Posted by Fast-Rite International, Inc. on | Comments Off on Fast-Rite Now Your Source for Cable Tie Express!
Fast-Rite is pleased to announce that it is now part of the Cable Tie Express distribution network. A wide variety of wire management items is now available to us from Cable Tie Express, including standard and specialty cable ties, heat shrink tubing, mounting bases, wire connectors and cable clamps. These products certainly enable Fast-Rite to assist customers in meeting their requirements with high quality ISO manufactured products and providing thorough and quick answers to product or application questions they have.
Fast-Rite stands by the Cable Tie Express tagline – “tying service to quality” – in its offering of these wire management products to our customers. Visit www.fast-rite.com or feel free to contact us for more information.
Posted by Fast-Rite International, Inc. on | Comments Off on Fast-Rite Adds New PSM Product Line!
Fast-Rite is pleased to announce we are now an authorized distributor for PSM International.
A Best-In-Class World leader since 1931 in the manufacture of CLINCH NUTS, CLINCH STUDS, STANDOFFS, AND INSERTS FOR PLASTICS, PSM is a global company offering advanced capabilities with manufacturing, R&D, and distribution operations in 23 countries around the world.
PSM International designs, manufactures and distributes special engineered fasteners, inserts for plastics, sheet metal fasteners, and direct screw fixings to global manufacturing sectors including computers, datacom, electronics, aerospace, automotive, medical, white goods, power generation, and general manufacturing.
Fast-Rite’s partnership with PSM offers our customers core competencies of Technical capabilities, industry application, and project management along with expert inventory management, inventory planning, and delivery. We cooperate with our customers early in the design phase and provide a full range of fastening solutions throughout the product life cycle – from design conception and prototyping through product launch and general production. It is our mission to help customers in producing time-to-market products with cost-efficient and high-quality fastening solutions – which we can do. Customers switching to PSM for their clinch and insert products typically enjoy considerable savings and receive not an “equivalent” but the exact same product that they have been paying much more for.
PSM Product users are veritable who’s who in the world industrial scene. they’re specified into prints for names like Dell, HP, NEC, Seagate, Sony, Toshiba Garmin, GE, Intermec, Viewsonic and more. Automotive heavyweights BMW, Daewoo, Ford, GM, Toyota, Volkswagen and much more.
For more information contact your sales representative at 630-858-0988.
Posted by Fast-Rite International, Inc. on | Comments Off on Make Your Construction Projects Much Easier!
Fast-Rite is pleased to announce that we are now a proud distributor of Phillips Square-Driv® Wood and Composite Screws. These specialty screws are available for all our valued customers.
These screws were developed to prevent the common woodworking problems of stripping, rusting, or a weak hold. The Phillips Square Driv® with Anti-Camout Ribs is a screw that just won’t strip. Coated with Durafast coating, this screw won’t rust or stain the wood – Guaranteed! And with the screw’s patented design that places more steel under the head at the torque point, it creates a stronger screw, and therefore a stronger hold to better support your projects.
These screws are manufactured under ISO9001 Quality Control monitoring and have the best warranty in the industry.
Fast-Rite International is proud to be a distributor of the Phillips Square-Driv® wood and composite screws. We at Fast-Rite are dedicated to constantly improving our service and we believe that adding these quality products will help us reach that goal.
Posted by Fast-Rite International, Inc. on | Comments Off on Salt-Spray Testing
In House Corrosion Test
As part of a continuing effort to enhance Fast-Rite’s in-house quality control lab, Director of Quality and Engineering Mark Jacobs recently announced the arrival of our new ASTM B117 Certified Salt-Spray Testing Chamber.
Often fasteners, stampings, and fittings are the “forgotten part” of an assembly. They’re typically the smallest part of the cost of the final project. But not if they develop corrosion out in the field! Now the corrosion might just be cosmetic, but if you’re selling a million-dollar piece of machinery such as a heavy-duty construction crane, you can bet the buyer wants to see those fasteners gleaming in the sun for years to come, not covered with rust.
How can you have confidence that corrosion will not develop?
It’s simple. To quantify the corrosion resistance of a material, it is common practice to submit the material to harsher environments than normally encountered in service, hoping to accelerate the damage.
Salt-Spray chambers are universally accepted as the best tool for this job. It’s possible to subject parts to a 500 or 1000 our salt spray test that creates a very harsh environment. If the parts survive this test without corrosion, it’s an excellent indicator that the corrosion resistance will give a long service life in the field.
Most distributors don’t have such equipment in house, so they either can’t provide documented testing results or else must send the parts out to an accredited third-party lab, which drives up both testing time and costs, which of course are passed back to the customer. But with in-house equipment and capacity, Fast-Rite can circumvent those delays and provide accurate, reliable test data cost-effectively to our customers.
Need some failure analysis? Testing on your components? Contact us today.
Posted by Fast-Rite International, Inc. on | Comments Off on Container Shortage Increases Freight Charges
How did the container shortage come about? After China’s Covid-19 recovery and during the shutdowns in the Western hemisphere, only 40% of containers shipped from China to North America were returned to back China. This means almost half of those containers are unusable and container manufacturers are not producing them fast enough to meet the current demands. A shortage in containers means a shortage in inventories and as big retailers try to get stock ready for the pre-holiday season, they are driving the demand even higher. Due to the high demand, container manufacturers are charging premiums for their containers (Source: dedola.com).
