With the purchase of our first CNC milling machine, a Hwacheon Vesta 660, we expected to be producing parts to make money. However, just having the machine on our floor is opening up new opportunities for us. These opportunities may not always add to sales but more so decrease our costs to suppliers.

Take this cap for example. I know you can't see the part but it is a cap for a battery case. We make about 15,000 caps per month for a customer. Each part needs to be anodized, but not completely. The part must only have the top or "cap" side of the part is anodized. The rest must remain bright. In order to do this, the bottom half of the part must be covered during the anodizing process.

To cover the thread portion of the part, the anodizer currently screws in hundreds of parts into a fixture. The fixture blocks the bottom half of the part from being anodized. They dip the fixture in to the anodizing bath and  then unscrew the parts from the fixture and send to back to us. Naturally, the labor to screw in and unscrew each part is costly to the anodizer so we are billed for this time. Now that we have the CNC Milling machine we are able to produce our own fixture. Once this is done we will be able to screw in the parts to our fixture, send it the anodizer, who will just dip the fixture and then send back to us. We are removing their labor cost which will create a sizeable savings in the end.