• Delivery cannot be guaranteed by any certain date nor within any specific time period: make no contracts or deals with third parties based on a timely delivery of your order. Nearly everyone believes their order is a matter of greatest urgency, including all the people who ordered before today and have been waiting days, weeks or months. If you were one of these people, you would not want us to put anyone who ordered later ahead of your work. Don't ask us to put your order ahead of them. Everything is processed in sequence based on the time the order was paid and recorded here, and not changed significantly in the meanwhile (changes can mean starting over, as of the date of the change). Howver, if you wish to have overtime work, and if we have diemakers available in the next 30 days (sometimes all overtime is sold out) then this gives you an option for fast delivery, sometimes within 10 days but typically within 30 days. Overtime work costs 2x the price for unspecified delivery time.
  
  
• Custom items are those which we do not usually stock. They are items which require individual construction to your specifications. We are glad to make custom items. Just be aware that by definition they are not on the shelf except by the rarest of circumstances. Therefore, you probably should plan on the longest delivery time, because if you do, you will be pleasantly surprised if we are able to deliver sooner. That is so much nicer than being angry because you thought it could be delivered immediately and it takes months to work through all the previous pending jobs and get to yours. Please remember that custom work or overtime work must be prepaid.
  
  
• Changes in pending orders may slow delivery time. If you placed an order for a die set, and every few days you call to make little changes in the design, we have to start from scratch, not only just changing the order as it is stored in our computer, but all the trails of paperwork that flow from that to the various die-makers and machinists who might be working on parts of it the whole time it is pending. The greatest part of the time involved in making a die set is the planning and setup time, not the actual production work, in most cases.

Overtime Rush
Corbin's work hours are from 7am to 6pm, Monday through Thursday. (The office is open from 9am to 5pm). We may have available overtime hours that are not sold out, during any given weekend. If we do, and you need your items made in 30 days or less, we can ask one or more die-makers to give up their weekend, in exchange for overtime pay, and make your dies on the first available weekend after you let us know. Our employees are not slaves, and we cannot force anyone to work overtime: typically, someone will agree to do so, but it is not in any way guaranteed to be available. If it is, you can have any part of your order expedited to OVERTIME RUSH basis. Here are the conditions for OVERTIME RUSH:

• Tell us which items are to be expedited before Thursday of the week you want us to start planning for OT work. There is NO OPPORTUNITY to expedite any items after Thursday of a given week, since we are closed and the die-makers may not be reachable. Your order can be placed initially this way, or upgraded to OVERTIME RUSH at any point during the pending period (assuming time is available on a given weekend).
  
  
• The price of OVERTIME RUSH jobs is twice the standard schedule price. This is because we must pay 1.5 times regular wages plus the extra taxes, benefits, insurance, workers comp, and the overhead for running the plant for the additional days when it is normally closed. We do not make "twice as much": we make exactly the same thing as if you pay regular rate. Our die-makers, who give up their weekends for you, are compensated more for doing so. And the various tax agencies get their share, too.
  
  
• Only those items which must be made on overtime are charged at this rate. If you ordered a press and dies, and we have the press in stock, only the dies are charged at OVERTIME RUSH rate.
  
  
• We CANNOT guarantee that we will have time to do any given order on OVERTIME RUSH basis, because this is a popular option and sometimes the available time on any given weekend is SOLD OUT. We will be able to tell you right away if this is the case. If the time is available and we accept the order on this basis, we will TRY to finish on the first available weekend, but we cannot guarantee this. We can guarantee any accepted OVERTIME RUSH jobs to be delivered within 30 days. Typically it will be within 10-14 days, sometimes by the next Monday. But do not demand or expect this: it may or may not be physically possible. There are only so many hours in a weekend.
  
  
• OVERTIME RUSH jobs are charged before the work is started. The reason is that our die-makers do not wish to give up their weekends with their families and then find that someone changed their mind, decided it was too expensive, or for some other reason decided not to pay for their work. We don't normally charge in advance except (1) for custom items, and (2) for overtime rush jobs. If we don't have pre-payment or a valid bank card on which to charge the work, then we cannot schedule the job as OVERTIME RUSH.

The Madness Behind the Methods...

