What we can make

The short version

7Fabs is a design, prototyping, fabrication and short-run manufacturing shop in Apopka, Florida. Five people, owner on the floor. Between drawing a part and finishing it, most of the steps happen on our own machines: we design it, cut it, print it, form it, weld it, machine it, coat it and put it together.

Some processes we don't run here. No shop has everything under one roof, and the ones that say they do are usually quoting someone else's machines anyway. What we don't run in-house, we complete through a partner network we've built and managed for more than a decade. Your quote names which operations are ours and which are partnered, before you pay for anything.

What we run in-house

Design and CAD. You can start from an idea, a sketch, a photo, a broken part or a finished model. Design work needed to make the part manufacturable is reviewed and scoped before anything gets made.

Machining and cutting

• CNC machining — 3-axis milling and lathe
• Fiber laser cutting for metal, including plate, pipe and tube
• CO2 laser cutting and engraving for plastics
• Wood CNC

One hard rule on the laser: we don't cut PVC or other chlorinated plastics. Cutting them releases hydrogen chloride, which is hazardous to whoever is running the machine and corrodes the optics. That's a safety line, not a preference, and no shop should cross it for you.

Forming and joining

• Sheet metal forming
• Welding — MIG, TIG and laser, in steel, stainless and aluminum
• Silicone molding and casting, at low volume
• Vacuum forming, at low volume

Additive and scanning

• 3D printing — FDM, SLA and SLS
• 3D scanning, for reverse-engineering an existing part or checking one against its model

The three print processes are not interchangeable. FDM parts are anisotropic: the bond between layers is weaker than the material within a layer, so the same part is measurably weaker pulled along the build direction than across it. Stratasys has published repeatability testing on ASA measuring upright strength substantially below on-edge strength — their data, their machines, cited here because it's the clearest published statement of a real effect. SLA is essentially isotropic, because the resin cures into covalent bonds in every direction; Formlabs has published tensile testing across a range of print orientations showing the same part behaves consistently whichever way it was built. Orientation is a design decision in FDM and much less of one in SLA.

Finishing and assembly

• Powder coating
• Sandblasting, polishing and grinding
• Drill press and other secondary operations
• Assembly and general prototyping

What we complete through partners

• 4- and 5-axis machining, and multi-axis lathe work
• Plating
• Anodizing
• Injection molding
• PCBA fabrication
• Any of the above at production volume

These are run by vendors we've worked with for years, not sourced ad hoc when a job lands. If you want to know who does a given operation on your job, ask — we'll answer straight, and we name it on the quote regardless.

Six questions that pick the process

Not a decision tree. These are the six things that do the real work, roughly in the order they matter.

1. How many do you need? One, ten, a hundred, ten thousand — these are four different answers, not one answer at four scales. Below a handful, the cheapest part is usually the one that needs no tooling: printed, cut, machined from stock. As quantity climbs, spending money once on a mold or a fixture starts to beat spending a little on every part. Tooling changes the shape of the cost curve, not just its height.

2. What does the part actually have to do? Hold a load? Seal something? Look right on a desk? Survive outdoors? Fit inside an assembly someone else designed? A visual prototype and a part that carries load are different parts even when the geometry is identical, and telling us which one you need changes the recommendation more than any other single sentence.

3. What shape is it? Some geometry rules processes in and out on its own. Deep internal cavities are hard to machine and easy to print. Thin flat parts with holes and bends are sheet metal work, not machining. Undercuts are cheap in casting and expensive in molding. Internal corners in a milled pocket are round because the cutter is round, and accuracy drops as pockets and holes get deeper relative to their width, because a long tool deflects.

4. What does it have to be made of? Material and process are coupled — you don't choose them separately. If it must be a specific metal, that rules out printing in polymer. If it must be a printed polymer, that constrains what strength you can count on. Start from the requirement and let the pair fall out together.

5. How tightly does it have to be controlled? Tolerances are reviewed per project. Ordinary work is made and verified in-house using accurate measurement tools. When a drawing calls for something tight, the job goes to a partner who can supply a CMM report — which usually costs less than trying it twice. Tell us your tolerances and we'll tell you which path the part takes and what documentation comes with it.

6. What does it need to look and feel like? As-cut, as-printed, sanded, polished, blasted, powder coated. Finish is a real cost line and a real schedule line, and it's the thing customers most often leave off a drawing and then are surprised by.

Then there's the date, which isn't a design question but decides plenty. Give us a real one — the date it has to be in your hands and what happens if it isn't — rather than "as soon as possible."

Most parts use more than one process

A bracket gets laser cut, formed, welded, then powder coated. A housing gets machined, then a printed insert gets bonded in. An enclosure gets sheet metal work and a PCBA that came from somewhere else, and the two meet at assembly. When you're picking a process, you're usually picking a sequence — which is one more reason the choice is easier to make from the requirement than from the catalog.

Materials

Material is selected per project, against what the part has to survive. Broadly:

• Metals. Steel, stainless and aluminum are the families we cut, form and weld most. Specific alloy and temper are chosen per job.
• Engineering plastics. Machinable and laser-cuttable stock, sorted loosely by service temperature and chemical behavior rather than by brand name.
• Printed polymers. FDM filaments, SLA resins and SLS powders, each with published properties that belong to the specific grade — not to "nylon" or "resin" as a category.
• Sheet. Metal and plastic sheet in the thicknesses a job calls for. If you're specifying by gauge, tell us the material too: gauge is a legacy convention and the same gauge number means a different thickness in steel, stainless and aluminum.

Two things people misread. Strength is not one number — tensile, yield, impact and fatigue are different questions, and a printed part's answer depends on which way it was built. Chemical resistance is conditional — it depends on the specific chemical, its concentration, the temperature and how long the exposure lasts, which is why supplier compatibility charts rate materials chemical by chemical instead of giving each one a grade. If the environment is aggressive, the honest move is to test a sample in it.

If you don't know what material you need, describe the environment instead: what it touches, how hot it gets, whether it lives outside, what it has to hold.

Validation and compliance work

If your program needs formal validation, it's available on request at additional cost, produced through our partner network:

• EVT / DVT / PVT stage gates
• T0 samples with a CMM report, confirming parts match the drawing before the production version is signed off
• PPAP packages

We don't advertise this as a headline service, because it's staffed by our partners and not by us, and we'd rather document it accurately than generate inquiries we can't serve properly. If you need it, say so at quote time and it gets priced in from the start.

You don't have to pick

Customers nominate the wrong process all the time, usually because they've read about one or used one before. It's not a failure — process selection is our job, not yours.

Send a STEP file if you have 3D geometry, a DXF if the part is flat, and a PDF drawing alongside the model — never instead of it. Uploading a file isn't a commitment. It starts a review, and a person confirms feasibility, pricing, capacity and timing before we commit to anything.