Have a mfg that is being held accountable for grease smudge on his product. Mfg feel it is not his and end user says it is not his. I am looking for a company that help resolve this issue. I have attached a picture of the damaged goods

IMG_2159.JPG (51 KB, 78 downloads)

Maybe I'm just slow, but I have no idea what the picture is. What is the product?

It is a plastic plate/lid

And is this a mold for making that product? And the smudge is showing up in the product made from the mold?

No this is the product, a plastic plate/lid. They are thermoformed anywhere from 4-20 at a time. The product was put into a box and shipped to end user. End user finds grease smudge on his product and wants a refund, mfg says it is not his grease, so I am looking to sample the "smudge" and determine who's grease it is...

That sounds like a huge challenge. To have a prayer I think you'd need to identify the likely candidate lubricants and provide a sample of those candidates to your lab for comparison. Also having a very small quantity of sample gease will limit the tests that can be done.

Herguth can do a lot of special lubricant tests. They do a good job with our routine oil analysis and a lot of special requests that come up during our failure analyses.

http://www.herguth.com/

Dave,

Really? Can't they wipe the grease off? How much is this plastic plate worth?

Not the first time, but I don't get it

I don't get it either.

Maybe CSI (*) would be better than an oil lab. Have 'em dust for prints ;-)

(That's CSI as in the TV show, not the company)

If you are the caterer that has purchased a couple of thousand of these plates so you can just put them out and move to the next task, a little smudge of grease is a big deal.

Someone has to wipe all those plates off before anyone would eat off them.

Also, would you buy a dirty plate for one time use? Sorta defeats the purpose of buying it if you have to clean it everytime.

Just my couple of pennies worth,

Aubrey

The customer's definition of quality is a properly formed, clean, grease-free, uniformly colored, firm, non-leaking plate.

I don't see a real problem in that definition. I expect the same thing when I buy picnic plates or I look for another brand.

There are other plates beside the kind you eat off ofand since these are described as "plates/lids" I expect that these are not intended for picnic use. Since there are only 4 to 20 of these in question, wiping off the smudge would be far easier and cost efficient than doing a forensic grease analysis study (at least it would be if I were doing the study .

I would expect that Dave has given his prospective client a quote for his services, and the client has wiped off the smudge and looked for another supplier by now.