Just about anything is cheaper than injection moulding, at least initially!
Yes. £4500 up front then £0.78 per enclosure. So initial cost for 1000 is £5.28/enclosure. I got a quote from Hammond and another Chinese company that had some serious communication difficulties for an off the shelf one in that quantity that was £11.90 an enclosure so it's actually pretty good.
ISTR a directory (somewhere or other) of local 3D print shops. Quite a few of those were simple "amateur" 3D printers hoping to cash in. If such a person could be located, turnaround could be <<1 week.
At the risk of lacking quality control and marketable outcomes which is the problem I have. I feel like if I'm in control I can get repeatable outcomes for a lower cost.
There are many 3D tools, each suited to a different way of conceiving and specifying a design. Choose whatever suits your problem.
OpenSCAD would be a peverse choice if you wanted to make a head and shoulders bust. I suspect one of the constraint-based tools might be appropriate for an enclosure, especially if you can/must encode any design rule checks before releasing the design to manufacture.
I'm really after constraint based modelling if I can get away with it as that has some advantages if you make small design changes (aka cock up fixes). Definitely no good for sculpting, but I'm no artist in that respect
![Cheesy :D](https://www.eevblog.com/forum/Smileys/default/xcheesy.gif.pagespeed.ic.KPzuH4J-TG.png)
It is a good tradeoff. The remaining issue would be ensuring your design is suitable for injection moulding.
That's part of the service from the Chinese guys I was talking to. If you send them the design files and chuck a working enclosure in the post their guarantee is they'll send an injection moulded ABS part back, unsprued and finished. 50% cash up front, 50% on delivery of first parts. They will send you the tooling if you want to take it away as well. They also do rework.
The bugger has been trying to find someone take a 1000 part order seriously, even if it leads to a 10,000 part order!