After having made quality swaging equipment for over 25 years, we find that most people obviously understand and are willing to wait their turn. Our faith in this was confirmed during the 1970's and 1980's, when we were taking orders on a two to three YEAR delivery queue, and had less than 5% cancellation rate!

In 1984, we decided that it would be worth the risk to build a new, modern die-making works and move out of our crowded little shop which had served so well for so long. We designed and built the building specifically for die-making and smooth workflow, from material coming in to the testing and proofing to the packing and shipping.

Shadowless lighting, massive insulation and two separate HVAC systems to maintain even year around temperature for the die shop (and the people), a bank of diamond lapping and honing machines with the best technology available for measuring and controlling taper, roundness, and absolute size in a production environment (with 50 millionths of an inch direct reading gauges mounted on each station, and a fortune in diamond-tip measuring probes for the torsion bar deep hole gauges and digital setting fixtures) -- all of this contributed to faster production with an improvement in quality control.

We quickly shrank our three-year backlogs to a fluctuating length of queue that ran sometimes three months, sometimes twelve months, but seldom longer and usually shorter. Today, with the vast majority of orders going out the door by the second day, we are doing vastly better than we did for most of a decade. Still, some orders may take longer depending on the size and number of orders that have just arrived at any given point. But remember, an order usually consists of many stock items and a few that need to be made, usually dies or punches. We can ship presses, jackets, lube, tubing, copper strip, core cutters, core moulds, software, books...items that we generally have to make in large quantities to be able to make them at all...most of the time from stock. Dies are much more individualized. Yes, there are certain shapes and calibers that many people order and we have made those our standard "stocking" items, but the demand for our work is so high that "stocking" is sometimes a bit of a misnomer. Most of our die work is not stock these days. We can't make enough to keep all of it in stock! It sells faster than we can build it. So, expect that the dies will take some time. Meanwhile you can become familiar with the press and other tools.

We are just as anxious to ship every order as you are to get an order! There is no advantage at all for us to delay anything. We put in long hours to keep the queue as short as possible. We're on your side when it comes to faster delivery! That is to the advantage of everyone. Bear in mind, if there were anything we could do to expedite delivery, we'd do it for our own sake just as readily as for yours! A prepaid order is a debt that must be repaid, and we are well aware of it. Likewise, cash flow is better if orders can be processed faster. We have no incentive to delay one second longer than necessary to get the job done correctly. But we have no interest in cutting corners to get a less desirable product shipped faster, either. You came here to get the best, and you deserve it.

Actually, there are two things we can do to expedite delivery. We have resisted doing these two things for a long time. We could (1) raise the prices. This would immediately stop a certain number of people from ordering, while making it more profitable to fill the orders of those who still want the products. Or we could (2) hire more die-makers provided we could find and train them. This of course also would raise the price, because the money to pay wages has to come from somewhere. A few people would decide they couldn't afford to order at the new price, and the orders would be reduced slightly while the work could be done faster.

As an alternative to forcing everyone to pay more to get faster delivery, we offer OVERTIME RUSH basis for those who choose speed over lower price. Those who prefer the lower price possible by using regular working hours always have the option to expedite any given item if the delivery time seems to be too long. You have the option to set your own price.

One of our longest term goals has been to make bullet swaging equipment affordable for the average shooter and handloader, and to make it possible for people interested in firearms to earn a good living by making custom bullets at home for resale. The price of equipment should be higher, based on what everyone else charges for similar products. Otherwise we could just farm out extra work to get it done quicker. Compare the price of a standard set of our dies, somewhere in the $300 to $500 range, with a similar set from nearly anyone else in the field (usually $1500 to $3500 range). Is it, perhaps, worth a little wait? The fact is, you'll probably wait as long, or longer, even for the much higher priced dies available from the handful of other high quality die-makers.

After pioneering so many swaging concepts and ideas for years, we discovered that we produce more dies in a month than the rest of the industry, combined, makes in a year. Our pricing is lower as a result, and the quality of our dies is known around the world. We worked for over two decades to make it so. Now, the only thing you need, besides 1/3 to 1/10 of the cost of what it used to take for the same equipment, is some patience.

