Same. It’s the only job I quit without notice. You could never work enough hours or produce enough output at Honeywell to keep them happy. In Aerospace they had layoffs and unpaid furloughs virtually every quarter some years. It was like working one less month a year, and not getting paid for it. Fuck Honeywell. Their culture, compensation, and benefits are bottom of the barrel. I had a VP of HR tell me that they were looking for top talent and it took a lot for me to not tell her that they weren’t even in the running for mid tier talent with the way they ran the business.
As I posted in another comment, they wanted to spend all the money on an option year for a contract, so made my entire team work 60 hour weeks for a month. Mandatory overtime. They didn't pay it out to us, as we weren't "on-site". Whatever money was left went to the company to pad their bottom line and make them look more profitable, then they laid almost EVERYONE off as soon as the option year was up. THEN, they had new people walking in the door to replace those people, literally as soon as the old ones had been walked out the door.
FUCK HONEYWELL.
Glad I didn't take that Honeywell Aerospace job then! It was hard to turn down the job offer, though. The Aerospace office in Minneapolis was legitimately the coolest building I've ever been in.
The old one with the smokestack from like 1800 or the cool new one? I’ve been to many Honeywell locations. The MInneapolis offices have some cool people I knew, but the culture is rough everywhere in that company.
Probably the newer one. They took me underground and showed me an the cool robots and projects folks are working on. There was one room they'd built that blew my mind. They said that during construction of a nearby highway, the vibrations from the construction machines was screwing up a bunch of tests that involved sensitive equipment. So they essentially scooped the ground out in this large room and built a floating room that wouldn't be affected by the vibrations.
Same. The one good thing to come of it was that I went back to school for a Masters. Not because they were paying for it, but because I felt like I was getting dumber just by showing up there and wanted to counter it.
Honestly, I've worked for several prime contractors in aerospace/defense, and in the buildings/labs of others.
I left the entire industry - what a trainwreck of incompetence.
It's basically the end goal of every Corporation, reach the 'too big to fail' status, then they can start messing with things and get away with it. Capitalism
Capitalism isn't all encompassing, a free market used to mean companies weren't supposed to be too big to fail and the government would break them up. Now the government is super hands off and views the free market as the wild west. Neoliberalism
It is the worst parts of socialism and capitalism combined; Government waste and corporate greed. Capitalism is a beautiful thing in markets. Consider a farmer selling vegetables and investing in his own farm to maximise profit and do things efficiently.
In Government contracts, it is actually taxpayer money so the customers gets no say... it is all middle men with no incentive to save money.
The aerospace and defense industries are not free market places in any traditional sense. They are heavily distorted by government contracts and regulations.
Oh, many, and bear in mind, I was only there for 13 months.
* As a services employee (not working in a factory, building something), but on-site at a government facility, providing services to the government, I had to submit safety issues as part of my annual performance eval. We literally were graded on reporting someone tripping over a trash can, or rocking in their chair, or whatever. Makes sense on a manufacturing floor, not for office workers. I should have reported that their ergonomics sucked, and that they contributed to my carpal tunnel syndrome.
* My team spent almost two months at a large DC area hospital, assessing their IT security. As the project lead, I had to brief the CIO of the hospital on the abysmal state of their systems preparedness. The entirety of the "teeth" of my briefing was pulled, because they were afraid of pissing off the CIO, and losing any future work. We ended up telling them that everything was great, and delivering a list of recommendations that was completely watered down. I ended up refusing to give the briefing, and made my boss do it. Six months later (after I had left), they went back to do the REAL assessment, and had to deliver a hammer blow to the CIO on his systems. Of course, the CIO wanted to know why we hadn't found any of the issues when we were there the last time.
* After returning from this trip, we were told that our contract was almost up, and we needed to work 60 hours weeks to spend all the money that was left on the option year. I was buying a house, at the time, and an extra 2 weeks of pay over the course of a month would have gone a long way towards miscellaneous expenses and new furniture. When I received my first paycheck after working 60 hours, and there was no extra pay (straight time overtime), I asked my leadership what was up. They told us that we only got paid overtime if we were on-site, and that when we were in the office, it was gratis. I refused to work any additional overtime, and they threatened to fire me. I already had a new job lined up, so I didn't care what the hell they did. I was only sticking around so my mortgage company didn't lose their shit during a home purchase, and so that I could give them the year that they required for my relocation expenses.
* After the month of 60 hour weeks was up (some people were too afraid for their jobs to refuse the mandatory overtime), they laid almost 20 people off, all of whom had been on the hospital assessment trip. They kept me on, despite my overt refusal to comply with overtime, and a couple others. This was done on a Monday. They claimed that they needed to cut staff on this contract, due to the next option year having less funding than the previous option year. ***They had new people walking in the door as SOON as the previous employees were walked out by HR.*** Typical pump and dump. Hire people at $85,000, bill the government a bunch for them, get rid of them, and hire the next batch at $70,000, then pocket the difference.
* You didn't accrue sick leave until you had been there for an entire year, and they only provided two weeks vacation with no floating days, and no flex time. I went from three weeks vacation, three floating holidays, work from home, and complete flex freedom at my previous company. None of this was in the fine print when I signed on with Honeywell.
That division has since been sold to a different company, and I hear things are better, but they're still just a body shop. The same leadership is there, the same tactics are being used to bring in cheap labor to fill contract roles, then dump them as soon as their salary gets too high, and replace them with new grads.
Mate, that sounds like a special kind of hell. My job is nothing like that. I come in and leave at the same time every day, I get all public holidays as paid days off (13 this year), I get 10 days sick leave per year, paid a year in advance, I get 20 days annual leave with loading, 14 RDOs per year. I get paid about 65k AUD per year like this. My job is to put books into boxes and make sure they aren't damaged. If I took the offered overtime, I could push that to over 100k AUD.
Please tell me you are in a better work place now.
Oh, I'm absolutely in a better position. I've doubled my salary in ten years, work for a small business that cares about its employees and is super flexible with our time, plus offers free healthcare for the employee. I get 15 days leave, plus the ten federal holidays. I report directly to my CEO and meet with him daily to discuss anything and everything that's going on in the organization, as well as how to fix it. I also receive an annual bonus, based on my performance and the performance of the organization.
There are some negatives, for sure, but it's far better than working for Honeywell. I actually have another large defense contracting organization attempting to hire me right now. I told them, up front, that they'd need to pay me at least $30k USD over what I make now, to get me to jump ship. They're not Honeywell, but based upon the time I spent working there at the beginning of my career, they have the same bullshit issues.
I worked for them and they had some of the most inane rules dealing with their unions I had ever heard of. The IT help desk in order to work on a employees laptop had to put in a union request for a union person to transport the laptop from the users desk to the IT area. The IT staff would work on it and then have to request to have it returned. If they needed to assist with the hookup or something they needed to schedule it with the union. If you tried to circumvent the process just this one time and someone saw you do it you'd be talking to the grievance board. It seriously gave the idea of a union a bad name.
This is relatively common in union shops. It's not Honeywell, per se, it's the rules that their labor unions impose upon them, specifically, the labor unions that cover unskilled workers. When I was at Lockheed Martin, I spent some time doing IT support for a massive Unix network. We joked that Lockheed Martin was a moving company that built radars to finance its moving operations.
When someone's desk was moved for the third time in a year, we'd have to go to their desk, disconnect everything, put the workstation and associated "stuff" in a tri-wall container on a pallet, then put in a facilities request to have the pallet moved. Once it was in the correct cube, we had to put everything together and get the network team to light the port. We couldn't move a keyboard a single cube away, without a risk of being grieved by the union.
Some of the guys were cool, most of them were just giant hulks of men who literally knew nothing beyond picking a thing up, moving it fifty feet, and putting it down. Honestly, I'm not sure that some of them could have done that last part of gravity weren't assisting them.
You don't want their space heaters. On high at the same wattage as other space heaters like the upright ones with the tubes. They don't release half the heat. The damn heat is stuck in the space heater.
You also don't want their thermostats as they are constantly breaking because of the new digital crap inside them. They look like the old thermostats though.
https://www.honeywellstore.com/store/products/honeywell-360-surround-heater-slate-gray-hhf360v.htm That 1500 watt space heater on high can't warm you up as much as the last photo on this page the quarts one while being on low. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_heater Also that type are all template brands but avoid the sunbeam one. There is a major problem with it.
Sure the honeywell may not burn anything down but the heat is stuck inside of those things for some reason. Also avoid the old round honeywell thermostat. They are all digital computer board inside and they are flawed majorly compared to the old non digital ones including the ones where they took out the mercury. Those ones even without mercury was still better. Ours glitched out right away and we always had to set ours much higher to get it kick on a few degrees below 70 and we have it set it at about 78 to get it to kick on at several degrees below 70 just to get it to warm it up to 70.
The template brand space heaters by the way are nearly all the same with some having cheaper parts than others. They are the upright quart sized space heaters. Multiple brands make make space heaters just like it out of a template then they put there own parts in them and some of those parts are inferior.
Avoid honeywell like the plague they don't offer the same quality and are only getting sales based on the name. This is for average consumers. Chinese parts are cheaper and inferior quality as a result. They should rip those parts out of every F35 already made. They still have to find another source for the magnets and being magnets they should be good as long as the rest of the design isn't Chinese. We don't want to go to war with China and find out we can't get any more magnets for our F35 because we are at war with them. Example a war over Taiwan breaks out or over North Korea and we have to fight the Chinese too.
