A customer's spring print, read into a draft quote sheet for your estimator.

Requests come as a drawing with a title block, a filled-in spec sheet, a note asking to match a sample, or a table in an email, and each describes the spring in its own terms. Your estimator finds the wire size and material, the coil diameter, the free length, the active coils, the end type, the load at length as stated, the finish and the annual quantity. Then comes the part no form does: deciding what is missing or contradictory and what to ask the customer.

For the test, AI reads copies of those requests and drafts your quote sheet field by field, with each value tied to the place on the print it came from. A field the print doesn't give stays empty with a note. Where two numbers can't both hold, the sheet shows both and says why. Price, lead time and whether the spring can be made at all stay blank for your estimator, and nothing goes to a customer.

Check lists exist, and they allow gaps. SAE J1122, Helical Springs: Specification Check Lists, first issued in 1976 and stabilized in 2016, offers sample forms for compression, extension and torsion springs, in SI units with inch and pound values alongside, and says not every field has to be filled in. ISO 2162-2 sets a uniform system for tender and order drawings. It asks that the data show how a spring may be adapted during manufacture, and it wants a minimum inside diameter stated for a spring working on a rod and a maximum outside diameter for one working in a cylinder. A customer's own sheet may follow either, neither or a house form from another decade, so the draft maps what arrived onto your estimator's fields and marks the ones nobody stated.

End type changes the count. Machinery's Handbook lists four compression spring ends, open or plain, open and ground, closed, and closed and ground, each with its own formulas for pitch, solid height, active coils, total coils and free length, and its figures show right-hand and left-hand helix. A print that gives a coil count without saying active or total, or says closed without saying ground, isn't finished. The handbook also lets the coil count move so a maker can hit load, rate, free length and solid height, so a print fixing all of them at once has over-specified something. The draft runs the print's own numbers, for example a working length below the solid height they imply, and leaves the ruling to your estimator.

Extension and torsion springs are different documents. On an extension spring, the handbook counts all coils as active, and each full hook adds about half a coil of deflection, so two hooks take one coil off the total. Initial tension, the force that must be overcome before the coils begin to open, has to be read as a load in its own right. A torsion spring is specified by torque with the deflection or arm position at a definite point, usually in pound-inches, and the handbook says one load usually suffices because a second load and deflection add manufacturing and testing time. It also warns designers about the supporting rod, the shrinking inside diameter and the test method. The draft keeps a separate field set for each family, and for wire forms and flat springs as well.

A wire callout is a rung on a ladder. ASTM's published scopes sort the wire. A227 is cold-drawn wire for springs without high stress or demanding fatigue, A228 is music wire for high stress or good fatigue properties, and A229 is commercial quality quenched and tempered wire. A1000 sits between those commercial grades and the valve spring grades, and A313 covers stainless. A print saying only "spring steel" leaves far more open than one naming a specification and diameter. Inch-pound and SI values are separate systems, and A313 assumes inch-pound unless the order carries the M designation. A gauge number isn't a size either: the handbook's wire table has one column for US steel wire gage and another for music or piano wire gage. The draft copies each callout as written and asks when it can't be resolved to a diameter and a specification.

Loads carry units and conditions. NIST's conversion table puts one pound-force at 4.448222 newtons and one kilogram-force at 9.80665 newtons, and a print from an overseas plant can use either. The handbook ties a compression spring's load tolerance to its length tolerance and deflection from free length, says closer squareness needs special process techniques that add cost, and notes that tighter torsion tolerances mean testing and adjusting each spring. Those are costs for your estimator to weigh, so the draft carries the callout and flags it. Finish, annual quantity and test requirements may sit in a note or a PO instead of the print. Your reviewer, the estimator others bring hard prints to, will check that each field came from the right place, that every gap your team raised with the customer got listed, and that the sheet stayed silent on anything it wasn't given. Standards and handbooks are named for context; nothing here is engineering advice.

With your reviewer's yes, new requests get the same sheet and gap list for about 30 days.

Your estimator approves every quote, sets every price and decides what goes back to the customer. A draft never reaches a customer or a live quote on its own, and the comparison keeps running through the month.

Any next job gets its own price, and monthly support follows once a job is running.