Guys, thanks for all the input. Really appreciated!

Ashley, Thanks for the suggestions of casting. We did look at Die casting some years ago for a smaller product but the tooling cost was very prohibitive (£10k+) so it wasn't an option at that time. I guess sand casting would work out much cheaper although this will be a low volume item I expect so the CNC pricing in batches of 25/50 is quite manageable for us. My main interest in in prototyping as we tend to go through a couple of revisions before arriving at the finished design, we're paying £400ish just now for a one-off which also takes ages to arrive!

Eric/Bernard/Bill, I like the idea of gang milling these slots. If I can pick up a horizontal mill at a reasonable price I could probably justify it just doing this operation, we have a 'family' of these fitting but all have the same pitch of fins so that could work out nicely for us!

Ian, we currently have quite a few extrusions made for us and have an excellent suppliers of these. That's a very good idea though and probably worth exploring further, I remember there were off the shelf heatsink extrusions that I look at years ago, that would probably save an expensive die getting made up.

Cheers,
Duncan

gang mill the slots-otherwise production will be slow!the trick with getting good clean yet deep slots is to have the swarf removed,in the machine centre,s this is acheived by high pressure coolant being used to wash the chips away.
do you have a working drawing of what you need?
do you have an auto cad or g code program to make these?
my friend has a busy workshop and he might be able to quote your existing supplier out of the picture.making these on a commercial basis in a home workshop would entail a lot of time.
-but we have home workshops to enable us to avoid the reliance on professionals!
best of luck with your endevours.

p.s. i too have a ridiculous collection of vehicles-if any of your leds are fit for motorcycles or military vehicles-i may become a customer!

PJ, thanks for the advice. My intention is simply to equip myself with some machine(s) and enough knowledge to make the odd prototype. We've always left production to the professionals with more time than us!

We've got full acad 2D drawings of the parts and would be happy to pass there around to some other suppliers, if you PM me some details or an email address I can send them over...

Unfortunately these LED fittings tend to be worth more than my rusty vehicles! On one fitting the LED alone is £120! Eeek! I do however have a nice Alvis Stalwart and a Tatra 813 you could add to your collection?!


Bernard, that Elliot was well spotted. Looks like a good solid buy, just a shame its so far away from me! I guess I'll need to be patient and wait for something a little closer. Many thanks anyway!!

Duncan , will reply on Forum as some of members have machines of type I would suggest for you (between hobby size and Bridgeport). A hobby size Tom Senior or Centec would be easily capable of gang milling your lighting parts in one offs and a universal version of one of these would give a lot of flexibility but I suspect you'll sooner or later want to mill something bigger for one of your "eccentric " vehicles. A machine that would be a pleasure to use and cope with both would be a larger Deckel or Thiel , but they are pricey , for good reasons. There are however numerous East European , Spanish etc copies of the Deckel design which I'm lead to believe are also of excellent quality. Look under the Metba(?) Spanish mill on the lathes site and it lists a lot of the copy makers at the bottom of the page. Not sure how often these come up however but they often have a spindle speed of 4000 rpm + for the vertical head , probably all the capacity you'd ever need , a lot of flexibility and they can easily cope with precisely gang milling your lighting prototypes. A good quality universal Elliott as some one has already suggested would also fit the bill-.These come up pretty often.Rgds. Alan