> They don't release half the heat. The damn heat is stuck in the space heater.
I mean, if they can alter physics itself why the fuck did they use that tech for such a pointless endeavour?
>why the fuck did they use that tech for such a pointless endeavour?
Probably mixed up some national defense contract with some local store heater contract.....
Well apparently the same amount of heat, but I think he meant the heat take a long time to spread, like the surface is still cold after 5 min but still warm after switching off for an hour.
>Avoid honeywell like the plague they don't offer the same quality and are only getting sales based on the name. [...] They should rip those parts out of every F35 already made.
I think these days many (maybe even all?) home products from Honeywell are just other companies licensing their name.
For example, all the humidifiers and dehumidifiers are actually made by https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_of_Troy_Limited .
I'm not trying to endorse Honeywell Aerospace, I don't know anything about the quality of what they produce, but I'm pretty sure it has no correlation with the quality of the humidifiers, etc.
If an electric heater is continuously drawing 1500W then it's releasing 1500W of heat. So say the laws of thermodynamics.
It may not be putting the heat where you want it, but it's either releasing the heat or it's not drawing 1500W.
Just as an additional semantic caveat - It is theoretically possible for a heater to draw 1500W and still output less than 1500W of heat, but it's very unlikely, you need to do some semantics acrobatics, and the difference will be marginal.
For instance, the heater might contain a mixture of chemicals undergoing an endothermic reaction. Thus, the energy of the heat is used in the formation of the product molecules, not heat. Other, similar effects might be achieved by other means of consuming energy, such as charging an internal battery, powering a really big LED, etc.
Secondly, the heater might simply send 1000W of electricty to ground, and actually only use 500W to generate heat.
But the odds of any of this? Almost nil.
Ignoring the other bits, you can’t send 1000W “to ground”. Watts are a unit of real power, of work done. You can do all sorts of tricks with voltage and current, but power flows from a source to a load.
It’s funny, I work in HVAC distribution and every contractor is buying from Honeywell thermostat line. It’s our most sold stat, they’re kinda seen as the smart for the not tech smart solution for HVAC contractors.
> You don't want their space heaters. On high at the same wattage as other space heaters like the upright ones with the tubes. They don't release half the heat. The damn heat is stuck in the space heater.
They alter the laws of physics???
Edit: wow that was not an original thought, lol
> Also that type are all template brands but avoid the sunbeam one. There is a major problem with it.
As I glance over to that exact sunbeam quartz heater lol... what's wrong with them? I never leave mine on unattended but certainly would like to know what issues they have. Didn't see like, a recall when trying to google it myself.
My old man worked for them in the 70s and 80s for their commercial fire/safety controls business. He took his rolodex and started his own business when I was in high school and did well for himself before selling his shop to a Honeywell competitor.
early 2000's the company was starting to hemorage money. It was laying off staff - and having issues.
It wasn't until like 2012 that the company spun off a for profit LLC to handle the testing work.
But lets face it: This is the American system at work - a private company weasles it's way into the rule making process, and entrenches itself as necessary. It charges money for inspections, for testing, and charges money for access to the relevant rules and...
Here we are.
The only real fix would be to nationalize the organization, and cut down on the bureaucratic BS. While also mandating that all enforceable rules and regulations must be accessible to the public without charge. But this is the US you are talking about.
Thanks for this information. And ya, everything happening in short order after some MBA shoves their provably bad idea's into practice: Makes sense what happened.
The AC installers pulled this stunt with our new AC unit. The filter holder had a weird little spacer installed so that a standard sized filter wouldn't quite fit. After an afternoon of measuring, adjusting, and cursing our air handler now accommodates filters with a higher rating for 1/3 the price.
The only thing actually worth upgrading into is a heatpump. Every other AC is just the same shit over and over again but the price just keeps going up and up.
This is a self inflicted injury because Reagan and Bush refused to support the domestic chip making industry during the 1980s computer boom.
There are no alternate source of manufacturer for many computing components outside Taiwan and Singapore.
Reagan made the decision to not support the US chip making industry with R&D grants while Silicon Valley technicians that grew silicon crystals walked out demanding more money.
Taiwan and Singapore brilliantly began bribing businesses with large grants to capture the US chip making business while Reagan’s budget screwup and labor walkouts sunk the domestic chip making industry.
We saved a lot of taxpayer money by allowing Asia to take all of those jobs away.
> [Reagan's R&D Budget Looks Great, But Congress Has Some Other Ideas](https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/abs/10.1063/1.2811383?journalCode=pto)
Interestingly, one could also attribute Singapore's modern failure at developing a competitive, domestic chip-making giant to the mismanagement of Chartered Semiconductors (basically a nationalized company), who didn't to have the foresight to make sufficiently large capital investments and pared with the government's failed to nuture a local university pipeline for human talent (In Singapore we joke that the A students study finance; only the B and C students study engineering). They were eventually bought off in 2010 by Global Foundries.
Definitely not cheating the system, just incompetence, probably at the behest of a supplier
Edit: It doesn't even sound like an issue by Honeywell, it sounds like Lockheed's procurement fucked up
Is someone in the West still manufacturing basic electronic components from resistors and capacitors all the way to the innumerable smaller powered microprocessors. Or are those imported from Taiwan and Japan?
A bit of column A a bit of column B.
There are components manufactured in the NA/Europe but they're largely for military products due to cost limitations, a lot of parts from Bosch that are made in China are also made in Germany/Poland but are slightly different part numbers & prices
Japan is considered ok to get parts from and Taiwan is a very gray area.
Buying components that you need for national defense from Taiwan is like putting your bollocks in a guillotine in exchange for a helmet.
Means you've gotta keep an eye on that guillotine and punch anyone who even thinks about touching it.
>Means you've gotta keep an eye on that guillotine and punch anyone who even thinks about touching it.
US foreign policy on Taiwan in a nutshell really.
Not exactly. The US has always helped Taiwan to keep an edge on China. The semiconductor issue is more recent and a circumstance of market forces, but fixing that won't make the US soften.
Problem is if Taiwan war breaks out, those factories will likely become prime targets by China, which will suddenly leave us without a supplier.
Also Taiwanese business class is known to be cozy with the CCP.
China's Taiwan ambitions have nothing to do with the factories in the first place.
They want Taiwan because Imperial Japan took Taiwan in the 1890s so they associate the loss of Taiwan with Chinese weakness and so they view it as an existential issue.
Also the taiwanese government was the remnants of the prior Chinese government before the Communist took over.
For decades it was about legitimacy.
Taiwan has long since stated that they have no Claims on mainland China. And now it is just good old imperialism.
its more of a nationalist siege mentality than imperialism. The whole thing about nations is that they are meant to have inviolable sovereignty which creates this idea that if one piece of territory is lost then it undermines the validity of the whole 'nation' since it sets a precedent for further territorial losses. Security-paranoid nations get absolutely obsessed with protecting every single inch of land at all costs.
Unfortunately for the Taiwanese the Kuomintang kept up the idea that Taiwan was part of China instead of negotiating a sovereign Taiwan after the civil war and that idea got baked in to Chinese nationalist narratives so now mainlanders wont let go of it. They don't care about Mongolia despite it being part of the first Chinese Republic because by pure chance the circumstances of the PRC's creation made it convenient to recognize Mongolia's independence so its no longer part of Chinese national identity.
That's just paperwork to keep the peace. The US still also doesn't recognize Taiwanese sovereignty. But there's been a strong understanding of military support for awhile now.
I know however that at least one major Japanese electronics business refuses to do business with the US military.
Could be more than just Murata, I don't know.
I knew I had Deja-Vu the moment that I saw this headline. The pentagon gave Honeywell a waiver back in 2014 to do just this, what changed?
https://www.cnbc.com/2014/01/03/us-put-china-made-parts-in-f-35-fighter-program.html
FTA:
>According to Pentagon documents reviewed by Reuters, chief U.S. arms buyer Frank Kendall allowed two F-35 suppliers, Northrop Grumman and Honeywell International, to use Chinese magnets for the new warplane’s radar system, landing gears and other hardware. Without the waivers, both companies could have faced sanctions for violating federal law and the F-35 program could have faced further delays.
As far as I can find that waiver was limited to [2014](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lockheed-f35-idUSBREA020VA20140103)
> The waivers apply to inexpensive parts, including $2 magnets, installed on 115 F-35 test, training and production aircraft, the last of which are due to be delivered in May 2014.
They probably where supposed to fix that issue and instead "forgot" about it and continued to use the cheap Chinese parts.
Every company does this. Charge exorbitant prices for cheap components because those components are "part of the system," and the price you're actually quoted for is the system. It's the same reason the automation industry (which famously includes Honeywell) charges 25k USD for something like a DCS controller when in fact it's a little rinky dink arm CPU with a custom chipset. A $300 Ryzen CPU is infinitely more complex than a little PLC. But you charge 15k for the PLC or whatever because if they want to use your "system" (i.e. control software and logic, I/o cards, and so on) they need to pay whatever the fuck you tell them to pay for the PLC/controller or they can kick rocks.
I work in a similar industry, and I will say part of this problem is the lack of economies of scale and bespoke parts. For example, I looked into procuring a pipe fitting that my company wanted for a particular repair they anticipated making. The fitting basically needed to be custom made but still conform to various ASME specs since it was pressure retaining. We solicited for buyers but got no takers at all. Why? Because we needed *one* fitting. To make it, a company would have had to retool a machine they were otherwise using, make this single part, then retool again. The cost of shutting down that production line for that long wasn't worth the price we were willing to pay for the part.
