Custom Panels and Trim: If You Can Draw It, We Can Make It

Sooner or later, every job throws you something weird. A parapet cap with an offset nobody makes. A transition piece that doesn’t exist on any spec sheet. A panel profile off a building that went up before you were in the trade, and now you’re the one who has to match it exactly. Standard parts are great for typical jobs and 90% of the time that’s all you need. However, sooner or later you’ll find yourself in a situation where you need something custom to make the job right. 

We can build any trim or panel profile up to 26 feet long. If you can draw it, we can make it — that’s the whole pitch, and it happens to be true. Let’s walk through what that actually looks like on our end: what’s easy, what’s a little more work, and why the price tag looks different than your standard order.

What “custom” really means once it hits our floor

At Indiana Metal a “custom” trim piece is anything that isn’t one of our standard profiles for any of the panels we manufacture.  Custom could be anything from an overized single angle to an intricate panel profile to replicate the panels on a 1940s barn – there’s a wide range when we talk about custom, and fabrication time and price reflect that. When we talk about custom that basically means there is no program sitting on the machine, warmed up and ready to go. You hand us a drawing — dimensions, bends, angles, a coffee-stained napkin sketch, whatever you’ve got — and our production team builds a brand new setup around it. Our standard profiles, the MP36s and MP150s of the world, run on programs we’ve used a thousand times. Our production robot can fabricate those standard parts, leaving our team free to handle wrapping and labeling, the same cannot be said for custom; that’s a skilled employee fabricating all of those parts.  

When you order a custom piece there are a few details our production team has to have to make sure the part is made correctly. Height, width, wehere the bends land, the angles, the length and which side you want the color on are all details we’ll need.  But don’t stress if all you’ve got is a rough sketch and a general idea. Send it anyway. We’ll ask the questions that fill in the blanks.

Where things get a little spicy

We’re not going to sell you a fairy tale where every design is equally simple, because it isn’t. A few notable things seperate “easy” custom from “this is going to take a minute” custom. 

Bends under half an inch. Squeeze a bend down that tight and you’re right up against what a brake can physically do without a fight. The margin for error gets thin. Not impossible — our team has moves for it — but it takes more patience, more setup, and sometimes an honest conversation about whether a slightly different approach gets you the same look without wrestling the steel the whole way.

Double smashes. A fold inside a fold. Sounds tidy on a drawing, gets a lot more opinionated once it’s real metal, especially on a long run. Same deal as the tight bends: troublesome, never a dead end.

Long & wide pieces. An extra wide pitch change at 20’3″ is just hard to fabricate, impossible by yourself and even with 2 people on the folder, extra care has to be given to maintain the integrity of the piece. 

So if your print’s got one of these in it, don’t crumple it up and go standard out of frustration. Send it over. We’d rather look at the actual thing and tell you straight what’s realistic than have you guess.

Why custom trim runs more than standard — even when the blank’s identical

Custom trim costs more than a standard piece even when the raw blank size is exactly the same. That’s not us padding the invoice for fun. It’s programming time and labor time and standard parts just don’t carry either of those costs.

Think about it this way. A standard piece runs on a program we built once and have run a hundred times since — the machine practically knows it by heart. A custom piece means building that program from scratch for a part we might only ever run this one time. Somebody’s got to pay for that setup work, and it lands on the job it was built for instead of getting spread thin across years of standard runs.

And for complex panels, there’s sometimes a setup charge too

Complex custom panels — this is mostly a panel thing, less of a trim thing — can carry a setup charge on top of the per-piece price. Here’s the reasoning,: before we commit to a full production run, we test it. Then we usually test it again. Rib height, panel width, bend angles — all of it has to be dead-on before material starts moving through in real volume.

When it’s worth going custom

• You need to match an existing panel or trim profile that isn’t made anymore
• The design calls for something a standard catalog just doesn’t carry — tapered panels, an unusual reveal, a one-off transition
• It’s a retrofit or renovation and the new material has to tie into something already on the building
• The look you’re chasing doesn’t exist off the standard list

Any of that sound like your project? Custom isn’t the fallback option — it’s the right tool for that job. It just comes with a different cost structure than grabbing MP36 trim off the shelf, and now you know exactly why.

Send us the drawing

Dimensions, a rough sketch, a physical sample if you’ve got one lying around — any of it gets you started. Our production team will look it over and give it to you straight: what’s realistic, what it’ll take to build, and where the number lands.

Bainbridge: 765-657-2828  |  Indianapolis: 317-907-7777  |  indianametal.com