For most of our history, building a prize wheel meant doing it largely by hand and doing it well. Small batch production paired with careful craftsmanship, and everything staged to perfection.
But as our business has grown, we've had to ask a hard question: how do you maintain that standard, and even raise it, when you're building at larger scale?
The answer is a deliberate, process-by-process upgrade from manual techniques to precision manufacturing technology. The new ways let us keep up with our perfectionist standard faster and more consistently across every unit in a run. Here's what that's looked like in practice.
Cutting: From Skilled Hands and Reliable Tools to Laser Precision
Cutting metal and other materials with conventional saws and drills is entirely workable. We did it for years, and experienced hands can produce high-quality results. But as we were measuring and marking each piece individually, hand-positioned cuts, we also accepted that small variations would exist across a production run. When you're building ten units, that's manageable. When you're building hundreds, it compounds.
Implementing laser cutting by partnering with local manufacturing facilities brought a different level of repeatability to our flat material work. The machine follows a digital file with sub-millimeter accuracy, producing clean edges and exact hole positions without contact force or the variation that comes with manual setup. Run the same file a hundred times, and the hundredth piece is identical to the first.
What changed at scale: Wheel faces, acrylic panels, and custom cutouts are now dimensionally consistent across an entire production run, not just close. For clients ordering multiple units for different markets, that means every wheel looks the same, whether it's in a booth in Chicago or San Diego.
Machined Parts: From Manual Craft to CNC Repeatability
Manual machining is a genuine skill, and we have skilled machinists in our team who produce excellent work. Our early custom hardware and structural components were produced through genuine craftsmanship. But matching parts across a larger run required careful fitting and sometimes hand-adjustment at assembly.
CNC milling runs from a program, a precise digital spec for every cut, hole, and contour, and executes it the same way every time. Complex geometries that took significant skill and time to produce manually can now be programmed once and reproduced exactly across an entire production run.
What changed at scale: Structural components fit together exactly as designed. Assembly is faster because parts don't need to be fitted or adjusted. The finished product is more rigid, the spin mechanism runs truer, and the overall quality that customers experience, the feel of a well-built wheel, has gone up even as our volume has grown.
Plastic Components: From 3D Printing to Injection Molded Consistency
For years, we 3D printed many of our plastic components in-house, including the stopper holders that give prize wheels their satisfying clicking sound as they spin. We designed these parts with care: intricate internal geometry engineered to distribute stress and prevent cracking even after thousands of rotations. Parts held up in the field, and we were proud of the engineering behind them.
But 3D printing at volume has a critical limit: Build time. As our production volume grew, we moved these components to injection molding using high-strength engineering-grade polymers.
What changed at scale: The same durability our 3D-printed designs achieved through careful geometry is now achieved through material science, ABS with excellent surface gloss, high impact resistance, and good heat distortion. Parts come off the mold with consistent surface quality and material properties, every time. The clicker that made ten thousand spins in a 3D-printed part now makes the same ten thousand spins in a part that's denser, stronger, and identical to every other one in the production run.
Finishing: From Painted by Hand to Powder Coated at Scale
For many years, we painted our metal parts in-house. Every piece went through a thorough QC inspection; surfaces were examined closely for imperfections, and anything that didn't meet our standards was pulled and reworked. That process produced results we were proud of, even if it was labor-intensive.
As volume grew, we made the move to powder coating. The process is fundamentally different: an electrostatically charged dry powder is applied to the metal and cured in an oven, bonding at a level that liquid paint simply can't match. The finish is smoother, more uniform, and significantly more resistant to chipping, fading, and corrosion.
What changed at scale: Parts coming out of powder coat pass QC at a much higher rate with far less rework. The consistency that our inspectors used to verify piece by piece is now baked into the process itself. And beyond the finish line: powder-coated steel holds up better against rust and environmental wear, which means our products are more durable in the field than ever, not just when they leave the shop.
Growth That Doesn't Cost You Quality
There's a version of this story where "scaling up" means cutting corners and hoping customers don't notice. That's not the version we're interested in. Every process upgrade we've made has been evaluated against a simple standard: does this let us produce a better product, more consistently, at the volume our customers need?
The answer across powder coating, laser cutting, CNC machining, and injection molding has been yes. The craftsmanship that defined our early work is still here; it's just been encoded into processes that don't depend on any single person having a good day.