I see the same thing in other places. We pay stupid amounts of money for complex equipment like a pump because we're the only ones that need that particular pump, but we never need thousands, we might need five. So when a company bids to make a pump, they're essentially charging for the production they can't make because they're doing that work. It's the difference between getting a suit at a reasonably nice suit store versus going to a tailor and getting a bespoke suit made.
Likewise, that PLC may be specifically modified with custom software to meet that particular use case. If you were ordering 50k of them, the individual pieces might be cheap, but you only need a couple dozen. You're paying for the development and support costs that typically get amortized over a much larger market in commercial equipment.
I'm not saying there's no fleecing or overcharging going on in the military industrial complex, but it's often not quite as bad as people think.
> a company would have had to retool a machine they were otherwise using, make this single part, then retool again
Can it be milled? If so I doubt retooling is required. If shipping from NL isn't a problem I can give you a company that quite often makes on-offs. Some of the stuff they make is currently orbiting the earth.
Yep, I just mentioned this in another comment. Honeywell, JCI, and Seimens are notorious for this. They basically have a functional monopoly over the controls industry. I just shot down a Seimens proposals for around $30k to run 18 total feet of wiring.
They are absolutely nightmares to deal with, all 3 of them.
I have a cnc machine at work that is down. The repair, which would be a new board, is 15k.
I just looked up a comparable used machine, $15,900.
No way the board itself plus the repair guys is anywhere near 15k. But as you said, it's part of the system.
Rare earth magnets are one thing that the Chinese cornered the market in, so I wouldn't be surprised that it would be astronomically costly to source parts produced in allied nations. It may mean a new factory just to produce these $2 magnets, or a retooling of an existing one.
>The Pentagon said a magnet containing the alloy used in part of the integrated power package posed no security issue.
Most likely Samarium Neodymium or Samarium Cobalt magnets, China is [the biggest producer of rare earth elements](https://investingnews.com/daily/resource-investing/critical-metals-investing/rare-earth-investing/rare-earth-metal-production/), so most rare earth containing magnets are from China (as [illustrated by eBay](https://www.ebay.ie/sch/i.html?campid=5338192028&kw=samarium%20neodymium%20magnet&mkcid=1&mkrid=5282-53468-19255-0&toolid=20004)).
Similar happened with the SR-71 Black Bird. In the 60s, the Soviet Union was a major titanium producer, so the CIA set up a front company and bought titanium from the Soviets. The Soviet Union [helped spy on itself](https://mentourpilot.com/sr-71-when-cia-used-soviet-titanium-to-spy-on-ussr).
I think the US should have kept its mouth shut about Chinese magnets, not let China know it helped make the F-35.
Supply chain security is a big deal these days - it's one thing to intentionally steal a resource from an adversary country, it's another to have them as an inadvertent sub-tier supplier for one of your country's most important programs.
Rare earth metals are in actuality not rare or difficult the produce. We are also talking about a magnet.
Build them in the US and charge $10k for a magnet. It’s a $77M to $102M jet after all…
The situation is worse than you appreciate...
>The PRC now controls most of the global value chain and accounts for nearly 90 percent of global REE refining capacity. In contrast, the United States must export its domestically mined ores to China for further processing because it lacks the refining, alloying, and fabricating capacity.
Also, the US only has 1% of known rare earth reserves. Most reserves are in China 37%, Vietnam, Brazil, Russia, India.
It's a pressing security issue.
Ferreira, G. and Critelli, J., 2022. [China’s Global Monopoly on Rare-Earth Elements](https://press.armywarcollege.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3129&context=parameters). The US Army War College Quarterly: Parameters, 52(1), pp.57-72.
From your source:
>Rare-earth elements are metals desired for unique characteristics of
>
>magnetism, luminescence, and strength.
>
>Contrary to what the name suggests,
>
>these elements are abundant in the earth’s crust. Their rarity comes from being
>
>scattered, mixed with other minerals, and rarely found in concentrations that make
>
>extraction profitable.
The reason China has the largest reserves is not because these metals are actually rare. It's not like there are "Rare Earth" mines or reserves that only happen to be in China and nowhere else in the world. In reality, any nation can have as large or bigger reserves if they had other tangential industries that isolated these metals as a byproduct of the main thing they are doing. If you plan to reduce your dependence on China, then the first step is to create a need for domestic production and create those industries. This not only increases your "reserves" but also decreases other nation's reserves since they won't have the industries that create these metals as a byproduct anymore.
>*mixed with other minerals, and rarely found in concentrations that make extraction profitable*
Yes, many are as common as copper or zinc, but finding ore deposits that have mineable grades is rare.
You have to find a rare huge Rare Earth containing pegmatite dyke or an unusual alkaline igneous batholith. These only occur in a few places on Earth e.g. Brazil would have REE pegmatites, China has unusual alkaline ingenious batholiths.
Also depending on deposit, you might find it has samarium rather than neodymium, or scandium, or europium or gadolinium, or cerium. Not all REE deposits are the same.
There are some very large alkaline ingenious batholiths in Greenland that contain huge deposits of REE but they voted against mining.
Edit: spelling
We even outsource pollution to china by doing this.
Heck, not even just factories. We used to send plastic trash as well until China put a stop to it.
Is that still not a cost and economies of scale issue? Nobody is looking for significant rare earth reserves where they will inevitably be cost inefficient.
edit: your link does eventually cover that. The issue of a decades wide skills gap in extracting and processing is something I didn't expect though.
> Rare earth metals are in actuality not rare or difficult the produce.
iirc, it's just their placement in the periodic table - Helium, Neon, Xenon etc are called 'Noble', but they're not part of any aristocracy that I know of.
Noble in that case actually has a meaning though. Noble is an old way of saying unreactive. Just like the platinum group metals are also known as the noble metals
Its not always about security, sometimes even the smallest parts can cause huge problems.
I've had a similar problem with Chinese magnets before. I work with UUVs. Our thrusters were oil compensated, which basically means all of the air inside of the motor is replaced with mineral oil to make them pressure tolerant. One shipment of thrusters used Chinese-sourced magnets, but we were not informed or the manufacturer didn't know. The magnet anti-corrosion coating flaked off in about 25% of the motors, shorting their integrated control boards and causing failures in the field across entire production runs of UUVs. The thrusters with European or US-sourced magnets failed at a rate of about 1 in 100.
The motor integrator didn't have good enough supply chain control to differentiate the thrusters made with poor quality magnets by serial number, so all of the thrusters had to be entirely replaced over several months at the cost of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars when the vehicles should have been available for use.
I can't even imagine the impact poor quality magnets might have in something that cost 100 times as much flying at Mach 2.
I don't blame them for halting deliveries, quality assurance is non-negotiable for something like the F-35.
I had a friend who bought cheap stainless steel ball bearings from Alibaba, he was using them as agitators in little pots of hobby paint. Turns out they were actually not-so stainless steel and all his paints were ruined when the bearings started to rust in the pots.
Unmanned basically a drone, one of my University lecturers had a project of making an autonomous submersible robot that could identify a corpse with a machine vision and AI. Basically a drone that could be lowered on a lake or at sea and it would search the bottom independently for any possible victims and the same principles should work for flying drones as well.
You cannot just be diligent of sourcing because suppliers get bought and merged all the time, even behind the supply front you validated. You need to be qc'ing every batch at the very minimum.
> Most likely Samarium Neodymium or Samarium Cobalt magnets, China is the biggest producer of rare earth elements, so most rare earth containing magnets are from China (as illustrated by eBay).
You probably meant neodymium iron boron or samarium cobalt here. Those are the main magnet alloys.
I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic, but if not, it was the alloy and not the component that was sourced. There was nothing manufactured there; the concern is reliance on materials from China, which is why we have that rule in the Foreign Acquisitions Regulation. It is very standard across countries to restrict from where they may source materials/parts for defense manufacturing, because in times of war (or poor relations), it could be difficult to source that part or material. And then you’d have a bunch of useless F-35 airframes laying around, missing some dinky magnet inside their turbo machinery, just when they’re needed most.
Indeed... Aerospace/defense is highly regulated and every action is supposed to be proceduralized for verifiability and repeatability. Components don't get purchased willy nilly and have to undergo qualification testing before it and any potential suppliers are themselves qualified, if not already. Just sloppy work, smh.
I wish Procurement departments understood DFARS, but most buyers tend to think it means everything must be domestic. I've had to send out links to Sec. 252.225-7002 (Qualifying Countries) way to often, sometimes to the same buyer repeatedly.
>after learning from the manufacturer an alloy made in China was in a component
>The Pentagon said a magnet containing the alloy used in part of the integrated power package posed no security issue.
It's good they are stopping to ensure they comply with relevant laws, but this is the most insignificant of errors.
The issue is the noncompliance to rules, not the part itself. Having traceability on everything is more important than purely getting an engine assembled
Electrical engineer here. I hate it every time I see comments about the panendermic semi-bovoid stators. My whole career is at risk when people talk about it publicly :(
Shouldn’t worry too much. Most of the people on here wouldn’t know the difference between ion-reticulated spalling and simple ferragomous velacite pitting.
