Recent content by savman330

4 FN 27, Do you care to elaborate on your quoting, order entry process etc. from a workflow standpoint? I am referring to this quote from your post: What areas are the most labor intensive or provide the greatest bottleneck? I can understand why a medium-small shop like kkroger may not be...

kkroger, While I knew pictures and drawings would be a challenge, I just assumed most people would submit files (.dwg, .dxf, .svg etc.)that were more or less on par with the quality of file I make for myself. Based on your experience and other comments itt, that seems to be a faulty premise...

Thanks for the fantastic response! That's basically what I have in mind. I need to standardize the input I receive, run a series of operations to calculate cut length, material used, #pierces, etc......but once I have the input standardized it's game over. From there I can return a real-time...

Some of these I think I can automate to a degree; but answering the third email re: file:types and tolerances could be a rabbit hole, I agree. I don't mind paying a reasonable price it's everything else that frustrates me.

I signed up for an account at tabandslot.com; another great resource I didn't even know about, thx. Haven't received an email yet, but they seem to operate under a stock set of materials and anything else is premium plan. I am curious what they have as stock materials.

I like the drop down menu idea...essentially here's what you can choose from that will have fast turnaround without extra charges; otherwise special order charges apply

What are your thoughts on offering economy pricing on a subset of common sizes? Or maybe common sizes would have a standard turn-around (e.g. 3 days) but uncommon would have longer delivery times standard with an option for faster turn for a fee? If you cut 100 different random jobs could you...

A couple people have mentioned having parts bent or powder coated as add-ons. What is the best way to charge on brake operations...price per bend? Anyone have any feedback re: pricing on brake or powder-coating as an add-on?

Flat rate is exactly what I had in mind. Up to 70# provided it fits. That's pretty easy to calculate. I could write a script to calculate shipping on small lighter parcels but I suspect Priority Flat Rate is going to win the day on the majority of orders.

Any thoughts on offering lower rates on a few standard sizes in steel to incentive people to use similar thicknesses? Other ideas on encouraging a particular set of materials? The only people I need to incentive are one doing one-offs and a few parts. Maybe I could offer a partial rebate on CAD...

Perhaps I could have a two tiered pricing structure: one for properly formatted CAD; another for drawing/photos, files that are in improper format, and everything else. Someone mentioned a simple browser based 'CAD'. CAD in quotes as it would be rudimentary.

I hope your wrong here! Also I don't quite understand what you are saying (below) re: feeding one small shop cutting jobs consistently....do you mean I will have a hard time sourcing material or keeping up with the demand to feed a single shop? Please elaborate on why you think this isn't a...

I have an engraver on my CNC so that is an option. Surprised at how many people want bending as well. Water-jet would be suited to the same style system but I don't have a water-jet! Yet.

I couldn't agree more. re: drawings and photos; I would need to charge a CAD fee, but my first thought is I could have a photo/drawing viewer that the client could use to draw a bounding box around the material and then enter the number of pierces. From there I could automatically calculate a...

The title speaks for itself; when you've had parts fabricated by CNC plasma job shop what would you change about the process? I am in considering making a web-based rapid prototyping business for CNC plasma. Essentially, it would be Proto-labs or Shapeways for CNC plasma cut parts. As a...