. If those who want tighter arsenic standards in drinking water had true geologic knowledge, they would know that both arsenic and mercury are some of the many elements that Nature put in the earth and that the groundwater has picked up over the thousands of years. Often, arsenic (As) is associated with gold deposits, even low grade, and other sulfide ore deposits. In many places in the USA, there are geological deposits of the mineral cinnabar (mercury sulfide) and pure mercury, such as the Big Bend area of Texas near the Rio Grande river. Over geological time, the groundwater has picked up mercury in many places over thousands of years. There are also geological formations that contain trace amounts of mercury in their sediments that for eons have been washing into the rivers, groundwater, and soils.

There are several hundred naturally-occurring lead deposits (lead sulfide and lead carbonate) in the USA that were in existence long before any Europeans explorers came around in the 1500s and 1600s. In many drinking water sources, there are a number of other elements in natural drinking water, such as uranium, lead, molybdenum, nickel, sulfur, etc. that originated from natural mineral deposits.

Some researchers have been giving statements that are not based upon complete analysis, but come across as fear. One researched stated "all the time people were dying of cancers now associated with drinking that arsenic-contaminated water". But we would have to assume that all autopsies of ancient and modern humans has shown a 100% statistical correlation to arsenic and not to other factors, such as other chemicals, other metals, diet, sun exposure, prescription drug effects, genetics, other elements, etc. In addition, a number of other studies did not show good statistical analysis / correlation on the level of arsenic (percent or parts per million) and health effects. The residents of Amargosa Valley and Beatty in Nevada and the Death Valley areas in California have elevated levels of arsenic in their drinking waters, but cancers are not prevalent there. A number of residents several of us know have lived to the age of 80s and 90s. How do we explain that?

In talking to the environmental and biological scientists on the West Coast about this issue, a peculiar point was brought up. Most of them have mathematically matched arsenic levels to human health affects through regression methods. These are the SAME types of methods used on Lead and Mercury research, as seen in the scientific publications. These methods "assume" a straight statistical correlation (both linear and non-linear) between the input of arsenic and the output (health affects). But how could they have known what other elements in the drinking water were doing in conjunction with arsenic? None of these scientists have filtered out those inputs that are either not affecting the output, or are affecting in minor ways, or are affecting in combined effects that do not show up until certain conditions are correct. The methods are the analyses of variances and other advanced techniques, which do not appear to be well known by these scientists.

Few scientists and researchers know how to use statistics properly to be able to filter and view data for the actual, true cause-and-effects. Too many times researchers use statistical regression methods that assume a direct relationship between the causes and effect, which may not be real. Although there are several books on the market, one of the best books that can help researchers, analysts, and scientists is a book entitled, "Statistics for Experimenters," by Box, Hunter, and Hunter.

Native peoples have been drinking water here in America and many other places for centuries with arsenic and other "contaminants," (like lead) long before there was ever a Federal government to protect us from the Earth. Why don't the environmentalists understand basic Earth Sciences?

See this link also:
http://geoinfo.nmt.edu/publications/earthmatters/EMV2N2.pdf

Natural arsenic and heavy metals in Alaskan waters from geological deposits:
http://water.usgs.gov/pubs/fs/fs-083-01/
http://www.adn.com/news/alaska/v-printer/story/6960082p-6860040c.html

and then sulfur also:
http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/leads.asp?ID=713#990

Shame on Nature for doing that......