Design guidelines for tumbled parts
Following a few basic design guidelines will help ensure your parts are tumbled properly and pass SendCutSend review.
Sizing & hole requirements
Sizing limits apply to flat parts before bending
| Min part size (flat) | .5″ x 1.5″ |
| Max part size (flat) | 4″ x 7″ |
| Min material thickness | .119″ |
- Thin or fragile parts may bend during tumbling. For those, use linear deburring instead.
- Verify min hole sizes for your material in the Material Catalog
- Need to check sizes for other services? See our Processing Min/Max Size Charts
What to expect with tumbled parts
- Purpose: Tumbling is for deburring and edge softening only, not cosmetic finishing.
- Edge softening: Cannot be precisely controlled. Expect rounded, uniform edges, not a specific radius.
- Holes and cutouts: Features smaller than 0.5″ won’t be fully processed inside.
- Surface finish: Will not be cosmetically perfect. Consistency between separate orders is not guaranteed.
- Fragile geometry: Unsupported features will bend. Not recommended for thin or delicate parts.
- Combined finishes: For tumbling plus anodizing, plating, or powder coating, submit a custom quote request.
Additional tumbling resources
If you’re designing parts for tumbling, these resources may help:
Pre-flight checklist
- File is in a format that we accept (2D: .dxf, .dwg, .ai, .eps; 3D: .step or .stp)
- All holes and cutouts are at least 50% material thickness for laser cut parts
- All holes and cutouts are no less than 0.070” for most waterjet cut parts
- All holes and cutouts are no less than 0.125” for all CNC routed parts
- File is built at a 1:1 scale, preferably in inch or mm units
- 2D files: all objects on the same layer, text converted to outlines, no open contours, all shapes united or merged, floating interiors bridged or stencilized
- 3D files: single solid sheet metal body, uniform thickness with a face at every edge, modeled at stock thickness with matching bend specs
- All stray points, duplicate lines, empty objects and text areas have been removed