Interesting discussion for a retired metallurgical engineer.
In my experience, the USA vs Mexico vs Asia vs India vs Anywhere is NOT the issue. It's about the business model, then managing both the product and the supply chain to match. Period.
If your business model requires holding failure and return rates to a low number, it's going to cost. The product specs have to be solid and the supply chain has to be held accountable for delivering them. Quality is NOT free. R&D Engineers, manufacturing engineers, sourcing managers, QA operations, performance tracking, customer support, and all the infrastructure to make it work are simply expensive.
What I see today is how easy it is for even a big company to stay far away from manufacturing and instead, outsource the finished product from a manufacturer that claims they manage the quality. If you ship this product and then have a high return rate, you blame the manufacturer, find a different one, and keep your customers guessing about inconsistent product performance.
You may call me cynical but show me the sourcing contract for an outsourced lifter. If it was easy and obvious, this thread wouldn't exist.
As to what makes a "good" HFT lifter, I did not work with cast iron (nor lifters) but can follow some of the terminology and comments in this thread. Thanks to P@blo for relaying the Johnson comments.
My interpretation and guess is Johnson's lifters were made of "chilled" iron blanks which they chose to not source elsewhere but the reasons aren't clear.
fyi - here's the microstructure I think P@blo's note describes. The white stuff is iron carbide:
https://old.foundrygate.com/upload/a...ast%20Iron.pdf
I personally don't think Johnson's way was the only way to deliver a durable and high quality (repeatable) lifter but at least they offered some insight into their way. For example, I'm confident a good HFT lifter could be made from steel but it would cost more than I'd want to pay.
I agree with P@blo it would be interesting to hear more about Hylift's solution. I don't think it has to match Johnson's but if they deliver a robust product consistently, they definitely invested and care. It's not easy nor inexpensive.
If Hylift now outsources what they used to do in-house, they at least know their own recipe and hopefully can manage their supply chain to deliver it. Contrast this with someone like Summit who I suspect never knew the details and probably sources to a "generic" set of requirements.