THE PLACE TO STAY
YOUR HOME IN PARADISE
The following articles can be found in hardware stores all over the Philippines:
CRESTON "Brand" "Stainless steel" door hinges where the heads of the supplied screws (which are of course not stainless) rip off one after the other as soon as they are fully screwed in leaving you in a shit! The parts of the hinges that contain the ball bearings are of course not stainless and rust heavily after a short time. Enjoy the picture below!
AMERILOCK TM "Brand" "Stainless steel" door hinges with their slogan "A BETTER WAY TO THINK ABOUT LOCKS" is teasing their stupid customers with the opposite of what they are really thinking about these "things" since they have the same problems.
MARCO POLO "Brand" Stainless steel (YOUR IDEAL FLUSHBOLT) is really stainless including the supplied screws at least when you mount it indoors. But you have to reweld the poor riveting of the flushbolt to keep if from falling off. Sadly they saved on material so you have to find a way to mount a fastening screw even if there is not enough "meat" left in the wood because of their misconstruction.
OMGE sliding door rollers with their brackets and lower guide pins where the guide pins and the roller bracket nuts need to be rewelded before you can use it because the poor riveting does not last. It looks like they are fakes of the italian real brand, they should do something to stop selling these poorly made plagiates to protect their name.
PUREWOOD Mahagony doors bought from a francise dealer Magic Home Marketing, South Fundidor, in Molo/Ilo-Ilo City, the city without a single park to relax. Since we ordered about 40 of the same doors for use as sliding doors from a door factory we of course expected them to be all alike, but not so! If you look along the mounted doors the dividers between the glass jump up and down from one door to the other, each is a unique piece of Philippine "craftsmanship". And if you consider that these doors were mounted by over 50 years old and therefore must-be "experienced Philippine carpenters" with too little gap between the end frame so they kept binding and that the "carpenter" upon asking told us that wood contracts when wet and expands when dry, then you can imagine how much fun it is to build a house here. After that they mounted the rail where the between 600 to 800 KG heavy doors were sliding with tox dowel pins that they dipped into wood glue to stick better in the concrete holes. Not surprisingly they slipped out very easily when made so nice slippery. That is called "learning by doing" here and replaces the apprenticeship from other countries, of course on our costs! So far only to the doors......
Then came the very nice plastic rain gutters we were glad to discover so the local craftsmen would not have to bend and rivet their own special construction out of cheap rust-away-quick sheet metal. DURACON are these pieces of joy called, made by ATLANTA INDUSTRIES, INC. in Metro Manila. Sadly, the lenghts of these gutters were never cut on the ends at a right angle and had to be recut, someone who was cheaper than a machine must have cut them by hand and might have had a beer or rum right next to him during that time. But that is only a guess. The same must have happened while they bent the so called "zink-plated" iron brackets for the gutter system, none of them fitted to the gutter, they all had to be rebend by our "craftsmen", loosing most of their not so good "zink-plating" so now after only two (Philippine repeat-style: (2) years there are already holes rusted thru these quality brackets and some rusted completely away so all of them need to be ripped off and replaced with real V4A stainless steel imported from Germany. The connectors of this gutter system sometimes simply cracked apart already upon mounting these new parts, but the plastic is made of "uPVC". "A permanent, maintenance-free rainwater system with smooth and clean appearance" if you believe the brochure. Strangely, ours looks completely crooked and is leaking in many spots (update 2011: in nearly ALL spots) since it seems to be impossible to glue these misconstructed parts together properly. Now we are waiting for the "entire system which is made from uPVC which incorporates an ultra-violet light inhibitor, formulated to stand up to strong sunlight & resist embrittlement" if it really does just that over the years we expect a gutter to last. ATLANTA INC. also produces plastic tubing, however not all the tubes we had from them were round, they also delivered oblong tubes, with "quality tested" stickers on them, maybe be beer and rum played a role there again...... Their Website has not been updated for over 5 years and emails to only one or two of their 12 given emailaddresses did not come back as undeliverable but noetheless none of them they ever dared to answer. Somebody there must have thought: What this sutpid beggar wants? Buy something from us?? I want to continue sleeping now.....
