While I was working as an Injun-Ear, we had several problems where the fasteners and welding consumables that we sourced from US vendors turned out to be from China and was not what we ordered.. Stainless (300 series) was the biggest problem.. Same with wire rope that we used for crane roving. Lots of issues with not meeting testing standards.. Got to where we did our own metal chemical analysis and marked the stuff with paint so that when it showed up, we could easily see that an item had been analyzed and was what it was supposed to be. Yes, the paint was special and no it was not available at the job site! We had one incident (lmid '90's) where three persons were killed because the alloy in use was not stainless when it was supposed to be. The company got a lot more interested in metals verification after that.. We even had problems with shops in India.. On a few big pressure vessels, they weld overlaid correct material on substandard material. The nuclear analyzer said it was fine .. until we ground down a little and found the bad stuff.. very sneaky ! It was only caught because one of our zealous welding inspectors thought it looked funny and pressed further.
In our new "Global Marketplace" it pays to be cautious !
Ed, you should be able to trace where the wire came from and what it actually is, from the spool numbers that you should be able to get from the supplier to the rigging company.. Good luck..
EDIT.. I want to add that we found a lot of good stuff being made in China.. and the company did not stop buying there ..but we used a more rigorous testing procedure on items that were from there. We found in one case an Italian supplier who had substituted some Italian substandard metal in an order that was supposed to be filled from a Chinese manufacturer. Amazing!
