"Peoples persecption[sic] of quality is usually corrupted by price & marketing"
I could "pedantic" you on that one, but I see what you mean.
Be my guess Fuzzy
I have dyslexia so spelling is not a strong suit
I gave up trying to check every word written well before internet forums were invented.
Down here post WWII the government realized how vulnerable we were to supply chain disruptions.
So they brought in big import duties along with the import replacement subsidy plan .
SO those who like to milk the government set up small factories to make shoddy copies of stuff we imported .
Thus there was born a cultural cringe that all high quality products were imported and all local made products were trash.
This is still part of the culture so it is near impossible to get any market penetration for a locally made product despite the fact that the local product is vastly superiour to what was being imported.
Victa once had 75 % of the local market, but most were branded with resellers name .
OTOH in the UK they sold for bigger money because the UK was by & large used to doing repairs on their own machines so the simplicity of the power torque appealed to them .
They sold very well in Germany because Germans appreciate good sound engineering .
Australians expected them to run forever with no maintenance so the 5 year & 10 year maintenance never got done thus they became hard to start so the owners went out & bought a Honda because the start so easy.
When I service the old piece of !!!!! sitting in the back of the shed and they see it start 1/2 through the first pull they can not believe what they are seeing.
Then when they start using it as "back up" the $ 1600 SP Honda ends up down the back of the shed , particularly if they mulch rather than catch ( Victa catchers were always too small )
The stupidity of it is Victa never thought about selling 5 year & 10 year service kits to hammer home just how cheap they were to run & maintain .
We had 5 companies that made ride ons and 8 that made walk behinds . nearly all have closed down because the locals will not buy locally made mowers despite the fact they they are so much better than anything we import.
My Greenfields Fast cut 34" cuts a acre much fasted than any other tractor style mower with decks up to 50" and can just about equal a 42" ZTR, has a service life of around 30 years and uses standard pollyester belts which usually wear out rather than break .
But they went bust last year because stupid Aussies would rather purchase the heavily advertised Husqvarna's that are pushing it to make 5 years , eat $ 100+ belts at an alarming rate , go through blades every season & because there is no overlap on the blades require double cutting to remove the unmowed strips between the blades if you let the grass get any higher than 6" and we are getting near 10" of growth a week right now .
