What a foundry or machine shop in Hubballi-Dharwad should put on its site

Picture an engineer at a Kolhapur pump maker opening your site at nine at night with a drawing for an SG iron housing. The question is whether you can pour it, machine it and supply it in batches. The site offers a gallery and a tonnage figure. A buyer who finds a Hubballi-Dharwad foundry or machine shop online has a drawing and a deadline, and your site should let them answer that first question alone. Show the grades you pour or cut, the weight or size range, your machines and the tolerances you hold routinely. Then say what inspection goes with each lot, and exactly how to send the drawing.

What the buyer with a drawing checks first

This is a development or purchase engineer at a pump, valve, tractor or machine-tool company, in Pune, Kolhapur, Bengaluru or Coimbatore. For a unit in the Hubballi-Dharwad and Belagavi belt of Karnataka, the buyer may sit across the state border in Maharashtra. With three or four possible vendors, the aim is to rule people out fast, before anyone wastes a call.

So the site is read like a filter. Is the grade there? Is the part inside your weight range? Do you machine, or is a second vendor needed? Will a report come with each lot? A missing answer often counts as a no, because ringing to ask costs the buyer time.

The general pages every manufacturing site needs are covered in our website checklist for manufacturing companies. What follows is the part only a foundry or a job-work machine shop has to get right.

The capability page, section by section

One page, in this order. The example lines are illustrative; write your own.

1. One line on what you make and for whom. "Grey and SG iron castings, 5 to 150 kg, as-cast or machined, for pump, valve and tractor makers."
2. Grades you pour, by designation. FG 260, SG 500/7 and the rest you actually pour, and the ones you do not. "No steel or aluminium" saves a buyer a call.
3. Size limits. Lightest and heaviest piece, and the largest casting dimension your moulding boxes take.
4. Moulding and cores. Green sand, no-bake or shell, and whether cores are made in-house.
5. Patterns. Who makes them, who owns them, where they are stored, and what happens to a pattern that sits idle.
6. Machining. Each machine by type, make, table size or swing, and quantity. Then the tolerance you hold every day on that machine.
7. Inspection. What you test in-house, what goes to an outside lab, and which report travels with each lot.
8. Who reads the drawing. A named person with a WhatsApp number.

A site with only a gallery and a tonnage figure gives the buyer nothing to filter on. Sections 2, 3 and 6 come before any photograph.

How to send us a drawing

Put this on its own page, linked from every other page. Change the names and details; keep the list.

Send your drawing to Prakash, who reads our drawings, on WhatsApp or by email, both below.

Please include: the 2D drawing as a PDF, and the 3D model as a STEP file if you have one. The material grade. Quantity per batch and per year. As-cast or machined, and which faces. Any test report you need with each lot. The delivery location, and your target date for samples.

What happens next: Prakash reads every drawing and replies with questions or a quotation. If we cannot make it, we say so, and where we can, we name someone who can.

That last sentence does more for you than it seems. A buyer who gets an honest no may come back with the next drawing.

Tolerances, stated honestly

The commonest mistake is copying a machine's catalogue figure onto the website. The machine may achieve it on a good day with a fresh tool. The buyer's quality team will measure your first-off parts against the drawing, and a number you cannot repeat costs you the account.

Write the tolerance you hold routinely, by process, and add "tighter on discussion" where it is true. The same goes for inspection. If your CMM work goes to a lab in Belagavi, say so. An outside lab is acceptable if you say so. A CMM the buyer was told about and never sees on the vendor visit is not.

For example: a foundry off Gokul Road

Imagine a foundry on the Gokul Road side of Hubballi pouring grey and SG iron, with a small machine shop alongside. Its site said "All types of ferrous castings as per customer requirement", showed a monthly tonnage figure and had a gallery of unlabelled castings.

The Kolhapur engineer from the top of this post read it twice and still could not tell whether the unit poured that grade, cast at that weight or machined the faces. The drawing went to a Belagavi foundry whose site answered all three.

The owner sat down with the works manager for two afternoons and wrote the capability page above. Each gallery photograph got a caption with grade and weight, and a few were retaken on the weighing scale. A sample inspection report went up with the customer's details blanked out. The "send a drawing" page named the development engineer, and the WhatsApp number went into the header of every page. The tonnage figure stayed, lower down. The first drawing arrived about two months later, for SG 700, which the foundry did not pour; it said so, and the engineer replied with a different part. That second drawing became an order of about 400 housings (invented figures).

When the website is not where your orders come from

Suppose most of your work comes from three OEMs you have supplied for years through their vendor development teams. Then the site will not bring many new enquiries. It still matters at their next vendor assessment, and to the engineers you are trying to hire. For that buyer, a capability presentation to hand over at supplier registration does more than the site.

And never show a customer's part, drawing or name without written permission. In job work, the drawing belongs to the customer.

Read your site as the Kolhapur engineer would

Open your site on a phone and pretend to be that engineer with one drawing. Try to find your grades, your weight range and the name of the person who reads drawings. Any of the three taking more than a minute? Start there. Writing the capability page and the drawing page with your works manager is website content writing, and tell us what you need starts it.