Manufacturing drawings from a sketch, a photograph or a sample
You know what you need making. What you do not have is a drawing anyone could quote from. We turn what you have into documentation a stranger can make the part from, and check designs before they go to production.
Undocumented engineering is a debt, and it comes due at the worst moment
When the supplier who has always made the part puts their price up and nobody else can quote it. When the person who knew how it goes together retires. When a customer’s quality audit asks to see the drawing register and there isn’t one.
Until then it costs nothing visible, which is exactly why it never gets done.
Drawings a stranger can make the part from
Manufacturing and detail drawings
Fully dimensioned and toleranced, with material specification, finish, stated general tolerances and revision control. To BS 8888, in DXF, DWG, STEP, PDF. A drawing only your current supplier can interpret is not documentation, it is a dependency.
Assemblies, fabrications and weldments
General arrangements, parts lists that match the drawings, weld symbols and preparation, and flat patterns with bend allowances that match the press brake the part will be folded on — which is not always what the CAD package assumes.
Independent design for manufacture review
Taking a design you are about to commit and asking what is driving cost and lead time: tolerances that exceed the duty, finishes specified out of habit, weldments that want to be a folded part.
Ours names the manufacturing route it assumes, rather than the one the firm quoting for the work would prefer. That is the reason it costs money.
Drawing registers and technical documentation
A numbering system, a revision protocol and an actual register around a folder of files named final_v3_REAL.dwg. Unglamorous, and the thing that makes everything else possible. If the drawings exist but are on paper
Most UK drawing services have never seen a press brake
Much of what ranks for engineering drawing work in this country is drafting capacity sold at volume, by people who will never have to make the part. The drawings are often technically competent and quietly unmanufacturable — a bend radius that does not exist on any tool you own, a tolerance nobody can hold in that material, a weld you cannot reach with a torch.
Ours are drawn by people who have made parts on the shop floor, which is why they can be quoted from.
Fixed-price ways to start
Each of these is a defined piece of work with a written output, priced against a scope agreed in writing first — not an open-ended engagement.
Manufacturing Drawing Service
A sketch, a photograph or a sampleYou know what you need making, but there is no drawing a supplier could quote from — just a sketch, an old print, or the part itself.
Business price, from£295Engineering Problem Review
A problem, with no solution decided yetSomething keeps failing, causing downtime or costing more than it should, and nobody has established what actually needs changing.
Business price, from£395Design for Manufacture Review
A drawing, design or 3D modelYou are about to commit a design to production and want it checked by people who have to make things, not just draw them.
Business price, from£495Straight answers, including the awkward ones
Yes, and it is a more common starting point than a CAD file. A sketch, a photograph, or a description of what the part has to do and what it bolts to will get us to a first drawing. What we come back with is questions — loads, fits, finish, quantity — because those turn a shape into something that can be made.
Because they are different products. The going rate for CAD drafting in the UK is roughly £30 to £140 a sheet, and that buys a tidy drawing of what you supplied. It does not include deciding which dimensions are functional, what tolerance each needs, what the part should be made from, or whether it can be manufactured at all.
The test we design to is whether three fabricators can quote from the drawing and return comparable prices. If what you need is genuinely a tidy-up of an existing correct drawing, say so — we will tell you to use a drafting service and save the difference.
You often should not, and we will say so. A supplier's free DFM is useful and also, unavoidably, optimised for that supplier's processes, capacity and margin. That is not dishonesty; it is what they are for.
A paid review earns its place when the answer matters more than the quotation: choosing between fabrication and machining, one supplier's advice conflicting with another's, or a part going out to competitive tender that needs specifying neutrally first. The review names the manufacturing route it assumes, so you see the assumption rather than inherit it.
Send us a sketch, a photograph, or the drawing you are not happy with.
We will tell you what it takes to turn it into something a supplier can quote from, and what that costs, before you commit to anything.