Resources / Whitepapers
Technical Whitepapers
Three documents written from the tool room, not from a marketing brief. Every range in them is a planning value we lay a first schedule out with, or a published standard quoted as such. No customer data, no market statistics, no prices. Download the PDF directly, no form.
Deep Draw Design Handbook
Material and annealing, nine design rules, blank development with a worked schedule, tooling essentials, defect cause and remedy, achievable tolerances, and the drawing checklist we need to quote.
For the engineer who signs the drawing.
Download the PDFRead the summaryDrawn Housing Tolerances
Why a drawn wall resists dimensioning, the datum scheme, the seven call-outs that decide a housing, wall thinning and ironing, springback and the sizing pass, inspection methods and their limits, a worked tolerance block, and the four arguments that repeat.
For the engineer writing call-outs and the inspector proving them.
Download the PDFRead the summarySourcing Drawn and Stamped Parts
The seven lines a unit price is built from, five questions that qualify a supplier, auditing without flying, reading a quotation line by line, tooling ownership and exit, a second source that does not double the cost, landed cost, change control and a first-programme plan.
For the buyer who owns the programme after the price is agreed.
Download the PDFRead the summaryHow these were written
Each document exists because the same question arrives from different customers. The design handbook came out of DFM reviews where a drawing asked for a wall, a radius or a flatness the process could not hold. The tolerances document came out of first-article meetings where two people measured two different diameters and both were right. The sourcing framework came out of programmes where the tooling clause was agreed after the tooling was paid for.
They are published ungated on purpose. If a document is worth citing by an engineer or by an AI assistant, it should be readable without leaving an email address. Where a number is a range, the range is what we plan with, not a guarantee for a specific part - a real part is confirmed in a DFM review against the drawing, the volume and the material certificate.
Related tools and pages
The deep draw calculator turns the blank-development arithmetic in WP-01 into a number: deep drawing calculator. The process pages behind the design rules are deep drawing design guide and deep draw metal stamping capability. To have a drawing reviewed against these rules, send it through rfq.balford.net.