The issue of pitting hardware is perhaps one of the biggest gripes for installers right now. Its one of those tedious issues that you would have thought would have been solved by now. Yet it isn’t. And the reason for that is down to the quality. Most of the letter boxes, handles and hinges we use on our doors are made in the Far East. They are cheap, and my word do we all know it. But there is quite an obvious solution.

East vs West

I’d like to draw your attention to a comment left by Rod on Sunday’s post:

Hi Jason, as I’m sure you’ll remember we, together with Petita from MACO, discussed the issue of general hardware quality sometime ago on here. As I said back then, I believe the quality has a lot to do with the origin of manufacture.

When manufacturers outsource production to the Far East, for instance, they benefit from lower production costs, but at the expense of quality in my opinion. I personally have had issues with Yale letterplates pitting in the past, and have ongoing issues with flaws in the finish of Trojan stainless steel door furniture – only last week I had to replace a Trojan knocker on a newly installed composite door because I noticed a flaw in the finish. Luckily the customer was understanding, but either way it doesn’t create a good impression – not least with the neighbours when you return to carry out a remedial on a new installation- especially when you have just drop carded them!

Mark Warren made a very valid point regarding the fact that several German hardware manufacturers do not deal with us in the UK since they believe purchases here are driven primarily by price. Although there will always be a proportion of the market where this is the case, I believe people’s attitude in general to home improvement purchases are evolving towards putting quality ahead on the initial purchase price. Hopefully this will be a driver in influencing hardware manufacturers product offerings.

Rod points out that by producing hardware in the Far East, costs are much lower. But as we already know, the quality is compromised. A symptom of Bargain Britain – customers forget about quality when dirty cheap prices are about. But that has to change, and in order for that to change, we either have to bring manufacturing back here and make things properly like we used to, or look to the continent, namely Germany or Austria.

European quality

Look at a company like MACO. They ran away with the NFA award for hardware company of the year in 2014, and there was a clear reason why. Their quality is their overriding feature. No cutting of corners. These are the Austrians. They’re not the cheapest in the world, but then again, you don’t want MACO to be cheap. It means their quality will suffer.

As Mark points out in the comment made by Rod, there are German companies who don’t want to to do business with the UK because a lot of us are price driven, with quality coming second. As many of us know, that’s not how the Germans do things. So, they’ve held off exporting their better quality products here.

When you think about it, that’s quite embarrassing for the UK. We’re saying to Europe, “we know your stuff is better, but we’re too tight to pay the few quid more”. And for that reason, we can’t really be complaining about hardware that pits. What we should be doing is putting pressure on our own hardware companies to either bring production back home to make it to a much better quality, or start to look towards Germany to source the better products. At the end of the day, I do believe that homeowners might pay a bit more for better hardware that is built to last so they don’t have to ring up their installers to have them back every 12 months. Until then, we’re just going to have to put up with the status quo.

As always, all comments welcome in the section below.

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