Dan RoyerThanks, Hackaday.io for the feature.
Today I received the first quote from a machinist for the gearbox prototype. In order to get my power and precision I need a gearbox that doesn't exist. Jim Shook, a fellow Hackspace member, designed a box as per my specs four custom parts and a bunch of McMaster Carr pieces. Each of the four pieces averages $250 to make one!
I guess I don't know what I expected. The same company made parts for my first robot. It was a crab that walked and the parts cost over $600.
So I'm putting it out to you, Internet: where do you go for machining? I have igs/step files and PDFs of the tolerances and materials.
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Depends on the material I guess. Metal costs indeed a lot - as I myself recently found out. For acrylic however you need only a low power laser and I have seen even claims of people being able to cut black acrylic with as low as sub 5W diode lasers.
If there is some kind of makerlab around you and delrin/pom(acrylic/plexi or something like that would suffice you might be able to cut the price substantially by dragging your own material with you and cutting it on a sub 100W laser yourself at some reasonable laser access fee.
If it must be metal then either a damn good cnc mill or laser/waterjet cutting seem to be the main options. 3D printing metal is even more expensive than that (usually by laser sintering).
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