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Expanded Build Services: Box-Build, Kitting, Battery Cables, and More

When MiniProto started, the answer to "what do you build" was short: custom wire harnesses and cable assemblies. That answer has been getting longer. Customers kept asking us to take on the next step, and the step after that, and we kept saying yes. Today we are making it official: we have expanded what we build well beyond harnesses and cables. Here is what is new, and why it matters if you would rather manage one vendor than five.

Box-build assembly

A harness is rarely the finished product; it usually lives inside something. With box-build assembly we integrate harnesses into enclosures and panels, so instead of receiving a bag of harnesses to install, you receive the assembled unit, wired and ready.

Kitting and assembly

For builds that happen on your floor, kitting and assembly delivers parts grouped the way they get used: per-unit kits with the right pieces in the right counts, plus assembly work wherever you would rather have it done here.

Electromechanical assembly

Electromechanical assembly covers builds where the harness meets hardware: brackets, panels, switches, and mechanical parts coming together as one assembly instead of a pile of components.

Electronic assembly

Where a build includes electronic components, our electronic assembly services fold that work into the same job, so the electronics and the wiring that serves them come from one bench.

Military wire harness manufacturing

We now offer military wire harness manufacturing, built to your specification and drawings. Send the print and we build to it, and when the print leaves a question open, we ask instead of guessing.

Custom battery cables

And for power work, custom battery cables: lug-to-lug cables in custom lengths with tinned lugs, sized to what your system actually needs rather than whatever length happens to be on the shelf.

Why we expanded

The common thread is fewer handoffs. Every extra vendor in a build is another quote to chase, another lead time to stack, and another place where a detail gets dropped. When the same shop that builds your harness can also kit it, integrate it into the enclosure, and ship the finished assembly, the project gets simpler for the only person it needs to be simple for: you.

It also makes quality easier to own. When the harness, the kit, and the enclosure work happen in one place, one shop is accountable for the whole result instead of a chain of vendors pointing at each other.

None of this changes the core of what we do. Harnesses and cable assemblies are still the center of the shop. These services grew directly out of them, one customer request at a time, and they use the same materials discipline and documentation habits as everything else we build.

Bring us the whole build

If your project goes beyond the harness (into an enclosure, a kit, a mixed assembly, or a set of battery cables), we would like to see it. Get a quote and tell us where you want us to take it.

Related Links

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New Services: Reverse Engineering and Harness Design

Two new engineering services: reverse engineering from a physical sample, and harness design from your requirements or sketch.

The State of MiniProto

Hey folks, Alex Malcoci, founder of MiniProto, coming at you with an update on the state of the wires. I am sending this email to the wonderful community we’ve built over the last year as I think we owe you an explanation. We built and continue to build MiniProto for people like you and I hope that you will engage with this email. Delays, delays, delays... I’ll start with the thing that has caused the most headache for many of you. In the last few months, we have not been able to achieve our goal of rapid turnaround harnesses, with some delays stretching into months. We absolutely hate becoming the problem that we aimed to solve. We are sorry. So why the delays? MiniProto has grown way faster than we ever imagined during times of uncertainty. Our biggest growth spurt came at the confluence of Lunar New Year and the rollout of a new historic tariff regime which drove our demand through the roof. We did not know if the demand was going to be sustained and took a conservative approach. As it turns out, this was not the correct path. The growth was sustained, despite having all our marketing channels off since the start of the year. We’ve been upgrading our operations. We finally accepted the fact that the demand was real and sustained in May, and have been working to improve our throughout. Our lead times have already decreased by 50% from peak. Here are some of the highlights: We have tripled the size of our assembly staff and created a staff training program to allow us to grow headcount at 10-20% monthly indefinitely while maintaining quality. Big thanks to HVVH for awarding us grants to accomplish this. We’ve invested in additional tooling to improve our throughput. We deployed a custom operations management platform tailored to our use case that will keep our hundreds (and hopefully thousands!) of orders organized and flowing smoothly. We’re moving to a bigger office in August, though remaining in Kingston, NY. One of our biggest bottlenecks has been space as we’re locked into a lease and this should uncork us significantly. Looking to the future. In our operations scaling, we’ve definitely neglected a few things that we hope to address in the coming months: Our customer communication and order transparency needs to improve. We’re planning to roll out systems that will make this significantly clearer. Our website is... broken. Our configuration tool could definitely use some love and it will receive it. We started documenting, but it’s nowhere near enough. Let us know what you’d like to see. We’re going to continue on the path of growth and hope that you will join us. We’d love to hear from you regarding this direction - just respond to this email.

MiniProto Chosen as Most Promising in Hudson Valley

Grateful to The Hudson Valley Venture Hub for hosting an amazing pitch competition. Excited to share that MiniProto won Third Place alongside outstanding founders.

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