SIEMENS AEG TELEPHONE KABEL BRAUNSCHWEIG DEUTSCHLAND GERMANY was written to an especially nasty shit we bought from UNIVERSAL shop in the two-stroke-engine "blue-air" city of nearby Kalibo. Only too late we found out that the material in this shit was not like expected copper but only copper plated chinese shit iron wire with such a high resistance that it could not be used as intended as a bell wire, the resistance of the bell coil was already built-in the wire so no electricity arrived there. Sadly it was already laid in the walls and can´t be replaced anymore. Bad luck the producer in China will say, why didn´t you carry a magnet along when buying wire from our country. From now on we do!
WESTINGHOUSE American "Quality" for over a hundred years if you believe the brochure made our industrial ceiling fans in brushed nickel design with "moisture-resistand fan blades with lifetime (limited of course) warranty" that rusts quicker than you can look and therefore needs to be surface-oiled several times a year where it is still adviseable, but not on the one out of the 9 fans that we bought which developed a short in the electric winding after only one year, real usage time maybe a few hours. The speed control boxes become yellow even when mounted inside the house but look as if they had been out in strong sunlight for some years. So better try again uncle Sam or watch your chinese producers of american quality how they are messing up your brand name after one hundred years in existence....
laGERMANIA of Metro Manila is trying to make you believe with their brand name that their built-in kitchen gas stoves have something to do with german quality. The cheapest potmetal knobs they use were full of pimpels only after a few months, a serviceman replaced them with equal bad nonexisting quality ones and had to repair one of the stoves and (try) to adjust the over-sensitive and misadjusted electric ignition on several of the 8 stoves we bought. Update 2011: On two of these "quality products! the electric ignition failed, and believe it or not, the factory in Manila does not have ANY spare parts! They just sell their garbage and forget it! This is only possible when nobody complains.... And it is impossible to complain, the emailaddress stated on their homepage does acutally not exist...
CPAC MONIER PHILS. INC., belonging to the Lafarge Group of France and the Siam Group of Thailand made our ELABANA concrete roof tiles which are if you believe the brochure "non-porous, leak-proof windtunnel tested and need no undersheeting for roof pitch of more than 25° and can be walked on". You really can walk on them if you don´t care that most of them are cracked after that walk. And sadly enough to say, only if you place single tiles onto each other there is nearly no space to look thru between them, but when actually bolted on a roof they don´t fit so good anymore giving an automatic ventilation system thru the clearly visible gaps and also shed some daylight in your attic. They also suck up water, just watch the paint coating change it´s color during a rain and better don´t step onto them, the corners very easily break off leaving you with tiles that can not be exchanged separately since they are all bolted to each other with screws and clips that are of course (who would think so far??) not stainless steel and will rust away after a few years probably letting your tiles fly away during a nice typhoon. But that will give you the chance to cover your roof new with different brand roof tiles when they would fit the given spaces by the underconstruction......
SANYO ELECTRIC CO. LTD om INDONESIA made our very nice ST-21CE1V TV´s, so called short-time TV´s since whe have 5 defective units after 2 years in which the were hardly ever been used. All of them had failing high-voltage units, the sparks are jumping all along the coil due to saved material in the construction and therefore insufficient isolation. So this "brand" is a better-keep-your-hands-off brand! Never again we will buy anything that says SANYO on it and nothing at all from Village Marketing in the "blue-air" smoke city of Kalibo.
MagneWALD 5 mm Magnesium Board, "The Building Board Reinvented" and "Superior Water Resistance" and "Resistant to climatic conditions" and "Dimensionally stable" are the "slightly" overexaggerated properties of the greatest shit we bought from Jerome at WILFEDO TRADING on the Mainstreet of Boracay and used for ceiling covering of the roof overhang, That stuff sucked up moisture from the air if humidity was 85 to 90% so there were drops forming inside and outside, keeping the already greased to prevent it from rusting undercostruction so wet that it rusted partly away after just two years. Needless to mention that this shit also warped so unsightly that all maybe 50 m² had to be removed again. Other people had the same nice experience with this garbage so it is no longer being produced as we heard. The customer test at customers cost failed......
