Bracket for the vehicle industry

The vehicle industry is the most demanding supply chain a component manufacturer can feed into, and strength is rarely the difficult part. Three other things are:

Repeatability. The part is fitted on a line that does not stop. If a hole sits half a millimetre out in batch 40, the line stops — and the cost is not the part, it is the line.

Dimensional accuracy over time. A die wears. Flash increases, dimensions drift. A part that was inside tolerance at shot 1,000 must still be inside it at shot 200,000. That takes maintenance discipline on the tool, not just inspection of the parts.

Delivery precision. Call-offs arrive at short notice and have to hit a date. A delay propagates up the chain.

Zinc die casting, with tool maintenance as a running part of the delivery.

Why zinc here. Zinc holds dimensions better than aluminium and is cast at around half the temperature. That gives two things that matter in this chain: sharper reproduction of detail, and substantially longer tool life. When part number 200,000 has to match part number 1, the wear curve of the tool matters as much as the process parameters.

Tool maintenance as a service. The customer owns the tool; we maintain it continuously through the production run. It is not an add-on we invoice separately — it is the precondition for repeatability holding across years.

A running relationship, not a transaction. The customer-owned tooling model presupposes that the series runs for a long time. That gives both the customer and us an interest in the tool being in good condition at shot 200,000, not only at shot 1,000.

A part delivered in series into a demanding supply chain, with the same geometry over time.

Here we should be precise about what this is not. We do not hold IATF 16949, which is normally required to supply a vehicle manufacturer directly. We supply into the chain, not at the top of it, and we claim nothing else.

Automotive is also not a segment we are pushing hard. Electrification is moving volume towards large integrated castings at very large players, and the certification requirement for direct supply is a real barrier for a company of our size.

The case is included because it shows something other than an industry ambition: that our parts go into supply chains where repeatability and delivery precision are measured, not merely agreed.