A cycle time quoted against your part
Eleven presses from 80 to 650 tonnes, tools built and maintained on the same floor, and a first-shot report you sign before the run starts.
What the floor runs at
Three figures against their own ceiling, so the number means something without a second sentence.
Tooling, on the same floor
A tool built elsewhere and run here is two companies arguing about one part. All three of these happen in this building.
New tools
Single and multi-cavity, built here from your part drawing. Lead time is quoted with the cavitation, because a four-cavity tool is not four times a single-cavity one in either price or weeks.
Maintenance and repair
Shot-count based, on a schedule agreed at handover rather than when a part starts flashing. Your tool, your schedule — we hold it and we do not own it.
Transfer and re-commission
A tool arriving from another moulder is stripped, measured and sampled before it runs. We will tell you what it needs before quoting the parts, which occasionally ends the conversation.
How a part starts
Five steps. You sign step four before anything is run in volume.
Drawing and volume
A 3D file, the material and the annual quantity. Without a volume a quotation is a guess — the cavitation that suits ten thousand parts is wrong for four hundred thousand.
Mouldability review
Wall sections, draft and gate position, before any price. Where a feature will not mould reliably we say so at this step rather than after the tool is cut.
Tool build
Cut here, with a mid-build review you are invited to. Most customers do not come; the ones who do catch things earlier than we would.
First shot report
Full dimensional report against the drawing, with the process settings recorded beside it. You approve it before the run, and it is the document a dispute two months later is settled from.
Run and hold
Settings locked to the approved report. A change to them is a written change, because a cycle shaved on the floor is a dimension moved somewhere nobody looked.
Before you send a part
Four answers, and the last one costs us work every year.
What is your cycle time?
It depends entirely on your part — wall section, shot weight, material and cooling. Ask any moulder who answers this with one number what part they measured it on; the reply usually explains the quotation as well.
Do you own the tool?
No. You pay for it and it is yours, held here under a written bailment. If you move to another moulder we will crate it and hand over the maintenance history with it.
What is the minimum order?
Two thousand parts on a repeat and none on a first run. Below two thousand the setup dominates and you would be paying us to change over rather than to mould.
Can you match a price we have been quoted?
Usually not, and where we can it is because the other quotation left something out — the tool, the packaging or the first-shot report. We will tell you which of the three rather than reprice, because a moulder who meets any number is a moulder who will find the difference somewhere on the floor.
Send an RFQ
A 3D file, the material and the annual volume. Everything else we will ask about on the call.