A Fantasy Speculation About The Quality Control Issue

R

ruben

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It's very late at night, so I will be brief for a change.

What if our Kievs, instead of being built by the Charlie Chaplin line of manufacture, were done by individual workers assembling each one all the parts, a la Henry Sherer ?

Since such way involves many workers, becoming a dynamic group - i,e. one is veteran, the other new, the third sick at home, the fourth is tyred by mid-day, etc etc, this may explain the variying quality of the gear.

Just a thought before going to bed.

Cheers,
Ruben
 
My thoughts about varying quality in a production environment are that the management gives lip service to quality but they are more interested in quantity. People that work in these places would prefer to do a "good job" or assemble, build, a quality product but become frustrated because the manufacturing pace does not allow it. Consequently many workers lose interest and don't care anymore. So quality suffers.

Just my observations from 14 years in a car factory.

Steve
 
I read somewhere a while ago Porsche engines in the early days were assembled and bench tested by one individual who then had to put his ID code on the finished engine. 🙂
 
I think this may well be one of the many explanations of the variable quality of gear made in the USSR.

There are many causes of malfunctioning gear, or of the perception that it is malfunctioning. The first is design - the product could never work, even if made by choirs of God's cleverest angels. The second is poor manufacturing. In the case of gear made in the USSR I think this is sometimes overstated. My Zorkis and FEDs are all between 30 and 50 years old and yet a basic service from Oleg always puts them in immaculate operating condition. From this I have concluded that the stuff is well designed and was made properly with durable materials. I am not so experienced with Kievs. Then there is age and neglect - any mainly mechanical device will not perform when it is old an its needs are not seen to.

And finally, operator error leading to a presumption that it is the tool and not the owners knowledge that is at fault. Any one of these factors can result in a bad experience but I think Soviet manufacturers reputation is so poor they tend to be first in line for blame they don't deserve every time.
 
Keith said:
I read somewhere a while ago Porsche engines in the early days were assembled and bench tested by one individual who then had to put his ID code on the finished engine. 🙂
Click to expand...
Saleen does this with each of their cars now--each employee stamps his name on the body and has the chance to name the car.
 
If my memory is not defaulting me, Jocko wrote once that a Brittish company importing Kievs, were checking one by one and adjusting what needed to be adjusted.

After some thought I come to the conclusion that the basic problem was political. There is a question wether a planified economy can work or not. Or in other words, if moral incentives can compensate for lower profit incentives. But for sure it cannot, if it is performed by a dictatorial regime, killing by its very definition the moral incentive.

Besides, Soviet products had extremely low outlet in the West due to the cold war, so high revenues export remained more of a rarity. Then the only possible outlet left under the circumstance was to increase the numbers of cameras for the internal Soviet market, which was rather of low income. This demanded to simplify production.

The first decade of Kiev small production, Peter Hennig says, were destinated to the nomenclature, who ironically served as a terror quality control guardian. No wonder these were the better cameras ever produced.

Where all these leaves us ? At the need to upgrade ourselves and be able to deal with our Kievs.

Cheers,
Ruben
 
I recall a story -- don't remember where I read it, but probably here -- about a Zeiss engineer (maybe captured after the war?) visiting the Kiev factory and asking his guide about the red stars on one worker's station. His guide informed him that the stars indicated that this worker was two years ahead of his quota for production. The Zeiss engineer was horrified and tried to explain that this wasn't how to build a Zeiss-quality camera, but the emphasis was clearly on quantity of production over quality.

May not be entirely true, but that's how I remember it. If anybody knows the source of the tale, I'd love to know what it is.
 
my part of speculation - i told this few times ago but i will repeat again. i think that QC was not a problem - problem is that we buy FSU gear that is 30 years old and was found in junk or in someone basement. you cant expect it to work properly. it is miracle that it even work. i am perfectly sure that some m leice kept in that conditions for 20-30 years wouldnt even fire. (its not because of QC but because FSU had much more simpler mechanisms so it easier to survive extreme conditions)
 
Recently I found a nice Leica IIIc in an acceptable condition (re. the asking price).
The owner bought it as another camera for his collection and it stayed for five years on a shelf unattended. He also told me that he bought the camera from a lady whose husband died 20 years before she decided to sell it. The guy stopped shooting with it about ten years before before his death.
It means the camera was almost 35 years forgotten God knows where and how.

Guess what?
The camera didn´t shoot, the curtains were in poor condition and some new parts as well as a full CLA was in order.

It´s almost the same that happens to a neglected FSU camera either it was at factory or when sold. QC? Sure they had it ata factory, but how it was managed? No one knows.

So as Ruben said : let´s learn how to live with our Kievs.

Ernesto
 
"The guy stopped shooting with it about ten years before before his death."

I bought a house like that. It had been unoccupied for ten years.

First the plumbing, then the wiring....:bang:
 
The company was called Technical and Optical Equipment and they ensured all the stuff the imported from the USSR was in good working order before it hit the retailer shelves. Their customer service was second to none. I sent them a faulty Zenit E and a new one was delivered personally to my house (I lived about a mile away from the warehouse) by one of their staff. The reason there are lots of good Zenits and Zorki 4s in the UK is because of TOE.
 
