How we vet the shops that see your drawing

Published in full, because a standard you cannot read is not a standard. Buyers can use it as their own checklist. Shops can use it to know what to prepare.

The eight checks

A shop answers all of these at registration. Anything missing gets asked before the shop receives a single preview.

1. PEEK experience, by grade

Which grades they have cut on paid work: unfilled, GF30, CF30, bearing blends, implant grade stock. A shop that machines acetal and nylon daily but has run PEEK twice is not the same supplier, and buyers should not have to discover that from the first delivery.

2. Tooling kept for plastics

Sharp polished tooling that has not been in steel, and separate tooling for fibre filled grades so glass and carbon dust never reach unfilled medical work. This is the cheapest thing to claim and one of the easiest to check in conversation, because a shop that does it will describe how it stores and tracks the tools.

3. Annealing capability

An oven in house, a named outside service, or nothing. All three are acceptable answers and each one changes which requests fit. Thin walled and tight bore work does not go to a shop with no route to stress relief.

4. Material access

Whether they buy rod, plate and tube from a stock distributor, order direct, or work only with customer supplied material, and whether they can pass through the lot certificate. A shop that cannot document where the stock came from cannot serve medical or semiconductor requests.

5. Part envelope and equipment

Machine list with counts, and the largest part they can hold. This is what stops a 600 mm plate landing at a shop whose table ends at 400 mm.

6. Quality system and documents

ISO 9001, ISO 13485, AS9100, cleanroom packing, or none of them. We ask for a copy of any certificate claimed, with registrar and expiry visible, and we check the scope actually covers plastics machining. Claiming a certificate that does not exist ends the relationship.

7. Response time

The commitment is a reply to the buyer within 48 hours. A quote that arrives after the buyer has ordered elsewhere is worse than a decline, for everyone.

8. Honest declination

We ask directly which grades and tolerances a shop will not take. A shop that says no to something is telling you its yes means something. This is the single strongest signal in the whole registration form.

What we check afterwards

• Preview to quote behaviour. A shop that takes leads and then does not quote gets fewer previews.
• Buyer feedback after the first job. We ask. Both sides get asked the same questions.
• Scope drift. A shop that starts accepting grades it earlier declined gets asked what changed.

What we do not check, and you should

This matters more than the list above, because a vetting page that only lists strengths is marketing.

• We do not audit. No floor visit, no process audit, no witnessed first article. We verify documents and declared capability, not a quality system in operation.
• We do not contact registrars. A certificate copy is evidence, not proof.
• We do not qualify the shop for your product. If your device or tool needs a supplier qualification, that is your process and your responsibility, and no matching service can do it for you.
• We do not inspect parts. Parts ship from the shop to you. We never touch them.

Use this as your own checklist

If you source PEEK outside this site, the eight checks work just as well on a shop you found yourself. Ask them in one email. The answers, and how fast they come back, tell you most of what you need before you send a drawing. The rest of what belongs in that first email is in the guide to what is realistic on a PEEK drawing.

For shops: what to have ready

Registration takes about five minutes if you have these at hand: machine list with counts, largest part envelope, grades you cut and grades you decline, annealing route, stock source, certificates with expiry, and the industries you already serve. Nothing else is asked, and nothing is published about your shop without your say so.

Questions people ask about this