| I’m saying that it’s far more accessible to anyone with a computer to do the design that it has ever been before. I only mentioned price as a response to Harry’s $5000 and the OPs $4500. But since you’re now also bringing that up, yes it should still be roughly the same cost even with additional design work. With today’s technology we don’t have to sit down and calculate additional structures and gusseting needed to support the design in a different material. Sure we can do that and I can see where those calculations would take time (and time is money), but with modern CAD packages like Solidworks or Autodesk Inventor, one can simply simulate and stress test the design with roughed in supports all on computer. Solidworks even has suggestions for you to add to your design. (I’m not sure what additional features Inventor or ProE or any other has. I just have a bit of reference experience with Solidworks) So you're saying Contracting out the engineering work would blow the budget.
No it won't. Solidworks will aid in improving your design with more supports and gussets where necessary. Even scanning and digitizing the entire engine block would be difficult.
3D scanners are pretty accurate these days. White light scanners in the sub $1500 can have accuracy of 0.015mm Assuming you’re talking about start to finish, the designer will scan the Iron block in a point cloud. Then develop a parametric solid out of that to be manipulated in Solidworks or other CAD software. Those two steps are mandatory in the initial design stage of the block since we don’t have the factory Nissan VG CAD drawings. But in this case the designer can simply alter the block on his way to making a parametric solid. It would take a negligible amount of additional time to do so and he wouldn’t have to do multiple renditions of printing to test it if works and revise the design if it doesn’t. At the end of everything, sure it’s cheaper. But there are lots of “backyard designers” out there like me. A lot more than there ever were and because it’s basically just to send out your design and get back a functional cast version, that really improves on accessibility.
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