In sheet metal fabrication, small adjustments made on a CAD file can translate to thousands of dollars saved on the shop floor. At Central Sheet Metal (CSM), we don’t just take your files and send an invoice. We review every design to catch unnecessary costs before production begins, ensuring you get perfect parts at the perfect price.
One of the biggest cost savings we support is material utilization. When you submit a design, we try our best to fit as many of your parts onto a raw sheet as possible. For example, we may take a single sheet and bend 20 individual brackets from it. If your parts feature irregular tabs or awkward shapes that do not nest cleanly, you end up paying for a significant amount of wasted metal. Our engineers do their best to find a solution like making the outer perimeter more geometric or designing a mounting tab as a separate component that can be inserted later.
Unique metal thickness is another fast way to drive up project costs. Our shop floor stays stocked with a wide range of standard materials, including Mild Steel up to .250”, Aluminum up to .125”, Stainless Steel up to 16 GA, as well as Cold Rolled, Hot Rolled (HR & HRP&O), and Coated Products like Galvanized, Galvanneal, and Paintlok. If your design uses a non-standard thickness, it forces a special material order that will extend lead times and increase costs. CSM can guide you towards the ideal standard materials we already have, cutting raw material costs and getting your project finished faster. All while keeping the quality of your part precise and complete.
During the CNC Bending process, parts are formed using specific top punches and bottom dies on our press brakes. Every time a part requires a different bend radius, our machine operators must swap out the heavy tooling and recalibrate the machine, because setup time equals labor costs on any manufacturing floor. Our team can help you adjust your part so that every single bend shares the same inside radius. This allows us to run the entire job on a single machine setup, eliminating labor costs that would be passed on to you.
