Custom Fabrication Requires Perspective

CNCROi.com is a custom fabrication shop, each day and every day, we “make something” for a client whether they are new parents wanting a photo of their baby engraved in a piece of Pine or an aerospace customer wanting a thousand custom foam inserts for their highly specialized tooling.

Sometimes things go great, sometimes there are challenges, but each project is fun to make and the reaction from our customers when they get their item(s) is always a wonderful email to read.

I have to keep reminding myself that just because I do custom for a living, most people do not and as such, what seems simple and straight forward to me can be mind-blowing to them.

To me, making a 3D animation of a custom award I designed is pretty “easy”, just draw out the various shapes, put them together then animate them to show a customer how what we are about to make for them works.

The next step down that road is to actually make the finished product, you want it out of wood? No problem! You want it out of stainless steel? No problem… you want it to be 20 ft high and actually work in the real world? How much money do you have?

At the end of the day, I taught myself how to make things out of wood, metal, plastic and what have you.

I also taught myself how to use equipment and optimized designs for said equipment, so cutting something out of metal using a waterjet to me is basically the same as doing the same out of wood using a CNC router or CNC laser when it comes to custom fabrication.

But going back, I have to constantly remind myself that all of this knowledge I’ve acquired and that has become second nature to me is something that’s actually pretty unique and there aren’t many people in the world who can take a product from idea to 3D to finished product from anything to anything.

I come into the lives of our customers and where others only offer them imported products that they can pick from a catalog, I tell them literally anything is possible given enough volume, time and budget.

It’s a fundamental shift that most people simply didn’t ever think about as even being a possibility.

So you want a custom steamboat model to display your products at a trade show but instead of wood, you want it out of stainless steel with laser etched details across the bow – for, that sounds like a great amount of fun!

Most other people really wouldn’t know where to start.

So when it comes to custom fabrication, many people get their heads blown into stagnation, stuck at the first step and again and again, I have to remind them that just because I know how to do this stuff intuitively, they don’t need to.

Custom fabrication is EASY!

Just tell me what you want, a sketch is always good with dimensions and then I can take things from there to have it made by my company CNCROi.com.

If there are any issues with what you want, they will reveal themselves during production and we’ll solve them as they come but 9 times out of 10, everything goes smoothly as it’s a variation of something I’ve done many times before.

Prototyping is also an important step for more complex projects which generally work out any design shortfalls that neither you or I were aware of using a specific material to make “something”.

Just keep an open mind and be flexible when it comes to custom fabrication.

Of course, CNCROi.com also has customers who know exactly what they want, how they want it and a thorough understanding of the process, defense, aerospace and medical related customers are a prime example and I have as much fun doing quality control for what we make for them as anybody else.

At the end of the day, nobody’s life will be fundamentally altered if a simple name badge has a flake of gold that’s a slightly different color variance across a piece of laser cut acrylic anymore than a small knot across a huge mural.

I think after people come to realize how CNCROi.com makes what we do for our customers, they gain a more thorough understanding of the processes and technologies that we employ in our shop to make what they want for them within budget and on time.

That’s why I make these videos, I really enjoy sharing small glimpses into the fun we have here in the shop.

Everyday we have new challenges with custom fabrication, new customers wanting something made that they can’t find anybody else to help them with or us having to purchase new equipment to do a project within our customer’s requirements.

Running a custom fabrication shop is a lot of fun and quite a privilege to have and the more of that I can share with others, the more I appreciate that the work we do here does make a difference by bringing them a little more custom into their lives.

Need some custom fabrication? Contact CNCROi.com right now!