Someone once asked, "If your dies cost 1/3 to 1/10 as much, how can they be any good?" Fair question. The reason is that we are completely dedicated to manufacturing swaging dies and tools, and have worked a long time to discover every possible way to make the dies better, yet faster. Because we do this full time, as a main business, rather than as a retirement hobby in half of a two-car garage, we can justify spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on plant and equipment to produce high precision. Our measuring instruments used on the production line cost many thousands of dollars each, far more than anyone making ten or twenty sets of dies a year could justify spending. We worked our way over the years into the ability to afford it and the volume of sales to justify it. It didn't happen overnight. Our first dies were not nearly as fine as the ones we make today. But they were as good as the competition, who made them in just the same manner as we did 22 years ago, before we could develop the better methods and afford the better instruments.

There is no other company in the world of our size dedicated to making bullet swaging equipment. Most of the ideas that have come about in the past 25 years in the custom bullet field came from here. What you don't see, and probably never will, are the hundreds of ideas that we tried that didn't work out, that cost thousands of dollars in time and material and wound up in the trash can. Those failures, as much as our successes, make it possible for us to economically build vastly superior products. We have tried the things others still are pondering and experimenting with. We know what works, and more important, what doesn't. That saves us a lot of money, time, and effort when it comes to designing and building new tooling for custom bullets. We know what to attempt and what to avoid. Not everything we attempt works, of course, but we certainly have a better chance of it working than a machine or die shop without our decades of experience.

We also have people working in the die-shop who have personally built more swage dies than the rest of the industry combined has created in its history. The gap continues to grow each day. Which die would you expect to be better made, the third one a machinist tried to build, or the 10,000th one? If everyone else in the world who makes swage dies builds them only as a part-time, retirement business or hobby, or a one-man shop, and restricts themselves to only a couple of calibers, or a handful of designs, and as a result, builds between ten and a hundred sets a year, how are they ever going to get anything like the same level of experience as a Corbin die-maker? We build anything from .14 caliber to 1-inch cannon, by the thousands of dies a year. We build more kinds of swaging presses than any other person or company in the world. This is just fact, since people want to know why we are able to make the best dies and still charge so little for them in comparison. The reason is, we make more of them, and have learned how to do it better and faster than anyone else.

One of the concepts we pioneered is the semi-custom system of production. Rather than making every single die from concept to finish as a custom product, and having to re-invent and manufacture nearly every part on every order, we identified groupings of bullets by pressure and physical requirements that could be built in given sizes and lengths of dies and presses. We came up with standard die dimensions to cover each grouping, and standard presses to handle larger sub-groups of die styles. Within each type of die, we could then do mass production of the blanks: the punches and the die bodies, the stop pins, the standard presses each covering a certain set of requirements for bullets. When each order came in, we would classify it as to what system, what length of parts and strength of dies would be needed, and simply reach in a bin of standard interchangeable parts to finish to custom specifications.

In this manner, we could use most of the efficiency of mass production methods, and at the same time, offer the quality and versatility of custom work within those interchangeable parts. The fit of the punch and die might be so close as to require custom fitting, but the die itself could be made or re-made from a standard plan and would fit into a standard press along with other calibers in a certain range. We did not have to try to force one overworked press design to handle everything: we designed different presses to cover large calibers, long bullets, hard lead, solid materials, and softer materials. The price could be more appropriate for the application: instead of building one very costly set of tooling and making various calibers in it, we could reserve the more costly equipment for applications that actually required it, and make smaller equipment available for operations that did not need the high pressure or extra length.

Since no one else in the world took this approach in custom bullet making equipment, we had at least two decades head start over those who saw what we had accomplished and tried to copy it. Our biggest trade secret is experience. And no one can steal that. We've seen cheap aluminum copies of our steel and iron presses. We've seen bits and pieces of what we designed being offered by others, but no one else has the complete package. And we keep building and adding to it, every week.

Because we do so much custom and experimental work, we are constantly learning and applying new ideas, which sometimes impact our earlier product designs. We may find that something can be done twice as fast, with half the tooling, and we immediately bring out a new tool that accomplishes it. We offer the only bullet jacket manufacturing equipment for home users, drawing precision jackets from strip copper or tubing. You can get any of the world's top quality swaging equipment here. But sometimes, there will be a delay while we finish some prior orders!