Your Drawing Is Your Product. Here Is What Happens To It.
Sending a drawing to a factory on the other side of the world is an act of trust, and the buyers who worry about it are right to. An NDA is a piece of paper; what protects your design is what a shop actually does day to day. This page is that — who sees your files, where they stop, what we refuse to do with them, and how you can check we mean it.
Where your file goes, and where it stops
| Who or what | What they get | What they do not get |
|---|---|---|
| Quotation | Bill, our engineering manager, and the person preparing the quote | Nobody outside those two sees a file at enquiry stage |
| Programming | The programmer works from your model to write the toolpaths | |
| The shop floor | A print of the part, and the program on the machine | The machinist does not need your assembly, your other parts, or your customer’s name — and does not get them |
| Finishing subcontractors | The parts themselves, and a written finish specification | Your drawing. An anodiser does not need it, so it is not sent |
| Everyone else | Nothing | No file, no photograph, no part name, no mention that you are a customer |
| After the order | Files are kept so we can run your repeat order without you re-sending everything | If you would rather we deleted them when the job closes, say so and we will |
An NDA is available before you send anything. We will sign yours rather than pushing ours at you — your legal team has already approved your wording, and arguing about ours wastes a week of your time for no benefit.
Check the rest of this website before you believe this page
Anyone can write a confidentiality paragraph. The useful test is what a supplier has already published about the customers who came before you, because that is exactly what they would publish about you.
So look at our case studies. One is a clutch pressure plate for a driveline manufacturer: no company name, no country, and the drawing dimensions deliberately removed from the description. The other is a titanium knife-scale job for a five-year customer, credited only as “a US knife brand”. We do not publish a customer’s name without their written permission, and when we do not have it, the job is published anonymously or not at all.
The same applies to photographs. The parts in our sample room are customers’ own custom parts, and they appear on this site as anonymous examples of what we have machined — never with a company name, a drawing, or an identifying marking. If you would rather your part was not photographed at all, tell us and it will not be.
- NDAOn request, before you send anything
- Whose wordingYours
- Customer namesNever published without written consent
- Drawings to subcontractorsNever
- Photographs of your partsOnly if you are happy with it
- File deletionOn request when the job closes
Four things we will not do with your design
Make your part for somebody else
Your geometry is yours. We will not machine your design for another buyer, we will not offer it to one, and if a second company sends us a drawing that is obviously your part, we will decline the enquiry rather than quote it.
Use your drawing to quote a competitor
Not as a reference, not as a starting point, not “something similar”. A shop that reuses one customer’s work to win another customer’s order will do it to you next.
Name you as a customer
Not on the website, not in an email to another buyer, not in a trade-show conversation — unless you have told us in writing that we may. Plenty of suppliers treat a logo as theirs to display the moment an order lands. It is not.
Send your file anywhere it does not need to go
Finishing houses get parts and a specification. Freight forwarders get dimensions and weights. Neither gets your model, and no third party gets it on the grounds that it would be convenient.
Six things worth doing before you send a drawing to any factory
Including this one. None of these are about us — they are simply what a careful buyer does, and a supplier who objects to any of them has told you something.
Get the NDA in before the file, not with it
Once the drawing has arrived, your leverage to negotiate the terms is gone. Ask first; it costs a day at most, and a supplier who will not sign before seeing the part is answering your question.
Mark the drawing itself
Your company name, a revision, and a confidentiality line in the title block. It travels with the file through every hand it passes, long after the email it arrived in is forgotten.
Send the part, not the assembly
A machine shop needs the component it is quoting. It does not need the surrounding mechanism, and sending the whole assembly gives away far more of your product than the job requires.
Ask who will hold the file, and for how long
It is a fair question and it has a real answer. Any supplier who cannot say where your data sits has not thought about it, which is the actual risk — carelessness far more often than theft.
Ask to see how they write about other customers
Read their case studies and their website gallery. If other buyers’ names, logos and parts are on display, assume yours will be too.
Ask which parts of the job leave the building
Almost every machine shop subcontracts something — anodising, plating, heat treatment. Ask which operations go out, and what goes out with them. “The parts and a finish specification” is a good answer. “The whole drawing package, so they can sort it out” means your design is sitting in a company you have never heard of and never agreed to.
Ask for the NDA first. We will sign yours.
Send us your wording and we will return it signed, usually the same working day, before you send a single file. If you would rather talk it through first, there is an engineer at the other end, not a sales inbox.