With Jeep Wrangler MSRPs starting north of $50,000, plastic door handles seem like an odd choice to some. 

“It stuck out to me that this super expensive car that you can get custom wheels, tires, light bars, paint-matched trim, all of the details, and it comes with black plastic door handles that fade in the sun the first summer,” said Nate Creamer, founder of AFS Corporate Member Cope & Drag Kustoms in Chicago.

That got Creamer’s wheels turning.

“Jeep enthusiasts love American made, they love heavy duty,” but the OEM door handles were anything but. Plastic also doesn’t lend itself well to the customization that so many Jeep customers take on. “Plastic doesn’t really take finishes, it’s really hard to paint. And of course, powder coating or plating is just out of the question,” Creamer said.

His solution: create an aftermarket aluminum cast door handle that Jeep enthusiasts could add to the vehicles themselves. 
The new handle earned Cope & Drag the AFS/Casting Source 2025 Best Example of a Casting Conversion award for its meticulous attention to detail and impressive conversion from plastic to metal.

Creamer, who first joined AFS as a student in 2017, started the project by purchasing OEM handles and creating a 3D scan from which to reverse engineer the design. That close examination revealed some serious challenges. The handles were made of injection-molded plastic with thin walls, intricate undercuts, and tight tolerances––features that can preclude traditional casting.
In addition, the new door handle had to be designed with a hollow space inside to accommodate the electronics in modern vehicles, such as passive entry systems that allow for keyless access. 

“There’s not a lot of room to make something super bulky, and I didn’t want to mess with the fit and the finish at all,” Creamer said. “I wanted a premium product that looked like it belonged on that vehicle.”

Visualizing the Workflow

When Creamer started down this road, he was working at MAGMA, which gave him access to high-end simulation software to optimize the design and process conditions. It was his first job out of college, and the company was willing to support his vision. 
“They were nice enough to let me do an entire presentation around the engineering challenges with coming up with something like this and really launching a product, following it from idea all the way through to production,” he said. 

Creamer ran hundreds of simulations using MAGMASOFT to ultimately land on the design his metalcasting company makes and sells today. 

He learned that the molds would need to be filled in two seconds or less to prevent cold shuts but using metal spray and turbulent flow wouldn’t be an option due to risk of air pockets and porosity. Creamer also leaned heavily into the theories he learned in school, in particular, John Campbell’s rules for metal casting. 

“I’m a big fan of John Campbell,” he said. Using those principles, Creamer created a gating calculator that could account for aluminum’s high thermal conductivity and short fill time windows, which is critical when pouring thin-walled parts into green sand.

The team engineered a special three-part, open-face corebox to capture all the necessary intricacies. That core is then packed with the green sand and given two or three passes with a sand rammer. 

They use the Campbell gating and keep to one constrained melt to allow the molten metal to flow through the four-cavity mold. “That’s how we’re able to create a really nice casting that performs well,” Creamer said. “The margin of error for this is really small, so our guys really have to be dialed in to make this work.”

It’s a very manual process right now––but it works well for delivering the desired results, he added. “You can see the craftsmanship in every single casting because it truly is handmade.”

Why green sand? It started as a matter of convenience.

“We had a lot of green sand, so I thought, could we do it [this way]?” Creamer said. 

The team was prepared to switch gears if the process was ineffective, but it worked “phenomenally,” according to Creamer.
“It’s actually faster [than other options], and it shakes out instantly with a couple of taps,” he noted. “And we don’t have to worry about core sand diluting our green sand or anything like that.”

Getting a Handle on Things

The finished handles weigh less than 1 lb.––noticeably heavier than plastic, but far from cumbersome––and have walls that are less than 1/8-in. thick. Cope & Drag opted for aluminum to achieve this end result. 

“Copper would be far too expensive and just unnecessary. Iron, steel––same thing,” Creamer said. 

Zinc was also considered, but “heavy duty zinc” doesn’t resonate the same way “heavy duty aluminum” does, he said. With aluminum, customers can picture the application and the durability. 

“From the time we actually made the tooling to now has been pretty smooth sailing, but we spent hundreds of hours up front, just doing it more virtually with some of those tools at our disposal,” Creamer said.

Proximity sparked the idea in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Creamer was living in Belvidere, Illinois. During that time, Jeep would use the city as a sort of distribution point to send the vehicles to other parts of the country. “Every day I would drive by and there would be thousands of Jeeps in that parking lot,” he said.

The handles have now been in production for two years, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive. 

“People at trade shows often think they’re plastic until they pick them up. It’s so fun to watch their faces,” Creamer said. “It’s always, ‘Oh my gosh, this is metal. This is what my Jeep’s supposed to feel like.’” 

Speaking the Customers’ Language

While Cope & Drag Kustoms would love to work directly with Jeep, that’s not currently on the table. “We’re a small team, they don’t know who I am,” Creamer said with a laugh. 

Instead, the company currently sells direct to consumers through Cast Off-Road, an entity Cope & Drag created just for this purpose, and at Jeep enthusiast conventions, such as the Great Smoky Mountain Jeep Invasion, which in 2024 reported more than 50,000 attendees. 

The decision to spin off the sales division was a matter of clarity for customers. “You’re already speaking a different language with just the name Cope & Drag,” Creamer said. “But Jeep enthusiasts understand and relate to ‘Off-Road.’”

But there are no silos between the two entities. The same team handles both sides of the operation. “We’re making molds on Tuesday, and then one of the shows comes along. We pack our bags, get in the car, and drive to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee,” he said. “We put on the nice white polos and get cleaned up to show off the handles.” 

Moving On Up

Creamer started Cope & Drag Kustoms in 2020 after realizing he was “tired of solving everyone else’s problems” and wanted to solve some for himself. Despite all the positive support at MAGMA, he wanted the ability to explore ideas that just didn’t gain traction at the technology company. 

“I just started thinking, why don’t I do this for myself?” he said.

Until 2024, Cope & Drag operated out of a “3,000-sq.-ft. shoebox” in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, but the building was less than ideal for day-to-day operations, let alone growth. 

“The floor was like an asphalt road with tons of potholes or something. It wasn’t flat,” he said. “It was tough, but we made it work.”

Eventually, it was time to make a change. After looking around Fort Atkinson, a chance conversation with a new colleague had him looking a bit further: Chicago. The colleague had a building in the Windy City that had 20,000 sq. ft. open––and he offered it to Cope & Drag. 

Creamer talked it over with his team––“I wanted to make sure they would all come with me,” he said. They did, and he opted to take over about half of that space. The new location is attached to Acorn Wire + Iron Works LLC, which allows for collaboration while maintaining independence. 

“Just talk about a scenario that’s truly a blessing, where somebody who’s been in my shoes before really just wanted to help us out and see us succeed,” Creamer said.

“That’s not dissimilar from a lot of people that I’ve met through AFS. I can’t even tell you how many people have helped us out. The list would be too long, and still to this day people are giving us advice and resources.”

Even though the company has tripled its foundry size, its team still only has four people. But Creamer said there’s definitely growth on the horizon, as the foundry looks to expand beyond its current job shop strategy, led by the Jeep door handle’s success.