Having problem finding foreign standards for free

A. Hello, cousin Yi, welcome to finishing.com! There are a number of services from whom you can order specifications without losing any time searching. Examples are Thompson's techstreet.com and global.ihs.com; and there are individual standards-writing bodies like www.astm.org and SAE.org. Finishing.com tries to hotlink any mention of standards to a source so no hunting is required at all.

But a huge lot of work goes into writing specifications (it's not just words, it's finding out what works and what is important, and involves thousands of hours of volunteer effort). So, like books, movies and music, they are copyrighted and are not available for free.

There is a site from which US Mil-specs can be downloaded for free -- in other words, US businesses are taxed and forced to fund a site where their off-shore competition is given a free leg-up on them. But, although I wish you only the best, I can't see giving you that URL, only for my local shops be taxed to provide Chinese shops with free specs -- I'll leave that task to someone who doesn't find the idea ludicrous :-)

A. Dear Yi

I agree with Ted 100%.

You are a commercial company and if you wish to obtain the standards of the countries you deal with then you should contact the standards office of each country and buy membership, this will allow you to buy the standards you are asking for. The US and Europe maintain high standards by this system, free standards off the internet are simply poor standards.

A. I can just add to what Ted in saying that the British DEF STANs are also freely available and yet are paid for by the British tax payer. I don't think you are too far off the mark!

A. I believe that we should show all the requests like this to all those buyers who are so ready to send work overseas to save a few pennies.

Yi. I am sorry but... you may take the food off our table but it is not reasonable to expect us to give you our chopsticks to eat it with.

  There is an amusing reason why I make harsh & critical responses instead of polite & helpful ones when the subject is China:

There is a Chinese "scraper site" -- a rogue web site which uses an automated program to download and copy all of our content and then republish it without any attribution, but surrounded by their own Google Adsense ads so they can steal the profit from our efforts.

We can't stop it because it's in China; so what I do instead is post as much criticism of China on this site as I can, knowing that it will be "scraped" and published inside China on that Chinese website. Whether the Chinese government cracks down on the "scraper site" for the criticism of the government, or they allow the criticisms of them to remain on the Chinese site, it's all good with me either way :-)