Let’s go ahead and address the elephant in the machine shop: material sourcing in the post-COVID world is hard, and there’s no telling when things will return to “normal.” Want an example? We recently got an order on a Thursday, sent the PO to our material supplier on a Friday, and found out that the material they had quoted us just days ago was gone.

Are your finishing requirements adding unexpected time, cost, and hassle to your precision machining orders?
There are many ways to overengineer a part, and including unnecessarily complex finishing callouts is high on the list. Follow these finishing best practices when designing your next part.

We pride ourselves on being the precision machine shop customers can turn to for their most complex parts, consistently achieving tight tolerance requirements and mastering challenging features and materials that other shops don’t want anything to do with.

There’s a saying we have in the precision machining world when discussing tolerances: Every decimal place adds a zero to the price. Manufacturers know that nine times out of 10, tolerancing is what drives up the cost of a part. And yet, time and again, customers submit over-toleranced part designs that are exceptionally difficult to bring to life on the shop floor.

There are many things we love about precision machining, but one of the best parts of our job is getting the chance to work with—and master—new and exciting materials. Last year introduced us to Nitronic 60, an all-purpose stainless steel alloy commonly found in minisatellites. This year, the newest material to come through our precision machine shop is Monel. And as is often the case here at Focused on Machining, once we get a taste of something, we can’t get enough of it!