[Daniel Ramsey]

I’ve had too many failures from crap chinese steel over the years, no matter how much they protest its always subgrade.

[crz]

Ya. No doubt you have welded on that crap. When I am running a bead with Low-hy (7018) on it, will be going along and the bead is popping from the gas/dirt pockets in that junk.

[crz]

BTW, I dont even use wire feed on it anymore since it wont hold.

Got to stick weld it to even have a chance.

[Hootowl99]

20 some years ago, I needed to hire a 6-sigma certified fabrication shop to build some equipment. One of the shops I was dealing with specialized with petrochemical customers on the gulf coast. We had a bit of history together from previous work and shared a few common clients. Anyway, this company took me a deeper into their quality program than the usual customer sees.

With respect to steels and metals in general, they had a big problem with the imported steels having false material certifications and false grade stampings on both tubular products and fittings. In other words, a high incidence of counterfeit product. Counterfeit product can get people killed in addition to economic loss. They had resorted to completely separate warehousing of domestic metals and imports. If a customer wanted lowest cost then they got the import and some kind of disclaimer in the contract regarding responsibility for the quality conformance verification shifting from the supplier to the client company.