[ohohyodafarted]

On the first job he did, (the CTC4 back) he charged $75/hr set-up and the charge for one back was $50. I thought that was fair for the back itself, and duplicates will only be $50 each. But when you are doing a one-off piece the cost of setting up the program adds a lot to the price of only one piece. And depending on how complex the program is, you may have an even higher program price. I will post an update with actual costs on the printed parts when I recieve the invoice for this work.

As for drawing myself, I do not have a proper drawing program anymore. I used to have a program called ProfileLab that I could do this in, and it would generate HPGL instruction file to drive plotters and routers. (HPGL=Hewlett Pakard Graphics Language) That is no longer available to me. If it was I could do the drawings myself and eliminate that part of the expense. I wish I still had ProfileLab, It was a nice program to do this sort of stuff. Does anyone have a suggestion for an inexpensive program that could be used to do the drawings? and possibly generate the HPGL plotter code?

The art file for the Wards Airline dial glass was generated from a flatbed scan of a reasonably good part, and imported into PhotoShop (I used a trial version of Photoshop Elements). I find PhotoShop to be a difficult and complex program to use, but it has many features that enable you to do stuff like make seperations by color etc. So I made 4 layers for various colors (based on the imported scan) and overlayed them. Then I took the art files to this company and he used the art files to generate the necessary code to print the parts with the UV flatbed printer. I don't know what kind of file the printer works with. For all I know it just takes a standard .JPG and prints like a normal computer printer does.