Custom springs in under an hour: how walk-in manufacturing works at Daichi

Most spring shops have a minimum order. A hundred pieces. Two weeks of lead time. Send us a drawing and a deposit and we’ll get back to you next month.

Daichi doesn’t work that way for single-piece custom. We have no minimum order. If you walk into our factory in Valenzuela with a sample and the geometry is straightforward, we can usually have your spring coiled, inspected, and in your hand in under an hour while you wait.

This sounds like a marketing claim. It isn’t. It’s how we’ve worked for fifty years and it works because of the shop floor we run, not because of how we talk about it.

Why most spring shops can’t do this

The standard spring-manufacturing model is set up for production runs. The CNC coilers are programmed for batches of hundreds or thousands. Setup time per program is non-trivial — entering the wire diameter, free length, end style, and number of coils takes a few minutes. Tooling change between materials takes longer. So shops batch up orders, run them sequentially, and quote every customer the same two-to-four-week lead time.

That model makes economic sense for shops doing OEM contracts. It doesn’t work for the engineer whose press just broke because of a spring failure and who needs one replacement piece by 4pm.

How we do it differently

Three things make sub-hour walk-in custom possible at Daichi:

1. We keep coiling machines available for walk-ins. One of our CNC coilers is dedicated to single-piece and small-batch work, separate from the production-run line. There’s no queue for it. If you walk in at 9am, we don’t slot you behind a 5,000-piece order that started at 6am.

2. We have wire stock in-house. Stainless spring steel and high-carbon spring steel in the most-requested wire diameters — 0.5mm, 0.8mm, 1.0mm, 1.2mm, 1.5mm, 2.0mm, 2.5mm, 3.0mm, all the way up to 10mm — sit on racks ready to load. No waiting for a delivery from a wire supplier.

3. Our spring engineers can program from a sample. Most walk-ins bring a broken spring with them. Our team measures wire diameter with a caliper, OD with a ring gauge, free length with a ruler, counts the active coils, identifies the end style, and programs the CNC coiler — usually in five to ten minutes. From program-loaded to first-piece-in-hand is another fifteen to thirty minutes depending on the geometry.

Add it up and most simple compression, extension, or torsion springs are out the door in 30–60 minutes total.

What works for walk-in (and what doesn’t)

Walk-in works well for:

  • Replacement springs where you have a broken sample
  • Standard geometries (compression, extension, torsion)
  • Wire diameters in our stock range (0.1mm – 10mm)
  • Stainless or high-carbon spring steel
  • Single pieces or small batches (1–10 pieces)
  • “Approximate” specs — we’ll engineer the missing dimensions

Walk-in is harder for:

  • Tight tolerances below ±0.05mm wire — we can do these, but they need extra QC time
  • Specialty alloys we’d need to source (Inconel, phosphor bronze, beryllium copper)
  • Very large springs above 10mm wire or 100mm OD
  • Extreme geometries — extreme taper ratios, very long bodies, unusual end forms
  • Mass production runs (those still go through the production-run line and standard 1–3 week lead times)

If your need falls outside walk-in territory, we’ll tell you when you arrive and quote you the production-run path.

What to bring

The fastest walk-in is the one where we don’t have to ask questions. Bring as much as you have:

  1. The broken or original spring, if there is one. Even a fragment helps.
  2. The assembly the spring goes into, if it’s small enough to carry. Seeing the application removes a lot of ambiguity.
  3. Any drawing or sketch, even hand-drawn on a napkin.
  4. Material preference if you have one — otherwise we’ll suggest based on the application.
  5. Quantity — even if it’s one piece, knowing whether you’ll be back for ten more next month changes how we approach the engineering.

Where to find us

ITC Compound Road, Canumay East, Valenzuela 1440, Metro Manila. We’re open Monday through Saturday, 08:30 to 16:00.

If you’re driving, search “Daichi Metal” on Waze or Google Maps. If you’re taking public transit, the address is a few minutes from the Canumay LRT-1 station extension.

If you’re not in Metro Manila or you can’t get away during business hours, the production-run path still gives you a quote in 24 hours and first piece in 1–3 weeks. Most of our customers prefer that path for their second order onward — once we have your spec on file, reordering is a one-line email.

Why we keep doing it this way

Fifty years in, most spring shops have moved fully to production-run economics. We’ve kept the walk-in path open because it’s how we started — coiling springs by the piece for engineers, contractors, and machine shops who needed something that day, not in a month.

It’s also how we’ve earned most of our long-term customers. The first order is a single-piece walk-in. The hundredth is a 50,000-piece production run. The relationship starts at the bench.

If you’ve got a broken spring on your desk and a deadline this afternoon, bring it over.

Daichi Springs manufactures custom and standard springs in Valenzuela, Metro Manila. Walk-ins welcome Mon–Sat 08:30–16:00. Get directions → · Or send a quote request →

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