For colleges
We are Dalloway Precision Engineering — a subcontract CNC machine shop in Lye, near Stourbridge, machining aerospace, medical and motorsport parts. This page is for engineering departments, technicians, and employer-engagement and work-placement teams. It is written to be forwarded internally without editing.
The classroom licence, in plain terms
Everything on dalloways.com marked as a free tool, chart or material page may be used freely in UK education. Specifically, you may: link to it from a course page, reading list, library guide or VLE; print the charts; photocopy them for students; reproduce them in handouts, worksheets and course material; and project them in a classroom or workshop.
You do not need to ask us, and there is no fee, no registration and no time limit. A credit to dalloways.com is appreciated where it fits naturally — it is how other people find the material — but it is not a condition of use.
The one thing we ask: do not present the figures as your own verified data. Every chart carries a footer saying the governing standard or the material certificate takes precedence, and that caveat should survive a photocopy.
Why we built any of this
Because we needed it. Every one of these tools started as a calculation someone here was doing on the back of a job bag. Putting them online cost us nothing extra and they are more useful shared.
There is a commercial hope behind it, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise: we are a machine shop, and we would like people who go on to specify or buy machined parts to know who we are. That is the entire business case. It is a long and indirect one, which is precisely why the material has to be genuinely good rather than a lead magnet with a form in front of it.
What we can offer
The free resources are exactly that — available now, no conversation needed, use them today. Everything else here is something we are open to discussing rather than something we are promising. Nothing on this page should be read as an offer or a guarantee — not of a placement, and not of any particular number of drawing reviews. We are a working shop of a size where one big order changes what is possible in a given month, and we would rather say that plainly than have a college plan around us and be let down.
Free resources, already built and free to reuse
Thirty-two calculators, five printable A4 charts and fifty material data pages, all ungated. Free to link, print, photocopy, put on a VLE and drop into your own handouts. The full licence position is set out at the top of this page, and is deliberately written so you can forward it to whoever needs to approve it.
Drawing reviews for student projects — arranged with you, not with students
Send us a student drawing and we will come back with what a real machine shop would flag — the expensive features, the over-tight tolerances, the geometry that cannot be produced as drawn. It is the same DFM check we run on any enquiry, it is free, and there is no expectation of an order.
We do ask that these come through you rather than direct from students. We are a small shop fitting this around live work, so it is a few drawings a term rather than an open service, agreed with you in advance so we can plan it around the machines. Allow a couple of weeks, and please do not build a submission deadline around it. If a whole cohort needs feedback, talk to us early and we will tell you honestly what is workable that term — which may be "not many, this time".
A talk, or a shop visit — worth asking about
What actually happens to a drawing when it reaches a subcontract shop: quoting it, planning the operations, proving the first one off, and the paperwork that has to exist when it ships. We are in Lye, near Stourbridge, so this is straightforward for colleges across the Black Country and Birmingham and workable further out. Nothing is fixed and we are not promising dates — it depends entirely on what the shop has on that week — but we are genuinely happy to be asked.
Industry placements — open to the conversation, not a standing offer
T Levels carry a statutory industry placement requirement and we know hosts are the bottleneck, so we would rather you asked us than assumed the answer was no. To be clear, nothing on this page is a commitment or an offer of a placement. We are a small working shop, our capacity moves with the order book, and whether we can take anyone at all depends on timing, numbers and what the student needs. What we can promise is a straight answer rather than a polite maybe — including "not this year" if that is the honest one. Start the conversation and we will tell you exactly where we stand.
What makes the resources defensible in teaching
Free engineering calculators are not scarce. Ones you would put in front of a student arguably are, because most will return a confident number outside the range where the underlying standard applies. Ours are built to three rules:
They show their working. Formula and substituted values, every time, so a student can reproduce the result by hand. A calculator a learner cannot check is a calculator that teaches them to trust black boxes.
They refuse rather than guess. The hardness converter will not return a Brinell value above the range ASTM E10 permits, and will not apply the steel table to aluminium at all. It says why instead. Most published charts print a number there anyway.
Where sources disagree, both are shown. Boring bar length-to-diameter limits differ between tooling manufacturers; we show the range and name the disagreement rather than averaging it into false precision. The AIAG gauge R&R study-variation multiplier changed between editions of the manual, so that tool asks which edition you are working to and states which it used.
Those three habits are, we would argue, more useful to teach than any individual figure on the site.
Where to start
The education page groups all thirty-two tools by curriculum topic — engineering mathematics, drawing interpretation, materials, dimensional control, machining, CNC, quality and statistics, threads and fasteners. The five printable charts are the ones most likely to be useful as handouts. If you deliver the Level 3 Machining Technician standard, there is a page written for those apprentices.
Talk to us
The quickest route is the contact form on our home page, or call the shop on 01384 895142. If you are an employer-engagement or work-placement officer, say so — it tells us which conversation we are having, and we will not send you a sales pitch for machined parts.
Send Your Drawing for a Same-Day Quote
Talk directly to the engineers who will machine your parts — no account managers, no trading-company markups. Complimentary DFM review with every enquiry.