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Posted: 8/2/2012 6:49:23 PM EDT
| How is pricing determined for part creation? Not asking for specifics or numbers just always wondered. Have part you want reproduced is basic price? Have auto cad design more or less price? Have idea even more cost? How does materials cost come in, alum vs steel vs titanium vs some type of plastic. Roughly how does fee structure change with complexity. Can you look at it and determine rough tool change number, or milling time to effect cost and how does that play in pricing? How does volume apply to discounts, what is generally considered a volume worthy of a discount? thanks I was just wondering. |
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How is pricing determined for part creation? Not asking for specifics or numbers just always wondered. Have part you want reproduced is basic price? Have auto cad design more or less price? Have idea even more cost? How does materials cost come in, alum vs steel vs titanium vs some type of plastic. Roughly how does fee structure change with complexity. Can you look at it and determine rough tool change number, or milling time to effect cost and how does that play in pricing? How does volume apply to discounts, what is generally considered a volume worthy of a discount? thanks I was just wondering. Machine shops generally have a shop rate just like anybody else. It may be $40/hr or it may be $100+/hr. That depends on a lot of things and varies widely. Different hourly rates are assigned inside of shops as well depending on what type of equipment it will take to produce the part (it's cheaper to run a drill press than it is a $700,000 machine). For CNC type parts the basics come down to "setup time" + Run Time + Material. Setup time usually a large part of the price for short runs since is ammortized over the number of parts produced. In other words, barring setting up a special process to make parts on a production basis, it takes the same amount of time to setup for 1 or 20 parts. Lots of different ways to calcuate times. Anywhere from programming the job and seeing what the CAM system says (nobody does that for small jobs), to "best guess" estimates based on experience. Let's make an example: We'll price this for 1,5, and 50. Shop rate for your job is $60/hr Setup time is estimated at 4 hours. This includes programming, physical setup of the machine, program prove out, etc. Basically the amount of time spent while getting the job running. Run time is estimated to be 20 minutes each Material is kind of wide open. If it takes a real amount of material that must be purchased, it is common to charge for the full amount that must be purchased. If you want some super duper material and the minimum buy is going to be $300 , you're probably going to be charged $300 for one piece, or $300 for as many parts as that amount of material will make (plus markup for handling maybe). If you just want some common stock, you'll probably get charged what it cost or some nominal amount. If it takes $3 worth of aluminum the shop already had, you're probably not going to be charged as it will be pretty much inconsequential, or maybe they just say $10. For this example let's say the shop had to buy $100 worth of material they're never going to use again and they can make 50 of your parts out of it. 1 piece price = (4hrs setup x $60) + (20min run x $60/hr) + ($100 in material) = $360 total or $360 each 5 piece price = (4hrs setup x $60) + (20min run x 5 x $60/hr) + ($100 in material) = $439 total or $87.80 each 50 piece price = (4hrs setup x $60) + (20min run x 50 x $60/hr) + ($100 in material) = $1339 total or $26.78 each That's why it looks like there are "discounts." Like I said, the material thing can vary, but it's usually a pretty small percentage of the cost. If you use common stuff, they might just charge for what it actually use so the cost would be fixed across the quantities. If you're going to get charged for a large amount you can always ask for it back or to be "yours" in the shop too. You probably won't run into that. For manual jobs, it will be estimated time + material. Or it could be actual time + material and you get charged for what they actuall spent, same can go for CNC stuff too. And also material obviously effects machining time so you can't just subsitute iconel in the place of aluminum and think the only increase will be material. Lots of ways to do it. Hope this helps. 
ETA: As far as the creation part, you can just count the engineering time if any into "setup" time although it may have a different rate. Have a solid design, just pay for the parts. Have a half-assed CAD, pay for completion of that, plus parts. Have an idea, pay for complete development and parts. |
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snip Hope this helps.
Awesome answer OSUBeaver. The only thing I would add to that is tooling expense. If I need to order tooling for a job. Custom cutters or reamers on small quantities. On a production order I will try to estimate tool life, and bill that into the per part price. |
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