Buddy-Bar

I wouldn’t let these guys make or machine a bicycle sprocket! Management is willfully blind to the manipulation and insolence of their shop manager, Ivan who treats customers like dirt.
5 years ago I came to them with a single cylinder head to be cast. They screwed up the water jacket cores and blamed me for the blown out castings. Once they figured out how to get the water jacket cores right (without any changes needed to my tooling) they offered their machine services. The idea of having the foundry take responsibility for casting to finished part seemed appealing enough to take them up on their offer.
Oh what a mistake it turned out to be! I provided them with mature, proven CNC programming, current drawings and fixtures. The first thing the shop foreman, Ivan said was that he couldn’t work with anything and had to start over — new fixtures and of course new programming — all at my expense! An estimate of about $ 5000 and 6 weeks to first article was provided by company management (John Fell and Mike McKeen) and then the never ending excuses began. Their machine was down, their programmer was out sick, on vacation, etc. They had a rush job come into the shop, etc, etc, etc. Eventually after 1 YEAR! I had a first article. Yep — you read right — 1 YEAR to get a fist article on a single cylinder head after being provided with current drawings, CNC programs and fixtures from a previous shop. They never performed a pressure test on the parts as specified and I only found out later that they had made a programming mistake that punctured the water jacket in 6 places that was not caught by their CMM. 15 castings and 1 year wasted.
But wait! They expected to be paid in full — $ 13K for the programming and another $ 3K for the castings and machine time! Don’t worry, we’ll make it up to you on the next run.
Fast forward to 2011, when the project was revived and I went back for a quote for a dozen more cylinder heads and I was provided with a middle finger quote! Informed that even with the existing programming of which only minor changes were required (2 hrs) that I now had to pay 40 hours ($ 4800) of machine setup time for a 47 tool job that one job — another $ 3600 to Qualify the first article and $ 270 per head for machine time calculated at $ 120/​hr! 2.25 hours to machine one cylinder head!
Independently I had their CNC programming reviewed by a machinist/​programmer with 20+ years of experience. After simulation and analysis, he remarked that the program was overly complex and wasteful of machine time and also that most of the tools specified were standard tools that the shop kept loaded in the machine in order to minimize setup time! Keep in mind that they have a 100 tool rack in the 50 taper machine that my job was run on.
In an attempt to bring this to light with company management in a request to review the quote and related costs, during a meeting with the shop foreman Ivan, John Fell and Mike McKeen I was treated to nothing short of arrogance and complete denial! Instead they accused ME of costing them money and blamed me for it taking over a year to do the original programming! The shop manager, Ivan had no direct involvement in the original CNC programming yet he professed to know that every single op and the setup times were all very accurate and justifiable. While I stated the results of my review, the shop foreman Ivan just burst out laughing! The utter insolent arrogance of an employee right to the face of a paying customer with the complicit support of his management was just unbelievable!
It should be noted that John Fell admitted to firing the original programmer that did the CNC programming work for my job because he claimed that individual had been holding back the performance of their machine shop. So admitting to me that the programmer that did my work was enough of a problem to have fired him — Ivan then refused his boss’s request to review and optimize the CNC program for my job claiming it would be a waste of time. Ivan steadfastly accused me of not knowing what I was talking about but when I confronted him on a couple of indisputable items — he just walked out of the room in a huff — he just couldn’t handle the truth and the lies that he was perpetuating!
They obviously have more business than they deserve and as a result they have no respect at all for any smaller customers who need less than 1000 of something. 5 years ago they were interested in my business, they pulled me in, I invested $ 15K and over a year of time on a SIMPLE part! Now, I come back and they figured they had me hooked and that I would just have to bend over and take being screwed by them again.
With arrogant prima donna firms like Buddy Bar it is no wonder that so much manufacturing work has moved to China.
I have pulled ALL of my business from Buddy Bar and I wouldn’t recommend them. Do business with Buddy Bar at your own risk!

This is the place to take automotive aluminum castings.
They’ve been there, done that. They did all the edelbrock manifolds for decades. Mike Is great.