We print in full color, directly onto metal

A gray part is not a finished product. It is the first of three purchase orders.

PO 01

Order the part

A cutter sends you gray metal, in whatever finish came off their chart.

PO 02

Find a powder coater

Ship it out. Wait. Hope the color is close to the one in your brand guidelines.

PO 03

Find a screen printer

Ship it again. Hope the registration is right. Three lead times, three invoices, three chances for it to land wrong.

That is the standard way to buy a metal object with a logo on it in this country, and it is only the standard way because the shops that cut the metal never bought a printer.

We did. Our UV flatbed lays CMYK ink directly onto the sheet and cures it on contact, so the graphic goes on before the part ever leaves the building. Photographs, gradients and six-point type all survive it. Your actual brand color goes down rather than the nearest one on somebody's chart, and on an ADA sign the braille domes raise in the same pass as the room number beside them.

Show us what you want printed

We sell the part you would otherwise have had to send somewhere else to finish.

What we make

Four kinds of work

Ranked the way we actually want the phone to ring.

      01
Data plates, UID and serial markingIf you build machines, every unit that leaves your dock carries a plate: model, serial, capacity table, voltage, a 2D data matrix, often a MIL-STD-130 format for anything heading to a defense buyer. It is a purchase you make forever, in small lots, usually late. We mark and print them on anodized aluminum or stainless, to your artwork, in the quantity you actually need this month.
A machine builder shipping forty units a month needs forty plates a month, every month, and does not want to buy five thousand of them to get a decent price.

      02
ADA signage, priced per door, for the whole buildingRaised characters at least 1/32 inch proud, contracted Grade 2 braille, non-glare finish, the contrast the code asks for. The flatbed puts the room number, the pictogram, the wayfinding arrow and the operator's brand color down in one pass, on metal rather than on plastic. Give us the door schedule and we will quote the building, not the sign.
A 180-room hotel refurbishment is 180 room plates, plus the back of house, plus the restrooms, plus every stairwell and exit. One schedule, one delivery, one invoice.

      03
Your brand on the part, your box, our name nowhere on itThe online cutters need a CAD file before they will give you a price. Most product people do not have one, and neither do their customers. Send a photograph, a sketch on the back of an envelope, or the broken part itself. We draw it, print it in your colors with your logo on the visible face, pack it in your packaging and ship it wherever you tell us.
A rooftop tent brand wants 200 bracket sets in its own two-color livery, logo printed on the face that shows, in plain boxes with its own labels, drop-shipped as they sell.

      04
Our own products, because we should have to live with the workWe design, print and sell a small line of our own finished goods. It keeps us honest about the parts of this job that shops usually push back onto the customer: packaging that survives a courier, color that matches the photograph, a part that looks right on a shelf rather than on a pallet.
If you want that done under your name instead of ours, that is Line 03, and the conversation starts the same way.

Tell us which one you are

The same-day quote

You get a number today. Not a receipt for your enquiry.

1,794

Requests for quote followed through a single job shop for a year by The Fabricator.

50%+

Of winning bids arrived within three days. Past three days, the job has usually already been awarded to somebody else.

Ask the shops themselves and the normal turnaround is three days to a week.

“I have no idea how someone can expect you to make a quote in 24hrs.” A shop owner on Practical Machinist

So the trade press has drawn a deadline and the working habit of the industry sits on the wrong side of it. Nobody is being lazy. In most shops the person who knows what things cost is also the person running the machine, so quoting happens in the evening after the floor goes quiet. We got around it by deciding what things cost before you ask.

The promise

Send a file, a photo or a sketch before 2pm, Monday to Friday.
You get a real price back the same day, with the name of the person who worked it out and the assumptions it rests on.
Complicated jobs get a phone call the same day telling you exactly when the number lands.

Start the clock

Capability

The machines, and what they will and will not do

Published because you should not have to phone a stranger to find out whether your part fits.

Straight answer

The numbers still marked with a dash are being measured on our own machines rather than copied off a brochure, and they go up the day they are measured. Every shop in this category publishes nothing at all and asks you to phone. We would rather show you the gaps than pretend they are not there.

PrintThe reason this shop exists

ProcessCMYK ink laid directly onto the sheet and cured by UV lamp on contact. No evaporation, no oven, no transfer film, no vinyl.

SubstratesAluminum, anodized aluminum, stainless, brass, copper, powder-coated steel, acrylic, wood and board.

HandlesPhotographs, gradients, fine type and raised braille domes, all in a single pass.

UV flatbedspec pending

Max print areaspec pending

Max media thicknessspec pending

Inksspec pending

Resolutionspec pending

Cut · FiberMetal

CutsAluminum · mild steel · stainless · brass · copper

Assist gasNitrogen on stainless and aluminum as standard. Oxygen leaves a chromium-oxide edge that rejects paint and compromises a weld. We do not do that.

Sourcespec pending

Bedspec pending

Mild steel tospec pending

Stainless tospec pending

Aluminum tospec pending

Cut · CO2Everything that is not metal

CutsAcrylic · wood · gasket · leather · board

Sourcespec pending

Bedspec pending

EdgeFlame-polished on acrylic. A fiber laser cannot produce this edge at any power — its wavelength passes straight through clear acrylic.

Does not cutMetal. No shop-class CO2 does, whatever you read.

Form & mark

In houseBending and forming, welding, and laser engraving — so a formed, welded, marked and printed part never leaves the building between operations.

Press brakespec pending

Weldingspec pending

Engraverspec pending

Marking areaspec pending

Finish

Powder coatIn house

Ovenspec pending

Anodizing, platingOutsourced to a named partner. We manage it, it lands on one invoice, it adds days, and we tell you how many before you order.

