Chile Forum

I read a lot of comments on the poor quality of home construction in Chile, and I had this thought about it:

I just spent 2 days with my son, doing several very ordinary construction type chores. Replace a sink, replace 4 faucets, inspect roof beams, replace paneling and insulation, wire some new lights, make an opening and install a pre-hung door, install a water heater.

My son does meticulous work. Over 2 days we used: a table saw, chop saw, circular saw, sawzall, roto-zip, 3 different sizes of hack saw, and a jig saw. We used a small compressor and a pnumatic stapler, a pnuematic brad nailer, and electric stapler. We used bucketfuls of hand tools: 3 different levels and a T-square, hammer, wood chisel, razor knives, wire strippers, pex tool, pliers, safety gogles ...... and many many more.

To carry the tools, he needs a cargo trailer. To pull the trailer, he has a pickup truck (an economy car can't do the job).

All in all, thousands of dollars worth of tools, even before you have to get them to the job site.

I'd sure hate to try to do those jobs with nothing but a hammer, a hand saw, and 2 screw drivers. I don't think it would be possible. Yet how is the construction worker in Chile, who earns $500 a month, supposed to buy even the selection of hand tools that we needed?

In a culture where theft doesn't seem to be frowned on, the contractor couldn't keep buying the same tools over and over to supply his workers. The worker can't afford to buy the tools on his salary. So, it's not surprising that the workmanship is substandard.

You've hit the nail on the head (arf arf).
The fact is, Chileans are on the whole, cheap. If a "maestro" will do a half assed job for 20% less than a guy with all the tools who'll do a great job, you know who'll get the work.
Quality housing isn't the priority it is here. My various "maestros" have been amazed at the variety of tools I have on hand and these just a small basic toolkit of what I'd really like to bring.
As for the theft aspect, the penalties need to get a lot stiffer before that'll change.

Most of the time I have a project ready to go but no time to do it, I will hire a maestro. After he has no clue as to what it is that I´m building or my vision of my project, he gets downgraded to helper/beerholder/tool getter and I normally fill in and finish things up the way that I like. He is using my tools anyway because (A. he is not in posession of the needed tool(s) or (b. he needs to go easy/mac/feria to purchase said tool(s) (which he gets to keep in his box and the price of the tool(s) are added on bill at the end. (C. has never been learnt how to use the tool(s) properly I.E. chisel for flathead screwdriver & vice versa.

There's no excuse for not having the basic tools to do a job. Here, for a lot of maestros, the job's just a means to an end, ie to make money, so it's done as quickly and cheaply as possible. Taking pride in workmanship, forget it.... As for care of tools, I have had maestros twist and jam the blade on my electric planer, burn out my drill using blunt drill bits, and use my wood chisels to dig nails out. I had one electrician whose entire toolkit was a hammer, a flat blade screwdriver and a pair of pliers.....there are good maestros, but they take some finding. If you pay more money and get a company to do the job, the only difference is that you get another guy to micromanage the first one.

Funny a friend from the States came to visit that lives in Chile and use to be a carpenter in the States. He noticed I had a set of sawhorses in my backyard. He commented that he thinks those are first sawhorses he has ever seen in Chile. I likly own no more than about 300,000 or 500,000 pesos worth of tools, and mostly just the basics such as drill, saw, level, hammer. I have seen entire houses built with less in Chile.

We appeared to have a simple breaker blow this week. Turned out not to be so simple. The electricians from Socovesa that wired the house showed up (we are still under warranty). Seemed on the surface a simple problem, but when tested anytime we plugged anything over about 30w in to any socket in the house the breaker would blow. Turns out it was a bad wire somewhere in the kitchen. They spent two days rewiring my entire kitchen and a couple of adjacent rooms. About the second day it occurred to me that I never seen a single one of the 4 electricians ever pull out a circuit tester. What they all had were these little lights on their key chain that show there is electricity in a circut, but nothing to show there is any sort of variance or anything unusual going on in the circut. It was the kind of thing with a circuit tester that should have been isolated in about an hour of testing. It took them 5 hours of just disconnecting and reconnecting each line to find the problem, before they started working on it.

By the way, I think the ultimate problem came down to them using cheap gage wire and sockets that condensation managed to get in to the wires. Likely when the casing got brittle and broke.