Despite our company’s efforts to absorb as many of these price surges as possible for all our customers in the past months, these container surcharges will begin to emerge in our prices in the weeks to come. This is not the news we want to bring to you, but we are committed to being a transparent company as we value the trust you put in us as your supplier.
Posted by Fast-Rite International, Inc. on | Comments Off on What Do We Mean, “Assemblies”?
When we say we make assemblies, just what do we mean?
Am I talking bags or boxes of material, such as a parts kit? Or am I talking about some sort of sub assembly. Which is it?
The answer is, what does the customer need? What does the use case call for?
For thirty years we at Fast-Rite have provided parts in various containers, plastic bags, cartons, blister packs or other types. These might include fasteners, brackets, stampings, wire nuts or any type of widget that would be assembled to the main product.
But Fast-Rite goes far beyond “putting screws in a box”.
First, We Listen
Fast-Rite works diligently worked with our customer’s engineering staffs to first understand what your real needs are, what your use case is, and then work to develop solutions for the challenges the market provides. In doing so, we do more than provide a widget, we work directly with the engineering and production staff to understand what is really needed and apply our 30 years of experience and engineering expertise to design a solution.
As a result, we can confidently say we are the OEM Optimizer, providing solutions to our customers that optimize the functionality of their components while providing them cost-effective solutions
You’ve seen it!
Many times our work and products are behind the scenes. You would have to disassemble a name brand radial arm saw to see the parts Fast-Rite put into it. Or you might be looking right at parts in a household appliance but because our name is not on it, you wouldn’t know. You don’t see Fast-Rite labels on that custom grill, do you?
But if you’ve ever been in a “Big Box” warehouse type store (and who hasn’t?) you have been surrounded by examples. In most every store, in most every aisle, hundreds or thousands of them.
Let me just cite one example.
A Case Study
It was the mid 90’s, and the big box home improvement business was just exploding
Home Depot, Lowes, Sam’s Club, Costco and other stores were opening new locations every time you turned around.
These stores turned numbers, and that required a lot of stock on hand. So the store designers took a note from the warehouse business, and instead of shelving, they used heavy duty industrial racking to store their merchandize.
So, when the basic structure was complete, crews of installers would come in and start erecting the racks. They would lift the uprights up and attach the cross beams. In those days it was common to use nuts and bolts to fasten the cross beam to the upright. That required a crew to hold the beam, and workers with wrenches or socket drivers to insert the bolts and tighten the nuts.
It’s critical that the cross beams were tightened. Some designs of racking would allow the beams to be mounted without bolting, but that created a real hazard. They could be dropped into the uprights, but then would need bolting or else a misplaced lift truck fork could accidently dislodge a pallet, creating the potential for products spilling out of the racks onto customers or employees below.
But manually bolting took time. It was clear there was room for improvement that would provide absolutely critical safety while simplifying and reducing the workload needed to mount, reposition or remove the cross beams that hold all that stock up in the air.
And the Big Box company was in a hurry – there was a constant construction schedule putting in hundreds of new locations, resulting in many thousands of locations in the US alone, not including the rest of the world.
A Better Mousetrap
If anyone could build “a better mousetrap”, the market was ready to find them.
A new solution that would greatly reduce the time and workload to rack a store.
A Tool-Less solution that would allow for instant assembly .
A locking solution that would securely hold the beam in place and not allow a beam to be accidently lifted out of position.
A way to simply and easily remove and and reposition Beams.
A drastic reduction in labor cost for outfitting each store.
Our customer had an idea as to how to do this. But the idea needed refinement, there would be multiple revision needed before the device would be safe for production use. And our customer was simply put, not in the “widget business”. The best solution seemed to be a hardened, multi-piece spring loaded assembly with a locking pin that could be mounted and locked in place instantly, without the need for nuts and bolts.
Multiple tests, revisions, samples need to be made and put into quality testing. Fast-Rite Account Reps worked with the factory engineers to work through design modifications. And finally, the project went live, full production started, and as a result, there are many thousands of locations throughout the world using millions of those devices, enjoying the fruits of those labors.
Hidden in Plain Sight
A few years back we were in a prospective customer facility. The engineer did not know us well, or what we have done. He wasn’t familiar with our products. I simply walked him over to his own warehouse racks, where unbeknownst to him, the patented parts were right there, still effective, 20 years later, serving the needs of his company. He then understood we do more than “put screws in a box”.
Do you need solutions rather than widgets? Do you need a partner than can provide effective engineered solutions, that can think out of the box and work with your staff to devise cost effective solutions? Do you need partners that can provide solutions that enhance the safety and effectiveness of your products? Fast-Rite can work with you to develop assemblies that can effectively improve your products, processes and cost-effectiveness. Contact our Engineering team at 888.327.8077 or email sales@fast-rite.com
Fast-Rite stands by the Cable Tie Express tagline – “tying service to quality” – in its offering of these wire management products to our customers. Visit www.fast-rite.com or feel free to contact us for more information.