Advanced ceramics manufacturing is the sequence that turns ceramic powder into a finished engineering component — forming the shape, sintering it to full density, then machining, joining and inspecting it to the drawing. It differs from metal manufacturing in one decisive way: the part shrinks substantially during sintering and can only be cut with diamond afterwards, so where tolerance is created has to be decided before the first tool is made.

Yes — the terms are regional, not technical. Europe and the UK say technical ceramics or engineering ceramics, North America and Taiwan say advanced ceramics, and Japan says fine ceramics. All three describe the same engineered oxides, nitrides and carbides: alumina, zirconia, silicon carbide, silicon nitride, aluminium nitride and boron nitride. If your specification uses one term and our drawing pack uses another, nothing about the material or the process changes.

A single piece is a normal order. Machining from a blank needs no tool, so a prototype carries no tooling cost and no tooling lead time. Moving to a moulded route makes sense once the geometry is frozen and the volume justifies the tool — we will tell you where that crossover falls for your part.

There is no single figure. Shrinkage changes with the material and with the furnace, so the compensation applied to the tool or the blank is calculated for that material on that production route — not taken from a published table. This is the step where first articles most often come back out of size, which is why we review the drawing before the tool is cut rather than after.

It depends on the operation. Surface grinding reaches 1100 × 600 mm, lapping and polishing Ø600 mm, 5-axis CNC 350 × 350 × 350 mm, and the largest workpiece handled overall is 1000 × 800 mm. A part bigger than one station's envelope can often still be produced if its critical features fall inside it.

Ø0.08 mm bore and 0.1 mm wall, both in zirconia at OD ≤ 8 mm. Zirconia is the material that makes features this fine survive machining — at 1000 MPa flexural strength it tolerates the local stress that would chip alumina. Ask before designing the same feature in another material.

Yes. The ceramic surface is metallized, nickel plated, then vacuum brazed to the mating metal part, in assemblies up to Ø150 mm. Finished joints are helium mass-spectrometer leak tested and hold below 1×10⁻⁹ mbar·l/s. Tell us the service temperature and the mating metal at quotation stage, because both affect the braze selection.

Because the tool needs draft to release the part. Draft is a property of the moulding process, not of the ceramic — if your design needs that wall square, we grind it square after forming. The same applies to tolerance: as-moulded is roughly ±0.3 mm at 94–96% purity and ±0.1 mm at 99%, and anything tighter is created by machining afterwards.

To your drawing, and to sample. Custom OEM and ODM geometry is our normal work rather than an exception — most of what we ship is specific to one customer's tool. Send a 2D drawing or a 3D model with the critical dimensions identified.