Manufacturing bespoke aluminium profiles is becoming increasingly expensive. Rising aluminium prices, higher energy costs, logistics pressures and other compounding factors continue to push the total cost per part upward. At times, even when you switch to a lower-priced supplier, the savings fall short of expectations. In many cases, the most effective way to control cost is not to change suppliers, but to optimise the design itself.

Here are five practical ways to adjust your profile design to reduce manufacturing cost without compromising performance.

1. Simplify cavities and avoid excessively thin walls

Extrusion is pushing an aluminium billet at a temperature between 400 and 480°C through a die under enormous pressure. When the profile is overly complex, the metal lets you know immediately. It twists, it bows, it slows down, and the reject rate climbs. Basically, the design fights the process.

Deep, narrow cavities are usually the biggest culprits. They force the aluminium to flow unevenly through the die, which leads to:

• twisting or bowing during extrusion

• shorter die life

• lower throughput

• higher scrap rate

And then there’s wall thickness. Ultra-thin walls (generally below 1.2–1.5 mm depending on alloy and width) can behave poorly in production. They cool unevenly, distort more easily, and break under minimal stress.

The alloy you choose plays an important role in that:

• 6060 and 6063, even 6061, can handle finer details and thinner walls.

• Stronger alloys like 6005A or 6082 need thicker, more stable sections to extrude cleanly.

Symmetry also matters. A balanced profile almost always extrudes straighter and faster than one with weight or complexity pushed to one side.

Keeping wall thickness consistent is one of the easiest wins. It stabilises metal flow, reduces the compensation required on the die bearings, and lowers internal stress. Large flat surfaces or wide hollow chambers should be treated with caution. Unless reinforced, they tend to distort.

Practical design edits:

• Increase ultra-thin walls by 0.3–0.5 mm

• Replace deep, narrow channels with wider or shallower alternatives

• Remove hollow sections that aren’t structurally needed

• Keep wall thickness as uniform as possible across the design

2. Ensure the profile can be machined from a single orientation

If extrusion is about metal flow, machining is about access. And nothing increases cost faster than a part that needs to be flipped, rotated, reclamped, and re-zeroed multiple times. Every new setup means:

• re-fixturing the part

• resetting datums

• verifying offsets

• re-proving the programme

• and adding minutes — sometimes hours — to the cycle time

Designing a profile that can be machined from one single direction is one of the easiest ways to save money. It cuts cycle time, reduces tolerance drift between operations, and lowers handling risk.

But access isn’t just about orientation. Tool reach and part stiffness matter just as much. A feature may technically be reachable, but if it's buried inside a deep pocket or surrounded by tall walls, you're asking the tool to chatter, vibrate, or run slowly. Long-reach cutters and careful passes cost time. And when the extrusion itself is long or flexible, insufficient rigidity forces slower feed rates or specialised fixtures. Once again, all extra cost.

There’s also a factor people rarely think about: extrusion straightness. If a profile arrives twisted or bowed, machining becomes a balancing act. The operator has to clamp around the distortion, adjust the programme, or take lighter passes. All of that is avoidable if the profile is designed with balanced mass, reasonable wall thickness, and symmetrical ribs so that it extrudes straight from the start.

Practical design edits:

• Reorient holes or slots so they can be reached from one machining direction

• Add simple flats for stable, reliable clamping

• Remove undercuts or features that require 4- or 5-axis machining, unless absolutely essential

• Place features closer to accessible faces to avoid long tool reach and vibration

3. Remove non-functional aesthetic geometry that increases production difficulty

Everyone loves a clean, sleek-looking profile, but some visual features make the machines suffer far more than the human eye can appreciate. Tiny grooves, razor-sharp edges, ornamental recesses… they look great on a drawing, but they often translate into:

• micro end mills spinning at slow feed rates

• long, delicate toolpaths

• increased tool wear

• and inconsistent surface finish

A tiny 0.5–1 mm radius can completely transform the manufacturability without changing how the part looks. Many decorative grooves or contours can be widened or softened just slightly and still appear identical in the final assembly — only now they cost a fraction of the price to machine and finish.

