I've been trying to troubleshoot a surface texturing issue for several weeks. I accidentally noticed the pulley had wobble, but thought it was the stepper motor at first. Nope. It's the pulley.
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Absolutely. Unless a person wants to spend thousands of dollars on push button solutions that cover every imaginable use case, customization is the way to go.
For solid machines, the customer should already have an idea about what parts need to be modified. If a machine was advertised to mill a widget at +/-20% tolerance, cool. If you want to spend $500 more on a custom pully to get withing 5%, awesome. Precision is expensive and customization is niche.
For cheap machines, everything is generally ravaged by bean counters at every level of design and manufacturing. As long as people understand this and can make repairs, that is sometimes OK.
While I feel OPs pain of finding a 2¢ part that was 0.3mm off center, I can only just shrug it off. A pseudo-premium 5¢ part or building a jig for a worker to test each gear would have been quite expensive and it would probably tack on $2-$5 to the end product price. ($2-$5 actually matters on sites like Amazon or Temu and could potentially cost thousands in lost sales due to product placement.)