Aluminum · MOQ from 1,000
Five suppliers.
Five people to chase.
One contact instead.
Tooling, casting, CNC, deburring, finishing — one person coordinates all five. You brief once. We handle the handoffs where projects die.
- Minimum order
- 1,000 pcs
- Mold fabrication
- 60–90 days
- Vendors to contacts
- 5 → 1
- On the factory floor
- 20 yrs
Start here
Which one of these is you right now?
Pick the closest one. Skip the sales pitch.
All I have is the sample
No drawing. No CAD file. Every factory says send the drawing first.
How reverse engineering works → 02I have the file, not the factory
Design's done. Now you need four more vendors — and nobody wants four figures of volume.
What low volume actually costs → 03My last supplier went quiet
Deposit paid. Replies slowed. Updates stopped.
How we handle this →The timeline
Real numbers, phase by phase
Most quotes give you one number and no breakdown. A number without a breakdown isn't a timeline — it's a hope. Here's ours, drawn to scale.
Reverse engineering
Only if you have no drawing or CAD file
DFM review
Before any steel gets cut
3D print check
You hold the part before any steel is cut
Mold fabrication
The longest single phase — watch this one
Post-trial correction
After the first trial shot
Surface finishing
Final stage before shipment
Mass production
Once the process is proven
Mold fabrication is most of your schedule — that's the phase to watch. The three dashed bars have no end point on purpose: DFM, the 3D print and mass production all genuinely depend on your part. A shop that gives you a confident number for those before seeing it is guessing at you, not estimating for you.
Why it matters
What the coordination actually costs you
Splitting the chain across five vendors doesn't save money. It moves the coordination onto your desk, twelve hours from the factory floor.
| Five separate vendors | One integrator | |
|---|---|---|
| Who you email when a date slips | ✕ Five separate shops, each blaming the one upstream | ● One person, who already knows what the other four are doing |
| Who owns the DFM decision | ✕ Nobody — each vendor optimizes their own step | ● Decided once, up front, against every downstream process |
| What happens when a part fails inspection | ✕ A round of finger-pointing you have to referee | ● We find the cause and tell you which stage it came from |
| Who eats the coordination work | ✕ You do, at 2am, across a 12-hour time gap | ● We do — that is the actual service |
Who you're actually talking to
I came up on the foundry floor
My first job in this industry was inside a casting plant. That's where you learn which mold shops are genuinely good, and which ones just quote well.
My family's business is deburring. It's the stage most people skip over when they're getting a quote, and it's one of the things that decides your yield more than anything else.
These shops might look small. What runs through them is work for large companies, shipping to their major clients. That standard doesn't drop because your order starts at 1,000 pieces.
Twenty years in, the thing I'd tell anyone starting out is the same thing that got me here — don't be afraid of getting it wrong. The mistakes are where the actual skill comes from.
Before you ask
Things most factories won't put on their website
You'll find this out eventually. Now is cheaper.
We won't quote off a sample from a brand-new mold
A mold wears. Quote off a fresh-mold sample and the number is already wrong before production starts. We learned that the expensive way.
Cheap and high-quality at the same time gets a no
There's a floor we won't quote under. People have walked, gone cheaper, and come back holding a mold that can't hold spec.
Some designs need to change before they can be made
Draft angle and wall thickness set wrong don't fix themselves downstream. We'll show you what the fix costs later — usually that's what changes minds.
We don't do the gift-giving thing
It has cost us orders. It's also why your parts get inspected honestly instead of waved through.
Off the line
Raw castings, before deburring and machining.
Start a project
Send the part. We'll tell you if it can be made.
A sample, a napkin sketch, or a finished CAD file — any of those is enough to start. If the honest answer is no, you'll hear that instead of a quote built to win the order.
- Minimum order
- 1,000 pcs
- No drawing needed
- 3–4 weeks