Can the HF 4x6" band saw cut multiple pieces of 4x4" steel tubing?

My 4x6 HF saw is over 30yrs old with original motor and not that many blades. It is remarkable because the motor does resemble like a washing machine motor with its open case unlike most machine tool motors.

I'm not sure they read the reviews, they could. I think they drop the different makers who end up being brought back and want a refund. There is a lot of stuff that has gone away like bead rollers and other metal working machines. Some of us embrace the idea most of the stuff is so rediculously low priced compared to the real thing that we don't mind treating it like a kit and modify it to our needs.

But you can see in the reviews on the HF site there are a lot of guys who expect it to be perfect. I guess I can't blame them but they obviously have never priced the original machine. I do have a pang of guilt but it's hard to be loyal when a lot of the originals are being made in China and are still out of reach with my budget. We definitely are living the Chinese curse, "may you live in interesting times".
 
C-Bag said:
I'm not sure they read the reviews, they could. I think they drop the different makers who end up being brought back and want a refund. We definitely are living the Chinese curse, "may you live in interesting times".
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You may have noticed in their ads that there are multiple part numbers for one item. Each supplier gets its own part number, allowing HF to track which ones are having high return rates.

That's my favorite blessing/curse.
 
MrWhoopee said:
You may have noticed in their ads that there are multiple part numbers for one item. Each supplier gets its own part number, allowing HF to track which ones are having high return rates.

That's my favorite blessing/curse.
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I have noticed that and it's really confusing if you just go in and try to buy something cold. Sometimes there is a difference in price, sometimes the color of the case, sometimes only the part # ! And the reviews can vary wildly. Often the highest price one is not the good one.

A really interesting book is Made In China Poorly. It gives an interesting glimpse behind the scenes that helps explain some of these anomalies. I have to admire the Chinese for luring in these foreigners who their greed drives them to take advantage of these supposed backward poor people. Meanwhile the Chinese are a very old business culture and use this to build infrastructure and employ the most people possible meanwhile knocking off the greedy co and end up competing with them.

Then in my case, I turn around and use those Chinese machines to make infrastructure and equipment to manufacture a product here that it would have not been possible with pre out sourced equipment. Interesting times indeed.
 
Several decades ago, a good friend expressed his surprise that China had become a communist county, given that the Chinese were capitalists when our ancestors still wore animal skins.
 
We were competing against the Chinese on pre-cast concrete strand. I asked our engineer why were they cheaper than us since we were both using the rod from the same Chinese mill." Well their strander runs run 3X faster than ours. " Ours was the latest and greatest in 1980.

The Chinese should be able to make things better than us. They have newer machines, Chinese workers are neither lazy nor stupid, they have a never ending supply of engineers but they don't. I think it a cultural thing, it's a what can we get away with .
 
It does make you wonder about the psychological impact of living under a totalitarian regime does to creativity. Education is a very slippery thing for dictatorships. On one hand they need highly educated people to innovate but that means they have to think freely/creatively outside the box and the only way that's not scary to any regime is if they are throughly indoctrinated AFAIK. That would seem to defeat the purpose :)

IMHO the 4x6 RongFu saw is a bit of a marvel and obviously a well placed product. You could use it (and I have) for small production and over the years it has stayed basically the same price as I think I bought mine for like $159 30yrs ago. So affordable to the hobbyist. Most of what HF carry is like that I believe although I see contractors in there every time I'm in there. So who's to say they have not done it better than us? I would argue they know their market and their price constraints pretty well. They are now making stuff for about a 1/3 of the name brands and for home use they seem last just fine. But notice they have come out with western sounding name brands that are significantly more expensive and are comparing them to the big name brands in their ads. To me they are just using the WallyWorld model where you go in and undercut the locals until they fold then when the competition is dead you jack the prices back up.
 
BBC did a series on the decline of the west. It was more about the spread of western thought and values. The show would start out with a woman cop directing traffic in China. China has a dictatorship in the name of a German intellectual and the cop is a woman. It was an old series when it was aired on local public Knowledge network. It predicted the conflict with traditional Islam, BTW.

I have a Rong Fu from the early '80s as near as I could find out. They started making them in the very late '70s or early '80s. An American company, Bainbridge produced a cruder version before that. I had a better version of the Rong Fu style, but it was worn out when I got it.
 
Let's please stay on topic gentlemen. Thanks.
 
Downwindtracker2 said:
I have a Rong Fu from the early '80s as near as I could find out. They started making them in the very late '70s or early '80s.
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That’s what I’ve had for 30 years still working good, replaced the motor with a craftsman table saw motor 8yrs ago.
 
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