machine shop or water jetting

YoussefGamal · **Joined:** Tue Jul 19, 2011 1:33 pm **Posts:** 21

Hey guys, I am looking for a local shop that would be "friendly" to making seat brackets for my car (miata). I have a IGES file that is semi-ready for use, but I am still getting outrageous prices. Any advice here? or perhaps a shop you have used that was more reasonable price wise.

Charlie Guthrie · **Joined:** Thu Aug 28, 2003 8:14 pm **Posts:** 832

What do you consider "outrageous" in terms of price? Keeping in mind that a typical machine shop will have a billing rate of at least $60/per hour. They also charge for machine run time. I used to build custom machines and many customers are surprised at the cost of "simple" small parts.
Have you considered printing the parts to full size and then cutting them yourself using a band saw or saber saw? When I was helping develop a pharmacy robot, our prototype shop used that method for many sheet metal parts to shorten the development time and to cut the cost of our prototype parts. We just printed the part on paper then applied it to the sheet metal using spray adhesive then we just cut on the line. You can make some really good looking parts with a band saw and a couple of files. The hardest part for you may be bending the parts if necessary.
Charlie G

JamesMilko · **Posted:** Mon Sep 05, 2011 9:40 am

Youssef,

Assuming you're sidemounting a seat, I just bought the regular side mount brackets from Momo to a machine shop behind Performance Chassis in Cary and had them bend them how I needed it. Think they charged me $20 to bend up 4 brackets on their press. To mount them to the floor I just bent up some steel bar from Lowes. Heated it up with a propane torch and bent it into shape on a vice, drilled holes and bolted it to the OEM mount points/sidemount brackets. All in it likely cost me about $150-$160 for both seats and 2-3 hours of my time.

Feel free to swing by at VIR if you want to take a look at how I did it. Black Miata w/ Tan F150 tow vehicle. I can grab some pictures if you're trying to get them in before this weekend.

Stephen Westerfield · **Posted:** Mon Sep 05, 2011 2:18 pm

These guys are right off of Aviation and good to work with. No idea on price though.

http://www.adrhydrocut.com/

BriceJohnson · **Joined:** Thu Apr 13, 2006 7:33 am **Posts:** 2230

+1, Al is a great guy.

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