Precision drawings make the real thing a sure bet.

There are many gradients of quality in the metal fabrication business. We’ll label the major categories of quality as poor, commercially acceptable and precision. The big money is always on precision quality.

Manufacturing a part to exact engineering specifications always requires a complete set of shop drawings, no exceptions!  The draftsmen who prepare these precise, detailed drawings are called detailers and for good reason. For any component to fit and function properly it must be created three times:  at conception, at engineering & design and at the manufacturing stage the real physical part. The engineering drawings make their physical manifestations buildable. Precisely detailed drawings are the second creations that assure the real solid things work.

When taken literally, The devil is in the details is just plain wrong!  On the contrary, the added value and profit are in the details!  The phrase really means that the devil shows up when the details are missing from the fabrication specs.  All hell can break loose on the shop floor or worse, at the client site, when fabricators attempt to push a job with insufficient drawings through the shop.

Detailing, not to be confused with expensive car cleaning, is a step in the quality fabrication process that provides shop techs the precise virtual model (detailed shop drawings) to fabricate a part and/or build an assembly. When the fabricator can say Oh yeah, now I see exactly what you want me to make! The project moves forward with alacrity.

Today’s CAD and 3D rendering software is amazing. It enables architects, engineers and product designers to visually create things with striking accuracy to their real world equivalents.

The best detailers provide drawings and renderings that enable fabricators to see the desired end result and do their jobs effectively. For clients and OEMs, this means they’ll have prototypes that prove concepts. Their finished products will please the marketplace with exceptional quality and performance.

Quality has a cost. Detailing is a cost of doing business in the metal fabrication world. The higher the quality (the more precisely detailed) the drawings are for your project, the higher the quality of the finished product. Most will agree that poor quality is off the table, commercially acceptable quality is skating on thin ice, and precision quality is always the objective. Precision quality requires precise details.

Gilchrist Metal Fabricating Company is always happy to review your designs and shop drawings at any stage in the process. We can advise you of the feasibility and costs associated with taking your project to the next stage in manufacturing.  Please feel free to call or email us if you have any questions:  (603) 889-2600

What do you need to know?

The goal of this newsletter is to bring informative and helpful ideas about metal work to our customers and the metalworking industries. We wanted our first issue to reintroduce our brand and business philosophy. Metalwork Mettle is designed with you in mind. We promise to bring you information you can use on a regular basis. Feel free to contact us and share your ideas. (603) 889-2600 [email protected]

One Heck of a Hobby Shop!

Make it or buy it? Manufacturing products in-house brings many benefits. Good customers appreciate what they can get faster and more reliably – a lesson Jack Gilchrist learned when he made the decision to bring a machine Image removed by sender.shop in-house to his metal fabrication plant in Hudson, New Hampshire. It made a huge impact on productivity and customer service.

Gilchrist Metal Fabricating (GMF) is a world class metal fabrication shop that can do just about anything for a wide range of components, subassemblies and OEM customers. If it’s made of metal, GMF can roll it, bend it, twist it, bump it, cut it, weld it, grind it, form it, drill it, CNC machine it, finish it and more – all under one roof. If your “hobby” is industrial contract manufacturing, Gilchrist Metal Fabricating is where you can really go to town, and probably have some fun!

Take it easy and get it done!

The company that makes things easier for customers gets the lion’s share of repeat business and word of mouth referrals – pure gold in diversified contract manufacturing. This philosophy has served 3 generations of Gilchrists and their customers very well. A friendly, laid back atmosphere is combined with an intense interest in metal work of all kinds at GMF. A typical walk of the shop floor will show an amazing diversity of product and building components in various stages of formation. You’ll likely see managers, foremen and shop techs huddled to work out the perfect customImage removed by sender. solution for a customer, creative manufacturing solutions becoming evident in their grins.

Not holding back any pride for his company and people, Jack Gilchrist said recently, “Everyone on our team works here because they like being part of a diversified, hard working metal shop. We really enjoy this stuff.” He further proffers, “We like finding the ideal solutions to fabrication challenges that other shops might shy away from. We actually want the complex and the difficult work. We’ve invested in people, skills and equipment to handle it.”

Examples of GMF’s work range from such common fabrications as custom metal rails and precision parts to the very unusual such as protective deepwater drill housings, X-ray machine components and one-of-kind architectural metal structures. They work expertly with iron, bronze, steel, aluminum, stainless steel, zinc and various alloys.

What do you need to know?

The goal of this newsletter is to bring informative and helpful ideas about metal work to our customers and the metalworking industries. We wanted our first issue to reintroduce our brand and business philosophy. Metalwork Mettle is designed with you in mind. We promise to bring you information you can use on a regular basis. Feel free to contact us and share your ideas. (603) 889-2600 | [email protected]

After you design it, let’s review the project together.

Is there any such thing as perfection? We all know the answer to that because we’re all human. However, there is such a thing as making something perfectly good and that’s great for business! There are certain realities in the economics of fabricating metal parts and components that dictate how precise some tolerances can be before they put costs out of range for the market to tolerate.

Sure, you may have the engineering wizardry and we have the precision fabricating ability to make amazing things. Throw enough money and manpower into a project and we can make a prototype that will blow your top off! But then you need to figure out how to manufacture the 5,000 or 20,000 of those units you need within the budget you have. Sometimes you just can’t make the perfectly engineered product a mass produced reality, even with the strongest of intentions and the best fabricators in the market working on it. This is when POP ,Proof of Principle, is a critically important exercise.

Design with POP!

Going through POP lets everyone involved in a project figure out the right precision tolerances needed. If you go for perfection first, you may end up with something too expensive to feasibly manufacture. Here’s where we can separate what you and your customers really need compared with what you may at first want. Collaboration is the key. Once we get to fulfilling the need in prototyping, we can test for the quality that the market will be happy with and then make a component or assembly that will be cost effective to manufacture and profitable to sell.

For example, maybe we can bend a slightly longer piece of metal into a shape that engineering specified as a welded on piece. Right there you just saved the cost of an additional skilled operation. If the bent piece is good enough and works well, you go with it. When form, fit and functionality of a part work for the intended purpose, you’ll probably be well advised to accept recommended modifications to the original design. Two teams working together in cooperation always result in more value. The improved efficiency of fabrication arrived at through collaboration can make all the difference in the profitability of the project.

Keep in mind here that GMFCo is a custom, precision metal fabrication manufacturer and we love working on challenging projects. As we’ve said before, This is one heck of a hobby shop! We appreciate it when engineering teams and other fabricators refer business to us because of our reputation for having the capabilities that few others in the market have. But when fabrication perfection is just too good to be true, we’ll be honest with you and tell you that too. Together, we’ll devise the ideal solution for you and your customers. The experts at GMFCo would like to help you achieve your goals.

Gilchrist Metal Fabricating Company is always happy to review your designs and shop drawings at any stage in the process. We can advise you of the feasibility and costs associated with taking your project to the next stage in manufacturing.

What do you need to know?

Our goal is to bring informative and helpful ideas about metal work to our customers and the metalworking industries. Feel free to contact us and share your ideas.

(603) 889-2600 [email protected]