We offer a wide variety of finishing services to achieve almost any look and feel on your parts. We offer treatments for metal, texturing for plastic injection mold tools, painting for metal and plastic, and many more. 

 

There is not a given set of tolerances that fits all processes and materials. In every case, the final tolerances on your part will depend on a number of factors, including but not limited to:
 

1. Part size / Design geometry/  The number, type and size of features
 

2. Material(s) / Surface finish /  Manufacturing process
 

3. Once your order is confirmed, we will review your design and provide a design for manufacturing review, pointing out any areas where we may not be able to achieve your desired tolerances. It’s helpful if you can specify which areas in your design have critical tolerances that must be met and which can be slightly modified if needed to reduce time and costs involved. Here are some general tolerance guidelines:
 

4. General tolerances for CNC machining in metal and plastic
 

5. Plastic injection molding tolerances
 

6. General tolerance for metal 3D printing is +/- 0.5mm
 

7. Shrinkage rate of +/- 0.15% is to be expected for vacuum casting
 

8. All manufacturing and technical specifications need to be clearly specified in the 2D drawings in order to be followed.

 

2. Additionally, engineers often need just one or maybe a few parts for test fixtures, assembly jigs, or assembly fixtures. Machining is the best option here as well, but traditional machine shops often charge a significant non-recurring engineering (NRE) charge for programming and fixturing. This NRE charge often makes getting very small quantities not affordable. The automated CNC machining process eliminates the upfront NRE costs and is able to offer quantities as low as one part at an affordable price and get parts in your hands in as fast as 1 day.

3. Injection molding is better suited to support larger amounts of samples for functional or market testing, bridge tooling, or low-volume production. If you need parts before a steel tool can be made (typically 6 to 10 weeks with other molders) or your volume requirements don't justify expensive steel production tooling, we can supply production parts to meet your full requirements (up to 10,000+ parts) in 1 to 15 days.

Vacuum casting is a method for making high quality prototypes or low volumes of parts formed from inexpensive silicone molds. Copies made in this way show great surface detail and fidelity to the original pattern.

 

1. We can use diverse 3D printing processes to fabricate your parts. More rapid and cost-effective compared with CNC Machining from one piece to large quantities.
 

2. 3D printing has become a standard technique for developing one-off visual prototypes due to its speed, affordability, and flexibility. Printed parts sometimes lack strength and impact resistance, but this matters little for visual prototypes.