Well... Molex has been my go to company for nearly 20 years. Been consistently good quality.
For past several years - they have been posting huge price increases. OK -- parts still made in US and good quality, sure - I'll keep going.

Last few shipments have ALL been from Bangladore, India and the quality has been horrendous. Crushed contacts, lots of broken headers, bent pins - stuff I used to never see. Checked into local Molex plant. Old owners used to routinely present productivity and quality awards to the Lincoln plant. Now - sold to new owners (few years back), plant is closed and all employees laid off.

So the question is -- if Molex keeps selling crap quality at high prices, where do I go? I may as well just buy the Taiwanese equivalents and be done with them. I may be switching completely to AMP (TE) even though they cost more (and are probably still made overseas).

... frustrated.

Actually - at my 'other' job, Molex has been taboo since the 1980's. We exclusively use AMP and Cannon.
Even back then - when compared to AMP, Molex was of lesser quality. But for consumer goods, Molex was a 'good' quality component.

Moving conversation from separate conversation:
https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/advise-for-early-solid-state-owners/page/3

Conversation was regarding poor quality of 08-52-0072 crimp contacts. See image below for what is being shipped.

<rant mode on>
I normally go through about 40K of various contacts per month through Waldom.
You would think that with a complaint such as this, Waldom would have removed their inventory from resale until they investigated. Nope. When I filed the complaint, they had just over 66000 available. Never took them down during investigation and now it seems that somebody else has bought 5000 of contacts with known problems... and I'll bet Waldom said nothing. As of today, they are showing 61000 remaining.

I did get an RMA number from them for the remainder of what I have left. Will they reimburse me for replenishing the crap ones that went out? No.
I'm willing to bet when they get these, they will return them to stock and sell them to another unsuspecting customer.

08520072_Defect (resized).jpg

Ya know - I was also thinking they had the despooler running too quickly and it wasn't given enough time to stop and center.

I never did follow through with what happened with these contacts.

The vendor I used had their stripping machine not setup properly. They ran multiple reels of 08-52-0071 for a good size batch of 08-52-0072 contacts. I sent all that I had left back to the vendor. They did not clear out the defective contacts from their available list. In fact, when they received my contacts that I sent back - their number of contacts available went up. Apparently they did not care that a large percentage was defective.

As a result - I have changed to a new vendor as my regular source for several contact versions.

Also Molex did get involved in this case. Not surprising - *nothing* happened.

Been Molexed again.
Two contact extraction tools for edge connectors used by Gottelieb -- 11-03-0016 and 11-03-0003.
Metal part of the extractors are identical. Only difference between the two -- 11-03-0016 has a black plastic knob added at the end to provide better grip on the tool.

Used to be the 11-03-0003 was a couple bucks less than the 11-03-0016 but the little plastic knob helped to save your fingers.
Well... Molex in all their wisdom hiked the price of the 11-03-0003 by more than 2x.
Then they modified the 11-03-0016 (it is now essential the same thing as the 11-03-0003) and sell it for less than the 11-03-0003.
WTF?

11-03-Blunder (resized).jpg