e-machine shop (design your own parts)

[sil]

seen this on another forum, pretty neat if your good with cad
http://www.emachineshop.com/

[bszopi]

pretty neat if your good with cad

I remember hearing about this before. IIRC, it seemed kind of expensive. But it was awhile ago, so who knows. I have some things I might have to draw up and get a quote for.

[SappySE107]

Yup, I had it before but that wasn't too useful:P I can't CAD parts.

[bszopi]

Well, I did some quick playing.... I have a design similar to Ben's phenolic spacers that I imported into the program. After messing around with it trying to figure out what I was doing, I finally figured out how to make it all work. I picked something that I think was phenolic (or close enough to it for pricing comparisons). In order to get the parts at the same price as Ben is currently selling them for (when he has them ), you would have to order 24 of them.

If you need a 1-off part (and are willing to wait 2-4 weeks from what I saw), and are willing to drop some $$$ on the part, then it might be worth it. To do just a single spacer (1/2" aluminum, cause I never tried just a single unit in phenolic) was right around $325. I dunno, maybe this is comparable to a local shop.... Maybe Marc can answer that.

[Carlspike]

I used it to design some parts and it seemed to work pretty good. I just used the program to print out drawings of what parts I wanted to take to other machine shops for prices.