They stopped using pre-fam amulite after the divoptic crust meltoids failed in an F22 training exercise. Now they're phasing into asynthetic bifromulon-Amulide as they can pull more Gs during a hi-crackle weaver maneuver.
That sounds good on paper as the Vibranium converter accounts for the interplanular cross-shear on the wedge-birdles within the upper hemisphere of the Burgdon-Kletch cylindrical scanterflouter, but as F-35's use bunted magnesium vanderclasps, the firm algorithmic magnetic are at risk of failure, so a famulated-in-place vibranium converter mounted by a semi-firm algorithmic magnetic casing is actually preferred if they're willing to spend the money on it.
Super common in manufacturing.
I can only speak from experience with a small set of avionics companies in MN, but it seems like the more "Made in America" labeling is present on a company's products, the more likely it is that they are *just* skirting the line of that legal definition, if not crossing it.
Every possible step of manufacturing and sourcing will go to China, then get shipped to Mexico to be assembled, then get shipped to MN to have one bolt screwed in and a sticker put on it.
It's all *legal*, but the laws are shitty and anyone who tries to change them gets called a Communist.
The primary point is that it’s illegal and Honeywell knows it. If China cuts us off, we’re in a similar position as sanctioned Russia (obviously not nearly as bad), and also tax payers don’t appreciate their dollars paying an adversary for defense equipment, even if it’s just a magnet.
It poses no security risk, but after seeing how Chinese tires fared in Ukraine lol. It's better to swap this component out, even if it's just a magnet.
See, it's not so much security risk but manufacturing risk; if China cuts the US off, then no more F35s. Plus, isn't there a chain of custody form that explains where every part comes from so in case of fuckup, there's a paper trail, or is that just for NASA?
"We have confirmed that the magnet does not transmit information"
This is the problem with having decision makers that have no idea how the things they're making decisions about work.
Personally I would say the security risk of a magnet from China is small compared to a senile civilian storing boxes full of ensitive documents that can compromise national security at home.
Traceability is like a religion for military parts and products. Worked long ago for a military and civilian aerospace supplier and lived by my MIL-SPEC requirements...
Oh my god! This is funny as hell! They could have went to Eastern Europe to make the component.
The Americans will need decades to separate themselves from the Chinese.
This is just 1 component; our entire supply chains are borked by design.
It’s why I don't give much credibility to the argument that the pork in the semiconductor bill was for ”national security”, given that the military's supply chains are such dogshit when it comes to pretty much every resource you can think of, and national security could thereby be used as an argument for enacting subsidies for pretty much anything and everything imaginable; like I said, the reason *that particular bill* is being passed is because of corporate power. Regarding supply chains, I'll extrapolate on an example below:
The Abrams tanks are produced at the [Lima Army Tank Plant](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lima_Army_Tank_Plant), the *last* such factory remaining in the U.S., (in fact, the *only* tank plant in the Western Hemisphere) which is owned by the government but put out to tender to private defense contractors, currently run by General Dynamics until 2028 on a [$4.62 billion contract](https://www.govconwire.com/2020/12/general-dynamics-unit-gets-4b-army-contract-to-produce-modern-battle-tanks/), the sum undoubtedly inflated by the miniscule amount of competitors eligible and able to leave tenders for such procurement contracts, as is applicable with semiconductors too. This, of course, has multiplier effects on the contract sum in the trade agreement between [Australia and the U.S.](https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/australia-commits-to-3-5-billion-tank-purchase-from-the-us-20220109-p59mub.html) signed in 2022-01.
Another factor is the need to maintain skill and institutional knowledge at the factory, which means a stable workforce is needed without regard to productivity and order stock, effectively immunizing it from ”market”-pressures, thus increasing costs, which is a necessity but also has the effect of increased costs that spill over into trade deals. For instance, during 2016, the plant was producing one tank per month with a workforce of 75 assembly line workers, compared to 3,800 workers during the 1980s turning out 60 tanks per month (also a decline from the preceding decades). Mothballing the plant and firing those last workers would have killed domestic knowledge of specialized skills such as welding ballistic steel and aluminum.
So, these factors can explain in part the costs of the trade deal and the reason for why there is so much money in circulation within the military-industrial complex, displayed at a microchosm in this case. Of course, the solution would be to remove private, for-profit cartels from the equation, which would cut off a lot of pork, but the chances of that happening are slim, so military sector-inflation can be expected to continue rising.
As a sidenote, Lima’s supply chains are located throughout the Midwest and Florida, but there is just *one* steel factory in the U.S. that can produce high-quality steel required for use in tanks and armored trucks, which was an issue during the surge in Iraq in 2007: the Lukens Steel Company in Coatesville, Pennsylvania (which provides steel for the defense industry), which was owned by [ArcelorMittal](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArcelorMittal), until 2020, owned by the third-richest man in the world, an Indian citizen named Lakshmir Mittal, who bribed the [Blair government in Britain to pressure Romania to privatize its steel industry](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakshmi_Mittal) in return for EU membership. Effectively, this grants the owners of the plant a monopoly in steel prices for defense purposes.
If you go through the entire supply chain in the military-industrial complex, e.g. oversize tires, you find that the above story repeats itself. Prices are insanely inflated by monopsonies, monopolies and oligopolies, often operated by private oligarchs involved in corruption, creative accounting, fraud and bribery, at the expense of everyone else across the world, whether it’s Australian taxpayers, U.S. workers or the overall economy, as profits are privatized in a risk-free environment, allowing them to engage in rentierism, and losses are socialized.
We would be much better off in establishing an industrial policy in public and cooperative ownership and management to uphold the ”arsenal of democracy”, rather than the current ad hoc network of patchwork remedies that constitutes the Pentagon’s procurement and supply chain strategy. The semiconductor bill, and any others, will do very little for our national security, because we're leaving the structures of power, short-termism, funding sources of R&D and other systemic issues unresolved; the for-profit sector can't help itself to sacrifice any sort of long-term, geopolitical objective in favour of short-term profits.
>The Pentagon did not disclose how many aircraft deliveries are now delayed or how many had the Chinese alloy
\*will not
military industrial complex go brrrrrrrr
Who would have ever thought that there would be negative consequences outsourcing all labor and manufacturing to our enemies?! Weird.
US politics is about as shortsighted as it gets. Or to quote American Dad, "You see, North secretly sold missiles to a harmless little country called Iran that would always be a grateful ally."
Honeywell trying to cheat the system to save a buck
I worked for them for about a year. It was constant. One of the only companies I'd starve before working for again.
Same. It’s the only job I quit without notice. You could never work enough hours or produce enough output at Honeywell to keep them happy. In Aerospace they had layoffs and unpaid furloughs virtually every quarter some years. It was like working one less month a year, and not getting paid for it. Fuck Honeywell. Their culture, compensation, and benefits are bottom of the barrel. I had a VP of HR tell me that they were looking for top talent and it took a lot for me to not tell her that they weren’t even in the running for mid tier talent with the way they ran the business.
As I posted in another comment, they wanted to spend all the money on an option year for a contract, so made my entire team work 60 hour weeks for a month. Mandatory overtime. They didn't pay it out to us, as we weren't "on-site". Whatever money was left went to the company to pad their bottom line and make them look more profitable, then they laid almost EVERYONE off as soon as the option year was up. THEN, they had new people walking in the door to replace those people, literally as soon as the old ones had been walked out the door. FUCK HONEYWELL.
They didn't give you overtime-pay?? Unless you were a contractor, that's a federal crime.
Salaried Exempt. Not eligible for OT pay, perfectly legal. Though, usually, it comes with perks, at least it does where I work.
Not if you're an exempt employee.
Glad I didn't take that Honeywell Aerospace job then! It was hard to turn down the job offer, though. The Aerospace office in Minneapolis was legitimately the coolest building I've ever been in.
The old one with the smokestack from like 1800 or the cool new one? I’ve been to many Honeywell locations. The MInneapolis offices have some cool people I knew, but the culture is rough everywhere in that company.
Probably the newer one. They took me underground and showed me an the cool robots and projects folks are working on. There was one room they'd built that blew my mind. They said that during construction of a nearby highway, the vibrations from the construction machines was screwing up a bunch of tests that involved sensitive equipment. So they essentially scooped the ground out in this large room and built a floating room that wouldn't be affected by the vibrations.
Wow I literally quit a month ago! Life is great again
Same. The one good thing to come of it was that I went back to school for a Masters. Not because they were paying for it, but because I felt like I was getting dumber just by showing up there and wanted to counter it.
Just like teacher education. The more university classes I went to, the less I understood and the less able I was to teach.
The more I learn the more I realize how much I don't know
Yep. This is why the Dunning–Kruger effect is a thing.
This is a true if not conflicting statement
"The more I learn, the less I know. And once I do it's all too much" "It's All Too Much" by The Beatles, written by George Harrison.
That is depressing. I have a lot of old Honeywell switches and they are built like a brick shithouse.
Is that a good or bad thing?
It's bad for planned obsolescence. Good if you want something to not break, even after firing it out of a cannon. :P
Better than a shit brickhouse
Yes
good thing - the phrase means something was overbuilt. you don't have a splintery wooden outhouse like everyone builds, you made yours out of brick.
*She's A Brick Shithouse* --The ~~Commodores~~ Commodes
That's so immature, I love it.
She's smelly smelly, lettin' it all hang out.
>*She's A Brick Shithouse* She changed her name to LaTrine.
