After two months of testing six types of mold steel and making six phone calls—and still unable to find a solution—Mr. Zhou came yesterday to purchase high-toughness LG die steel. It really wasn’t easy.
Mr. Zhou works with cold heading dies for forging red copper. He first contacted me in early June. His die was made of ASSAB 88 with a surface coating, but it cracked during trial runs. He asked me what die steel he should use for red copper cold heading dies to prevent cracking.
He called me five times that day, but didn’t end up buying the high-toughness LG die steel I recommended.
However, he came back yesterday to tell me that over the past two months, he’d tested Japan’s “R” brand RXR3 and SLD, with hardnesses of HRC 58–60, and they all cracked. He also tried Sweden’s Dievar, ASSAB 88, Caldie, and Unimax—with hardnesses as low as 46–48 HRC—and they all cracked as well. The dies would crack after producing no more than 3,000 units. The dies wear out too quickly, the costs are unsustainable, and most importantly, he can’t get the product made. Spending all day making dies is driving him crazy.
Yeah, he bought die steel from the “Big Three”—it’s definitely not cheap—and he had to add a coating, too. It took a long time to produce, but the mold cracked after making just 3,000 products. A mold with such a short lifespan is a total write-off; no one could handle that.
He must have tested every type of die steel he could think of, one by one—that certainly cost a lot of money. Fortunately, his company has deep pockets and doesn’t mind this expense. If it were anyone else, they wouldn’t be so stubborn; they would have given up long ago and looked for other solutions.
With this order, what I see isn’t the joy of winning the contract, but the importance of trust.
The fact that the client was willing to mobilize his entire factory’s resources and spend two months testing six different types of mold steel shows that he hadn’t even considered buying my mold steel in the first place. If he hadn’t been completely out of options, he definitely wouldn’t have come to me.
If he hadn’t searched for a lot of information online and frequently come across my posts, he wouldn’t have even thought of me.
Had he not asked many people, received explanations that didn’t satisfy him, and failed to see specific case studies, he absolutely would not have purchased the high-toughness LG die steel from me.
This order has once again made me realize the power of trust. His choice of a large company was also based on trust, and his willingness to try six types of mold steel from two companies was also rooted in his trust in large companies.
In business, trust is the foundation.
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Wu Dejian’s tool steel, the chief of staff of the user, bought everything he had used.