I likly own no more than about 300,000 or 500,000 pesos worth of tools, and mostly just the basics such as drill, saw, level, hammer. I have seen entire houses built with less in Chile.

You have a level? a real level? If I'd known last year that the clown who framed my place didn't own one, I'd have bought him one!
On that note, I bought one in Easy in Vina to set jambs and hang my doors and after the first jamb realized that it was about 3/8" out in 4'. Great, now I have a level (the next one I bought) and a straight edge (the first one). Saw horses? High speed. I bought a couple of those articulating ladders that can form all sorts of shapes including a bench, very helpful.
As for Chilean electricians, when the one doing my place saw me using 12 ga Romex to wire my 110v system he commented that Romex doesn't make code in Chile. Fast forward two months, drywall is complete. I'm moving some outlets he put in the way of the countertops and imagine my surprise, he had used the rest of my Romex to install them.
It'll probably never happen in my lifetime but Chile badly needs some form of licensing authority (more bureaucracy I know) to train or ensure competence of these guys.

As long as we are on the subject of tools perhaps you can answer a couple of related questions for me. I am a machinist who manufactures Disc brake and power steering conversions for antique Dodge trucks as well as overhaul tools for Sikorsky S64 Skycranes (these are somewhat more complex than hammers and screwdrivers). If I were to ship a CNC machine shop down to Chile would that be a viable business in any of the smaller communities and which ones? I will not live in a large city so the SCL area is not an option. Since Chile is in the process of trying to work its way into a state of modernity I would think there would be some incredible opportunities for someone who can literally design and then manufacture anything from scratch. I am 60 and have tried retiring and can't seem to pull it off, I have to be developing something or I am not happy. I am not trying to get rich I already have an income stream from my other businesses.

Wouldn't it be funny if one of the best machine shops in Chile was located in Patagonia out on the campo! Hey, maybe I could move in next door to Rune I'm sure he would appreciate the soothing sounds of metal being tormented into shape.

Helitool, I would say that the demand for custom machine work is pretty limited to Santiago, the major seaports, and the mining towns. Outside of those places there isn't much call for the sort of precision work you are talking about. If it can't be made or fixed or a regular lathe it will be "improvised".

helitool wrote:If I were to ship a CNC machine shop down to Chile would that be a viable business in any of the smaller communities and which ones? I will not live in a large city so the SCL area is not an option. Since Chile is in the process of trying to work its way into a state of modernity I would think there would be some incredible opportunities for someone who can literally design and then manufacture anything from scratch.

I own the same kind of business, i.e. specialty manufacturing with CNC tools to minimize the number of employees, and I had the same thoughts about moving the operation to a place like Chile. The biggest issues would be the import duties on the machines, and then the question of where to get the needed inputs and raw materials. Here in the states I can pick up the phone and order fifty pieces of precision-cut aluminum tooling plate and have them delivered in less than a week, or go online and get obscure hardware from McMaster-Carr delivered the next day. From what I saw, that could never happen in Chile because the people there place no value on that kind of work. Nothing wrong with that per se, it just seems they're happier growing avocados and baking bread.

Wonder if customs would accept the actual price you paid for the machinery as its real value for duty purposes. I only buy 30 year old american made machinery and then retrofit it to modern standards. Typically I don't pay more than $500-$1000 for a CNC mill or lathe so the duty even at $25% would not break my budget. For the CNC plasma table I can bring all the high tech stuff down in a suitcase (weighs less than 30 lbs) and then buy the steel tubing there to make the table itself. Total cost less than $1000 for a 12' x 5' table that will cut any shape you can draw in autocad. I did this my last trip to Thailand. If the whole country is in to baking bread and avocados then the one guy who can preform magic with metal might have a monopoly on what ever high tech metal work there is.

While I like your approach,

a monopoly on what ever high tech metal work there is

Should just about cover your gardener's bill.

helitool wrote:If the whole country is in to baking bread and avocados then the one guy who can preform magic with metal might have a monopoly on what ever high tech metal work there is.

My last post was probably a bit flippant, and there is a market for precision parts and prototypes in Chile. Up north the astronomers are installing over a billion dollars worth of equipment for the LSST near Cerro Tololo, and the ALMA project near San Pedro de Atacama. A sharp fellow could probably catch a few of the crumbs that fall off of the table from those two projects to support a small shop and earn a peso or two.