Before BLF I had no idea about OSH Park. It’s a great alternative for those designing circuit boards as it doesn’t cost heaps, you get the price before committing to anything and you don’t need to have lots of them made.
Are there similar services for aluminum fabrication? Where I can upload a CAD design and have it produced? I’m looking at designing my own head lamp host.
I dont know if possibly a laser cutter can do what you want if they have them in your area.
Big Blue Saw does custom laser and waterjet cutting…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_metal_laser_sintering is this what you were thinking about?
edit: also try https://www.google.com/search?q=aluminum+3d+printing
If you find anything out, tell us. I have an idea kicking around in my head that may never come out, but its nice to know if the option exists.
Thanks for the tips. I see there are quite a few that offer the services I’m looking for. I’ll drop a line here if I get something produced.
I think what would be equivalent to what OSH Park takes would be the program for a numerically controlled lathe. Then they would have to check the program somehow so it didn’t break the lathe. They could then charge us by the minute, as they used to charge for computer time. In principle it should be possible and little more expensive than buying mass produced hosts.
We need to contact people who make their own steam engines or model airplanes or something to see what they do. Or look for machine shops that do that directly.
We would have to find open source software for programming a lathe and learn to use it.
A lathe is not going to do it. I’m interested in a non-round host for a head light design.
For functional shapes that are not bodies of revoluiton, 3D printing seems right. Or some sort of mill. Auto combustion chambers can be cut to arbitrary shape with an NC mill.
If I were to do flashlights with non round bodies that look good and feel good in the hand, I would rather not use a computer for the outside shape at all, but make it out of clay or wax. That way I could tell what I was doing by feeling it. Maybe that is because I have made a lot of pottery. In Second Life virtual reality I made mathematically shaped virtual objects but never did “sculpties” because for arbitrary 3D shapes it would not be nearly such a good medium as clay. A stoneware flashlight would have serious disadvantages, so I would try to use sculpture techniques to render the shapes in aluminum.
Not that 3D printing wouldn’t work for that. There is an old thread here showing beautiful flashlights made that way.