If there's 12 hours of cutting time, how much will this cost to manufacture? My mental image of the CNC machine is something the size of a dining room table.
The first one is the most expensive...That was about 15 grand. They get cheaper though, the next one was only half that! :biggrin:
Really though, I'm not entire sure the cost, talking my cost to make one for me of course. Brass is more expensive, if it was aluminum the cost would be about 80 cents. $6 for 2 bits, after cutting one barrel, no point continuing with that bit, it's pretty much wore out. I don't know what PR costs, with coloring, maybe another dollar. Cutting fluid..now that's expensive! Seems to burn through about 1/2 gallon over 12 hrs, with splashing and evaporation, $175 for 5 gallons but you add water, so 5 gallons is really 50 gallons, breaks down to maybe $1.75, and then electricity I pray I don't see that bill. So my known physical costs on this pen without the pen kit would be probably $10-12. Not that a blank like this could be retailed that low, as you have a lot of physical labor involved too, it's not all just watching the machine work. There's drilling rods to do, trimming rods, cleaning and oiling and some other maintenance on the machine as it runs every so often you have to go check on it, there's wear and tear on the machine itself and then many many hours of sitting at a computer working on the design. In a retail world, to make and sell a blank like this would not be profitable, just sustaining, because you'd have to charge a fair bit to hit that break even point and people will only pay so much because they also can only charge so much. And the time it takes to cut one out, you only get half a pen a day.
A CNC could be the size of a table or many times larger. Mine takes up a 4 foot square, but the machine itself is only about 2x2x3 without including the stand, and about a 1000 lbs. The size of the machine for something like this doesn't really matter. A much larger machine could not do it any faster, it has the same limitations as to what a cutter bit can handle.