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I have an idea for a product and want to get it made. I started with a rough sketch and am now speaking with an industrial designer who will look it over, make it functional, and send me all the required files to contact a manufacturer. I've also been talking to two design companies who take an idea from point A to D. They'll take my idea, make it functional, but also build me a prototype and get me in contact with trusted manufacturers in their network.

My main questions are: Has anyone used one of these companies? Has another gone the solo/bootstrap route? Can you tell me if I am headed in the right direction? What were the costly mistakes made in your process?

It's hard to justify the 19k price tag, but I also understand the value they bring with their knowledge and connections to manufacturers. On the other hand, it may take me longer, but I know I can figure it out by myself since my idea is not complex.

Hi there! I’m very new to the manufacturing industry and have a few questions. I recently came across poppet valves and other compressor valves that use multiple springs. I’m wondering if anyone could help me understand why multiple springs are used in some valves but not others, how the springs are installed in the valves, and how certain arrays of springs are designed. I’ve attached a photo to show what I’m talking about.

Hey everyone,

I am researching on how you guys handle production tracking and quality issues.Trying to understand what actually works and what's a pain.

1. How do you keep track of what's happening on your line?
2. What's the most time-consuming part of your day?
3. What tools or systems are you using now?

Appreciate any insights from your experience!

I work in apparel industry and we do screen printing as part of our offerings.

To prevent inks from drying way too fast on screens on the presses, a fogger system has been deemed necessary, using fog to moisturize ink on screen continuously.

We have 20 presses, of which at any given moment, at least 16 are operational.

So for the fogger system.

Would it make more sense to have a huge industrial fogger in a central area with piping and water traps delivering fog to screens or smaller individual foggers delivering fog to one or two presses?

Our presses have 14, 16, 18, and 32 pallets/heads.

Screen->flasher->cool down is how we operate.

For the central system, I think it'll be more reliable and can deliver huge amounts of fog, but I have no previous experience delivering fog as long as 60 feet from its source.

All discussion is welcome!

Hi All,

Can anyone comment on whether plastic films can be cold laminated to paper labels like metal foils?

I’m having an issue wherein the ink on black foil is cracking after embossing. I’m hoping the elasticity of a plastic film will allow the colour to stretch with the emboss.

Any advice appreciated!

Hello I am looking to manufacture clothing products with Egyptian Cotton fabric, I am quite inexperienced with manufacturing so I am looking for recommendations of reliable manufacturing and sourcing companies that can fulfill my needs

I am looking to manufacture a small amount as of now with intricate designs with neck and wash tags out of Egyptian cotton. Primarily sweatshirts and t shirts for now

I also am unsure of the process of how to coordinate between a fabric sourced and a manufacturer.

If there is a company that can both source and manufacture that would be very helpful.

Please tell me anything else I may need to know because as I stated previously I am very inexperienced with the process Thank you in advance!

I've worked at a soap company for about 3 years now, we run machines called pastillators to make small laundry scent beads. I just wanted to make this post hoping to find someone who works on these machines as well. There's very little on the internet in general and the support company we have for the machines is German so it can be really difficult to trouble shoot. If ANYONE out there knows a thing or 2 drop a comment please. My machines are kaiser brand, we have the ROLLOSIZER head model. I'm currently having issues with consistency, and both of the bearing on the left and right side of the head leak product. But it's not constant, I thought it was the lip seals but I would expect it to be more consistent with a seal failure.

Manufacturing - Cp/Cpk technical question CNC

Background: I'm attending a meeting Monday and looking for expert advice from someone familiar with multi fixture machining centers. The manufacturer is a machining facility that utilizes Hydromat CNC rotary index machines. The machines have 12 fixtures, with 10 spindles, one unload station and one load station. The facility has been in business for many decades, is high quality, high volume, and has over 100 CNC machines. They recently lost their QA Director to retirement, and the QA Manager went to another company and poached the remaining best talent a few months after. I'm involved because the customer requires a Cp/Cpk report with every order and the data suddenly looks awful.

Here's the confusion: We found that the old QA protocol was to perform Cpk at the start of every shift, first 30 pieces from fixture #1 only. And then if Cpk is good, to move on and perform Cp across all 12 fixtures. The new management team has switched to taking Cp/Cpk across all 12 fixtures and eliminated the original methodology. Suddenly the process appears out of control, when they've been doing it this way for decades.

