How a $30,000 “savings” became a $120,000 rebuild—and what every engineer should know about long strand glass fiber before committing to tooling. Glass fiber warpage injection molding The part came
Insights
When “industry standard” pricing doesn’t make sense, sometimes the best solution is a napkin sketch and a talented local tool maker. “We’re going through pins every shift.” That’s the message
The 4-Month Paint Rack Problem We Solved With a 3D Printer (And the $500K Disaster We Avoided) We had a problem that looked impossible to solve. An automotive component—four feet
The Maintenance Worker Who Saved Us $2 Million (And Why We Almost Didn’t Listen) “Ya know, if ya did internal manifold it would fit.” The words came up over the
My boss dropped a complicated fuel loading project on my desk and asked for a project scope document. Not a rough outline—a comprehensive scope that would go to all stakeholders,
We were facing a capacity crisis. A new program was coming in, our injection resource planning showed we were running at 90% capacity, and we needed more machines. Fast.
The mold sat in our tool room for three months before anyone had the courage to scrap it. Three hundred and twenty-seven thousand dollars of hardened steel, precision-machined and
The Design Stage Health Check: 9 Questions That Predict Launch Failure I can spot a doomed project three months before the panic sets in. After 35 years
Plastic Injection Molding Offshore The $60,000 Mold That Cost $300,000 (And How to Offshore Right) I’d been brought on as their in-house project engineer specifically to manage launches like this
*The most expensive project failures aren’t caused by budget overruns or missed deadlines. They’re caused by the one thing most leaders overlook: the human cost of poor communication.*