When you need rapid prototyping services, you want to work with manufacturing professionals who can help you achieve the necessary level of quality—without spending too much too soon in your product development process.

Accurate CNC Services offers quick-turn prototype machining services for a wide range of industries and applications.

Fine-Tune Your Design for Top-Quality Prototyping

We say it all the time: we approach every project determined to be the best. To ensure excellence, we collaborate closely with you to finesse each design iteration until you’re ready to press PLAY on final production.

From your initial RFQ to delivery day, you can count on us to:

• Provide Design for Manufacturability (DfM) guidance

• Offer material recommendations

• Transparently discuss costs and cost-cutting solutions

DfM guidance

When you’re designing a part or product in CAD, the software doesn’t explain the manufacturing processes necessary to achieve your goals. 

Because of this disconnect between CAD and our precision machining equipment, your seemingly simple design may make for a massively expensive prototype. We’re always happy to review your drawings and provide DfM feedback to ensure your design is manufacturable. 

For example, does your design include corner radii? We can’t achieve interior square corners using a router, but we can add small radii to those corners, allowing us to machine the features quickly and easily. 

Material recommendations

Most prototypes can be made from a less expensive material than you’ll want for the final part or product. We’ll ask how you intend to use the current prototype and then review your material options with you.   

For example, UHMW is a terrific prototyping material. However, it won’t hold up to stress testing designed to evaluate, say, an aluminum part. So we may recommend UHMW for a lower-fidelity prototype but advise you to invest in aluminum for a higher-fidelity prototype.

Cost-cutting solutions

The Accurate CNC Services team will never sacrifice critical quality simply to make a part on the cheap. But we aren’t out to burn through your hard-earned money unnecessarily, either! You can trust us to offer relevant, reasonable tips for obtaining the right quality at the right price.

Real Machining: GoPro Mount for a Pro Racer’s Go-Kart

Did you know professional go-kart racing is a “thing”? One of our customers is a professional kart racer who designed a heavy-duty GoPro mount for his kart—and Accurate CNC Services is working with him to develop a scalable model!

From idea to implementation

Our customer made his very first GoPro mount from solid aluminum using a bandsaw and a drill press. We’re helping him make small changes to the design so that it will be faster and cheaper to produce at volume.

The racer’s first design was process-heavy, requiring a large number of rotations at a higher-than-desired cost. With minor modifications, we made the product significantly more machinable. We can program the setup, press a button, walk away, and let the machine do its job. Simply redesigning the product for automation made it immediately less expensive to manufacture.

We also added small radii to the interior square corners—a change that doesn’t affect the product’s functionality but does speed up the machining process and reduce production costs.

By collaborating closely with our kart-racing customer, we’ve not only ensured a part that functions as intended, but we’ve also made the product sturdier and longer-lasting. That’s what we love best about offering prototype machining services.

Real Machining: Vetteskins

Our customer Vetteskins designs and sells fully customized split-window panels and other aftermarket products for Corvettes. Vetteskins’ stick-on split-window panels enable Corvette owners to give their cars’ windows the old-school look of a 1963 Corvette Stingray.

Accurate CNC Services makes the production panels out of ⅛” Lexan—a pricey thermoplastic. But we craft his prototypes from—wait for it—cardboard. 

The cheapest prototype on the planet

We begin by meeting with the Vetteskins owner, who typically shows up with a pad of paper and some Sharpie markers. He draws and re-draws while we ask questions and take notes. Then we make the prototype! 

There are two key advantages to prototyping Vetteskins with cardboard. First, cardboard prototypes are about as cheap as you can get. Second, our customer can take that cardboard prototype back to his shop to see how it looks on a car. If he wants any changes, he just pulls out a pair of scissors and cuts the form to size.

We can easily rescan and modify the design from there until it’s perfect and well-suited for manufacturing.

Accurate CNC Services’ Simple Prototyping Solutions

Product teams frequently overcomplicate prototypes, thinking the prototypes need to be just like the final product—but that isn’t always the case. Often, cheaper materials make much more sense, allowing customers to work inexpensively through multiple iterations until the design is essentially production-ready.

Is a UHMW prototype going to fit and function exactly like an aluminum version? Of course not! But in the early stages of prototyping, we can get you close to perfect with the cheaper material, then finesse the final details using a material that will eventually hit the shelves.

Ultimately, we’re here to help you get the job done as quickly, cost-effectively, and easily as possible. Our customers choose Accurate CNC Services for our collaboration and transparency as much as our quality. 

If you’re ready to get your own product launched, chat with us about our rapid prototyping services. You’ll be holding a prototype in your hand in no time!

Request a quote.