I'm not that familiar with machines like this, that have multiple fixtures working simultaneously so I reached out to the machine manufacturer and they sided with the old way the company was doing it. I wasn't expecting that to be honest.

Looking for input. Might also have more to type/ask after the meeting.

I want to know of income an owner that has a small sofa manufacture

Hi all,

I am struggling with the concept of identifying direct labor cost per unit. I have all of my metrics set up (throughput, number of employees, pay, etc.). Where I am struggling is understand what hours of the day would be calculated into the cost per unit. For example in an 8 hour shift there will be 30 minute set up, 30 minute clean, and a 30 minute lunch. Our "run time" would be 6.5 hours but the hours worked is 8 (it's not this simple with how I stagger shifts but this is just to give an example). I read something on calculating non-run time as incidental costs but I'm not really sure how to approach this. Thanks in advance!

My factory in China does about 20m in revenue a year but we only earn about 4-5 m a year in profit. We have had the same setup more or less with the same personelle for a very long time. I came in last year made some changes to our management and now our productivity has increased for sure and we are in a good place with a new factory in Thailand. However this has brought on some pressure in terms of cost of operations. So that’s basically the situation of the factory, what I want to ask is how do I increase my margins of profit while fundamentally not changing too much… i know this is a very specific question but I thought I would ask the general population first before I spend hundred grand with mackinsey lol… the products we make are sports related… mainly mold making and injection molding, we are very good at RnD so that’s something I’m going to keep investing in. I want to grow the business to be able to solve more people’s problem while stabilizing what I already have making and make more every year. We have about 400+ people working for us and we don’t have enough product that is simple or enough volume to buy robots and justify that cost. So if you have any questions please comment below but would love to get everyone’s options! Thanks a ton

Material Question:

We have a device that needed to be minimally sealed to the environment (water spills, etc).
Tested out four feet gaskets that seal the compartment but still flex out of a 30A polyjet 3D printed material. 
There are solid feet part that do the compressing.
This device will handle changing weight from 55lbs and below.

My thought was to have them made out of 30A Silicone but the manufacturer is suggesting 30A TPE mainly because they can't do silicone molds only injection molded plastics.

Do you think this is a good substitution?
I am a little worried by the compression set of the TPE.

What else should I be thinking about to make this decision.

Thank you.

https://preview.redd.it/tejnliqgq41e1.png?width=909&format=png&auto=webp&s=18a3486b7545714f4287200596454913f4fa38d8

We've introduced a new product into our manufacturing space that is causing a significant amount of dust. We have a commercial packaging machine so I am looking for an idea on some kind of system where we can capture the dust as the item drops from the scale house and into the bag. It does not need to be fancy at all. I don't think, at least just yet, we need a large commercial dust collector since we're only really running this product 4-5 days a month. Clean up has been incredibly challenging since the dust is just collecting. Blowing it out isn't ideal for obvious reasons. Thanks!

Hello, I was wondering if anyone knew the best place to go for having custom fabric cutouts made? I want to have some patterns turned into cutouts that can be pressed down on to fabric to have the same pattern cut out into the fabric. Thank you.

We have 200 teams in the field, and we use ERP Monitor G5, which manages 200 different warehouses. Since the field teams won’t use the ERP directly, we want to provide them with a tool/platform that can be accessed via mobile phones.

The challenge is that we need the tool to support 200 warehouses, but platforms like MaintainX and UpKeep don’t provide this kind of structure. What they offer is support for 200 organizations, but that won’t work for us.

Has anyone experienced a similar situation? Can you recommend a platform/tool that can handle this setup?

Hi, I just graduated last year 2023 and planning to apply on a Manufacturing Industry. I applied for their Process Tester but I don't have any ideas on what they do inside the industry. Can someone enlighten me with this job? Thank you!

I own a business that manufacturers roofing tools. As part of our branding we have been laser marking our company logo and a QR code that goes to our website. The results look great but the process takes longer than we'd like. They are also prone to scratching and smudging, especially if they end up getting rained on at a job site. We're considering getting a metal punch stamp made as an alternative but we're worried about readability of both the QR Code and logo. The material for the tools is 6061-T6 Aluminum that has been disk orbital sanded for a brushed finish. Does anyone have experience with stamping a QR Code? How much detail can you expect? Is there enough contrast to make the code readable or would it require additional inking? Is there anything I'm not considering? I appreciate any insight.

