Maker School: What should it cost...seat-of-the-pants estimating.

There are a lot of things that  Fabber has to take into consideration when coming up with an estimate for cutting your job, and they can vary depending on the Fabber and his location. Although the Fabber is the only one that can tell you exactly what a job will cost, here's some information to help you get a general idea of what a project might cost

Design time:

• Maker can minimize by doing much of the design work
• Much like having t-shirts printed...making first one can be expensive because of toolpathing and setup time, but subsequent ones become cheaper

Materials: Materials can fall into a couple of categories

• Plywood and other Sheet goods: from $.25 a square foot for OSB, $1-2 for MDF and construction/cabinet plywood, $3-8 for specialty ply like Marine or hardwood veneer. Might be a minimum size...generally 4 square feet
• foams: from $1 a square foot for insulation foam, $10-40 for sign foam
• plastics: from $4 a square foot for 1/4" acrylic, $6 a square foot for 3/4" PVC sheets, and up for specialty plastics
• lumber: from $4 a board foot (12"x12"x1") for poplar and pine to $20 for teak and other exotics. Usually an extra charge for cutting lumber because of the issues with handling and flatness
• soft metals: Aluminum is  a commodity and varies with alloy...check with Fabber for current pricing
• Some materials may have to be special ordered, adding to time and cost

Cutting time:

• Cost per hour: $40-100 on average, depending on location and type of work
• varies with material and thickness: 1/2" ply might be cut in one pass, the same thickness aluminum might take 10 passes at 1/4 the speed
• More with lots of up and down movements, like drilling holes
• Extra time (and cost) with bit change: 5-10 minutes
• Extra cost with 2-sided cutting...can be more than double that of single sided if registration is important
• generally not much cheaper in large quantities

Overhead:

• bits and cutters: A straight bit might last 30 sheets and cost $1-2 per cut sheet, but some specialty profile bits or bits for unususal materials like plastics or metal can cost several hundred dollars
• Material prep and handling: generally more with lumber that sheet goods like plywood, unless you supply ready-to-cut materials
• Packaging and handling:
• Holding jig building: important for efficiency in large production runs but can be expensive:
• Waste: a certain percentage of the material is wasted as sawdust, or unusable because of the shape or size of the pieces. Doing a preliminary layout on a "virtual" sheet of material on the computer can help see how much waste there might be.