A quick gut-check before you send the print.
Customers often use the word ‘niche’ to describe what a supplier can make. Our manufacturing capabilities are very broad, so we prefer the term competitive niche: the parts on which we’d expect to win a global competitive assessment. If you understand who we are and what we do, you’ll find we’re an easy company to work with, with tremendously broad capabilities, and within our competitive niche we can compete with anyone in the world.
Our goal is simple: provide per-print parts, on time, at competitive prices, to customers who are ethical, honest, good communicators, and who pay their bills on time. Just as important is what we’re not. We stock hardware items, but we never stock custom fabrications, so if we can’t be competitive building to your release and ship quantity, it isn’t our competitive niche and we’re not the right source for the work.
For our stocked hardware families, the test is simple: if you find a picture of it in our system and there are lots of part numbers associated with it (that is, lots of different thread-size options), chances are we’ll be competitive regardless of volume.
Competitive regardless of volume if it’s a pictured, multi-part-number item. We stock 700,000+ ball joints, with lead times from in-stock to about 8 months. We import all of our ball joints. Browse ball joints →
Same test. We stock over 1,000,000 yoke and clevis ends and forge many yoke ends in-house. We’re competitive on standard clevis pins when they’re the type that goes with one of our standard clevises or yoke ends. Browse clevis & yoke ends →
Same test. We stock over 1,000,000 spherical rod ends and make many of our nylon-raced rod ends in-house. Browse spherical rod ends →
Competitive at any volume if it’s threaded on one or both ends, is a true push-pull cable (not just a pull cable), is not a brake cable, and uses standard inch or metric ends. Browse push-pull cables →
Bar, wire, tube and plate fabrications are most competitive at 250 to 2,500 pieces, and especially strong when several operations stack on one part. See the Tube Fabrication, Bar & Wire Hot Forming and Upset Forging guides.
Mechanical linkage assemblies in any volume, and tube or bar fabrications with molded polyurethane, pressed-in bearings, or assembled linkage ends, are a strong fit for our under-one-roof model.
Across all of the above, a few factors define where we’re most competitive:
Ball joints, clevises, clevis pins, spherical rod ends, yoke ends and threaded push-pull cables are competitive whether you need 5 or 5,000.
Because we cost setup and run time as two separate things (most shops bundle them), wire, bar, flat-bar and plate fabrications are most competitive in that mid-volume range, which tracks the off-highway market we serve.
Rod diameters from 3/16" to 3/4" and their metric equivalents are where we’re strongest.
This matters most with tubing: we do well with structural tubes, not fluid or air-bearing tubes.
About 97% of what we run is carbon steel, but the niche holds for stainless and aluminum, which actually broaden it because fewer shops will work with or source those materials.
By far the most important factor. The more operations a part needs, bending, swaging, upset forging, press forming, welding, threading, powder coating, the more clearly it’s ours.