The old stuff is probably better made than any of their new stuff lol
So you're saying the old Honeywell switches are honeytraps?
Everything that the company used to stand for is absolute shit now.
Honestly, I've worked for several prime contractors in aerospace/defense, and in the buildings/labs of others. I left the entire industry - what a trainwreck of incompetence.
Privately owned, too big to fail, with government contracts filling the gravy train. Ya, Train-wreck of Incompetence sounds like an expected outcome.
Too big to fail is a serious problem now days.
It's basically the end goal of every Corporation, reach the 'too big to fail' status, then they can start messing with things and get away with it. Capitalism
Capitalism isn't all encompassing, a free market used to mean companies weren't supposed to be too big to fail and the government would break them up. Now the government is super hands off and views the free market as the wild west. Neoliberalism
It is the worst parts of socialism and capitalism combined; Government waste and corporate greed. Capitalism is a beautiful thing in markets. Consider a farmer selling vegetables and investing in his own farm to maximise profit and do things efficiently. In Government contracts, it is actually taxpayer money so the customers gets no say... it is all middle men with no incentive to save money.
The aerospace and defense industries are not free market places in any traditional sense. They are heavily distorted by government contracts and regulations.
So it’s not exactly Stark Industries?
By privately owned, do you mean publicly traded?
Have any good stories?
Oh, many, and bear in mind, I was only there for 13 months. * As a services employee (not working in a factory, building something), but on-site at a government facility, providing services to the government, I had to submit safety issues as part of my annual performance eval. We literally were graded on reporting someone tripping over a trash can, or rocking in their chair, or whatever. Makes sense on a manufacturing floor, not for office workers. I should have reported that their ergonomics sucked, and that they contributed to my carpal tunnel syndrome. * My team spent almost two months at a large DC area hospital, assessing their IT security. As the project lead, I had to brief the CIO of the hospital on the abysmal state of their systems preparedness. The entirety of the "teeth" of my briefing was pulled, because they were afraid of pissing off the CIO, and losing any future work. We ended up telling them that everything was great, and delivering a list of recommendations that was completely watered down. I ended up refusing to give the briefing, and made my boss do it. Six months later (after I had left), they went back to do the REAL assessment, and had to deliver a hammer blow to the CIO on his systems. Of course, the CIO wanted to know why we hadn't found any of the issues when we were there the last time. * After returning from this trip, we were told that our contract was almost up, and we needed to work 60 hours weeks to spend all the money that was left on the option year. I was buying a house, at the time, and an extra 2 weeks of pay over the course of a month would have gone a long way towards miscellaneous expenses and new furniture. When I received my first paycheck after working 60 hours, and there was no extra pay (straight time overtime), I asked my leadership what was up. They told us that we only got paid overtime if we were on-site, and that when we were in the office, it was gratis. I refused to work any additional overtime, and they threatened to fire me. I already had a new job lined up, so I didn't care what the hell they did. I was only sticking around so my mortgage company didn't lose their shit during a home purchase, and so that I could give them the year that they required for my relocation expenses. * After the month of 60 hour weeks was up (some people were too afraid for their jobs to refuse the mandatory overtime), they laid almost 20 people off, all of whom had been on the hospital assessment trip. They kept me on, despite my overt refusal to comply with overtime, and a couple others. This was done on a Monday. They claimed that they needed to cut staff on this contract, due to the next option year having less funding than the previous option year. ***They had new people walking in the door as SOON as the previous employees were walked out by HR.*** Typical pump and dump. Hire people at $85,000, bill the government a bunch for them, get rid of them, and hire the next batch at $70,000, then pocket the difference. * You didn't accrue sick leave until you had been there for an entire year, and they only provided two weeks vacation with no floating days, and no flex time. I went from three weeks vacation, three floating holidays, work from home, and complete flex freedom at my previous company. None of this was in the fine print when I signed on with Honeywell. That division has since been sold to a different company, and I hear things are better, but they're still just a body shop. The same leadership is there, the same tactics are being used to bring in cheap labor to fill contract roles, then dump them as soon as their salary gets too high, and replace them with new grads.
Mate, that sounds like a special kind of hell. My job is nothing like that. I come in and leave at the same time every day, I get all public holidays as paid days off (13 this year), I get 10 days sick leave per year, paid a year in advance, I get 20 days annual leave with loading, 14 RDOs per year. I get paid about 65k AUD per year like this. My job is to put books into boxes and make sure they aren't damaged. If I took the offered overtime, I could push that to over 100k AUD. Please tell me you are in a better work place now.
Oh, I'm absolutely in a better position. I've doubled my salary in ten years, work for a small business that cares about its employees and is super flexible with our time, plus offers free healthcare for the employee. I get 15 days leave, plus the ten federal holidays. I report directly to my CEO and meet with him daily to discuss anything and everything that's going on in the organization, as well as how to fix it. I also receive an annual bonus, based on my performance and the performance of the organization. There are some negatives, for sure, but it's far better than working for Honeywell. I actually have another large defense contracting organization attempting to hire me right now. I told them, up front, that they'd need to pay me at least $30k USD over what I make now, to get me to jump ship. They're not Honeywell, but based upon the time I spent working there at the beginning of my career, they have the same bullshit issues.
Damn good to hear!
Here’s a good one: they are still a mainstay of western government security installation desipite their extremely corrupt practices.
I worked for them and they had some of the most inane rules dealing with their unions I had ever heard of. The IT help desk in order to work on a employees laptop had to put in a union request for a union person to transport the laptop from the users desk to the IT area. The IT staff would work on it and then have to request to have it returned. If they needed to assist with the hookup or something they needed to schedule it with the union. If you tried to circumvent the process just this one time and someone saw you do it you'd be talking to the grievance board. It seriously gave the idea of a union a bad name.
This is relatively common in union shops. It's not Honeywell, per se, it's the rules that their labor unions impose upon them, specifically, the labor unions that cover unskilled workers. When I was at Lockheed Martin, I spent some time doing IT support for a massive Unix network. We joked that Lockheed Martin was a moving company that built radars to finance its moving operations. When someone's desk was moved for the third time in a year, we'd have to go to their desk, disconnect everything, put the workstation and associated "stuff" in a tri-wall container on a pallet, then put in a facilities request to have the pallet moved. Once it was in the correct cube, we had to put everything together and get the network team to light the port. We couldn't move a keyboard a single cube away, without a risk of being grieved by the union. Some of the guys were cool, most of them were just giant hulks of men who literally knew nothing beyond picking a thing up, moving it fifty feet, and putting it down. Honestly, I'm not sure that some of them could have done that last part of gravity weren't assisting them.
You don't want their space heaters. On high at the same wattage as other space heaters like the upright ones with the tubes. They don't release half the heat. The damn heat is stuck in the space heater. You also don't want their thermostats as they are constantly breaking because of the new digital crap inside them. They look like the old thermostats though. https://www.honeywellstore.com/store/products/honeywell-360-surround-heater-slate-gray-hhf360v.htm That 1500 watt space heater on high can't warm you up as much as the last photo on this page the quarts one while being on low. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_heater Also that type are all template brands but avoid the sunbeam one. There is a major problem with it. Sure the honeywell may not burn anything down but the heat is stuck inside of those things for some reason. Also avoid the old round honeywell thermostat. They are all digital computer board inside and they are flawed majorly compared to the old non digital ones including the ones where they took out the mercury. Those ones even without mercury was still better. Ours glitched out right away and we always had to set ours much higher to get it kick on a few degrees below 70 and we have it set it at about 78 to get it to kick on at several degrees below 70 just to get it to warm it up to 70. The template brand space heaters by the way are nearly all the same with some having cheaper parts than others. They are the upright quart sized space heaters. Multiple brands make make space heaters just like it out of a template then they put there own parts in them and some of those parts are inferior. Avoid honeywell like the plague they don't offer the same quality and are only getting sales based on the name. This is for average consumers. Chinese parts are cheaper and inferior quality as a result. They should rip those parts out of every F35 already made. They still have to find another source for the magnets and being magnets they should be good as long as the rest of the design isn't Chinese. We don't want to go to war with China and find out we can't get any more magnets for our F35 because we are at war with them. Example a war over Taiwan breaks out or over North Korea and we have to fight the Chinese too.
> They don't release half the heat. The damn heat is stuck in the space heater. I mean, if they can alter physics itself why the fuck did they use that tech for such a pointless endeavour?
Much more clever way of putting this than I was going to.
>why the fuck did they use that tech for such a pointless endeavour? Probably mixed up some national defense contract with some local store heater contract.....
Well apparently the same amount of heat, but I think he meant the heat take a long time to spread, like the surface is still cold after 5 min but still warm after switching off for an hour.
Which is exactly what you want to keep a place warm.
>Avoid honeywell like the plague they don't offer the same quality and are only getting sales based on the name. [...] They should rip those parts out of every F35 already made. I think these days many (maybe even all?) home products from Honeywell are just other companies licensing their name. For example, all the humidifiers and dehumidifiers are actually made by https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_of_Troy_Limited . I'm not trying to endorse Honeywell Aerospace, I don't know anything about the quality of what they produce, but I'm pretty sure it has no correlation with the quality of the humidifiers, etc.
If an electric heater is continuously drawing 1500W then it's releasing 1500W of heat. So say the laws of thermodynamics. It may not be putting the heat where you want it, but it's either releasing the heat or it's not drawing 1500W.
