The Hidden Cost of Poor Tooling: Why Custom-Designed Tools Outperform Off-the-Shelf Options
When manufacturers evaluate a new forming project, most of the conversation centers on the machine itself — tonnage, cycle time, footprint. Tooling is often treated as an afterthought, something to source later from whichever catalog has the closest match. That decision is more expensive than it looks. Tooling built to a generic profile, rather than to the exact tube diameter, wall thickness, and material of the part being run, is one of the most common…