From ANG PUE Hardware in Kalibo we ordered and paid for iron angle bars of a certain thickness, delivered was a very low quality quick-rusting and much thinner stuff, a good reason to tell him that this was the last material we ever bought from him, thank you!
EUROTILES of Manila makes the "SUPERIOR CERAMIC TILES" and wants you to believe by their name that they are of european quality, but sadly the size differences were so really bad that our local tile setter could not even match them anymore, we had to return a lot of them.
MARIWASA Tile Company of Manila made our pool tiles, sadly after one to two years the tile glazing starts blistering, pointing out that they want to sell you another batch of differrent tiles since of course they change colors frequently so you need to replace ALL of your tiles.
DELLOPTOELECTRONICS.DE sold us another chinese made shit, but this time bought in Germany: 5 mm diameter 20000 mcd white LED´s together with the proper resistors to use 3 of them in a row on 12 V supply as emergency lighting. They even write on their website: "wir kaufen mittlerweile in solch großen Mengen ein, dass wir die Qualität selbst bestimmen" (we buy in the meantime in such large amounts that we define the quality ourself), so if that is true then they want this "quality": the LED´s fail one after the other, it is just cheap chinese shit again and keeps me busy replacing these SHIT LED´s! Their other products we bought from them, LED Spot Lampe GU10 WARMWEISS which should last "up to" 50000 hours did not even come close to that, ALL of the about 48 or 50 old style regular round 1-lens LED´s in there were completely burnt out after only 3 to 4 months of continuous operation, only dim light points were still visible. That equals between 2000 to 3000 hours, completely different from the advertised 50000 hours, but now we know how important the two small words "up to" are, can be between 1 and 50000 that means obviously. However, they replaced these lamps but the replacements are failing again as expected even if now we switch them on only 12 hours a day, it will only take double the days but probably the same total operating hours.
So that means ALL of these lamps are garbage since they simply don´t last.
SANDLEFORD "TM" made our fancy ES 20 electronic safes we installed in each Apartment. Bought from a "Surplus" store (we translate that into garbage selling store) with the name "SAVE ON SURPLUS" in the blue-air city of nearby Kalibo. The chinese shit electronics in there failed after only a few months, reason was that the wires of the transistors WERE RUSTING AWAY since the manufacturer saved a little bit on his materials and used iron instead of copper wire! Also the number pads of them failed because it´s simply chinese made garbage again, sold in the Philippines with a warranty of only a few days because they know what worthless garbage the are selling for real money.
Sadly we don´t know the chinese "Brand" name of the 1 1/4 inch "Stainless Steel" tubing we bought from different hardware stores in Ilo-Ilo and used for our reling. It is antimagnetic like real stainless steel and so hard that you can´t even drill a hole in it but it rusts really excellent. Same with "stainless" anglebars and round bars, very nice rusters, the round bar outperforms even regular concrete reinforcement iron in it´s rusting capabilities. But don´t worry, we have been told that there is no real stainless steel in the Philippines, all of it will rust.
And now the managers/owners of these garbage producing companies will boil about reading this about their "excellent" products and will think: do we have to get this bastard who writes the truth about our stuff get killed or just deported for writing this? Take it easy guys and see this as a chance to produce real quality stuff, as better you are than your competitors as more you will sell and you might even have satisfied customers that will recommend you like we do for the next article:
HERE comes the highlight of real chinese quality stuff: Believe it or not, this crooked chinese backyard manufacture hand soldered by a surely drunk skilled craftsman instant gas water heater only looks horrible and also rust´s very quick so it is a good idea to keep the sheet metal housing well greased inside and out to extend it´s life BUT IT WORKS REALLY WELL!! Even in combination with our temperature regulated shower armatures it switches on and off properly as soon as the water pressure is good enough. We surely did not expect that! The small shown heater supplies 12000 Watts and is good enough for two showers, we just mounted another bigger one with 24000 watts which is good for at least 4 showers. Sadly we can´t even mention the chinese manufacturers name because of the chinese script. Noticed the elegant "tilt" of the burner?
