Where I fit
Most of it starts the same way: somebody wants something made and there is nothing to quote off. That is not the only shape it takes, though, and I would rather hear what your gap is than guess at it.
- A customer with an idea and no drawings — send them my way and the design stops being yours to carry
- A job you have already won, where a detail needs drawing before anybody can cut it
- Your own engineer or draftsman buried three jobs deep
- A site visit where your salesman needs somebody technical standing next to him
- A scheduled shutdown, with parts the millwrights will have to fabricate on site
Tell me which one you are dealing with. Every shop runs differently, and what you need from me is a conversation, not a menu.
The design stops being your problem
A customer with nothing to quote off becomes my client, not your unpaid drawing office. You get a package to price, and the customer can bid it to you on the same terms as anybody else.
Fixtures for repeat work
Building the same weldment more than a couple of times? I'll design the fixture that holds tolerance across the run, so unit fifty matches unit one.
Overflow, not replacement
Plenty of shops have their own engineer or draftsman. I am there for the weeks they are buried, and I go away again when they are not.
Partner pricing
Reduced rates on work you commission directly, because you're not costing me a sales call.
Priority in the schedule
Partner work goes to the front of the queue. When your customer is down, that's the part that matters.
Your name on it, if you want
The package can be delivered under your letterhead. Plenty of shops would rather present design as their own capability, and that's fine by me.
Work sent back your way
When a plant hires me direct and asks who should build it, partners are who I name. In-house maintenance crews need the parts they can't make, too — that work goes to partners as well.
One of yours, not a competitor
I came up on the tools — machining, welding, sheet metal, CNC plasma. I can build what I draw, which is why it builds easy. I don't bid against the shops that send me work.
Packages that cost less to build
Cutting is the cheap, predictable part of a weldment. Fit-up is the slow, variable, skill-dependent part — and it's where the hours disappear.
Every plate-to-plate joint I draw is a tab passing through a slot. Parts self-locate and self-square against each other. Gusset feet are stepped so each one seats in a single orientation and the assembly physically can't go together wrong.
On a waterjet that notch is the same cut path as the outline, so the feature costs nothing to produce. What it removes is layout, jigging, squaring, and a second pair of hands holding a part while somebody tacks it. The second unit comes out identical to the first without a fixture.
Nested to stock you buy
Parts arrive grouped by material and thickness on real blank sizes, with cut files ready for the table. No sorting out what to order.
Questions answered before they're asked
Sequenced drawings, hardware schedules, material callouts. Your guys shouldn't have to phone the designer to start work.
Running the same part more than once?
A weldment can come out dead to print the first time and still drift by unit ten. Heat pulls it, the next welder sets up a little differently, and before long you're grinding to fit and arguing about tolerances that were fine on the prototype.
A fixture ends that. Parts locate the same way every time, the fixture holds against the pull, and unit fifty comes out like unit one — built by whoever is on shift, not only by your best hand.
I design weld fixtures and assembly jigs the same way I design parts: tabbed and slotted so the fixture itself goes together without needing a fixture, cut from plate you can actually get, with locating faces and clamp positions where the weld sequence needs them rather than where they were convenient to draw.
Where it earns its place, some of that tooling gets printed rather than cut — a drill template that locates a hole pattern, a gauge your guys check against once and throw in a drawer, a check piece to prove an awkward fit before anything goes to the table. It is a tool I reach for when proving something first saves a remake, not a step on every job.
Setup time stops being per-unit
Layout, squaring and tacking happen once, in the fixture design. After that every unit is load, clamp, weld. The hours you save compound across the run.
It unlocks work you'd otherwise pass on
A shop that can't hold tolerance across repeats can't bid repeat work. Tooling is how one-off fabrication turns into production quantities, which is a different class of customer and a steadier one.
What I ask in return
Just the two things
That when a design I did gets built, you're the shop I recommended — and that when you send me work, you keep sending it. No exclusivity, no contract, no minimum, no fee to join.
Tell me where the gap is
A customer with no drawings, a job already on the floor, or an outage three months out. Photos and a description are enough to start, and if it isn't a fit I'll tell you in an hour rather than waste your week.