Lately, we have a customer who came to us with a spring drawing seeking urgent help as the current vendor refuse to provide further support.
A quick glance at the drawing which is almost 20 years old, and we see a few concerns on why possibly the current vendor is unable to support further.
- Uncommon raw material, SUS 302 wire which requires a high MOQ.
- Uncommon wire diameter of 0.51mm
- Customer demand is very low at 100pcs each order, possibly less than 1000pcs a year.
With a high MOQ and uncommon wire diameter, this wire order could have been customized at the very start to support this project.
And after more than 20 years, the MOQ is finally consumed and thus the current vendor does not want to carry this burden of storing a huge customized wire MOQ again.
KANOU could have easily just declined this RFQ but we decided to take up the challenge and show our customer that we are not cherry picking and we are here to resolve their issue.
The bottomline is KANOU always want to take up new challenges, such that even if we fail, we failed knowing that we had tried our best.
We began exploring the raw material availability, and the common & nearest wire diameter is 0.50mm instead of the required 0.51mm.
As this spring is very small with just a free length of 11mm, outer diameter of 3.3mm and a load requirement when compressed to 5.3mm, with a wire diameter reduction from 0.51mm to 0.5mm, it will change the load requirement drastically.
Our challenge is to workout a design change within the controlled parameters of the free length & outer diameter to meet the eventual load.
And with this proposal, in the future it will be easier to manage this uncommon material as we had at least changed the wire diameter to a common one.
This is KANOU, come to us with your spring issues, we have spring experts with us.
Raymond Chew
Raymond.chew@kanouprecision.com
SGK
30.08.2024
