What to Send Us Before We Can Quote a Welding Machine

Most quotations that go wrong do not go wrong at the machine. They go wrong at the enquiry, because the enquiry described a part the customer does not actually make. A drawing with a thickness on it, a photograph of a similar product, or a sentence that says the last supplier used a machine of a certain size, are all we sometimes have to work from. The quote that follows is a guess with a price attached, and both sides find out in commissioning week.

This is the list we ask for, in the order that changes the answer most. It is also a reasonable checklist for a buyer preparing an enquiry to several suppliers at once, because the answers improve every quotation you receive, not only ours.

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An aluminium enclosure from a customer trial, with the corner seam welded. The joint a buyer most often leaves out of the enquiry is the one on the corner.

The Part Beats the Drawing, Every Time

A physical sample settles in ten minutes what a drawing argues about for a week. Send three to five parts if they are small: one to cut up, one to weld on and one to keep as the reference for what the finished joint should look like. If the parts are large, send the section that contains the joint, cut out with a saw rather than a torch, because a torch-cut edge changes the fit-up.

Where nothing can be shipped, the minimum is a drawing with the weld locations marked, the material and coating stated per side, and a photograph of an existing joint at close range. A photograph of the whole assembly is much less useful than a photograph of the seam, and the seam is almost never the thing that gets photographed.

Send the part in the condition it arrives in production. Degreased, de-burred and picked samples weld beautifully and prove nothing. If the real parts come in with oil, mill scale, a protective film or a coat of primer, the trial should have that on it too.

The Stack, Not the Thickness

Thickness alone is the least useful number in an enquiry. What decides the schedule is the stack: how many sheets, in what order, what each one is made of and what is on its surface. Two sheets of 1.0 mm and a pair of 1.2 and 0.8 both measure two millimetres and weld differently, because the current path and the heat balance are different.

The table below is the block we ask a customer to fill in before a trial is booked. It is short on purpose, and the third column is what we usually get instead.

What we ask	Why it changes the answer	The answer that costs a week
Material and grade per sheet	Conductivity and hardenability set the current window	Mild steel, when it is actually high-strength
Thickness of each sheet in the stack	Decides the nugget size and the force	A single number for the whole joint
Coating, and on which side	Zinc, primer and paint all change the interface	None, then galvanised parts arrive
Joint type and number of spots	Lap, projection and seam need different machines	It is a spot weld, as if there were one kind
Finish or appearance requirement	Decides whether marking is acceptable	Nothing, then the first parts are rejected for marks

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Six spot welds on an aluminium lap joint from a trial. The buyer inspects the mark; the schedule is set for the nugget underneath it.

Six Numbers on the Form

Beyond the part, six numbers decide which machine class is worth quoting. Cycle time per part, number of welds per part, annual volume, available power, available air, and the skill level of the operator who will run it. Each one moves the answer, and the first two move it most.

Available power is the one buyers most often leave to the electrician, and it is worth settling early: a machine that needs a supply the site does not have is not a machine, it is a project. Air pressure and flow matter for the same reason on a pneumatic press, and floor space matters more than the footprint of the machine, because the parts have to be handled in front of it.

Annual volume matters differently. A part that runs two thousand times a year and a part that runs two hundred thousand have the same weld and different economics: the first justifies a general-purpose machine with quick changeover, the second justifies tooling built around that one part. Quoting the same machine for both is a common and expensive mistake, and it stays invisible until the volume is stated. Operator skill belongs in the same sentence, because a machine that needs a skilled hand to hold its schedule is a different purchase from one that does not.

Cycle Time Picks the Machine, Not the Weld

On a manual machine the weld is often the short part of the cycle. Six seconds of handling and two seconds of welding is a normal ratio on a mid-sized panel, and no amount of transformer will change the six. When a buyer says the machine must make thirty parts an hour, the honest answer is usually that the handling has to change before the welding can.

That is why we ask for the cycle as a breakdown rather than a target. Load, position, weld, unload, inspect. Once the breakdown exists, the choice between a manual standing machine, a multi-gun arrangement and a small robot cell becomes arithmetic instead of preference, and the quotation can say which part of the cycle it is actually improving.

What Should Come Back in a Quotation

A quotation that only lists a machine and a price leaves the buyer to discover the rest later. Ours contains six things, and a buyer comparing offers should expect the same from every supplier: a proposed weld schedule with the assumptions written down, the machine class and the reason for it, the tooling scope and who owns the drawings, a utilities table with power, air and water requirements, the acceptance criteria for the first-off parts, and the consumables list with lead times.

The acceptance criteria line is the one worth reading twice. If a quotation does not say how the first parts will be judged, the judgement will be made by whoever is standing at the machine on the day, and that conversation is always more expensive than the document.

Three Answers That Cost a Week Each

The first is same as the last one. It sounds efficient and it removes every piece of information from the enquiry, because the last machine was bought for a part that nobody described either. The second is two millimetre steel, which is neither a material nor a stack and usually turns out to be coated. The third is a request for a certificate without saying which market the machine is going to, which forces us to guess and then revise the quotation once the destination is known.

None of these are unreasonable answers. They are what an enquiry looks like when it is written in a hurry by someone who knows the part and forgets that the supplier does not. A photograph and a filled-in stack table take ten minutes and usually remove one round of questions from the process.

Conclusion

A welding quotation is only as good as the description of the joint. The part, the stack, the coating, the cycle and the site services cover almost everything that changes the answer, and none of them require an engineer to produce. Buyers who supply them get comparable offers instead of incomparable ones, which is the only condition under which a price comparison means anything.

Requirements vary by destination market. Always confirm against the current edition of the applicable standard and with your certification body.

PDKJ continues to provide customized laser welding and resistance welding solutions based on different materials, workpiece structures, welding requirements, and production applications.

What To Send Us Before We Can Quote A Welding Machine