How a titanium machining shop gets vetted before it sees your drawing
Placing a titanium drawing with a small number of shops only works if each of them is right for the part. There is no pile of ten quotes to hide a bad fit. That puts real weight on how a shop gets checked before an RFQ reaches it at all.
This is the list, in the order it gets applied.
Titanium in current production, not two years ago
The first filter is the simplest and the one most often skated over: does the shop cut titanium regularly, right now, or did it cut one project’s worth two years ago and list “titanium capable” on its website ever since.
Regular production means the operators still remember the speeds and feeds that work, still stock the right insert grades, and have not let a Grade 5 job sit unquoted for three months because nobody on the floor wants to touch it. A shop that machines titanium once a year is not lying if it says it can do the work. It is a different risk from one that runs it every week.
Machine and fixturing fit for the actual part
Titanium’s low thermal conductivity and tendency to work-harden make rigidity matter more than it does on aluminium. A shop with the right spindle power and workholding for a small bracket may be the wrong fit for a large thin-walled housing that needs a different fixturing strategy to avoid chatter. Thin-wall titanium parts covers why.
Checking this means looking at the part’s envelope, wall thickness and feature depth against what the shop has run before in that size range, not asking whether it “does 5-axis” in general terms.
Certificates and traceability, matched to the actual requirement
Aerospace and medical-adjacent titanium work often needs a mill certificate to EN 10204 3.1, heat lot traceability, or a first article inspection report. Not every shop that cuts good titanium parts has the paperwork discipline to produce these correctly and on time.
This check is specific to the RFQ, not generic. A shop that has never been asked for lot traceability is not ruled out of all titanium work. It may be ruled out of this particular RFQ if the buyer needs that traceability and the shop has no process for capturing it.
Confidentiality practice, not just willingness
Being willing to sign a confidentiality undertaking and having a workable process for handling a confidential drawing are not the same thing. Part of vetting a shop is asking how the file will be handled once it lands: who on the floor sees it, whether it goes into a shared drive visible to unrelated projects, whether a signature changes any of that in practice.
A shop that treats this as a formality to get past is a weaker match for a buyer who cares about it, even if its machining is otherwise strong.
Response discipline and honest declines
The last check is behavioural rather than technical: does the shop reply promptly, and does it decline work it cannot hold rather than quote optimistically and miss.
A shop that says no to a part outside its comfort zone, clearly and quickly, is doing exactly what it should. That behaviour weighs as much as raw machining capability when a job is placed.
Why the list is published
The criteria are public so that a buyer can see what the shop running an order has been checked against, the same way a quality management standard publishes its requirements. The full version is the shop audit standard. We are a trading company and the shop is our choice; you can ask what the shop running your order evidenced against it. If you prefer to run the questions yourself, ten questions to ask a titanium shop is the short version. This check is one part of our guide to choosing an exotic alloy machining supplier, which also covers direct shops, marketplaces and the trial order.
Get a quote and the engineer on your request will tell you which of these checks mattered most for your part.