enclosure
I need to produce a small batch (less than 100) of custom enclosures, each made up of 5-6 pieces of plastic. I need surfaces to look smooth and hard (think the quality of a computer keyboard) and one of the pieces needs to be see-through, while another needs to contain several labels.
What are the places you guys are using for this? Also, what is the price range I'm looking at?
A few similar questions with good answers:
Regarding laser sintering, the answer is probably yes, but the price might be higher than you want. A good model maker can make stuff that looks indistinguishable from the final product, but for many k$.
For the enclosure, Bud Industries makes a line of NEMA rated waterproof plastic enclosures. They vary in price from $10 to $50 from distributors like Digikey based on size and rating.
An example box that may fit your dimension requirements is the NBB-10260 (Digikey). It even comes with a clear lid for reading LCD displays if you need to.
An option for getting cables out of a box that I have used in the past is a Cable Gland.
You simply drill the correct size hole in your enclosure and tighten the cable gland around your cable. If you adhere to the datasheet dimensions, it can be waterproof and dustproof.
Best Answer
I gave the following answer to this earlier question
For a two part moulding the tooling cost was around £6-8k. The design time was a couple of weeks - you do your own sums on the cost of that. You are talking of what sounds like quite a complicated design if it is made up of 6 parts, so expect the costs to rise accordingly.