by James Wright | Sep 11, 2026 | Aerospace Compliance & Quality, Defense Manufacturing
ITAR gets talked about as though it’s a certification you pass once and hang on the wall. It’s not. It’s a set of federal export control regulations that restrict who can access defense-related technical data — including engineering drawings, CAD files, process...
by James Wright | Sep 4, 2026 | Aerospace Compliance & Quality, Aerospace Machining, CNC Machining, Manufacturing & Cost Estimating
Most CNC quotes arrive as a single number per part — unit price times quantity, done. That works fine for simple commercial jobs. Aerospace quotes are different. They may break the cost into line items because different parts of the cost behave differently: some are...
by Accurate Machine & Tool Team | Sep 1, 2026 | Aerospace Compliance & Quality, Aerospace Machining
A First Article Inspection isn’t a quality-control formality — it’s the documented proof that a part, a process, and a drawing all agree with each other before production begins. Quick summary: AS9102 defines the aerospace industry’s First Article Inspection Report...
by James Wright | Aug 28, 2026 | Aerospace Compliance & Quality, Aerospace Machining, Defense Manufacturing
First article inspection is the reason your first aerospace production run costs more than every run after it. FAI per AS9102 is a complete dimensional verification of every single feature on the drawing — not a sampling plan, not a spot-check. Every dimension, every...
by James Wright | Aug 14, 2026 | Aerospace Compliance & Quality, Aerospace Machining, CNC Machining, Manufacturing Technology
If the drawing says “anodize per MIL-A-8625,” that’s not one process. It’s a family of processes, and picking the wrong type can mean a part that looks right but fails in service — or a part that meets the corrosion spec but no longer fits in the assembly because the...
by James Wright | Aug 7, 2026 | Aerospace Compliance & Quality, Aerospace Machining, Blog, CNC Machining, Defense Manufacturing, Manufacturing & Cost Estimating
The single biggest sticker shock in aerospace machining isn’t the material or the machine time. It’s everything around them — the compliance documentation, the first-article inspection, the material certification, the ITAR overhead, the NRE for fixturing a part...
