Date   : Mon, 01 Jun 2009 17:38:18 +0100
From   : philb@... (Phil Blundell)
Subject: BBC Master SCSI

On Mon, 2009-06-01 at 16:31 +0100, Mark Haysman wrote:
> The PCB houses I've worked with have always done their own in-house Tooling, 
> and usually costs around the ?60 mark for smallish boards, and is a one-off. 
> The economy of scale dicatates that they will make a certain amount of PCBs 
> per "run", so if you only order 20, they may end up making 50, and charging 
> you a lot more per board for those 20 than they would if you took the full 
> 50, as they're not wasting any.

For small runs of PCBs you might like to try the Newbury Electronics
"PCB Train" service (www.pcbtrain.co.uk).  They work by bundling up lots
of different customers' boards onto one panel and then amortising the
tooling charge over the whole lot; I've found that it normally works out
cheaper overall than our local "conventional" board house, though this
isn't absolutely always true and obviously you can't re-use the
photoplots afterwards.

p.