At TBSI, we provide several additional services tailored to suit our customers’ specific needs. Whether you need assembling, heat treating, induction hardening, annealing, stamping, punching, or prototyping, TBSI has you covered. Our manufacturing solutions are designed to eliminate typical production constraints that engineers and buyers often face.
We offer a comprehensive supplier network of fully vetted and highly skilled manufacturing partners that provide complex, dependable solutions tailor-made to meet your production goals.
Assembly
In the assembly process, our partners can utilize several methods to bind pieces together, including threaded fasteners, welding, riveting, adhesives, and bending crimped seams. The typical starting materials for fabrication and assembly include structural steel, sheet metal, flux, welding wire, and fasteners to join cut pieces. We combine both manual labor and automation for improved efficiency and better outcomes.
Heat Treating
By heating and cooling metals under specific conditions, heat treating enhances the metal’s properties, durability, and performance. Depending on the application, heat treating can soften metals to improve their moldability, or it can harden metals to enhance their strength.
Additionally, heat treating can add a hard surface to softer components for increased abrasion resistance. Creating corrosion-resistant surfaces protects parts from corroding and toughens otherwise fragile materials.
Heat-treated parts are integral to aircraft, automobile, computer, spacecraft, and heavy equipment operation. Standard tools that depend on heat treating for durability and performance include axes, saws, bearings, gears, cutting tools, fasteners, axles, crankshafts, and camshafts.
Induction Hardening
The induction hardening process increases surface hardness, wear resistance, and fatigue life of materials by creating a hardened surface layer and maintaining a soft core. This process enhances the mechanical properties of iron components in specific applications, including engine components, powertrain, stampings, and suspension.
Induction hardening is also exceptional at repairing field failures and warranty claims. It allows you to treat a localized area without remaking the entire component.
Annealing
Annealing refers to a heat process that reduces the hardness of a material while increasing its ductility. By reducing dislocations in the crystal structure of the material, annealing makes materials more formable. The process is usually performed once the material has gone through a hardening or cold working process, thus preventing brittle failure and making the material more robust for future operations.
Metal Stamping and Punching
Metal stamping is a manufacturing process that reshapes flat metal sheets. Some common techniques include piercing, bending, punching, and blanking. In sheet metal punching, materials are cut from a piece of sheet metal through shearing force, like a paper hole puncher. Similarly, CNC punching creates holes and cutouts of various sizes and shapes.
Prototyping
A prototype is a rough draft or mock-up of a part often created long before the actual manufacturing process begins. This allows designers to experiment with and develop the prototype so that it meets certain standards. Prototype materials depend on the application, but popular metals include aluminum, steel, and copper.
Sheet metal forming, laser cutting, and CNC machining are the most common ways to produce metal prototypes. Prototypes are usually made of metal at the preproduction stage, when they closely resemble the final product.
Choose a TBSI Service
At TBSI, we understand any successful project needs a high level of organization, hard work, and partnership. As your manufacturing partner, our goal is to help you overcome your production constraints. We are a strategic sourcing company focused on providing our customers with crucial raw materials, competitive pricing, and quick lead times. If you have any questions or want to request a quote, contact us today.