Trenton Forging has long been known for having some of the best lead times in the industry, which helps us provide exceptional time-to-market for our customers. A few of the factors that allow us to have such exceptional time-to-market are our agility, readiness, and adaptability. These three qualities mean we can respond to customers’ needs that others deem impossible.
In 2018, a large automotive OEM set to relaunch an iconic and historic platform. During the final weeks of crash testing, the casting, which mounted the fuel pump to the newly developed engine block, was failing catastrophically during front-end collisions, causing fires. The failures caused the OEM to delay the launch of the platform. Their interim response was to pivot away from the brittle castings and hire a prototyping firm to machine these small intricate components out of billet steel, taking extravagant amounts of time just to waste most of the raw material on chips. Production costs soared by orders of magnitude compared to the casting. A mutual source who knew that Trenton Forging excels at providing timely solutions connecting us to this OEM.
Our engineering department redesigned the casting as a forging nearly overnight. Within days of first contact, our internal tool and die facility had created prototype tooling, and immediately thereafter, components were run for first article. Trenton’s quality department even navigated the arduous automotive PPAP (Production Part Approval Process) required by the OEM in a staggeringly short 2-week period.
Our rapid and directed response not only salvaged the launch of the iconic brand but also allowed us to create a long-lasting relationship with this OEM. And, years later, we still manufacture parts for them in a production capacity.