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Balford metalworking engineering answers MCP Server

by balford Your server? Claim it
answering

Balford metalworking engineering answers is answering right now. Last checked 5 min ago. It exposes 3 tools.

Metal stamping, deep drawing and DFM answers from Balford's own published engineering pages.

Uptime history 29 days of history · worst day 99%
29 days agonow
100.0%
Uptime 24h
91 of 91 checks
3
Tools
read from the server
620 ms
Response time
average over 24h
open, no key
Access
streamable-http

Balford metalworking engineering answers missed one check this week

Everything else answered, so this is steady rather than shaky. We check every 15 minutes, which is how a one-off gets told apart from the start of a pattern, and how you hear about the next one within the hour instead of from your users.

Three servers free · no card

Connect this server

Endpoint below is the one we actually reach during checks — not the one copied from a README. Last verified 5 min ago.

run in your terminal
claude mcp add ask --transport http https://balford.net/ask/mcp
Settings → Connectors → Add custom connector, then paste this address
https://balford.net/ask/mcp
~/.codex/config.toml
[mcp_servers.ask]
url = "https://balford.net/ask/mcp"
.cursor/mcp.json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ask": {
      "url": "https://balford.net/ask/mcp"
    }
  }
}
.vscode/mcp.json
{
  "servers": {
    "ask": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://balford.net/ask/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Available tools 3

Read directly from the server with tools/list, grouped by what they act on. If a tool disappears, we record the date.

ask
ask_balford_engineering
Answer a metalworking engineering or sourcing question from Balford's own published engineering material. Covers fine blanking and thinning / ironing deep drawing as focus processes, plus progressive and transfer dies, precision stamping, sheet metal, CNC, brazing, annealing, plating, tolerances, DFM and RFQ preparation. Returns a written answer with numbered citations plus the source pages. Use this for 'how do I', 'what is', 'which process fits', or 'what do you need for an RFQ' questions. It will not quote a price, a lead-time guarantee, a certification Balford does not hold, or anything from a customer drawing. Answers are assembled from Balford's own published engineering material and cite the page each claim came from. Nothing is quoted that is not already public on balford.net. This is not a quotation, a certification claim, or a dimensional acceptance.
balford
search_balford_material
Retrieve the passages of Balford's published engineering material that match a query, without writing an answer. Use this to check what Balford has actually published on a topic, to gather source URLs for a citation, or to ground your own reasoning. Costs no model tokens. Answers are assembled from Balford's own published engineering material and cite the page each claim came from. Nothing is quoted that is not already public on balford.net. This is not a quotation, a certification claim, or a dimensional acceptance.
engineering
list_engineering_topics
List the canonical engineering questions Balford's knowledge base is built around, grouped by process family, with the URL of the answer page for each. Use this to find the right published answer before asking a free-form question, or to see whether a topic is covered at all. Costs no model tokens.

Endpoints

URLTransportStateLatencyChecked
https://balford.net/ask/mcp streamable-http answering 652 ms 5 min ago

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Balford metalworking engineering answers — questions

Answers built from our own checks of this server.

What can Balford metalworking engineering answers do?
It exposes 3 tools, read directly from the server on our last check. Among them: ask_balford_engineering, list_engineering_topics, search_balford_material. The full list with descriptions is on this page — we take it from the server itself via tools/list, not from a README. How MCP servers expose tools in the first place →
Is Balford metalworking engineering answers working right now?
We send a real MCP handshake every 15 minutes. Over the last 24 hours 91 of 91 checks got a reply (100.0%), average response time 620 ms. The bar chart above shows every period we have measured.
How do I connect Balford metalworking engineering answers?
Copy the ready config from this page. We generate it for Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Codex, Cursor and VS Code, each in the form that client actually reads. It is a remote server, so there is nothing to install — the client connects to the address.
Does Balford metalworking engineering answers need an API key?
No. Balford metalworking engineering answers completed a full MCP handshake with us as an anonymous client and listed its tools without asking for anything. All 3 of them are readable on this page. This is what we observed, not what the docs claim.
How fast is Balford metalworking engineering answers?
It answers our handshake in 620 ms on average, which is faster than 16% of all working MCP servers we measure. That is on the slow side — worth knowing if the tool sits inside an interactive loop. The comparison comes from our own checks across the whole registry, every 15 minutes.