ABOUT US
Who We Are
Three M Tool is a team of friendly, experienced metalworking professionals who design and fabricate wire baskets and engineered metal fabrication solutions for a number of industries, including medical, automotive, aerospace, and general manufacuring. Offering a sophisticated level of material knowledge and exceptional customer service, we are highly responsive to our customers’ needs, and we deliver fast quotes that include part drawings in less than a week. This streamlined quoting process translates into shorter lead times for our customers, and our engineering and fabrication expertise means you always get a dependable, high-performance product that’s designed for manufacturability.
More Than Baskets
Three M Tool is widely known for our wire mesh baskets that are manufactured from durable carbon or stainless steel and that feature solidly welded frames and heavy wire mesh linings. Every one of our wire mesh baskets serves a specific need for our clients, and they are engineered to solve a problem. Our focus on the problem-solution nature of product design is what allows us to create more than just baskets, and you can find our work in a wide variety of applications, including: parts cleaning and parts washing, sanitizing and sterilizing, coating and finishing, transport and shipping, material handling, heat treating/normalizing, and impregnation.
Our Team
Austin Hunt
President
Jennifer Snyder
Office Manger
Suzette Chismar
Consultive Sales
Noel Pagan
Production Manager
Bill Gilgore
Manufacturing Engineer
Samantha Smith
Production Planner / Buyer
Michael Kline
Design Engineer
How We Design Wire Baskets
- General application: cleaning, filtering, chemical dip, heat treating, FPI inspection, etc.
- Application environment: ultrasonic, high temperature, enclosed vapor degreasing (EVD), caustic dip, spray wash.
- Work envelope size: dimensions of any tanks, conveyors, machine chambers, etc.
- Smallest part size: opening size for mesh selection, mesh openings should be just smaller than the smallest part.
- Other wire basket features:
- Handles (top, ends, swinging)
- Lid (hinged, latches, compression)
- Part orientation (top loading only or full rotation)
- Divided compartments (solid metal, perforated, mesh walls)
- Crossing rod grids
- Pin rack (spacing, length, radiused ends)
- Part protection (Nylon 11 coating, UHMW)
- Basket stacking (stack height)
- Lifting (single-point hoist, multi-point sling hoist, fork truck)
- Part examples: digital models, photos, samples
- Design intent: Will the wire basket or product design work for its intended purpose?
- Manufacturability: Can the wire basket or product design be made easily and accurately?
- Usability: Is the wire basket or product design safe, intuitive, and comfortable for the end user?
- Value: Will the cost to make the wire basket or part be appropriate to the customer’s need?
- Ideally, the customer has supplied digital part models or physical part samples that we can digitize. We start by positioning digital parts models within the work envelope constraints, paying close attention to how the parts are oriented to maintain part-to-part clearance.
- With the digital parts positioned “in space,” the basket is designed outward to support and secure the parts during the process. We are able to experiment with different configurations within SolidWorks to find the design that is the most secure and the easiest to load.
- Our design concept is then presented to the customer with engineering drawings or digital animations. Because the parts, the basket, and sometimes even the process equipment has been drawn to scale, problems are easy to identify and correct before production begins.
Our History
