The Birth of the first stainless steel faucet in China
At the beginning of 2000, Italian businessman Fabrizio Zanetta came to Foshan, the famous Chinese plumbing manufacturing city, with a copper faucet sample. He searched the local market and hoped to find a manufacturer that could replace the copper with stainless steel. It seemed to be a mission impossible at that time due to the nature of stainless steel, which is extremely difficult to process and shape.
the hopeless Zanetta was introduced to a technician Mr Shen ,who was famous in the automobile mold manufacturing industry. He has been engaged in mold casting for more than 20 years in Changchun FAW and Nanhai Automobile Factory and has strong mold development and Manufacturing experience. Mr Shen showed great interest in making faucets with 304 stainless steel, a healthy lead-free material. He went to Mr Kong, who was the founder of the first Simmons production equipment in China as well as the Qianlian Hardware Machinery Factory. They both saw a bright future of it and decided to take over the project from Zanetta.
It was a difficult starting:
Technically, it faced two major problems: the combination of casting and welding. To solve these problems, the two elderly people,drove a small car, ran through the entire Shuikou Town, bought about 80 sets of copper faucets back and forth, researched and remodeled again and again. the worst was, many new problems were found, such as how to solve pores and sand holes of castings. The material is hard and tough, and the machining is large. Any stainless steel part, even a screw, can’t buy ready-made qualified parts, and they need to solve it on their own. In addition, the welding technology at that time was not mature, and there was no production experience to learn from,like: What technology was used for welding, how to control the current intensity, how to solve the local overheating deformation…a list of unknown was waiting for them.
8 months later , 240 days overall, after numerous trial failures, China’s first stainless steel faucet, A-3 kitchen hot and cold mixing faucet, was successfully developed at Huangqi Qinglian Machinery Factory ( Sento former name), and successfully applied for a patent in April 2001 (patent number: CN01235662.X).
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