Edit to clarify that the tools are currently laser marked, not laser engraved and that the tools have been disk orbital sanded for finish.

Hi,

I am looking for a manufacturer to make a board game.

I can get individual pieces from alibaba but I’m looking for someone who can make the packaging and everything.

Any help would be amazing.

I work for a small window and door manufacturer. Our plant manager is having surgery over the Christmas holidays and will require 6 to 8 weeks of recovery and rehabilitation. I have been asked to cover for him during his absence. January and February are our slowest period in terms of production. What are some ideas to keep our shop employees busy during this time?

Some ideas I've had so far:

• clean and organize work areas and workstations
• clean and perform preventative maintenance on equipment, tools and machines
• organize and cycle count inventory (even though our year-end inventory isn't until the end of April)

Our business is high volume. We produce some machines but also treat parts that other folks send us and then send these parts back to them.

As a result we end up with invoices with a long list of items. Our payment terms are 45 - 60 days so customers transfer money to us each month for a certain set of invoices.

Reconciling the payments to the bank to different invoices is prooving to be a real pain. Anyone else having to deal with this?

I work in an a place who fundamentally does not agree with me. Also the main resource that our company depends on is from China. They are the only supplier of our only product. As a concerned American employee, who works for a what should be equally if not more concerned business owner, I am deeply concerned about tariffs. Higher ups told me that “they need our product, someone has to pay”. Mind you, the majority of our customers are hard working farmers and grain growers. How do I stay sane in an environment that refuses to believe that their product will be tariffed and the price will be too high?

Hey all,
I want to make a life-size packaging of around 1.6m in height for my brand. However, after contacting my usual manufacturer in China, they said they could only make it to 0.6m in height. Does anyone know any manufacturers who make it this big? I have attached an example from Rhode here.

https://preview.redd.it/8bz6q147ct0e1.png?width=1172&format=png&auto=webp&s=8beb0e0f012c2f2a135ad63c48bbe424cd2b4489

Is there anything I can reference/ show him stating this isn’t normal industry standard request? . Especially for 16 gauge material

Thanks in advance

I am trying to make my own line of face paints for professional face painters. I am close to having a formula of my own but can’t seem to find a manufacturing company to make them. All of the most well known facepaint products use China and Vietnam for production. Ideally I’d like to produce it myself but have no idea how to purchase the equipment or what equipment is needed. Until then I want to outsource to a reputable manufacturer. Any ideas??

How many sofas can make a manufacture company per day if it has nine employees and not much technology

Greetings all,

The subreddit could use some help with moderation, specifically keeping up with the mod queue. Currently it can take a couple of days before we can approve posts and comments, which causes them to gain less traction than they deserve (because the posts are older by the time they're allowed through).

• Prior participation in /r/manufacturing is required
• Experience with moderating in other subreddits is a plus
• The bulk of the work is approving/removing items in the mod queue. If you can spend a few minutes per day, just during your regular redditing, that already is a big help.

In this subreddit we work pretty independently so there are no other commitments than upholding the rules as they are and keeping an eye on modmail once a week. There isn't a whole lot of discussion in modmail, maybe one conversation every few months, but when there is something that's the place to discuss it.

If you're willing to help, thank you! Please send us a modmail.

If you have any questions, place them here so others with the same question can see the answer.

If for whatever reason you prefer to ask the questions on modmail, that's fine too.

We’re a small team working on some new pet meds in India. We’ve actually developed a easy way to make it easier to give cats their medicine making it easy for the pet owners.

Right now, we’re looking to work with a 3rd-party manufacturer to handle production, but I’m not sure how to go about finding a reliable one or what to look out for when choosing.

How do we go about finding good 3rd-party manufacturers in India? And when it comes to choosing one, what should we look for? Any specific red flags or things to watch out for? Also, what’s a typical margin we should expect in the pharma industry for this kind of setup?

If capable, shoot me a DM. Done dealing with China. Need a few products sourced made in the USA. Willing to deal with multiple suppliers since all these materials are wildly different. Thomasnet is no where near as easy to use as ali, though, figured I'd give this a shot.