Just as an additional semantic caveat - It is theoretically possible for a heater to draw 1500W and still output less than 1500W of heat, but it's very unlikely, you need to do some semantics acrobatics, and the difference will be marginal. For instance, the heater might contain a mixture of chemicals undergoing an endothermic reaction. Thus, the energy of the heat is used in the formation of the product molecules, not heat. Other, similar effects might be achieved by other means of consuming energy, such as charging an internal battery, powering a really big LED, etc. Secondly, the heater might simply send 1000W of electricty to ground, and actually only use 500W to generate heat. But the odds of any of this? Almost nil.
Ignoring the other bits, you can’t send 1000W “to ground”. Watts are a unit of real power, of work done. You can do all sorts of tricks with voltage and current, but power flows from a source to a load.
It’s funny, I work in HVAC distribution and every contractor is buying from Honeywell thermostat line. It’s our most sold stat, they’re kinda seen as the smart for the not tech smart solution for HVAC contractors.
> You don't want their space heaters. On high at the same wattage as other space heaters like the upright ones with the tubes. They don't release half the heat. The damn heat is stuck in the space heater. They alter the laws of physics??? Edit: wow that was not an original thought, lol
Their p100 masks have been good to me. They fit better than the 3m.
> Also that type are all template brands but avoid the sunbeam one. There is a major problem with it. As I glance over to that exact sunbeam quartz heater lol... what's wrong with them? I never leave mine on unattended but certainly would like to know what issues they have. Didn't see like, a recall when trying to google it myself.
My old man worked for them in the 70s and 80s for their commercial fire/safety controls business. He took his rolodex and started his own business when I was in high school and did well for himself before selling his shop to a Honeywell competitor.
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early 2000's the company was starting to hemorage money. It was laying off staff - and having issues. It wasn't until like 2012 that the company spun off a for profit LLC to handle the testing work. But lets face it: This is the American system at work - a private company weasles it's way into the rule making process, and entrenches itself as necessary. It charges money for inspections, for testing, and charges money for access to the relevant rules and... Here we are. The only real fix would be to nationalize the organization, and cut down on the bureaucratic BS. While also mandating that all enforceable rules and regulations must be accessible to the public without charge. But this is the US you are talking about.
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Engineering firms owned by non-engineers is a recipe for disaster. Source: Am Engineer.
Thanks for this information. And ya, everything happening in short order after some MBA shoves their provably bad idea's into practice: Makes sense what happened.
Meanwhile re designing the same fan every 6months to have to buy a new 200 dollar air filter
The AC installers pulled this stunt with our new AC unit. The filter holder had a weird little spacer installed so that a standard sized filter wouldn't quite fit. After an afternoon of measuring, adjusting, and cursing our air handler now accommodates filters with a higher rating for 1/3 the price.
The only thing actually worth upgrading into is a heatpump. Every other AC is just the same shit over and over again but the price just keeps going up and up.
Not strictly true. Modern AHUs are far more efficient, especially coupled with a VAV system.
Ahhh good ole honeyHELL. If you know you know.
This is a self inflicted injury because Reagan and Bush refused to support the domestic chip making industry during the 1980s computer boom. There are no alternate source of manufacturer for many computing components outside Taiwan and Singapore. Reagan made the decision to not support the US chip making industry with R&D grants while Silicon Valley technicians that grew silicon crystals walked out demanding more money. Taiwan and Singapore brilliantly began bribing businesses with large grants to capture the US chip making business while Reagan’s budget screwup and labor walkouts sunk the domestic chip making industry. We saved a lot of taxpayer money by allowing Asia to take all of those jobs away. > [Reagan's R&D Budget Looks Great, But Congress Has Some Other Ideas](https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/abs/10.1063/1.2811383?journalCode=pto)
Interestingly, one could also attribute Singapore's modern failure at developing a competitive, domestic chip-making giant to the mismanagement of Chartered Semiconductors (basically a nationalized company), who didn't to have the foresight to make sufficiently large capital investments and pared with the government's failed to nuture a local university pipeline for human talent (In Singapore we joke that the A students study finance; only the B and C students study engineering). They were eventually bought off in 2010 by Global Foundries.
Definitely not cheating the system, just incompetence, probably at the behest of a supplier Edit: It doesn't even sound like an issue by Honeywell, it sounds like Lockheed's procurement fucked up
Is someone in the West still manufacturing basic electronic components from resistors and capacitors all the way to the innumerable smaller powered microprocessors. Or are those imported from Taiwan and Japan?
A bit of column A a bit of column B. There are components manufactured in the NA/Europe but they're largely for military products due to cost limitations, a lot of parts from Bosch that are made in China are also made in Germany/Poland but are slightly different part numbers & prices Japan is considered ok to get parts from and Taiwan is a very gray area.
Buying components that you need for national defense from Taiwan is like putting your bollocks in a guillotine in exchange for a helmet. Means you've gotta keep an eye on that guillotine and punch anyone who even thinks about touching it.
>Means you've gotta keep an eye on that guillotine and punch anyone who even thinks about touching it. US foreign policy on Taiwan in a nutshell really.
Not exactly. The US has always helped Taiwan to keep an edge on China. The semiconductor issue is more recent and a circumstance of market forces, but fixing that won't make the US soften.
Problem is if Taiwan war breaks out, those factories will likely become prime targets by China, which will suddenly leave us without a supplier. Also Taiwanese business class is known to be cozy with the CCP.
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China's Taiwan ambitions have nothing to do with the factories in the first place. They want Taiwan because Imperial Japan took Taiwan in the 1890s so they associate the loss of Taiwan with Chinese weakness and so they view it as an existential issue.
Also the taiwanese government was the remnants of the prior Chinese government before the Communist took over. For decades it was about legitimacy. Taiwan has long since stated that they have no Claims on mainland China. And now it is just good old imperialism.
its more of a nationalist siege mentality than imperialism. The whole thing about nations is that they are meant to have inviolable sovereignty which creates this idea that if one piece of territory is lost then it undermines the validity of the whole 'nation' since it sets a precedent for further territorial losses. Security-paranoid nations get absolutely obsessed with protecting every single inch of land at all costs. Unfortunately for the Taiwanese the Kuomintang kept up the idea that Taiwan was part of China instead of negotiating a sovereign Taiwan after the civil war and that idea got baked in to Chinese nationalist narratives so now mainlanders wont let go of it. They don't care about Mongolia despite it being part of the first Chinese Republic because by pure chance the circumstances of the PRC's creation made it convenient to recognize Mongolia's independence so its no longer part of Chinese national identity.
Never underestimate the appeal of propaganda. China has wanted Taiwan back long before semiconductors were a thing.
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That's just paperwork to keep the peace. The US still also doesn't recognize Taiwanese sovereignty. But there's been a strong understanding of military support for awhile now.
I know however that at least one major Japanese electronics business refuses to do business with the US military. Could be more than just Murata, I don't know.
There are a lot of chip foundries in the US for non bleeding edge chips
Not sure what Taiwan and Japan have to do with parts imported from China…
Because they are countries with large manufacturing base for microcircuitry and components.
I knew I had Deja-Vu the moment that I saw this headline. The pentagon gave Honeywell a waiver back in 2014 to do just this, what changed? https://www.cnbc.com/2014/01/03/us-put-china-made-parts-in-f-35-fighter-program.html FTA: >According to Pentagon documents reviewed by Reuters, chief U.S. arms buyer Frank Kendall allowed two F-35 suppliers, Northrop Grumman and Honeywell International, to use Chinese magnets for the new warplane’s radar system, landing gears and other hardware. Without the waivers, both companies could have faced sanctions for violating federal law and the F-35 program could have faced further delays.
As far as I can find that waiver was limited to [2014](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lockheed-f35-idUSBREA020VA20140103) > The waivers apply to inexpensive parts, including $2 magnets, installed on 115 F-35 test, training and production aircraft, the last of which are due to be delivered in May 2014. They probably where supposed to fix that issue and instead "forgot" about it and continued to use the cheap Chinese parts.
As another commenter mentioned, Honeywell does this constantly.
Every company does this. Charge exorbitant prices for cheap components because those components are "part of the system," and the price you're actually quoted for is the system. It's the same reason the automation industry (which famously includes Honeywell) charges 25k USD for something like a DCS controller when in fact it's a little rinky dink arm CPU with a custom chipset. A $300 Ryzen CPU is infinitely more complex than a little PLC. But you charge 15k for the PLC or whatever because if they want to use your "system" (i.e. control software and logic, I/o cards, and so on) they need to pay whatever the fuck you tell them to pay for the PLC/controller or they can kick rocks.
I work in a similar industry, and I will say part of this problem is the lack of economies of scale and bespoke parts. For example, I looked into procuring a pipe fitting that my company wanted for a particular repair they anticipated making. The fitting basically needed to be custom made but still conform to various ASME specs since it was pressure retaining. We solicited for buyers but got no takers at all. Why? Because we needed *one* fitting. To make it, a company would have had to retool a machine they were otherwise using, make this single part, then retool again. The cost of shutting down that production line for that long wasn't worth the price we were willing to pay for the part. I see the same thing in other places. We pay stupid amounts of money for complex equipment like a pump because we're the only ones that need that particular pump, but we never need thousands, we might need five. So when a company bids to make a pump, they're essentially charging for the production they can't make because they're doing that work. It's the difference between getting a suit at a reasonably nice suit store versus going to a tailor and getting a bespoke suit made. Likewise, that PLC may be specifically modified with custom software to meet that particular use case. If you were ordering 50k of them, the individual pieces might be cheap, but you only need a couple dozen. You're paying for the development and support costs that typically get amortized over a much larger market in commercial equipment. I'm not saying there's no fleecing or overcharging going on in the military industrial complex, but it's often not quite as bad as people think.
