I attempted my first ever custom machine design/build and I am more than twice the estimated time and I am approximately 2/3rds completed. The customer and I are disagreeing on cost (material estimate is inline so far, but my time is very far off) and frankly, although I am embarassed to say this, this looks like it will be the first contract (I've been self employed for 15 years) that I won't be able to finish.
I want to learn as much as I can from this so I don't repeat the situation. To that end I was hoping for at least some ball park feedback on cost re: custom machinery.
Of course I know what my costs are, but I was hoping to get some examples or guiding rules of thumb that I could use as a sanity check. The scope of work on this project was design/engineering; procurement; fabrication; machining; pneumatic circuits; high and low voltage electrical; and programming the logic to control it all.
Instead of trying to describe every element of the machine....I thought it would be more productive if we talked in terms of R&D costs to make a one off prototype of a machine relative to the final sales price of a moderate to low volume piece of industrial machinery. In other words, imagine someone approached you with an idea for novel machine they want made. By novel I mean you can't simply copy an existing design b/c the machine doesn't exist. On the other hand the machine is more or less combining known processes in a unique way. We aren't talking about bleeding edge research here.
If the final sales price of the machine in a low volume production environment is X dollars, would you expect the first one to cost 2(X), 5(X), etc? Say for example something more involved than a band saw mill but (significantly) less involved than a wood gasification plant. A decent analogy is if someone wanted to modify the functionality of a band saw mill (but still build the band saw mill from scratch), add three or four pieces of automated functionality down stream from the milling of wood; say dynamically cutting the wood to length, drilling some holes and sorting the wood. Additionally, they wanted a semi automated feeding system to load the logs. All to be operated by a single 100 lb person of low skill.
An extreme example is pharmaceutical products...the first one costs 200 million dollars and the second one costs 5 cents.
I ask because I have an idea of what I think the machine would cost in a low volume production environment (12-50/year). It's basically a guess mixed with intuition I arrived at by looking a drastically simpler machines and much more complex machines and arriving at a number somewhere in the middle.
Any feedback is appreciated.
I want to learn as much as I can from this so I don't repeat the situation. To that end I was hoping for at least some ball park feedback on cost re: custom machinery.
Of course I know what my costs are, but I was hoping to get some examples or guiding rules of thumb that I could use as a sanity check. The scope of work on this project was design/engineering; procurement; fabrication; machining; pneumatic circuits; high and low voltage electrical; and programming the logic to control it all.
Instead of trying to describe every element of the machine....I thought it would be more productive if we talked in terms of R&D costs to make a one off prototype of a machine relative to the final sales price of a moderate to low volume piece of industrial machinery. In other words, imagine someone approached you with an idea for novel machine they want made. By novel I mean you can't simply copy an existing design b/c the machine doesn't exist. On the other hand the machine is more or less combining known processes in a unique way. We aren't talking about bleeding edge research here.
If the final sales price of the machine in a low volume production environment is X dollars, would you expect the first one to cost 2(X), 5(X), etc? Say for example something more involved than a band saw mill but (significantly) less involved than a wood gasification plant. A decent analogy is if someone wanted to modify the functionality of a band saw mill (but still build the band saw mill from scratch), add three or four pieces of automated functionality down stream from the milling of wood; say dynamically cutting the wood to length, drilling some holes and sorting the wood. Additionally, they wanted a semi automated feeding system to load the logs. All to be operated by a single 100 lb person of low skill.
An extreme example is pharmaceutical products...the first one costs 200 million dollars and the second one costs 5 cents.
I ask because I have an idea of what I think the machine would cost in a low volume production environment (12-50/year). It's basically a guess mixed with intuition I arrived at by looking a drastically simpler machines and much more complex machines and arriving at a number somewhere in the middle.
Any feedback is appreciated.