Any idea how much this part would cost to make?

Do you mean roughly like this?

Or you can have 10 for USD 950

Suspect it would be a lot cheaper to source in the UK if you could find a machine shop doing not a lot :)

Depending on how long the boss needs to be you're machining away a lot of brass for no good reason. If the speed and loads on the part are low I might suggest making the boss separately and using a press fit and/or a screwed attachment to the disk. Then you only need a bit of brass plate and an offcut of small diameter bar instead of a big chunk of 115mm bar. You could probably get both of those free from someone's scrapbin. However you also have more machining operations to do so the extra time would cancel out the savings on material cost if you can't do the machining yourself.

In volume you'd probably start such an item from a casting that was close to final shape and just needed a light cut all over.

Also try and make things to standard sizes that people are going to have tooling for already. A 4.75mm bore to a tight tolerance means buying a specially made reamer which will never get used again and you're going to have to absorb the whole cost of. A 5mm bore would be a much easier proposition. Most places will already have a 5mm reamer and if not they're on the shelf at tool merchants for little cost.

Designing things to just fit other things is one skill. Designing things that other people can actually make easily/cheaply is another. A friend used to be a CNC turner at Xtrac who make gearboxes for F1 cars and other race cars. His life used to be plagued by snotty nosed kids fresh out of uni who sat at a CAD computer all day designing clever things which no bugger could make because they'd never actually done any machining themselves. One of them came up with a gearbox part that had a blind bore that started at 25mm diameter and then had to widen out further in through a 90 degree turn to

He had to be taken to one side, given a good slap round the head with a half brick and have it patiently explained to him that if the biggest boring tool you can get down a 25mm hole is ummm 25mm, and half of that is going to be shank, how the hell do you machine a 25mm undercut with it? He was then despatched back to his little designing cubicle to design something the workshop could actually produce.

Anyway, as a one off I'd guess about £125 to £150 from a CNC engineers. Maybe a bit less if someone with a manual lathe and mill and dividing head was desperate for work.

4.75 + 0.01 mm = 0.1874 = 3/16" - 0.0001"

A 3/16" reamer will give a hole of 0.1875" = 4.763 mm to 0.1880" = 4.775 mm the larger size being the most probable.

I presume that the shaft is actually 3/16" nominal!

Regards Brian

I'm interested to know what was going to live down this hole he designed, anyway ? ISTM there would be the same problems getting whatever it was down the hole as there would be in making it in the first place ?

Could be just air to reduce mass.

Archie

I'd say weight reduction.

Nick

Probably just weight saving given that this was F1 stuff.

Boring ! I was hoping he'd planned a fabrication that was going to be made up in situ :-)

Thanks very much for the suggestions and offers. Sorry I've taken a few days to follow this up; I've had a busy weekend.

Martin, yes, your drawing is roughly what the part would look like. My idea was to make a small master clock which would be a visually appealing (hence the large brass disc with visible light shining through the holes) way to supply timekeeping pulses to European slave clocks (the kind which need an alternating polarity pulse once per minute). Output would be via a transistor flip flop to reverse the polarity of successive pulses.

Brian, yes, I think the shaft is probably 3/16" as the motor is American. I only measured it quickly with vernier calipers graduated to

I need to weigh up if the master clock I'll get will be worth the effort and expenditure. I'm reluctant to use a "black box" electronic pulse generator, as I like to see the mechanics inside a clock, but I might be better to buy a cheap pulse generator for the moment (39 Euros plus postage) and save up for a genuine mechanical master clock in the future. I also unexpectedly (and rather excitingly) acquired an air raid siren on Friday, so I think that'll be taking up some workshop time this autumn.

I'll weigh up my options. Thanks very much for the advice.

Best wishes,

Chris