industrial, machinery and appliance spare parts / Buying guide
Lead times, realistically
Last updated
A spare part from China is rarely late because the machining took longer than quoted. It is late because two days were spent clarifying a drawing, four waiting for a sample approval, and a week because nobody flagged that the part contains a magnet.
The manufacturing is the predictable part. Everything around it is where the schedule goes.
In this guide
Stage by stage
- Quoting: 1–3 days with a complete drawing, a week or more without one.
- Sampling: 5–10 days for machined parts, 2–3 weeks where tooling is involved.
- Your approval: however long it takes you, and in practice this is frequently the longest stage.
- Production: 5–15 days for machined parts, longer for cast or moulded.
- Domestic freight to the warehouse: 2–5 days.
- Export: 3–7 days by air, 25–45 by sea.
- Customs: 1–5 days, longer if anything is queried.
What actually causes delay
- An incomplete drawing, which turns quoting into a conversation.
- Slow sample approval on your side, which stops the clock entirely.
- A material the shop has to buy in rather than hold.
- Dangerous-goods content discovered at booking rather than at ordering — magnets, batteries, oils.
- Chinese New Year, which stops production for weeks and slows it for weeks either side.
Planning around it rather than fighting it
The single change that helps most is buying wear parts before they fail. A predictable consumable ordered by sea in a consolidated shipment costs a fraction of the same part flown in during a breakdown, and the lead time stops mattering.
For genuine emergencies, air freight and a shop with the material in stock can produce a machined part in under two weeks door to door. It is expensive and it works.
Questions & answers
Common questions
- What is the fastest realistic turnaround?
- For a simple machined part with a clear drawing and air freight, roughly 10–14 days door to door. Anything faster is an exception, not a plan.
- When should I avoid ordering?
- The six weeks around Chinese New Year. Production stops, and the backlog afterwards is longer than the holiday itself.
- Can you hold stock for us?
- Yes — parts can sit at the warehouse and ship on call, with storage charged after the free period. For critical spares it is usually worth it.
Your next step
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Send a 1688 or Taobao product link and you get back the specification in English, the supplier check, and the landed cost to your country before you commit to anything.
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