TACTIC ENGINEERING

Our Story

We invented magnetic mounts for vehicles. Not for the market. Because we needed them, and they did not exist.

It Started With a Problem Nobody Had Solved

Before Tactic Engineering existed, there were overland trips. Long ones. Asia. Africa. The kind of trips where recovery boards are not optional equipment, they are what gets you out of sand and mud when there is no tow truck within 200 kilometres.

The problem was always the same: where do you put two MaxTrax boards on the outside of a van without drilling holes, without permanent racks, and without losing them on a washboard road? Every solution on the market required bolting something to the vehicle. Roof racks. Side brackets. Permanent modifications that damage the body, void warranties, and look terrible when the boards are not mounted.

The idea was simple. Magnets. Strong enough to hold recovery boards at highway speed and on rough terrain. Soft enough to not scratch the paint. With a pin system that locks the boards in place but releases in seconds when you need them. The idea was simple. Making it actually work took years of engineering.

The First Prototypes

The first versions were rough. We tested different magnet sizes, different coatings, different pin geometries. The challenge was not just holding the boards to the vehicle. That part is relatively straightforward with neodymium magnets. The challenge was everything else: making the system quick to mount and dismount with one hand, preventing the boards from shifting or rotating, protecting the vehicle paint from scratching, and keeping the whole assembly secure enough that you could drive on unpaved roads for hours without checking it.

We went through dozens of iterations. Early pin designs cracked in cold weather. Some magnet coatings chipped after UV exposure. The first anti-theft cables were too stiff to be practical. Each failure taught us something specific about the forces a magnetic mount has to survive in the real world: vibration, heat cycles, rain, dust, and the occasional impact from branches on narrow forest tracks.

How It's Made

Every Tactic Engineering product is designed, printed, and assembled in Ticino, Switzerland. There is no offshore factory. There is no contract manufacturer. We control the entire production chain.

The magnets: N52 neodymium. The strongest permanent magnets commercially available. Each one is coated in rubber to protect your vehicle's paint and can be installed and removed without tools. The rubber coating protects vehicle paint, but not all rubber coatings are equal. We went through three suppliers before finding a coating that maintained its grip after thousands of mount-dismount cycles without degrading or leaving residue.

The reinforcement: aerospace-grade aluminium. The pins are not pure plastic. Each one is reinforced with aluminium inserts at the stress points where the locking mechanism engages. This hybrid construction, composite shell with metal reinforcement, costs more to produce than a single-material part. It also means the pins do not wear out at the contact points the way a pure plastic part would.

The 3D printing process: SLS, not FDM. Most 3D-printed accessories on the market are made on desktop FDM printers. These machines deposit melted filament in visible layers, creating parts that are weaker along the layer lines and rougher on the surface. Our SLS machine uses a laser to fuse powdered nylon in a build chamber. The result is a part with uniform strength in every direction, a naturally smooth surface, and no visible layer lines. It is a different class of manufacturing.

Designed and Made in Switzerland

Every step of the process happens in Ticino, in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland. Design. CAD modelling. 3D scanning. SLS printing. Post-processing. Assembly. Quality control. Packaging. Shipping. There is no offshore factory. There is no contract manufacturer. When you order from Tactic Engineering, the product was made in the same place where it was designed.

When you control the entire production chain, you can iterate fast. A design change goes from CAD to printed part in hours, not weeks. A customer report of a fitment issue leads to a corrected version shipping within days. That feedback loop is impossible to replicate when your production is on the other side of the world.

The team is small: a founder who does design and engineering, a logistics partner who handles fulfilment, and a mechanical engineer who contributes to product development. That is it. No marketing department. No call centre. Every product is inspected before it ships. When you email us, you are talking to someone who was involved in making the product you bought.

The Journey So Far

"We do not compete on price. We do not try to make the cheapest product. We spend time making better products. If you want to know the difference, hold one of ours in your hand. The finish, the weight, the precision of the fit. That is the argument."

What Drives Us

My name is Gaetan Della Pietra. I am the founder and CEO of Tactic Engineering. I design the products, run the CAD, manage the SLS printer, handle customer service, write the blog posts, and take out the recycling. The company is small by choice. When there are three people making a product, there is no room for a part to ship that someone did not personally inspect.

Every product we make starts from the same place: the absence of a good solution. When there was no way to mount recovery boards without drilling, we made one. When there was no magnetic awning support that actually held, we made one. When there was no vehicle-specific phone mount that used magnets instead of clamps, we designed one. That is the whole story. There is no secret. Just engineering, precision, and the stubbornness to do it properly even when cheaper shortcuts exist.