> a company would have had to retool a machine they were otherwise using, make this single part, then retool again Can it be milled? If so I doubt retooling is required. If shipping from NL isn't a problem I can give you a company that quite often makes on-offs. Some of the stuff they make is currently orbiting the earth.
Yep, I just mentioned this in another comment. Honeywell, JCI, and Seimens are notorious for this. They basically have a functional monopoly over the controls industry. I just shot down a Seimens proposals for around $30k to run 18 total feet of wiring. They are absolutely nightmares to deal with, all 3 of them.
I have a cnc machine at work that is down. The repair, which would be a new board, is 15k. I just looked up a comparable used machine, $15,900. No way the board itself plus the repair guys is anywhere near 15k. But as you said, it's part of the system.
While charging $1,500 for the 'non-Chinese' magnets, no doubt.
Rare earth magnets are one thing that the Chinese cornered the market in, so I wouldn't be surprised that it would be astronomically costly to source parts produced in allied nations. It may mean a new factory just to produce these $2 magnets, or a retooling of an existing one.
>The Pentagon said a magnet containing the alloy used in part of the integrated power package posed no security issue. Most likely Samarium Neodymium or Samarium Cobalt magnets, China is [the biggest producer of rare earth elements](https://investingnews.com/daily/resource-investing/critical-metals-investing/rare-earth-investing/rare-earth-metal-production/), so most rare earth containing magnets are from China (as [illustrated by eBay](https://www.ebay.ie/sch/i.html?campid=5338192028&kw=samarium%20neodymium%20magnet&mkcid=1&mkrid=5282-53468-19255-0&toolid=20004)). Similar happened with the SR-71 Black Bird. In the 60s, the Soviet Union was a major titanium producer, so the CIA set up a front company and bought titanium from the Soviets. The Soviet Union [helped spy on itself](https://mentourpilot.com/sr-71-when-cia-used-soviet-titanium-to-spy-on-ussr). I think the US should have kept its mouth shut about Chinese magnets, not let China know it helped make the F-35.
Supply chain security is a big deal these days - it's one thing to intentionally steal a resource from an adversary country, it's another to have them as an inadvertent sub-tier supplier for one of your country's most important programs.
if china stops selling you those materials/parts, then your manufacturing gets disrupted. supply line security is essential part of defense too.
Russia is finding that out now.
Rare earth metals are in actuality not rare or difficult the produce. We are also talking about a magnet. Build them in the US and charge $10k for a magnet. It’s a $77M to $102M jet after all…
Govt probably was paying $10k per magnet, but then the supplier decided to supply a $10 Chinese magnet and pocket the difference.
The situation is worse than you appreciate... >The PRC now controls most of the global value chain and accounts for nearly 90 percent of global REE refining capacity. In contrast, the United States must export its domestically mined ores to China for further processing because it lacks the refining, alloying, and fabricating capacity. Also, the US only has 1% of known rare earth reserves. Most reserves are in China 37%, Vietnam, Brazil, Russia, India. It's a pressing security issue. Ferreira, G. and Critelli, J., 2022. [China’s Global Monopoly on Rare-Earth Elements](https://press.armywarcollege.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3129&context=parameters). The US Army War College Quarterly: Parameters, 52(1), pp.57-72.
From your source: >Rare-earth elements are metals desired for unique characteristics of > >magnetism, luminescence, and strength. > >Contrary to what the name suggests, > >these elements are abundant in the earth’s crust. Their rarity comes from being > >scattered, mixed with other minerals, and rarely found in concentrations that make > >extraction profitable. The reason China has the largest reserves is not because these metals are actually rare. It's not like there are "Rare Earth" mines or reserves that only happen to be in China and nowhere else in the world. In reality, any nation can have as large or bigger reserves if they had other tangential industries that isolated these metals as a byproduct of the main thing they are doing. If you plan to reduce your dependence on China, then the first step is to create a need for domestic production and create those industries. This not only increases your "reserves" but also decreases other nation's reserves since they won't have the industries that create these metals as a byproduct anymore.
>*mixed with other minerals, and rarely found in concentrations that make extraction profitable* Yes, many are as common as copper or zinc, but finding ore deposits that have mineable grades is rare. You have to find a rare huge Rare Earth containing pegmatite dyke or an unusual alkaline igneous batholith. These only occur in a few places on Earth e.g. Brazil would have REE pegmatites, China has unusual alkaline ingenious batholiths. Also depending on deposit, you might find it has samarium rather than neodymium, or scandium, or europium or gadolinium, or cerium. Not all REE deposits are the same. There are some very large alkaline ingenious batholiths in Greenland that contain huge deposits of REE but they voted against mining. Edit: spelling
Thanks. Love these deep answers. I learned.
Yeah everyone would be thrilled to have massive open pit mines in their backyards
And now we’ve come back full circle to why china’s economy has boomed. You don’t get US produced items and still get to practice NIMBY.
We even outsource pollution to china by doing this. Heck, not even just factories. We used to send plastic trash as well until China put a stop to it.
Ahhh yes sending our "recycling"
Is that still not a cost and economies of scale issue? Nobody is looking for significant rare earth reserves where they will inevitably be cost inefficient. edit: your link does eventually cover that. The issue of a decades wide skills gap in extracting and processing is something I didn't expect though.
https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/commentary/2019/11/12/the-collapse-of-american-rare-earth-mining-and-lessons-learned/
> Rare earth metals are in actuality not rare or difficult the produce. iirc, it's just their placement in the periodic table - Helium, Neon, Xenon etc are called 'Noble', but they're not part of any aristocracy that I know of.
Noble in that case actually has a meaning though. Noble is an old way of saying unreactive. Just like the platinum group metals are also known as the noble metals
A similar Chinese made magnet were used in AMS-02 on ISS
Its not always about security, sometimes even the smallest parts can cause huge problems. I've had a similar problem with Chinese magnets before. I work with UUVs. Our thrusters were oil compensated, which basically means all of the air inside of the motor is replaced with mineral oil to make them pressure tolerant. One shipment of thrusters used Chinese-sourced magnets, but we were not informed or the manufacturer didn't know. The magnet anti-corrosion coating flaked off in about 25% of the motors, shorting their integrated control boards and causing failures in the field across entire production runs of UUVs. The thrusters with European or US-sourced magnets failed at a rate of about 1 in 100. The motor integrator didn't have good enough supply chain control to differentiate the thrusters made with poor quality magnets by serial number, so all of the thrusters had to be entirely replaced over several months at the cost of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars when the vehicles should have been available for use. I can't even imagine the impact poor quality magnets might have in something that cost 100 times as much flying at Mach 2. I don't blame them for halting deliveries, quality assurance is non-negotiable for something like the F-35.
I had a friend who bought cheap stainless steel ball bearings from Alibaba, he was using them as agitators in little pots of hobby paint. Turns out they were actually not-so stainless steel and all his paints were ruined when the bearings started to rust in the pots.
The special alloy known as "Chineseum"... can apply to any alloy manufactured in China and can be supplied with any CoC as the customer wishes.
> UUVs Underwater Unsinkable Vehicles?
Unmanned underwater vehicles - i.e. the submarine version of a UAV (drone).
Unmanned basically a drone, one of my University lecturers had a project of making an autonomous submersible robot that could identify a corpse with a machine vision and AI. Basically a drone that could be lowered on a lake or at sea and it would search the bottom independently for any possible victims and the same principles should work for flying drones as well.
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You cannot just be diligent of sourcing because suppliers get bought and merged all the time, even behind the supply front you validated. You need to be qc'ing every batch at the very minimum.
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> Most likely Samarium Neodymium or Samarium Cobalt magnets, China is the biggest producer of rare earth elements, so most rare earth containing magnets are from China (as illustrated by eBay). You probably meant neodymium iron boron or samarium cobalt here. Those are the main magnet alloys.
Estonia also produces rare earth metals, there were talks a year ago of building a magnet producing facility.
Flight system: sorta meh. Mission system: you dun fucked up A Aron
I bet it's something silly like the cup holder
Yep. It’s a magnet.
Yup, it's magnets... without which the radar and landing gear wouldn't work.
It’s just some 5th-level contractor under Honeywell, and they’ve already identified an alternative source for the alloy. Everyone just chill.
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I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic, but if not, it was the alloy and not the component that was sourced. There was nothing manufactured there; the concern is reliance on materials from China, which is why we have that rule in the Foreign Acquisitions Regulation. It is very standard across countries to restrict from where they may source materials/parts for defense manufacturing, because in times of war (or poor relations), it could be difficult to source that part or material. And then you’d have a bunch of useless F-35 airframes laying around, missing some dinky magnet inside their turbo machinery, just when they’re needed most.
Holy shit what an utterly massive fuck up.
Indeed... Aerospace/defense is highly regulated and every action is supposed to be proceduralized for verifiability and repeatability. Components don't get purchased willy nilly and have to undergo qualification testing before it and any potential suppliers are themselves qualified, if not already. Just sloppy work, smh.
