You did an awesome job on your box frames!
The reason I asked, is because I thought I remembered you saying you hadn’t specified the material on the drawing. So I just watched the video again, and at 5:08, you say, " … so this is supposed to be steel but it is obviously not and I’m going to take responsibility for this because I did not specify on the drawing what material this is supposed to be."
GRC
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@GrayRaceCat I did specify the material I the bill of materials TS 2x2 .120 (tube steel). It’s easy to miss. I should of made it more clear I the drawing. But I also didn’t think it be a problem because the shops and I had a verbal conversation about the material also.
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that would count as a fix
Tell them about the mistakes they made, then show them how to fix them using a table and good tools.
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Take them all back, but to different shop than made them. Show them the spec and see if they can do better.
Do nothing for sure. As someone dipping toes in machining I don’t think you made it clear enough these were tolerance critical. A constant problem with new customers is over-spec so they made sure it was square and left it at that. Had you said it was tolerance critical I bet some of the shops would’ve turned away the work.
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Drew knew. That’s different. Don’t go back, probably good people, but not aware of the purpose of those boxes.
Let them (three others) know that you are searching for the most accurate shop, and you will need a bunch of those, but they really really need to be within the tolerances.
And the tolerance should be 0.5 mm or 1/50 of an inch.
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I +1 this idea.
Some people will make things right, others are just out to make a buck.
But the fact of the matter is that you took drawings with tolerances to the shops and they all failed the tolerances – even the one that claimed to provide an inspection report (which I’m super curious about).
Even if your intended purpose was to throw the material onto the scrap pile, you provided a drawing and they all agreed to meet the drawing and charged you for it. “An honest days work for an honest days pay” – the one guy did mention something about “not using a micrometer or something”. Each one of these shops clearly made a mistake in terms of meeting the spec: if they got into it and realized they were in over their head, or if they realized that they couldn’t quite meet the spec, they should have been up front and honest about that. Sure, Jason was doing this to prove a point, but what if this job actually needed these to meet a spec?
Now Jason’s team has to work around parts that are out of spec. That’s no good.
Honestly, I’d take each of them back to the shops and say, “Hey, I went to inspect these parts and it turns out they don’t meet my spec, because XYZ.” And then just see how they react. If they’re defensive and argumentative, “You’re wrong, these are totally fine, you don’t know your elbow from a hole in the ground” then you know they’re not really a worthwhile shop. TBH, I’d even name & shame. And on the other side, if they are humble/teachable or even open to the possibility that they screwed up, “Oh, yeah, I can’t get that kind of accuracy/I didn’t even realize that was something I needed to consider/I was facing personal issues and clearly made a mistake”
I’d call that out, too. Working with customers involves customer service, and making things right when you screw stuff up. It’s better that they learn the lesson from you where the worst case scenario is you toss their output on a scrap pile, than when the lesson is that something important fails because they didn’t meet the tolerances of the job.
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How do you know that they do not have either of those? A cheap micrometer would be more than sufficient for the tolerances you specified, and even my eBay former (decades ago) optical bench granite slab with crud stuck to areas of the top is flat enough in a large enough area to measure what you need.
I think that your presumption is that they are not equipped to do the work properly. I believe that presumption is in error. In this case it may be more reasonable to presume that they were too lazy to do the work properly. You had demonstrated yourself how to make a large flat surface with your DIY fixture table build (with the cast iron square plates, which I wish I had purchased). It can be done to reasonable fabricating tolerances with minimal tools, it just takes a whole lot of work. Many people are allergic to that kind of work.
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I would normally agree but when all three shops can’t identify problems it’s probably because they aren’t equipped with the correct tools to check. I’ve never worked in a fab shop where we had a granite surface plate or a 36 in calipers. That brings me back to my point. They need a fixture table! This wouldn’t be a problem if the weren’t so stubborn. None of the shops had one.
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Maybe Take them back and give them a score card 
with how much the dimensions where off with precise measurements it will really screw their heads up
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I want to see how our shop would do. We tend to be pretty strict with this stuff but I’m sure that’s what all the shops in the video would say too
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Sell each of them a welding table. :+ )
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@kennyjb98 If you tried this frame build in your shop how would you test it? Do you have a surface plate? How would you check for overall size? What about square? What tools would you use for qc?
Let me ask our welders tomorrow. I’m a new engineer there so I’m not sure what the exact process would be. Most of our products have tolerances of about .015" but we’ve had issues with qc.
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I have a small business doing welding fabrication and machining (still getting the machining set up) in central Australia. Though I don’t have a fixture table (yet, I would love one) I’m already getting a reputation for good work. Personally if I’m not happy with the product I redo it even if I know that the customer would be. Yes I’m fussy but that’s the machinist side of me.
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I would send them the link and let them know that you, as a courtesy, didn’t publish their names.
It would be interested to see what they did with that.
The results could be another video topic.
theres also a remedy to cut the material as tight as you can, so it fits perfectly,clamp em down weld 4 outside first then 4 inside both vertcally, then horizontal from outside welding toward the inside all 4 45 dgr welds let i cool down abit take it out turn it round , clamp iup again then weld all 4 from inside to outside should be good, because of schrinking of material you should have a slighly better fit.
Take them back along with the one your buddymade on the table and the table should sell itself to the shops ^^
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