Contour Tool was founded in 1986 as a quick-turnaround tooling company. When global competition reshaped the screw machine industry in the early 1990s, we made a deliberate pivot — investing in CNC equipment and focusing on the complex, close-tolerance work that larger shops tended to avoid. That decision defined what Contour Tool is today: a precision CNC machining partner for manufacturers who need difficult jobs done right.
The customers who come to us typically aren’t looking for the cheapest quote. They’re looking for a shop that can handle the jobs that are genuinely difficult — hard-to-hold castings, tight tolerances, complex geometries — and deliver them reliably. That’s the work we’ve built our reputation on.
What We Machine
Our CNC machining capabilities span milling, turning, and Swiss machining, giving us the flexibility to produce a wide range of precision CNC machined parts. We work in aluminum, stainless steel, alloy steel, brass, bronze, copper, cast iron, and high-performance plastics including ABS and Acetal — and our experience with each material means we know how to set up tooling, control parameters, and hold tolerances throughout a production run.
We produce precision components for:
Hydraulics and Pneumatics
CNC machined hydraulic parts including valve bodies, manifolds, cylinders, and housings where precise bores, tight fits, and clean surface finishes determine whether an assembly performs or fails. This is one of our primary markets, and we’ve built long-term partnerships here through consistent quality and on-time delivery.
Industrial and Agricultural Equipment
Complex components for demanding applications across industrial machinery, construction equipment, and agricultural equipment markets. Many of these parts are castings or irregular shapes that require custom fixturing to machine correctly.
Aerospace
We’ve successfully completed challenging aerospace projects that other shops couldn’t or wouldn’t quote, delivering components with complex geometries and tight tolerances to AS-9100 standards.
Food Processing Equipment
Precision components where dimensional accuracy and material selection both matter, produced to the same quality standards we apply across all of our work.
Castings and Hard-to-Hold Work
One of Contour Tool’s core strengths is secondary machining of castings — components that are irregular in shape, difficult to fixture, and require tight tolerances and surface finishes that casting alone can’t achieve. We design and manufacture custom fixtures in-house, on our CNC production machines, which gives us better accuracy, better repeatability, and faster turnaround than shops that send fixture work out.
Small to Medium Production Runs
Our sweet spot is small to medium production runs — typically 50 to 500 pieces — where the work is repeatable but the volumes don’t justify the setup costs of high-volume production machining. We also have Swiss machining capability that scales from 1000 to 100,000 pieces and beyond for the right applications. Whatever your volume, every part goes through the same engineering review and CMM inspection process before it ships.
Quality You Can Verify
We maintain ISO certification and AS-9100 compliance. Our CMMs are programmed offline from your solid model, which means inspection is built into the process — not tacked on at the end. Our average on-time delivery rate is 96 percent, and our employee tenure averages more than 20 years. Those aren’t marketing numbers. They’re indicators of a shop that runs a disciplined process and stands behind its work.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are CNC machining parts?
CNC machined parts are components produced by computer-controlled cutting machines that remove material from raw stock to create a finished part to exact specifications. The process can produce everything from simple cylindrical components to complex geometries with multiple features, tight tolerances, and fine surface finishes — across a wide range of metals and plastics.
What are examples of machined parts?
Machined parts are found across virtually every industry. Common examples include hydraulic valve bodies and manifolds, pneumatic housings, agricultural equipment components, aerospace structural parts, and industrial machinery components. At Contour Tool, many of the parts we machine are castings or irregularly shaped components that require custom fixturing and close-tolerance secondary machining to finish correctly.
What are the basic CNC components?
A CNC machining setup includes the machine tool — whether a mill, lathe, or turning center — along with cutting tools, workholding fixtures, and the control system that executes programmed instructions. The process starts with a CAD model, which CAM software converts into machine instructions. The CNC machine follows those instructions to remove material and produce the finished part, which is then inspected against dimensional requirements using a coordinate measuring machine (CMM).