Even the best continuous improvement programs miss things. Toyota is the world leader in CI (AKA Lean Manufacturing) and they still miss stuff. If you think you're going to find a perfect manufacturer, good luck. Nobody's perfect yet. And even if you found the perfect manufacturer, you'd still have to find a perfect dealer. Again, good luck. I don't know about you, but as hard as I try, I'm a long way from perfect too.

 

I agree nobody's perfect, not even Toyota. From where I stand, the next manufacture/dealer will only have to better than Ford, and from the evidence I've seen, with my very own eyes, that probably won't be to difficult. Good luck to you as well.

 

Dealer shops don't do a lot of engine repairs. They replace engines due to the liability involved. If they repair it, they have to guarantee the repair. if they put a reman engine in it the reman supplier has the liability. A good independent shop is a better place to go for repairs if you can find one.

 

Getting back to your original "defect." You do know that valves bend for a reason, right? I say because your whole post is about "defective (possibly Chinese) valves." In all my years of working on engines, I've seen plenty of bent valves. The problem is, the bent valves were the result of something else going wrong. In other words, a bent valve is a symptom of another problem. Did you find out what the root cause of the bent valves was? If you didn't look for it - and address the root cause - you will have failed in your own (not so continuous) improvement effort.

 

I do have an independant shop in mind for these sort of tasks. I will keep an eye on this forum in the future, just in case another consumer has a problem with Fords Chinese valve continuous improvement program.

 

I couldn't find anything else that didn't measure up to Fords specifications, I spoke with several Ford service people during this process, just to verify and make sure I didn't miss something along the way. While they did do a good job of giving me other places to look, I replaced all of my internal components for just that reason of not finding anything else conclusive. After all, I'm not perfect.