Has Detector Build Quality Decreased Dramatically Over The Years?

[klunker]

 KWality coNtrol shur aint watt it useto be,.

[phrunt]

My question wasn't related to any particular brand as it appears all brands are falling behind when it comes to quality, it was overall has quality dropped, to me it seems it has, but I wasn't around for the earlier detectors many of which still seem to be running today. 

[jasong]

Well, most people in this particular part of the forum primarily use one brand due when it comes to daily use equipment, so... 

I don't get a lot of use out of other detectors myself. But my expectations for $500 equipment is much lower than more expensive equipment. I had 3 Nokta Fors Core's fail in a row and just gave up and threw the last one into my closet and never touched it again. I wouldn't do the same with a broken 6k or 7k.

[Norvic]

1 hour ago, phrunt said:

I know, you just get these defensive old guys coming on saying they've used every detector since they were made of wood and never had a problem.

I`m an old guy and I concur I`ve had very little detector troubles, after dozens of em, only returned a dead GM2 last century, returned a few coils under warranty and killed many. Build quality falling I don`t see it, every detector I`ve had if I wanted to be negative had a problem to dwell on, but I`ll go for the positive, bar one they all paid for themselves in weight many times over, and I`m not called sandpaper coz I treat em with kid gloves.

There ya are cuz ya got this oldie in😉

[Sheppo]

One word related to this completely:

 

COVID.

 

COVID has played a massive part worldwide in quality control issues with factory staffing playing a massive one with Companies grabbing who they can, where they can to keep production rolling. Often these people lack the skills their usual labour force hold which then flows down to quality at the end of their production line. This has also affected Quality Control in manufacturing.

 

I’m going to be very blunt here. Getting onto these forums whinging about quality does absolutely nothing to help the situation we’re in. If you want our current situation to improve, get off your backside, get skilled in the sector you want to work in, go to work and do your job properly. That is the only way we will ever go back to seeing the previous quality of every product we’ve ever used.

[Jonathan Porter]

3 hours ago, phrunt said:

My question wasn't related to any particular brand as it appears all brands are falling behind when it comes to quality, it was overall has quality dropped, to me it seems it has, but I wasn't around for the earlier detectors many of which still seem to be running today. 

Have you ever thought the amount of detectors out there now has grown massively, especially over the last 10 years? Combine that with a growing and extremely well connected digital community and you will of course see a lot more public comments about issues than would ever have been publicly talked about back in the days before you started to add water and stir your gold pot (got into detecting).

I know how many latest release ML machines we’ve sold through our shop and I generally personally deal with every issue we’ve seen and I can assure you it is a lot less than people think, it’s a pain and it’s frustrating but its only magnified because of public social connectivity and the nature of the understandable frustration of the people who’ve had issues. Yes there are issues, especially a year ago (we are still seeing some of those early sales still coming through with niggles), but those issues are being addressed. Most of the problems cannot be solved through Beta because they are at a factory level where someone has not paid attention to what they are doing etc, in other words human error which is impossible to Beta test for. Having just recovered from Covid myself I can vouch for the brain fog part of it long after quarantine ended, I would hate to be on a factory floor trying to focus on my job even now weeks and weeks later.

I disagree with the build quality comments especially with the 6000, it’s a pretty robust machine that can hold its own with previous models like the GPZ7000 for instance. The 7000’s have been around for a long time now and have proven themselves over and over again, with hundreds of thousands of them being used world wide.

EDIT: Saying Covid is an issue isn’t an excuse, in a factory environment it has been a reality. Yes we can’t just blame covid for everything but it is still a factor especially last year. Unfortunately there is a delay in when units were built relative to when they are sold and especially when they see some use, so you will see issues pop up from time to time, this is where choosing a good dealer who is switched on as preferred to online shopping. I generally assemble every GPX we sell and will pick up on any issues straight away.

[kac]

This is what happens when the bean counters get involved in products and push for max profits. Unfortunately many other companies in the component food chain get caught up with bad parts. As for design flaws, the testers should be the ones discovering the issues so the company can fix before it hits the public.

No excuse for dumping garbage on the market.

[jasong]

The falsely labelled, poorly produced, or outright forgeries of components is a major problem just generally speaking for all electronics products today. 

I just watched a vid of a guy testing a power supply, the capacitor exploded because it said "100v" on it, but it was clearly a 50v cap and relabelled because why bother spending the money for a real 100v cap when you can just slap a new label on the box of any old whatever you already have sitting on the production floor?

Saw another vid on how common chip forgery is now, and sure enough when I checked my own IC's, I had a handful of clearly fake chips from recent purchases. 100% of my chips from university days 20 years ago were real though. These forgeries don't perform how engineers expect, and it really makes me wonder if when seeing stability issues with the 6000 if it might something as simple as the factory put in a forged FPGA chip or something along that line.

Similarly, I just bought a "10dbi" antenna. It's sticker was peeling, and the original rating said "8dbi" underneath. I opened the can and it was actually just a 3dbi antenna element inside - the exact same one I was trying to replace, a forgery of a forgery of a forgery - how's that for Inception? Or, I just bought a 3500w (5000w surge) inverter that struggles with 3000w surge and 2000w continuous. Outright lies just to make a buck and hope the customer doesn't notice.

It's rampant, and getting worse. I could fill a novel with the shady business practices and shoddy manufacturing I've encountered in the crypto miner manufacturing world, some of which might utilize the same manufacturing facilities as our detectors. These problems will still be around after Covid is gone too.

[phrunt]

This wasn't really a thread about Minelab, I think it's well established their quality has been a bit lacking of late for whatever reason, hopefully they've resolved their 6000 problems now and it sounds like it by dealer reports.  It was more about the other brands joining the party. I always thought Minelab were excellent quality until recently, my GPZ is a solid build, my 4500 and 5000 I think are very tough reliable designs,  I always had the impression XP were very good quality yet the Deus 2 is having some troubles, and more notably Nokta came out and boldly were saying their detectors are much better quality than the competition and then since their Legend release it's been plagued with problems too, many of which have been hardware requiring detectors and coils replaced, it was more pointing out for some reason at the moment no brands seem immune to quality issues, even the ones that thought they were.

The difference with those brands too, XP and Nokta is they build in house, their products are their own making, Minelab just subcontract and don't even make metal detectors anymore so they have someone to blame and try pull into line, XP and Nokta make their own in their own production facilities and have full control yet they're having plenty of problems too, especially ironically Nokta that used the "better build quality" as a way of marketing and taking pot shots at Minelab.

JP's right about with the days of social media these faults are out in the open a lot more than they used to be so we hear a lot more about problems than previously so manufacturers really have to be on the ball with quality or word spreads quickly.

I was more curious if detectors have always been quite problematic or if it's more a recent thing as the Equinox was the first major release during my time of detecting and it had it's share of problems then the other detectors that have come out after it too have been a bit shaky, so I wasn't sure if this is just quite normal for detectors.

Out of interest, when Minelab changed over to offshore production did they reduce their prices to reflect their much lower manufacturing cost, or did the detectors remain the same price? 

[geof_junk]

My detector is a bit old but it still works.