Comment by bsder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bsder | Hacker News Reader

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> A tool for metal stamping that costs me 5KUSD in China was quoted to me for 55KUSD in the East Bay. And, the 5K cost gets refunded to me after 40K pieces are bought...

Mechanical engineering in the US DRIVES ME CRAZY.

For electrical, China is 1/2 to 1/3 the cost. They also horribly screw up 1 in 3 that you have to redo completely. This is fine if you have the time. Otherwise, you go domestic.

Everything associated with electrical in the US understands that they are competing on turnaround, high-margin, high-value, and customer service. Yes, they're more expensive than China, but not unreasonably so.

The mechanical stuff is just totally out to lunch in the US. My gut feel is that mechanical shops in the US are in two categories: 1) competent, and running at 100% capacity or 2) incompetent, and running at almost 0% capacity. This is a recipe for frustration. You either can't get time ot can't get knowledge.

Consequently, all of the good electrical manufacturers I know have mechanical on site too (CNC milling, lathe, and probably injection molder). Even if it sits idle 95% of the time, that ONE time they need it NOW, it just paid for itself.

"My gut feel is that mechanical shops in the US are in two categories: 1) competent, and running at 100% capacity or 2) incompetent, and running at almost 0% capacity."

Buying something mechanical in the US is disorganized. There's nothing like Alibaba's wholesale side, with a reputation system. There's ThomasNet, but it's just a big industry directory. There might be an opportunity here for somebody. But it's not going to be a huge business.

Designing something to be injection molded is hard. There are lots of little things that run the price way up. There's "Injection Molding Part Design for Dummies", which is $495 on Amazon, but Proto Labs will send you a copy for free if you ask them. Incidentally, all TechShop locations have a small injection molding machine good for about one part a minute, and a CNC mill on which you can make a mold. They even have Autodesk Moldflow, which helps design molds using finite element analysis to predict what will work. So you can make prototypes and learn what works.

If you're dealing with a mold-making shop, if you send them files in Inventor or SolidWorks along with a Moldflow analysis, you'll probably get a much better price. In mechanical, the more clueless you are, the more it costs.

EMachineShop has a nice little CAD program which knows what their shop can do and will price the job. It will tell you if they can't make something due to some constraint (sheet metal bends too close, hole too deep, etc.) and gives hints on how to make the job cheaper. Those guys have been around for about 15 years, do a nice business, but haven't grown much.

TechShop is great for hobbyists with some money to spare (there are a lot of hidden costs, both time and money, that they don't tell you about), but terrible for professionals. Their machines are regularly not working for days at a time, and I've had experience with multiple locations so this is indicative of the company as a whole.

If you want to manufacture with plastic, I'd be surprised if there was any reason to do it outside of China. If you're working with metal, it's a much trickier question.

Along with EMachineShop, there's also Plethora. I've never used Plethora and it seems incredibly limited, but they've been around a few years and have a ton of people on staff (which can't be cheap) so they must be getting decent business.

Your mention of Alibaba made me think of something. I believe the electrical manufacturing world is much more globally integrated than the mechanical world. I say that as a practicing mechanical engineer. A resistor, capacitor, chip are the same in US, Europe & China. On the mechanical side all have different material standards and industrial standards.

And here is the US's disadvantage there, we are still on an island when it comes to that stuff. Sure you can get some metric nuts and bolts here (in US steel grades). But try buying European grade steel here (nigh impossible). Try getting an EN (nee DIN) or JIS flange here (do-able but lots of calling around). Try finding an engineer competent in the PED or machinery directive.

In Europe and Asia they can get US materials and make to our standard and sell to us. But its much harder and more rare to make products here and sell them to Europe and Asia. Usually you are making a US product, and "proving equivalency" with the European and Asian standards.

It's not even that easy to get metric nuts and bolts (as a hobbyist at least).

"but Proto Labs will send you a copy for free if you ask them"

... and you happen to have a U.S. or Canada mailing address.

http://p.protolabs.com/injection-molding-dummies-book

"*We currently ship promotional items to the U.S. and Canada only."

There are a few companies that totally get it though. Protolabs has an amazing service, it is highly automated so you save the programming costs that makes local CNC manufacturing so high. They are limited in the features, but for the majority of things they are fast and reasonably priced for low quantity. There are similar services for sheet metal I've used as well.

However even with that service, I have a CNC machining place I use in China that will beat even automated vendors. It takes 6 days to ship instead of 3, but the prices are generally lower, they can do a lot more finishing, they can do much more complicated machining and higher tolerances.

I feel bad for our local CNC guy as he rarely gets any work from us anymore. He has always had our best interests in mind, and has bailed us out on many occasions. He just cannot meet the lead times we can get elsewhere, we cannot afford to wait 2-3 weeks for a part when we can get it in a week. His prices are also higher, but that really wasn't what drove us elsewhere.

In my experience there are plenty of US shops happy to get work on a few specific widgets, typically by having a CAGE code. They aren't necessarily incompetent in the act of making a specific part, but they aren't optimized in a production sense.

A quick checklist for sniffing out shops: 1. Are they ISO? Getting through an ISO audit says something about the facility. 2. How much WIP is sitting around on a visit? With the best vendors I've worked with you'd swear they didn't do anything until you see their shipping lanes. Low WIP and busy shipping is another positive. 3. Ask to see their rework area. If they have one and SOPs for handling rework, that is a positive 4. Ask to see their documentation for current parts. PPAP, CoC, etc.

I'm not a mechanical engineer, but if I were to make mechanical parts I'd probably venture up to Detroit, Windsor, Seattle, or Los Angeles to tap into automotive and aerospace talent.

It's hard to believe there aren't a ton of shops out in those areas to help keep costs competitive. But I could see costs remaining high for the reasons you stated - high cost, high value industries.

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