An in-house engineering and testing facility becomes an invaluable cost-saving asset.

The rapid rise in the precious metals market, specifically gold and silver in 2010, threatened to have a significant impact on Multicraft International’s automotive brake switch assemblies.

This product line utilizes terminals incorporating solid gold and solid silver contacts. It was projected that the rise in precious metal costs would negatively impact this program by more than $600,000 per year.

Multicraft engineers re-evaluated the design and function of the switch. After considerable research, our team suggested that the gold and silver content could be significantly reduced by designing a new bi-metal contact incorporating a copper-clad base, with a gold or silver top pad layer.

Using in-house testing facilities, Multicraft International was able to validate the new design through completion of a 1.2 million-cycle durability test of the new contacts, over a three month period, running 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Our customer approved the new design, based on our documented testing and Multicraft was able to not only reverse the negative financial impact, but offer our customer a cost reduction, going above and beyond.