An electrical engineer I once worked for had ordered some "simple" wall
brackets to hang a piece of equipment, drew them unwisely, and was
charged $3000 by the company shop to make them "exactly" like his
sketch. After that he made a lot of unnecessary work for himself (and
me) by avoiding any sort of custom mechanical solution to normal lab
problems. I finally talked him into letting me design a fixture to hold
an unevenly shaped optical device that he had been mounting for months
with duct tape. The next day I found him holding the cheap, simple
ball-plunger fixture in Rodin's The Thinker pose, just muttering 'wow'.


This is why we won't quote time or cost without a drawing, expecially
from obvious mechanical innocents.

Jim Wilkins, electronic/mechanical/chemical lab tech