Confidential projects: NDAs, IP and repeatability

Most enquiries that arrive with a drawing attached also carry a question that isn't written in the email: what happens to this file once we send it? For a bracket off a garden shed, nobody asks. For an unreleased product, a customer's tooling, or a component someone has spent eighteen months developing, it is the first thing a procurement team wants answered — and it tends to be the thing 3D printing bureaux are vaguest about.

So here is our position, in plain terms: what we will sign, who owns what, where your files actually sit, and how we make sure part two hundred matches part one. Where the honest answer is "we don't do that", we have said so rather than left it out.

We sign your NDA

We work under the customer's non-disclosure agreement as standard. One-way or mutual, your template or ours — it makes no difference to us, and we don't insist on our own paperwork as a condition of quoting. The only detail worth getting right is the counterparty name: Bicester3D is the trading name, and the contracting entity is RODA Technology Ltd. Agreements made out to "Bicester3D Ltd" have to be reissued, which costs a day nobody has.

One practical suggestion. Send the NDA with the enquiry rather than after the quote. Sensitive projects are usually the ones with the tightest deadlines, and there is nothing more avoidable than losing a week to legal review while the parts sit unstarted. We turn standard agreements around same day. What we won't do is negotiate at length over unusual clauses — we are a manufacturing business, not a legal department, and if a draft needs heavy redlining we will say so early rather than sit on it.

Who owns what

You own your part, your drawings and your intellectual property. Printing something does not give us any claim over it, and nothing about sending us a file changes who holds the rights to the design.

Where we do the modelling ourselves, the output is yours too. Our custom CAD work is handed over as the native model and a STEP file, not just a mesh. That matters more than it sounds: a supplier who only ever gives you an STL has effectively locked you into printing with them, because nobody else can edit it sensibly. You should be able to take our model to another manufacturer, or to an injection moulder, without asking our permission or paying us again.

We don't reuse customer geometry. Your part doesn't go in the gallery, on social media, or into a case study unless you have told us in writing that it can. Every case study on this site is there because the customer agreed to it, and several good ones never got written because the answer was no.

There is one boundary worth naming, because it comes up regularly on reverse engineering jobs. We will rebuild a part you own, a part that is obsolete, or a part whose manufacturer no longer supports it. We will not reproduce a component that is currently on sale and covered by a live design right or patent, however easy it would be. If a job sits somewhere in the middle, we ask rather than assume — and occasionally we decline. That should reassure you rather than frustrate you: a supplier who is careless about someone else's IP will be careless about yours.

What actually happens to your files

Files come in over an encrypted upload and sit in access-controlled cloud storage. They are opened by whoever prepares the job and nobody else. Sliced files live on the machine for as long as the job is running and are cleared with the queue. We don't email geometry around, and we don't push work out to an anonymous network of third-party printers — everything is made in our own workshop, which removes an entire category of confidentiality problem before it starts.

We retain files by default, because that is what makes a repeat order cheap and identical rather than a fresh setup exercise. If you would rather we didn't, say so on the order and we will delete everything after delivery and confirm by email. It is a normal request and it costs nothing.

Repeatability: making part two hundred like part one

Confidentiality is the question buyers ask first. Repeatability is the one that decides whether they come back. Anyone can print one good part; the discipline is in printing the same part again in November that you printed in August.

The variables that actually move a dimension are boring and few. Material grade and supplier, machine, nozzle and layer height, wall count, infill, and — the one people forget — build orientation, which decides where the layer lines fall and therefore which direction the part is weakest in. We fix all of those in a named profile per part number and record them against the order, so a repeat run is a reprint rather than a re-engineering job.

For low-volume manufacturing runs we print and measure a first article before committing the batch, so a problem costs one part rather than sixty. Where tolerances are the point of the job — as they were on this OpenSCAD DAC bracket — we agree what is being measured and to what tolerance before anything is printed, in writing, because "it should fit" is not a specification either.

A representative example

A product company is six weeks from launch with an enclosure that has not been shown publicly. The NDA is signed the day the enquiry arrives and the quote goes out the next morning. Eight prototypes go out in PETG for fit checks; two revisions later the design freezes and we run sixty in ASA for the pre-launch units, on the same machine and the same reserved filament batch, with a first article approved before the run starts. After delivery they ask us to delete the files, we do, and we confirm it. Nothing about the job appears anywhere. That sequence is typical of how confidential work runs here, though the specifics are illustrative rather than a particular customer.

What we can't do

We are a small, well-equipped UK workshop, not an accredited defence supplier, and it saves everyone time to be direct about the ceiling. We hold no ISO 9001, ISO 27001 or IATF certification, so we cannot supply accredited quality documentation, PPAP packs or certificates of conformity beyond a written statement of the material and process used. We have no security-cleared staff or facilities, no ITAR registration, and we do not take military or defence work at all. We are not a CMM house: dimensional checks are made with hand metrology and scanning, which is fine for verification but is not accredited inspection.

If your procurement process requires any of the above, we are the wrong supplier and we would rather tell you at enquiry stage than three weeks into a programme. Nothing here is legal advice, either — your own counsel should read anything you sign.

How to start

Send the NDA with the enquiry, tell us the quantity you expect to reach eventually rather than just the first order, and say up front whether files should be deleted after delivery. Those three lines remove almost every delay that confidential projects normally run into, and they cost you nothing to write.