On Sat, 08 Mar 2008 10:47:45 -0500, axolotl wrote:

Tim Wescott wrote:
I just got the following parts quoted Did I go to the wrong shop?

I will venture another opinion. It's your drawing. You are asking a guy
to quote on a print with words like "about" and "3-4" with tolerances of
.001". From where? Center to center? You didn't say that. The sheet
metal guy sees trouble, and he will quote a premium price to compensate
for the potential trouble. He or she is not in the engineering prototype
business.

You might want to look at extruded C channel, in aluminum or plastic. In
plastic you wouldn't have to worry about a bearing material. McMaster
has some.

Kevin Gallimore

My plan was to get budgetary pricing so I knew if I should even start the
business, or use that approach, then to pay a mechanical engineer to
finish the design with a nicely detailed and toleranced drawing.

Clearly this shop doesn't understand the notion of budgetary pricing -- I
was getting back an honest-to-god quote with four significant digits; a
"budgetary price" with more than 1-1/2 significant digits is either a lie
of a wildly premature quote.

--
Tim Wescott
Control systems and communications consulting
http://www.wescottdesign.com

Need to learn how to apply control theory in your embedded system?
"Applied Control Theory for Embedded Systems" by Tim Wescott
Elsevier/Newnes, http://www.wescottdesign.com/actfes/actfes.html