There’s also the extrusion side to consider. Purely aesthetic features can disrupt metal flow, force more complex die bearings, or create thin zones that distort as the profile cools. So a detail added “just for looks” can end up affecting both extrusion and machining cost.

Practical design edits:

• Add small radii instead of sharp transitions

• Widen narrow decorative grooves

• Remove extremely fine details that require slow, fragile machining

4. Integrate multiple components into one extruded profile

Brackets, stiffeners, plates, guides — most assemblies contain components that don’t have to exist as separate parts. In many cases, they can be built directly into the extrusion itself. When you do that, you instantly eliminate:

• welding and fastening

• machining on secondary components

• stacking tolerance issues

• and the constant headache of alignment during assembly

It’s one of the smartest ways to reduce cost because you’re not shaving pennies off a cycle time, you’re removing entire steps from the production process.

But integration has to be done thoughtfully. Adding ribs, bosses, and channels changes how the aluminium flows through the die. The more complex the geometry, the more the die must compensate to keep the flow balanced. And if the integration is asymmetric, you risk distortion during cooling.

A few rules of thumb to keep things stable:

• ribs should be placed symmetrically whenever possible

• web thicknesses should generally stay above 1.2–1.5 mm for common alloys

• very large unsupported surfaces should be reinforced to prevent bowing

Yes, a more advanced die can cost slightly more upfront, but for recurring production, the savings almost always outweigh the investment. Assembly time drops, machining disappears, and overall repeatability improves. Even the scrap generated during extrusion startup becomes a smaller concern compared to the labour you remove from the process.

Practical design edits:

• Build mounting bosses or internal ribs directly into the extrusion

• Incorporate alignment guides or fastening grooves

• Replace welded reinforcements with thicker or reshaped extrusion walls

5. Optimise the profile for anodising (especially post-machining anodising)

Anodising may look simple from the outside, but the process is incredibly sensitive to geometry. A profile that looks perfectly fine in CAD can behave very badly in the anodising bath. Deep recesses trap chemicals. Sharp corners build oxide unevenly. Thick areas heat differently from thin ones. And inconsistent wall thickness almost always shows up as visible colour variation.

All of these issues slow down processing, create unpredictable results, and drive up scrap.

It becomes even more critical when the part is anodised after machining, which is often necessary to ensure colour uniformity across visible faces. In that case, you also have to think about how the part will be racked. If there is no discreet area for the rack to grip, the process leaves visible marks in places you don’t want them.

Small design edits make a huge difference:

• Uniform wall thickness helps ensure even oxide growth

• Radii in internal corners improve chemical circulation so the colour stays consistent

• Avoiding very deep or inaccessible pockets prevents acid pooling and expensive rework

Good anodising design isn’t just about aesthetics. It reduces scrap, improves throughput, and makes the entire finishing process more predictable.

Practical design edits:

• Add radius to internal corners

• Avoid deep recesses that trap anodising fluid

• Include small, discreet areas suitable for racking

• Keep wall thicknesses as consistent as possible

Reducing your manufacturing cost

Optimising the design and production process is an effective way to counter rising pressures such as raw aluminium prices, energy costs, and general supply-chain inflation.

At ALUCAD, we deliver highly competitive production costs, but a huge cost advantage comes from how we engineer your part. When relevant, we propose design adjustments like the ones mentioned above to help you lower manufacturing cost without affecting performance.

Our engineering team includes experts who have been with us nearly as long as the company itself. And overall, we have an average tenure of eight years. They know exactly how to optimise a profile so that machining time (often the largest hidden cost) is kept as low as possible. Machining is the heart of our business, and we approach every project with a focus on reducing unnecessary operations while improving precision. We also design and manufacture custom tooling whenever it can accelerate machining or stabilise the process.

We manufacture custom extruded and machined aluminium profiles with a focus on cost reduction, consistency, and both technical and service reliability. If you’re looking to reduce the cost of your aluminium profile supply chain, send us your design and we’ll prepare a detailed quotation.