This eBay Tip Could Be The Key To Getting The Highest Quality Makita Tools
For over a quarter-century, eBay has been one of the internet's premier shopping destinations, starting as a marketplace for auctions of secondhand goods before branching out as the years passed. Since it's a marketplace for individual sellers, eBay is a great place to find "gray market" items or products imported from other countries where they're sold exclusively.
One company in Japan that has long benefitted from its homeland's stellar reputation for quality manufacturing is power tools manufacturer Makita. However, over time, it's shifted some manufacturing to other countries, like China. This has led to some tool enthusiasts insisting that Japanese-made Makita tools available in the company's home country are better and trying to import them secondhand instead of buying the Chinese-made versions at retail. Some tool YouTubers, like Project Farm, have even compared Chinese-made and Japanese-made Makita tools with the same specs and found the Japanese ones do better in testing, which made them even more desirable.
But since you have to import some of the tools to get the Japanese-made versions, that requires buying them on sites like eBay. With so many items for sale, you may need help tailoring your searches there to find what you're looking for. Thankfully, it's pretty easy: Just add "Japan" or, perhaps more accurately, "Made in Japan" to your "Makita" searches. If you know how to tailor searches on Google and other sites, then it's just as easy to do so on eBay. There are some other search modifiers you can use, though, so let's take a look at how to implement them.
Finding 'Made in Japan' Makita products on eBay
Since Japanese-made Makita tools are mainly sold domestically, once you narrow down your Makita search results on eBay using "Japan" or "Made in Japan," the vast majority of the results will be from Japan-based sellers. This is likely to increase the price due to shipping costs. But if you want to limit the search to U.S.-based or North American sellers more broadly, you can do that.
To narrow down the results and filter out overseas sellers, scroll down until you see the "Item Location" heading on the left side of the screen. There, you'll see radio buttons that you can click to narrow down the search to U.S.-based or North America-based sellers. Since we're talking about saving on shipping costs, U.S.-based sellers would be your best bet. That greatly reduces the number of items available, though, from, as of this writing, almost 800 down to 24.
From there, it's a question of how the prices, shipping included, compare betweenthe Japanese and American sellers. Since the Japanese ones won't have American warranties, you may also want to factor in the cost of a third-party warranty from the likes of Allstate, as well.
But are Japanese-made Makita tools actually better?
Having said all that: Are Japan-made Makita tools higher quality than their Chinese counterparts? After all, Japanese steel is extremely well-regarded, as it's forged with a high carbon content that makes for harder steel that allows for better sharpening. Collectors have long prized Japanese-pressed vinyl records because they used higher quality, quieter vinyl than the recycled vinyl that was common in the well into the 1980s. These are just a couple of the more obvious examples, but generally, Japanese-made goods have a reputation for high quality.
One prominent tool YouTuber who has tried to get to the bottom of this is Project Farm, which compared Makita Impact drivers of the same specs in April 2021. Qualitatively, he felt that the Japan-made driver "definitely performs better" in his testing, some of which is somewhat scientific while some aren't.
When he took them apart, he found that the two models had noticeably different internals, most notably the Japan-made driver having a much quieter bearing in the motor. And though he had no way to quantify it, he added that the Japan-made driver vibrated a lot less than the China-made one.
So it seems like there's something to this, but your mileage may vary as to whether it's worth the price difference and the hassle of getting an expensive power tool that won't have a domestic warranty.