Who handles your drawing
This is an independent sourcing operation for machine frames, welded bases and heavy weldments made in Vietnam. It is run by Ryan, independent sourcing agent based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. No factory, no sales floor, no account manager between you and the person reading the drawing.
What this actually does
- Review a drawing for manufacturability before any shop sees it
- Shortlist two or three shops that genuinely fit the part
- Run the quote comparison and show you what each shop actually quoted
- Write the quality plan into the PO: hold points, NDT, stress relief, documentation
- Book and attend inspection at the agreed hold points
- Arrange crating, export documentation and freight
What it does not do
- Own a factory, or pretend to. Nothing here is built in house
- Take a hidden margin on the shop price: the fee is disclosed and separate
- Quote export-controlled work: ITAR, defence and dual-use parts are declined at enquiry
- Pass your identity to the shops. They have a relationship with us, not with you
- Accept a job outside the network’s real envelope just to keep the enquiry
Four commitments worth checking us against
The fee is disclosed
A trading company buys from a shop and resells to you, with every reason to hide the spread. This works the other way: you see which shops quoted and what they quoted, and the fee sits on top as its own line. If a shop quotes lower next month, that is visible to you rather than absorbed quietly.
A no is a real answer
Some parts do not belong in Vietnam. Above roughly 6 m and 15 t the shops that can fabricate, stress relieve, machine and lift the part thin out fast, and the honest answer is that China has more options. You will get that answer rather than an optimistic quote and a problem in month four.
The drawing gets read before it gets priced
Every enquiry is reviewed for manufacturability first: datums, machining allowance, weld callouts, plate availability. Roughly half of the drawings that arrive have something in them that would have cost the buyer money, and it is cheaper to say so before five shops quote five different interpretations.
Evidence, not assurance
Mill certificates traceable to heat numbers, welder qualification records, furnace charts, third-party NDT reports, dimensional reports measured from your datums. A certificate on a wall is not a controlled process, and the documents are what turn a promise into something you can check.
Most of what goes wrong is decided before the PO
Large machine frames fail their buyers in a small number of repeatable ways: a tolerance specified on a surface that did not need it, stress relief left off the drawing, a plate thickness nobody stocks, a datum scheme no two shops read the same way. None of these are exotic. All of them are cheaper to fix in CAD than in a container.
The handbook is the written version of that review: every check that gets run on a drawing here, published rather than kept as a service secret. The calculators are the arithmetic behind it. Both are free, and both work whether or not you ever send an enquiry.
Straight answers to the obvious questions
- Are you a factory?
- No. Nothing is built in house. The network is Vietnamese heavy-fabrication shops, vetted and visited.
- Which shops?
- Not named publicly. Shops that let their customer list be published lose it to their own competitors, and so do you.
- How are you paid?
- A disclosed fee on top of the shop price, agreed before quoting. Not a hidden spread.
- What do you decline?
- ITAR, defence and dual-use work, at the enquiry stage. Also anything outside the network’s honest envelope.
- Who reads my drawing?
- Ryan, first, before any shop sees it. Mutual NDA on request beforehand.
- How fast?
- Within 24 business hours, including when the answer is no.
Direct:
Become a sourcing partner
The heavy-fabrication network is open to new shops. If you build large weldments, machine frames or precision-machined bases and you have export experience, send a capability profile. We reply within 24 business hours.