Hamond Times

These days, price pressure is everywhere. Our customers ask us to reduce the price of a part we make for them. Especially in the last six months, with steel prices rising, reducing part price calls for some wisdom.

The fact is, a large component of part cost is designed in by the people who designed the part and drew the part print. As contract manufacturers, we can only make what the print allows us to make. If the design is wasteful in raw materials or machine time, there isn't much we can do to change it without active co-operation from you and your designers.

Ah, but with your co-operation and a good understanding of what the part needs to do, what a difference we can make!

So here's a good starting place for a designer eager to look over a design and trim cost:

• Examine the tolerances and the tolerances of the mating components. Are they overspecified? Can any be relaxed without effecting part function? Or redrawn so they are less complex or less demanding? If so, our staff have been pouring extra effort and time into making a part more perfect than necessary for the function. They will be able to set up the job more quickly, be making parts sooner, need to do fewer in-process inspections, etc. This is true for angular tolerances on bends, particularly for tolerances on second, third and fourth bends. And especially true if the parts have to go through heat treat afterwards.
  
• Slide forming is generally an resource-economical technology - that is, we make relatively little scrap. We use precision slitters and use the material slit line one of our part edges. Slitting is a low-scrap (almost no-scrap) operation. However, this can be defeated if a part dimension (usually the part width) is specified more tightly than needed, and more tightly than slitters can slit accurately. Slitters can generally slit down to ±0.005", depending on the material and thickness. If you've asked for higher accuracy, then we have to cut the part out ourselves in the die (yielding an accuracy of ±0.001" or better), but that causes scrap. This matters more in stainless steel and/or copper and it's alloys, but these days, even low-carbon steel has become an expensive commodity, and wasting any of it leads to unnecessary expense.
  
• Sometimes, the complexity of the part design slows down our machines. Metal needs time to flow, and the more complex the shape, the more time each part will need on our machines. If the shape complexity is "pretty" rather than functional, perhaps a simpler shape could be made faster.
  

We understand that your designers don't know how our machines work, just like our designers don't know how your industry works. That's why the best designs come from active co-operation between our designers and yours. If you want to set up a meeting to discuss part cost with us, please write our sales manager John Sheehy and he'll set up a meeting.

There are many other ideas that can yield a better result ... too many to be put into one short article like this. To see more good ideas for improving our cost benefit to you, check back with this blog from time to time.

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