by ElSecundo » Fri Oct 11, 2013 2:02 pm
Building them with a 3D printer is pretty expensive, and there's no 'economy of scale'. Building two takes exactly twice as long as building one, and uses axactly twice as much material.
A decent, relatively low-end 3D printer is about $5,000, but that doesn't include the support materials or plastic cartridges. The cartridges probabably contain enough plastic to make 40-45 chassis, and each cartridge costs around $300 apiece. The support materials are consumed with every print job. And somebody still has to do the time-consuming work of developing the .STL file.
Bottom line, it isn't cheap. Shapeways may be able to help, though.