ORIGINAL: secretsg
I am definitely not prejudiced against Asian products. In fact I would trust the electronics from Asia over most NA mass produced products. We could get into how the work culture/unions changed how stuff are made here but that's getting too political.
However the experience with Metal components are personal. I used to do production costs on oil/gas industry components. While we were able to outsource the non critical valves/etc to China with proper QA. The actual stressed parts like pony and sucker rods had to be made in Canada. The quality discrepancy was just too large despite the savings.
They do have really high end stuff (China just broke thru on turbofan/jets production last couple years, only a handful of countries could do this.) Unfortunately they are just not available to us average consumers.
Working on these engines every day i can definitely see some pretty big disparities in the metallurgy between the Italian and Asian engine....The hardness on the cranks is one of the main areas...engines from Picco and OPS have got the hardest pure steel cranks I have ever seen...To do any machine work on these cranks puts the tooling thru hell.....Somehow Picco and OPS have figured out a way to achieve this hardness without making the crank brittle..Any time a Asian has come anywhere close to this hardness the cranks become brittle and tend to snap...For those who don't know the harder the crank the longer the lifespan of the crankpin.....Another are I see a difference is in the quality of the piston material, once again Picco has a amazing composition to their pistons, they are very durable and wear extremely slow...And due to the strength of the material they are machined to be very lightweight and still be reliable.......The only Taiwanese engines that impresses me with its metallurgy is the OFNA JL 21 made by Force..the hardening on the crank is better then any other Asian I have worked on and the piston material is nearly as good as it gets...The engine has displayed amazing durability even when pushed to the very extremes.....It takes some effort to machine a JL crank, and a miracle to machine a Picco crank...But engines like SH and Go I can cut like butter effortlessly......I have also has issues with both Go and SH with the pistons collapsing at the wrispin when they are pushed into the higher RPMs...they use a relatively basic cast piston that just doesn't have the strength and durability of the billet counterparts.......As well the cast pistons are usually heavier then the machined billet pistons, the lighter the piston is, the better the performance as well as less stress on the internals as the engine is revving........Many of the Taiwanese engines do run very good, but they definitely do not have the same level of expertise in the metallurgy as the Europeans, working with these every day it becomes very apparent.....