Three years ago when I started this project, I thought I would upload all the parts to an online machine shop and hit submit. After > $20,000 quote I decided to go with additive manufacturing & investment casting instead -- and what a journey this has been. I ended up spending over $25,000 on 3D printing, finishing, and getting tools and supplies for investment casting, not to mention over 3000 hours spent in extremely painful trial and error.

I often wondered - did I make a mistake? Should I have outsourced all of the aspects of production, paid the same price or less, AND spent all that time hanging out with people, doing less painful kinds of art and having fun?

Turns out no. I quoted only the main parts of the whole suit and attempted to extrapolate the rest of the pricing myself (since the quote process was rather long and I didn't want to spend hours on the phone with engineers). The extrapolations were bogus - some parts that I assumed would be at most $100-150 are actually $200-$1000. And with a total of 300 parts, just a few parts being higher (and multiplied by qty) adds more like $10,000-$20,000 to the whole suit. Just take a look at this:

(ForearmBase - $58 ea to 3D-print, $234 ea to machine)

(LowerForearm - $44 ea to 3D-print, $130 to machine.

For reference investment casting tools and supplies were something like $5000, but amortized over 300 parts of the suit x number suits made (I plan to cast 3). Basically that adds $6 dollars per part in addition to 3D printing cost.