In my experience, there is a substantial difference: the Canadian factory never replies to a quote request.

Agreed in China they'll respond to anything which is a Pro, in USA experience as well has been maybe they'll respond but the email will get a casual 1 line response in 2 weeks. There are certainly cultural differences between working with China versus other places and like anywhere else has pros and cons.

Chinese shops will always say yes to whatever question you ask.

Can you do XYZ impossible feature? yes! Can you do it for cheap? Yes! Etc,etc

The guy at the front of the business will BS you hard to get you in.

Later their DFM guy will make subtle, or not subtle changes to your CAD files because they realized they have to actually make it.

Or, they sub it out and take a cut off the top.

I have seen designs completely reverse engineered and recreated wholesale from a step file to fix numerous unpredictable features.

The client did not realize this until the tooling was already produced.

The YOLO factor cannot be understated. It can both work for and against you.

You're right, most of this is table stakes for production injection molded parts. The part that's particularly relevant for China is that they love to own the tooling themselves. Do not let this happen. Always either own the tooling outright yourself, or do as the article suggests and negotiate a more complicated agreement.

The other thing you have to watch out for in China is using low grade steel for molds. That might be a perfectly appropriate move... so long as it's what you are expecting (and paying for). Not so great if you paid for the best and got pot metal!

Both problems exist everywhere but are particularly important to watch for in China. The best shops will never do either, but it's still better to cut off these entire classes of problem by being proactive.

The way I've heard it put: In China you can get any quality of manufacturing you need, but you have to specify it exactly and verify it before accepting/paying.

This is exactly it. Trust but verify.

Also, each production run is unique and it's own beast. Never assume past success will guarantee future success.

Agreed, this is all just the basics on how an injection molding project goes. There is tons more involved in learning how to work specifically with Chinese manufacturers so you get the product that you require. Things like how building a relationship with your vendor being incredibly important to doing business with Chinese companies are not covered here.

We did some molding and extrusion at a startup I worked at. A couple of things from our experience:

- Need to be incredibly explicit. Call out tolerances, how you need it to be created, expectations, everything you can think of. They'll do the work to what you specify, but if you don't specify something, there will be issues there.

- They are as precise as you ask them to be.

- Be careful of prototypes to full orders. We got a lot of parts where the prototypes were perfect, but the when they mass produced them, the method was different, causing an issue with the part.

- You need to be the knowledgeable party of your design. From our interactions, they are implementing your design, not necessarily helping you make it work. If you don't have a lot of plastics knowledge, there will be a lot of issues and retooling to get it to work, so I would go with a manufacturer that is more collaborative.

The experience of the writer. I'm not sure he meant anything special about us in China in his writing, he seems to be even satisfied working with us !

Author here. We only worked with Chinese mold makers but from what I understand there are some country specifics, e.g. it is important to define the mold ownership in the contract. But yes, a lot of the advise probably applies independent of the country.

I don't see that being a China specific consideration.