Castings-Lowball quoting

[jdm2008315]

I'm wondering how many of you have encountered this.

We decide to use a casting for a particular part(after getting quotes for this and the alternatives of course(now granted these are difficult castings, that are oftentimes visible and need alot of finishing operations).
On several different parts(and vendors) the vendor has decided to drastically increase the price(and I'm not talking 10%-15%, I'm talking double, sometimes triple), after they have the tool and have been running for a little while.
Is this the norm in your experience?
Obviously if this was the original quote we would have probably went with a non-casting required design

 

[MikeHalloran]

Guys who vacuum form plastic sheet _always_ pull that crap, after lying to your boss and your designers about what is and what is not possible and getting your outfit locked into an unproducible design (that you originally said was unproduceable) that foreverafter requires a lot of labor intensive secondary operations.

I have not had similar trouble with injection molded plastic parts, except when I had a Supply Chain Manager who donned his 'hero suit' and moved the mold to save a few pennies, then bought a new mold, a piece at a time, because a given molder can't produce a decent part using anyone else's mold.

I haven't bought many castings.
Years ago, one that was badly toleranced ended up with air where some of the tapped holes were supposed to go.

More recently, a USA supplier of very simple machined stainless castings, actually a partnership between a founder and a machine shop, could not make the castings to print, given many many chances to do so
I was _so_ disappointed when a Chinese founder made 500 of them, every one perfect, on the first try, with no tooling charges, no price changes, and no funny business of any kind.
I hate to say this, but it appears that much of the USA workforce is drug-adddled or otherwise irregularly incompetent, and you may do better with an offshore supplier.










Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA