Your Quote Came Back Higher Than You Expected
It is almost never the material, and almost never the shop’s margin. On most parts two or three callouts decide the majority of the price, and the engineer who wrote them usually did not know they were the expensive ones. This page shows how a machined price is actually built, what we would ask to change on a typical part, and one real job where the customer said no to our suggestion and was right to.
Ask which line made the number — and see whether the shop can answer
A machined price is six separate things, and they behave completely differently. Material is fixed by what you specified. Setup is paid once for the whole batch. Cycle time is paid again on every single piece. Until you know which of the six is carrying your price, you cannot tell whether the fix is a drawing change, a bigger batch, or a different supplier — and you may be negotiating the one line that was never the problem.
| Cost line | What it actually is | What moves it | What does not move it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Material | The billet we buy, including everything we cut away and cannot sell back | Stock size close to the finished part; a grade that is standard rather than specified by trade name | Batch size, mostly — metal is metal |
| Setup & fixturing | Clamping, probing, writing and proving the program, cutting the first piece | Batch size — 50 pieces carry the same setup as 10; and the number of times the part must be re-clamped | Tolerances on features that are not being set up to |
| Cycle time | Spindle minutes, paid on every piece | Tolerances, internal corner radii, pocket depth against cutter diameter, and how freely the material cuts | Batch size — the hundredth piece takes the same minutes as the first |
| Tooling | Cutters consumed and replaced during the job | Hard or gummy materials, small corner radii, long reach, interrupted cuts | A larger order, beyond a small volume discount |
| Inspection | First-article measurement, then sampling through the run | GD&T callouts, features needing gauges, and any dimension you ask to see reported on every piece | The overall part size |
| Finishing & packing | Deburring, anodising, plating, passivation, marking, individual packing | Cosmetic requirements, masked areas, and whether pieces may touch each other in transit | Nothing on the machining side |
If you send us a quote you are unhappy with — ours or anyone else’s — ask us to say which of those six lines is carrying it. That answer is free and it takes an engineer, not an algorithm.
One aluminium housing, three versions of the same drawing
Take a 6061 electronics housing: a milled enclosure with a sealing face, a deep narrow cable channel, four mounting bosses and a clear anodise. Nothing about it is difficult. Three things on the drawing are doing most of the damage, and none of them is the part itself.
| Version | What the drawing asks for | What that forces on the floor |
|---|---|---|
| A — as drawn | ±0.01 mm on every dimension on the sheet; R0.5 internal corners; a 4 mm wide channel 18 mm deep; every dimension reported on every piece | A separate finishing pass on features that are only clearance; a 3 mm cutter reaching four and a half times its own diameter, so light cuts and slow pecking; and a measuring room that becomes the bottleneck instead of the machine |
| B — functional tolerances only | ±0.01 mm kept on the four dimensions that actually locate the board and seal the lid. Everything else falls back to ISO 2768-m | The finishing pass survives only where it matters. Most of the inspection time disappears with it. The part is unchanged in every way the customer can feel |
| C — B, plus two geometry changes | Internal corners opened from R0.5 to R1.5, and the cable channel widened from 4 mm to 6 mm | A 6 mm cutter reaches the floor of the channel in three times fewer passes and stops deflecting, and one tool change leaves the program entirely. This is usually the largest single saving on a part like this |
That housing is an illustration of a pattern we see most weeks, not a real customer part, and the saving is not a fixed percentage — on your part it depends on your batch size and your drawing. Send the drawing and the number comes back with the quote.
We offered a finer finish. The customer said no, and he was right.
On the clutch pressure plates we machined from solid compacted graphite iron, the friction face is specified at Ra 2.5–6.5 µm. That is a wide, rough-looking band next to the rest of the drawing, and our instinct was to offer to hold it finer — it looks better, it photographs better, and we could do it.
The customer turned it down immediately. A friction face is not a cosmetic face. That roughness is what lets the plate bed in against the disc; polish it and the part is worse, not better, however good it looks on arrival. He was right, and we machined it exactly as drawn.
