Trio Labs

Surface finish is one of those specifications that tends to receive less attention than it deserves until something goes wrong. The print calls for a finish value, the supplier delivers parts within that value, and the program moves on. At macro scale, this is usually fine. The finish is a quality attribute, the process produces it within tolerance, the conversation ends there. At micro scale, surface finish stops behaving like a quality attribute and starts behaving like a f

Engineers working on the next generation of medical devices run into this question constantly: at what point does a small part stop being a small part and become a micro-precision part? It sounds like semantics. It is not. The answer determines which manufacturing processes are viable, which suppliers are worth a conversation, and how the design itself needs to be approached. There is no industry-wide line where macro becomes micro. But there are three diagnostic signals that