Ruben:
I spend anxious nights pacing the floor worrying about quality control at Cosina.
You and I should have a beer together in the middle of nights of angst.
 
Folks, I am very much aware of the aging factor.

But can you confirm that when the cameras left the factory, they left smooth and accurate in their big mayoity ? Peter Hennig denies it. I tend to agree.

And I myself extremely doubt that the custormary overtension of the shutter, we find at every Kiev, isn't but from the factory. I doubt because it is a very annoying job to fiddle with the related screws, for every further user or seller to have been the one who overtensioned the shutter.

The Kievs problems started at the Arsenal factory, and what actually happened there is a thriller waiting for John LeCarre, perhaps.

Cheers,
Ruben
 
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ruben said:
Folks, I am very much aware of the aging factor.

But can you confirm that when the cameras left the factory, they left smooth and accurate in their big mayoity ? Peter Hennig denies it. I tend to agree.

And I myself extremely doubt that the custormary overtension of the shutter, we find at every Kiev, isn't but from the factory. I doubt because it is a very annoying job to fiddle with the related screws, for every further user or seller to have been the one who overtensioned the shutter.

The Kievs problems started at the Arsenal factory, and what actually happened there is a thriller waiting for John LeCarre, perhaps.

Cheers,
Ruben
Click to expand...


Hello Ruben,

I also agree that later Kievs left factory with much to desire. lack of incentives of workers will produce sub-quality product. As I worked in such a factory for many years, I could understand the situation. The system did not encourage hard working, as even you work yourself to death, you did not get a penny more.😡

Another reason is that by 1970's, Kiev was no longer a top end camera as I said before. They were made for the ordinary citizen rather than professionals and VIPs by then. I guess no one in the factory would think it was worth the effort as they put on the early Kiev 2,3s. A Kiev 2 or a Contax 2 cost about the same as a small car, but by 1970's, they only cost about half as a Zenit EM.

So I think a 1950's Kiev 2 and a 1970's Kiev 4A are two very different cameras.😀 Even if you can service it yourself, the quality of parts and components may not be the same.

My 0.2 ruble.

Kind regards

Zhang
 
"Fantasy Speculation". I like it. Separates it from the "Nonfiction Speculation" genre 😉

It's no fantasy that the human touch, given that that human touch is done by humans that care (and are rewarded accordingly) has a greater impact on Quality Control than a machine cared for by a detached, bean-counting board of executives.
 
I think Several people and the media have noted that the first FSU cameras were made with confiscated parts, and that as time went by, FSU cameras were more likely to be manufactured from parts made in the SU rather than parts originally made in Germany.

Also, I think I once mentioned hearing a man interviewed on the radio who had been a former fatory worker, not camera, who joking related that in the FSU, the State pretended to pay, and the workers pretended to work.

I wasn't there, so I don't know how true either antecdote may have been.
 
I am still amazed how many people can attempt to draw any conclusions about the state of quality control at a factory 20, 30, 50 years ago based on cheap purchases on ebay. Why would anyone deal with intnational shipping, trade, etc. to sell a perfectly good camera that has decent value at home if it were the finest example ever produced? Over ebay, you are getting the discards, the cameras people didn't know how to get rid of any other way. I've recieved two Kiev's that are almost flawless except for minor light leaks, despite being 30 years old and showing no signs of servicing.

I'm pretty sure the motivator for the sale was the appearance of light leaks, not a sudden generous desire to share with me the best they had to offer for a cheap price. If I bought those cameras at a local shop, they'd go back ASAP for a CLA or refund. Due to the international shipping situation and the price, I let it go. Sellers aren't fools.

It's also important to remember that during the Cold War, nobody could say anything positive about Soviet anything without being branded a Communist. When Communist was a dirty word. I'd take anything a Western author has to say about Soviet production and quality with an ENORMOUS grain of salt. Remember who made the AK-47. And who's planes and space program rival or surpass anyone's. Those aren't products of a society incapable of quality manufacture or precision engineering.

Lest we forget, there was a propaganda war on both sides for the better part of a century. It's foolish to think the "truth" is expressed by the opposing side.
 
also i dont think that one worker was making huge amounts of cameras. yes - production of kiev was much bigger than of contaxes but we dont know how any workers were in kiev factory and how many in contax. for example in serbia we always have more workers than it is needed. so i think other socialist countries followed same idea. if that is true - than one fsu worker had less job than contax worker. that would put a new light on a kiev production and quality.
 
i just found this info about east CZ factory
http://www.panix.com/~zone/photo/czlens.htm
"The massive Jena optical factory which at it's height in Eastern Germany employed over 60,000 factory workers has been broken up and parts have been sold off."
60000 workers in east CZ? i cant imagine how many of them were in arsenal.

and another story about moving a zeiss production to sssr
http://www.schott.com/ft/german/download/sonstiges7.pdf

and also interesting discussion
http://photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00G04b

and another interesting story
http://www.smecc.org/ziess.htm
"Zeiss Oberkochen then had approximately 31,700 employees who were generating $2.18 billion in sales; Oberkochen did not wish to acquire Carl Zeiss Jena liabilities (as most West German firms were hesitant to do) such as the staff and pension expenses for a grossly overstaffed (totaling about 70,000) and under productive (sales of about $390 million) work force."
 
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