We tell that story on a page about price because it is the honest half of design-for-manufacture. An engineer at the shop can see what a feature costs. Only your engineer knows what it is for. Our job is to raise the question early, in writing, before the order — and then to build what you decide, not what we would have preferred.
- PartClutch pressure plate
- MaterialEN-GJV-300 / RuT300
- We proposedA finer friction face
- Customer decidedKeep Ra 2.5–6.5 µm
- BuiltExactly as drawn
The cheapest way to run a part in the shop is not always the cheapest part
Two models of titanium knife scales, 400 sets each, Ti-6Al-4V, for a US knife brand who had been buying from us for five years. To save cycle time we roughed and finished the contour with the same cutter. The geometry came out in tolerance on every piece. The surface did not: fine tool marks that the stone-wash would not hide, visible on a part a customer holds up to the light in a shop.
We sanded 240 to 400 to 600 by hand to rescue the first batch, re-blasted and re-tumbled, and still shipped five days late with a discount we paid for ourselves. The fix for the rest was not clever — a dedicated finishing cutter, 40–60 m/min, 0.03–0.05 mm per tooth, 0.1–0.2 mm depth of cut, short overhang in a shrink-fit holder, climb milling with a spring pass. A few more minutes per piece, and no rescue work at all.
So when a quote from us is a little higher than you hoped on a cosmetic part, some of that difference is this job. We have already paid for the cheaper version once.
- PartTitanium knife scales
- MaterialTi-6Al-4V
- Quantity2 models × 400 sets
- Root causeRoughing and finishing on one cutter
- Cost to us5 days late, plus a discount
- FixDedicated finishing pass
What we will not do to make the number smaller
Every one of these makes a quote look better and makes the delivery worse. If a price you are comparing against ours is far below it, it is worth asking which of them the other shop has done.
Quote a tolerance we cannot hold
We hold ±0.002 in (±0.05 mm) as routine work, and tighter on specific features when the drawing needs it and the setup allows. If a callout is outside what we can hold repeatably, we say so at quotation, not at first article.
Substitute a material quietly
If we think a different grade would do the job for less, we will ask. We will never ship a different grade than the one on the purchase order, and material certificates come with the parts on request.
Skip the first article
Every job gets a first piece measured before the batch runs. It is the cheapest insurance either of us will ever buy, and taking it out of a quote to win the order is how a 500-piece scrap report happens.
Price a drawing we have not read
An auto-quote prices whatever you upload in seconds. We would rather take a few hours, have an engineer read it, and send back a number we can still stand behind after the order.
Leave finishing and packing out
Anodising, passivation, deburring, marking and packing are on the quote as lines you can see. A price that excludes them is not a lower price, it is a later invoice.
Claim certification we do not hold
We are not ISO 9001, ISO 13485 or IATF 16949 certified. We measure, we document, and we send the report — and we say this before you ask rather than after.
We are not the cheapest shop for every part, and we will tell you which
We are a 36-person factory in Dongguan with 32 machining centres, thirteen of them four-axis, plus turning, wire EDM and sinker EDM in the same building. That shape of shop is very good at some work and genuinely not the right answer for other work.
Where our price is hard to beat
- Batch sizeRoughly 20 to 5,000 pieces
- Repeat workFixtures and programs already paid for
- Mixed partsMilled, turned and EDM work on one order
- FinishingAnodise, plate, blast, tumble — handled, not subcontracted blind
- Awkward jobsParts other shops quoted and then declined
Where someone else will be cheaper
- One-off prototypesA local shop saves the freight
- True 5-axis partsWe run 2-, 3- and 4-axis only
- 100,000-piece turned partsBelongs on a Swiss line
- Castings and forgingsShould not be cut from solid
- Certified aerospace or medicalNeeds a certified supplier
Send the drawing and we will tell you what is driving the price
A quote back within 16 hours, together with the two or three changes that would make the part cheaper, faster or easier to hold in tolerance. You decide what to change — we do not touch your drawing. Files stay in the shop, and an NDA is available on request.