Bill,
Someone just emailed me your comments here, guess I missed it earlier.
I'm not sure where your going with this, but please lets stop it now.
The fact is, as any engineer knows, anything built by man will have the potential to fail.
The issue is not that a company will have product that fails, the issue is what a company does about it.
There are currently three basic methods of handling defects.
1. Put a product on the market knowing it will fail, and count on the fact a small number of customers will return said unit if the price is low enough. Without offense, this is often used by oversea's "fly by night" companys.
2. Ignore low returns number (high as 15%) and do buisness factoring in said returns.
3. Do an analysis on return product, change manufacturing methods, suppliers, or design to reduce your returns to a low percentage.
We have and always will use the third method, as long as I am in charge
So far we have had VERY few returns, and to date the issues have all been assembly defects, with the exception of some "rusty" bolts from a bad supplier.
To resolve that issue, we changed to stainless steel months ago.
I hope this answers some of your concerns
Dan
C-Systems