FAQ
Payment is accepted in United States Dollars only. Our website accepts major debit and credit cards as well as PayPal as payment options. Paying with PayPal is very secure and convenient. You can pay with a credit or debit card even if you do not have a PayPal account. Verified payment is required before the job begins. You must pay the full amount you have been quoted before the job begins.
We do not accept any other forms of payment: No checks. No bitcoin. No money orders. No traveler's/cashier's checks. No gift cards. No store credit. No trade-ins, or barter transactions (for example, you cannot pay for your parts in go-karts, or Plutonium).
Yes. We love our troops and veterans. We have much to thank them for. Both our veterans and active service military personnel can enjoy our exclusive military pricing. To qualify, please send us a copy of your Military ID, Veteran ID, or DD form 214. Once we verify your service, we will give you a personal discount code that will unlock your pricing. Please do not share your code. It is exclusive to you and will not work for someone else.
If you are a full time student in a STEM field, you can qualify for our academic pricing. The part you need must be strictly intended for an academic purpose: your thesis, your research, your science project, or similar academic or classroom activity that benefits education in general. It cannot be a part for your personal use. To qualify, please supply enrollment verification from your registrar and a detailed description of your academic work.
If you are a STEM teacher, or even a teaching assistant, and you need parts for classroom use, as in to use them to aid teach something in your official curriculum, please bring employment verification that shows classes you are teaching, and you too can benefit from academic pricing.
Phone consultation is $100 per hour. Please send us your phone number; we'll be happy to set up an appointment at a time that works for both parties. Our PBX will call you back automatically and an expert will be on the line to talk about all technical aspects of your project. Please note that we are in Central Standard Time Zone.
We use a shared inbox system. Please write to katya.ironworks@gmail.com and your concerns will be delivered directly to management.
Better question is why your part broke in the first place. It is called design for obsolescence. Made to break, so you keep buying it again and again. That $15.75 adds up now does not it. Assuming it is even available anymore and you now have to get a new lawnmower.
We make our parts it in the USA, with USA materials, and fairly compensated USA labor. With those principles, no machine shop can beat the price of mass-produced slop as a one-off. We can, however, produce for you a sports car quality part and do so at a competitive price. It will never break. It will make your lawnmower will go faster. And it will look classy while doing it.
We do not accept customer furnished materials because we cannot know where they have been sourced. There are few machinable metals. Many alloys are harmful to the machines or the machinists. In 1983 the Medical Center of Specialties in Juarez sold their radiotherapy machine as scrap. It is estimated 6010 pellets of Cobalt-60 were melted down and about 1000 tons of it got exported to the USA. This was discovered only by dumb luck (truck driver drove up inti detectors at to Los Alamos Labs gate by mistake). The US Government was able to recover only 90% of this haul, meaning 100 tons of it made it in circulation in the US. This is only one incident of many.
No. G-code is not a write-once-run-anywhere concept like Java. It is more like ASM, specific to machine architecture. G-code written for a Mazak machine will not safely run on a Haas machine. It should not even be run on another identical Mazak if any other one of thousands of machine parameters are different. Unless you work here, you cannot possibly know our PLC, what tools we have had in which machine, what flutes / inserts / coatings, what tool or work offsets were used, what fixtures are installed, how the M codes are mapped, and more. That means we have to go through your code line by line. That is not happening.
We do not bid on a job unless we are certain we can do it. To produce a sample for free, we have to invest hours and actually perform the reverse engineering, then send blueprints to the shop, and have the shop invest hours into making one. Ergo it is cost prohibitive for us to offer free samples. A sample is really a prototype, and we are a prototype shop - so you need to pay for it. If you like the sample, and decide to order for more (as 96% of our customers do) we will count the prototype price you paid towards quantity price.
Yes, we do offer quantity discounts. Ordering a single part is always going to be the most expensive per part because we have to set up and tear down tooling, write codes, configure machines, just for one part. The more identical parts you order the less it costs per part because cost of setting up the machine is amortized between more parts so you start paying for material rather than labor. And no, you cannot order infinity parts for zero cost. There is a limit after which cost no longer decreases with quantity.
Our machines will measure down to 0.0001", and our metrology equipment will measure down to 0.00005". For an ideal, stable, easily machinable material, we can achieve machined tolerance of +/- 0.001". Precipitation hardening steel is example of a very stable material. Nylon is not stable (absorb moisture and changes size after machining) so it cannot hold same tolerance. Just because we can achieve these values does not mean you need them. Ordering tighter tolerance than you need will end up paying more than you had to. Set your tolerance as loose as possible. If your motor has a 0.005" runout putting a 0.001" tolerance pulley on it will not fix it, but it will make us work twice as much, and have you pay twice as much.