When you’re ordering custom parts from an outside manufacturer, you know that your own company’s ability to meet deadlines and produce a viable final product is resting on this outside manufacturer’s ability to deliver a quality product to you in a timely fashion.
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Because your company’s reputation might have to depend on the quality and speed of the custom parts manufacturer you’re dealing with, it’s important to know whether or not if the other manufacturer can make a satisfactory part on time before you commit to a purchase.
With this in mind, here are a few questions to ask your custom parts manufacturer before buying parts from them:
Material choice is incredibly important in the manufacture of custom components. Your custom parts manufacturer’s material choice should provide a good balance of cost-effectiveness and long-term viability for the final product.
For example, if the parts you’re ordering are going to be exposed to mildly caustic environments or moisture, then plain steel, while cheap, wouldn’t be a good choice of material since it wouldn’t last long in a mildly caustic environment. Grade 316 stainless steel, on the other hand, would be overkill since the corrosives that the part will be exposed to aren’t that powerful, and the material is fairly costly.
Here, grade 304 stainless steel would be a better choice, as it can survive exposure to mild corrosives and isn’t as costly as grade 316 stainless steel.
When a custom metal parts manufacturer uses the right material for the job, you can get the most bang for your buck.
Aside from material choice, the choice of what coating or finish to use on a custom part, if any, can have a huge impact on the viability of that part for its use in the final product.
A coating of soft PVC can help a custom materials handling basket carry delicate objects without scratching them, or an electropolish finish can remove the microscopic flaws in a metal form that foreign objects may have caught in, improving the utility of the parts in applications where non-stick surfaces are a must.
Once again, it is important that the coating or finish used both enhances the utility/useful life of the part and makes sense financially.
Manufacturing techniques have come a long way in the last few decades. Many tasks that were once done only by hand have become automated. New technologies have been introduced to make certain manufacturing tasks faster and more consistent. For example, Marlin Steel uses the IDEAL Welding Machine to make sure every basket is precision made. Watch the video below!
Using a third-party manufacturer that relies on outmoded techniques to assemble your custom parts is, at best, a risky proposition. Manual assembly of metal parts is slow, as a manual laborer gets fatigued throughout the day, slowing down his or her productivity.
Manufacturers who use manufacturing automation don’t really have this problem. Robots, unlike people, don’t’ get tired, so they can keep working with the same machinelike precision at the same speed all day.
In fact, manufacturing automation plays a big role in answering the next two questions:
When you’re mass-producing a product, each part has to fall within a very specific set of measurements, or else the final product won’t fit together and you might as well have a collection of worthless scrap on your hands.
If the bend in a piece of steel wire is 90 degrees on one part, but 92 degrees on another, that’s a significant enough a different in the angle to potentially ruin the final product.
This is precisely why it is important to know how a manufacturer will make a part, as the precision of automated metal bending machines such as a CNC press brake can make ensuring consistent bend angles in metal easy, while relying on hand tools makes consistency nearly impossible to give in a time fashion.
One of the basic reasons that any manufacturer goes to a third party for the production of a part is that they’re on a tight schedule and cannot make the part themselves without going behind schedule. This problem is especially critical when your company has a major product release coming up.
Keeping consumers waiting for their product can be incredibly harmful to sales in this modern era of near-instant gratification where consumers are used to a two-day home delivery timetable.
So, it is important to know how fast the manufacturer you’re enlisting to make a custom part or component can fulfill your order and have the parts delivered to you. You may want to do some independent research and check with the manufacturer’s previous clients to ask them how quickly their own orders arrived after the work order was finalized.
Finding the right manufacturer to help you get the production of your critical components is incredibly important to meeting your company’s own obligations. Find out how Marlin Steel helped other companies meet their production goals by reading the case study at the link below:
No matter what industry you are in, choosing a woven wire mesh supplier can be a difficult and sometimes painful process. You are choosing to put your trust in someone, not to mention your money and time.
In the world of woven wire mesh, choosing the right specification and quality product can be crucial for the performance of your entire operation. We spend a lot of time helping potential customers decide if our product, our capabilities, and our culture is the right fit for them, so we know how important that decision is.
We wrote this article to help guide you in your wire mesh decision-making process.
We are going to dive into what type of buyer you are, get a real understanding of what to look for in a wire mesh supplier, and cover the importance of choosing an experienced wire mesh supplier.
When it comes to woven wire there are a lot of customizations and options out there. Knowing what these are before you talk to potential partners can help you estimate a lot of things for your project like cost, delivery or development time.
There are essentially two different ways to buy woven wire mesh: Raw Material or Material and added value services. There are different levels and cost ranges in each of those categories of course but that’s the most basic way to introduce this topic.
Wire mesh can be sold as strictly “material.” The material is woven to your specific technical needs and either sold on a roll or cut to certain size pieces. Sometimes companies stock certain weave types so you may have a shorter delivery time. If you are looking for a very technical or specific weave type or spec, you may be facing a longer production or delivery time.
The material itself could be in any price range. It could be very intricately woven filtration material or it could be a simple pattern like square mesh. Obviously, those two different weave types have very different price ranges but either way the process for buying woven wire this way is simple.
For more information on the cost of woven wire, you can read our Guide to Woven Wire Mesh which will explain cost ranges for different weaves.
These services include anything additional that needs to be done to your mesh before it is delivered to you. Some of those services are:
- CalendaringThere are some pretty distinct differences in what determines the amount of work needed for projects that involve added value services.
Link to Yaoguang Wire Mesh
For instance, you may simply need your cut-to-size pieces of mesh calendered to change the opening size. Though this is a pretty simple process, it may be a significant increase in time or cost from what you were going to pay for the material itself.
On the other end of the spectrum, you may be looking for a filter for your system that is entirely custom made from drawings with an engineering team all the way through to a final filter or customized product. This is going to be a much more extensive project that includes more people, time and resources.
Knowing these types of things not only helps you become a more educated buyer, but it also helps you make sure you are finding the right partner who specializes and is capable of meeting your needs and is not looking to just make a quick buck off of the material itself.
Of course the relationship you have with your partners is important, but we want you to be sure you have the type of relationship that allows for open communication and transparency.
Building custom products involve a lot of working parts, and there will be roadblocks. Sometimes hearing about other challenges they have faced with other customers can help you get some insight into how they manage relationships.
To find out more, you may want to ask questions like:
- What makes this project a success for you
- What other similar projects have you worked on
- Can you provide me with specific examples of problems you have run into in the past and how you overcame them?
This one is specific to the world of woven wire mesh. There are lots of places out there to get woven wire mesh. Some companies manufacture their own woven wire in house and others outsource depending on specification or alloy type or even just availability. For example, here at W.S. Tyler, we have parent and sister companies all around the world. This gives us a huge network of different types and qualities of mesh.
While this is generally a good thing, it is important that you as the customer know where your material is from and that you are getting the right mesh for your needs.
Some questions you could ask:
- Do you outsource your material?
- Where it is outsourced from?
It can be tough to trust that your product is going to be to the best standards without testing your final product or knowing what your customers will say. There are some technical things you can find before you decided to go with a wire mesh supplier that will tell you a lot about how seriously they take their quality control and product success.
Making sure you know your own industry standards before you ask these questions.
At W.S. Tyler we partner with an independent lab called Whitehouse Scientific Ltd that verifies the quality and accuracy of our woven wire. This company specializes in testing the accuracy of woven materials. This lets us operate in confidence knowing that the material leaving our building in any application is of the highest standard for our customers.
To help you in this decision you may want to ask questions like:
- Can you provide the necessary documentation for ISO or ASTM standards
- Can you prove the accuracy of your weave structures?
- Do you perform a bubble point test to check the accuracy of your weaves?
If you are using woven wire mesh for your processes, flow rate or pore size is going to be very important to you. So, when it comes to taking that mesh and shaping, cutting or molding it, it can get tricky to do that without changing the functionality or opening size of the mesh.
It takes a certain level of experience to be able to form woven cloth correctly without sacrificing your filtration capabilities. This type of experience only comes from working with mesh in many different situations.
Let's look at a transmission filter as an example.
A transmission filter is a very precisely woven and cut to size piece of wire mesh that is formed specifically to fit a transmission system. The edges are plastic injection molded to hold the wire mesh in place and allow it to fit perfectly into the system.
If you were to get the filter from a particular woven wire mesh supplier and then send it somewhere else for your plastic injection molding, you are bringing on the potential for mistakes.
Not only does the company injection molding your mesh need to be skilled and careful during the process not to damage or change the mesh, but now you also have to worry about your product suffering damage during the shipping process.
Ask Questions like:
- Do you do everything in-house?
- Have you dealt with this type of project before?
We hope that after reading this you feel a little more confident when choosing your partner in your woven wire mesh journey.
If nothing else, we hope you remember that when it comes to finding a partner in such a scientific and precise industry, it’s not just about the product. Sure, quality and technicalities are important, but you need to find a company that you feel has the same morals and values as you.
As always, if you are interested in using W.S. Tyler for your customized product or woven wire mesh needs, get in touch with us and we will be happy to see if we can be the right partner for you.
If you want to learn more, please visit our website Customized Wire Mesh Solutions.
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