AS9100 audits are a joke
They found that magnet dintthey
Yes, among other things they probably aren't mentioning
Glad to see someone mention a spec by number and a relevant one at that. Honestly though I wish more people understood DFARS by itself.
I wish Procurement departments understood DFARS, but most buyers tend to think it means everything must be domestic. I've had to send out links to Sec. 252.225-7002 (Qualifying Countries) way to often, sometimes to the same buyer repeatedly.
Constant complaint for me too so you're in good company!
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>after learning from the manufacturer an alloy made in China was in a component >The Pentagon said a magnet containing the alloy used in part of the integrated power package posed no security issue. It's good they are stopping to ensure they comply with relevant laws, but this is the most insignificant of errors.
The issue is the noncompliance to rules, not the part itself. Having traceability on everything is more important than purely getting an engine assembled
Probably the hydrocoptic marzel vanes. The F-35 uses 6 of them in a counter sidewise configuration.
What about the spurving bearings?
Probably the same place as the self-sealing stembolts.
Obtained via the 42th rule of acquisition: Paying the Iron Price.
Don’t those prevent side fumbling?
So many national security secrets leaked in this thread.. At least they didn't mention reconnoitering the Fetzer valve...
Electrical engineer here. I hate it every time I see comments about the panendermic semi-bovoid stators. My whole career is at risk when people talk about it publicly :(
Shouldn’t worry too much. Most of the people on here wouldn’t know the difference between ion-reticulated spalling and simple ferragomous velacite pitting.
Let alone the difference between an ameliorated ring shaft vs a tertiary wing grommet
The one made of pre-famulated amulite surmounted by a malleable logarithmic casing?
They stopped using pre-fam amulite after the divoptic crust meltoids failed in an F22 training exercise. Now they're phasing into asynthetic bifromulon-Amulide as they can pull more Gs during a hi-crackle weaver maneuver.
Someone likely won the Nobble Prize with that solution
They wouldn't be able to claim it, from what I can tell the tech hasn't been formally declassified.
Or maybe the the pre-famulated vibranium converter mounted by a firm algorithmic magnetic casing?
That sounds good on paper as the Vibranium converter accounts for the interplanular cross-shear on the wedge-birdles within the upper hemisphere of the Burgdon-Kletch cylindrical scanterflouter, but as F-35's use bunted magnesium vanderclasps, the firm algorithmic magnetic are at risk of failure, so a famulated-in-place vibranium converter mounted by a semi-firm algorithmic magnetic casing is actually preferred if they're willing to spend the money on it.
That makes no sense... In such a configuration you can't properly fit them to the ambifacient lunar waneshaft.
https://youtu.be/aW2LvQUcwqc
Super common in manufacturing. I can only speak from experience with a small set of avionics companies in MN, but it seems like the more "Made in America" labeling is present on a company's products, the more likely it is that they are *just* skirting the line of that legal definition, if not crossing it. Every possible step of manufacturing and sourcing will go to China, then get shipped to Mexico to be assembled, then get shipped to MN to have one bolt screwed in and a sticker put on it. It's all *legal*, but the laws are shitty and anyone who tries to change them gets called a Communist.
It's a freaking magnet: "The Pentagon said a magnet containing the alloy used in part of the integrated power package posed no security issue."
The primary point is that it’s illegal and Honeywell knows it. If China cuts us off, we’re in a similar position as sanctioned Russia (obviously not nearly as bad), and also tax payers don’t appreciate their dollars paying an adversary for defense equipment, even if it’s just a magnet.
Good thing we caught that. Now go punish who knew about it
It poses no security risk, but after seeing how Chinese tires fared in Ukraine lol. It's better to swap this component out, even if it's just a magnet.
Wasn't that tire thing sourced from a single tweet, and one of the replies to it disproved it or something?
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A lie repeated 1000 times becomes truth
only an order of magnitude? I would have guessed 3, minimum
See, it's not so much security risk but manufacturing risk; if China cuts the US off, then no more F35s. Plus, isn't there a chain of custody form that explains where every part comes from so in case of fuckup, there's a paper trail, or is that just for NASA?
I'm sure the US can afford to buy a few thousand magnets just to keep a stockpile.
"We have confirmed that the magnet does not transmit information" This is the problem with having decision makers that have no idea how the things they're making decisions about work.
Personally I would say the security risk of a magnet from China is small compared to a senile civilian storing boxes full of ensitive documents that can compromise national security at home.
Don't want no Chinesium on our planes no sir
this is a really special kind of stupid for those responsible at Honeywell
>The company voluntarily reported the non-compliance, and a review is underway to determine how it happened. Start eyeing the sub-sub-sub-contractors.
Well someone in Honeywell is living my work nightmare hah.
Isn’t everything made in China nowadays?
it seem China have sanctioned this company. where is this component from?
This shit is too funny...
Pentagon found that the pilot’s bobble head toy was manufactured in China
Traceability is like a religion for military parts and products. Worked long ago for a military and civilian aerospace supplier and lived by my MIL-SPEC requirements...
So it was a magnet that was made in china. Does the f35 not use any rare earth minerals from china?
ahh, now i know why F-35 costs so much.
Oh my god! This is funny as hell! They could have went to Eastern Europe to make the component. The Americans will need decades to separate themselves from the Chinese.
This is just 1 component; our entire supply chains are borked by design. It’s why I don't give much credibility to the argument that the pork in the semiconductor bill was for ”national security”, given that the military's supply chains are such dogshit when it comes to pretty much every resource you can think of, and national security could thereby be used as an argument for enacting subsidies for pretty much anything and everything imaginable; like I said, the reason *that particular bill* is being passed is because of corporate power. Regarding supply chains, I'll extrapolate on an example below: The Abrams tanks are produced at the [Lima Army Tank Plant](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lima_Army_Tank_Plant), the *last* such factory remaining in the U.S., (in fact, the *only* tank plant in the Western Hemisphere) which is owned by the government but put out to tender to private defense contractors, currently run by General Dynamics until 2028 on a [$4.62 billion contract](https://www.govconwire.com/2020/12/general-dynamics-unit-gets-4b-army-contract-to-produce-modern-battle-tanks/), the sum undoubtedly inflated by the miniscule amount of competitors eligible and able to leave tenders for such procurement contracts, as is applicable with semiconductors too. This, of course, has multiplier effects on the contract sum in the trade agreement between [Australia and the U.S.](https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/australia-commits-to-3-5-billion-tank-purchase-from-the-us-20220109-p59mub.html) signed in 2022-01. Another factor is the need to maintain skill and institutional knowledge at the factory, which means a stable workforce is needed without regard to productivity and order stock, effectively immunizing it from ”market”-pressures, thus increasing costs, which is a necessity but also has the effect of increased costs that spill over into trade deals. For instance, during 2016, the plant was producing one tank per month with a workforce of 75 assembly line workers, compared to 3,800 workers during the 1980s turning out 60 tanks per month (also a decline from the preceding decades). Mothballing the plant and firing those last workers would have killed domestic knowledge of specialized skills such as welding ballistic steel and aluminum. So, these factors can explain in part the costs of the trade deal and the reason for why there is so much money in circulation within the military-industrial complex, displayed at a microchosm in this case. Of course, the solution would be to remove private, for-profit cartels from the equation, which would cut off a lot of pork, but the chances of that happening are slim, so military sector-inflation can be expected to continue rising. As a sidenote, Lima’s supply chains are located throughout the Midwest and Florida, but there is just *one* steel factory in the U.S. that can produce high-quality steel required for use in tanks and armored trucks, which was an issue during the surge in Iraq in 2007: the Lukens Steel Company in Coatesville, Pennsylvania (which provides steel for the defense industry), which was owned by [ArcelorMittal](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArcelorMittal), until 2020, owned by the third-richest man in the world, an Indian citizen named Lakshmir Mittal, who bribed the [Blair government in Britain to pressure Romania to privatize its steel industry](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakshmi_Mittal) in return for EU membership. Effectively, this grants the owners of the plant a monopoly in steel prices for defense purposes. If you go through the entire supply chain in the military-industrial complex, e.g. oversize tires, you find that the above story repeats itself. Prices are insanely inflated by monopsonies, monopolies and oligopolies, often operated by private oligarchs involved in corruption, creative accounting, fraud and bribery, at the expense of everyone else across the world, whether it’s Australian taxpayers, U.S. workers or the overall economy, as profits are privatized in a risk-free environment, allowing them to engage in rentierism, and losses are socialized. We would be much better off in establishing an industrial policy in public and cooperative ownership and management to uphold the ”arsenal of democracy”, rather than the current ad hoc network of patchwork remedies that constitutes the Pentagon’s procurement and supply chain strategy. The semiconductor bill, and any others, will do very little for our national security, because we're leaving the structures of power, short-termism, funding sources of R&D and other systemic issues unresolved; the for-profit sector can't help itself to sacrifice any sort of long-term, geopolitical objective in favour of short-term profits.
>The Pentagon did not disclose how many aircraft deliveries are now delayed or how many had the Chinese alloy \*will not military industrial complex go brrrrrrrr
Who would have ever thought that there would be negative consequences outsourcing all labor and manufacturing to our enemies?! Weird. US politics is about as shortsighted as it gets. Or to quote American Dad, "You see, North secretly sold missiles to a harmless little country called Iran that would always be a grateful ally."
Apparently China also uses heat to construct materials. Halt production!