Here's a great article about why China and USA tool manufacturing differ the way they do:
What's In A Tool? A Case For Made In USA.
Be sure to read the comments; there are a lot of smart people with interesting things to say.
One of my criticisms of the article, is the author refers to the “wrench casting”.
adjustable wrenches, particularly in the typical “Crescent wrench” size range, are rarely cast. The wrench bodies are usually hot forged, and the forging dies are likely significantly more costly to manufacture than The molds that would be made for casting a wrench body.
sometimes, small pieces of tools like this are cast( For instance, I think Facom casts the stationary jaws in their vise grips) but I believe even the moveable jaw on Crescent wrenches are forged for reasons of strength.
Also, as has been mentioned above, the later USA production wrenches were poorly machined, and there were lots of complaints on GJ about those adjustables over the years.
Western Forge adjustable wrenches on the other hand tended to be well machined, at least judging by the Ridgid adjustable I own that was supposedly made by them.
As far as fit and finish goes, especially concerning tool quality;
Good external fit and finish is not necessarily related to material quality, and in some cases may be inversely related to it.
Quality materials for instance, are sometimes highly dependent on supply chain availability, as well as internal material control quality.
After WWII, the US, likely had huge steel refining and manufacturing capability, to the point were quality steel was likely easy to acquire in the USA, with this also being the case in Canada.
As such, US manufacturers could make tools from quality steel, even if they fidn’t care mich about finish quality( and this was definitely sometimes the case).
Japan and Taiwan on the other hand, did not have the ability to produce quality steel right after WWII, at least in the quantities needed, so even if they cared about quality control, the raw materials were sometimes ****.
Toshio Odate, a Japanese born snd trained traditional woodworker, wrote a book that routinely mentions his apprenticeship, and constantly comments in it, about poor quality tools that were chrome or nickel plated to hide poor quality materials.
I‘ve never really come across low quality Japanese woodworking tools from typical woodworking suppliers in the USA,
and this is despite hearing that the top of the line Japanese woodworking tools usually aren’t exported,
which makes me think that Japan must have their own “Ace Hardware” equivalent stores, that sell cheaply made, low quality, woodworking tools to the average Japanese homeowner who just wants to saw some wood in his backyard. Nowadays, I presume the cheap tools are made in China and Taiwan, with better quality tools still made in Japan for those Japanese homeowners who don’t want cheap ****.