Tolerance

How we quote itTell us the one dimension that actually matters and we build the part around it. A capability study is running now and the measured numbers replace these dashes the day it finishes.

Flat featuresmeasuring

Bend anglemeasuring

Flange lengthmeasuring

Across a bendOpen the tolerance. Ask us before you drill.

Files

Geometry.dxf .dwg .ai .eps .svg .step .stp .pdf

Print artwork.ai .pdf .svg .psd .tif .png at 300 dpi at final size

Also acceptedA photograph of the thing you want copied.

Every one of those numbers came off our own machines rather than a brochure. Maximum capability and production capability are different things, and we quote the second one.

Our own research

We measured twenty-two of our competitors before we wrote a word of this page

Real fabrication websites, loaded in a real browser, measured against the same checklist.

0 / 22

would give you a price without a phone call

1 / 22

published a single dollar figure anywhere on the site

0 / 22

showed one review or one customer's words

10 / 22

kept the phone number below the fold

Seventeen of those twenty-two carry a current copyright and sixteen run analytics, so these are not abandoned sites. Somebody maintains them and somebody checks the traffic. The industry has not forgotten how to sell. It has decided not to.

We are not going to pretend those are bad shops. Plenty of them are better at metal than we will be for years. But the buyer's actual experience of this category is a form, a captcha, and a wait, and we would rather just answer the question.

Tolerances, thicknesses and bed sizes published on this page, above.
A price the same day, from a person with a name.
What we outsource, said out loud, with the days it adds.
Your artwork stays yours. We do not reuse it, resell it or post it without your permission.
If we get it wrong, we remake it. Tell us within 14 days of delivery.

One thing we cannot put here yet is a wall of five-star reviews, and we are not going to buy any or run a stock photograph of two people shaking hands over a workbench.

So here is the alternative, and it is better anyway. Hold the metal.

Free · we pay the postage · US addresses

Ask us for the sample pack and try to ruin it

Six pieces of real metal out of our own shop, in a flat box, free.

A full-color photographic print on brushed aluminum, so you can see what happens to a gradient on a surface with grain in it.
The same graphic on matte black powder coat.
A cut edge straight off the fiber with no dressing at all, so you can judge our kerf honestly.
A formed return edge.
A strip of Grade 2 braille domes printed and raised in a single pass.
A CMYK bar, so you can hold our color next to your brand guidelines under your own lights instead of ours.

Scratch it with a key. Fold it. Thumb the ink. That is what the pack is for, and it will tell you more in ten seconds than any page of copy.

Before you ask

The eight questions everybody asks

Not the way a sticker does. UV ink is not a paint that dries by evaporation and sits on top as a film. It cures the instant the lamp passes over it and keys into the surface underneath, and we prepare that surface for the specific substrate before anything is printed. Parts that get handled, washed or left outside get a clear coat over the top.

Published abrasion, adhesion and weathering figures for our process: under test. Until you have read those, take the free sample pack and attack it with a key. We would rather you found the limit on our metal than on your production run.

measuring on flat features, measuring on bend angle, measuring on flange length. Any dimension that crosses a bend opens up, which is true at every shop in the country whatever their website implies, so tell us which dimension actually matters and we will build the part around it.

Aluminum, mild steel, stainless, brass and copper on the fiber. Acrylic, wood, board, gasket and leather on the CO2. We print full color on all of those, and on anodized aluminum, which is what most data plates want to be. If you need a specific alloy, temper or mill certificate, say so on the enquiry and we will confirm before you commit.

One part. There is no minimum quantity and there never will be, because the one-part job is how most good customers introduce themselves. There is a minimum order value of $45, which exists because setting up a job costs the same whether you want one or fifty.

Geometry: .dxf, .dwg, .ai, .eps, .svg, .step, .stp, .pdf. Artwork: .ai, .pdf, .svg, .psd, .tif, .png at 300 dpi at final size. Vector is better than raster for anything with type in it. If your file is a screenshot of a file, send it anyway and we will tell you what we can do with it.

Yes, and this is most of our work. Send a photograph with a tape measure or a coin in the frame, a dimensioned sketch, a PDF from a catalogue, or the broken part in a jiffy bag. We draw it, send you the drawing to approve, and cut nothing until you have signed it off. The drawing is yours to keep, and you are free to take it to another shop. We would rather earn the second order than trap it.

Honestly: we print CMYK plus white, which reaches most brand colors and cannot reach all of them. Some spot colors sit outside what any four-color process can hit, and a shop that promises you a guaranteed Pantone match on metal is either using a spot ink system or is not telling you the truth.

What we do instead is print your color on your actual substrate, post you the swatch, and run nothing until you have held it and said yes. On a repeat order we print from the same profile, so the second batch matches the first.

Quote the same day. Production 3 to 5 business days for standard work once the artwork is approved, plus 2 days if it is being powder coated and 5 to 7 days if it is going out for anodizing or plating. You get a date with the quote, not after you have paid. If a date is going to slip you will hear it from us before you notice it yourself.

Send us the thing you want made

A drawing, a photograph, a sketch, a competitor's product, a broken bracket, a logo and a rough idea of a size. Any of those is enough to start with, and all of them beat a contact form that asks for your company size before it will let you speak to anyone.

Somebody here reads it. Somebody here answers it. Today.

Every metal shop in America will sell you a gray part.

A gray part is not a finished product. It is the first of three purchase orders.

Four kinds of work

Data plates, UID and serial marking

ADA signage, priced per door, for the whole building

Your brand on the part, your box, our name nowhere on it