Need a custom amp face plate


Any ideas on where I could get a customer faceplate made? It would need to be anodized black aluminum, approx. 1/2" thick.

Thanks for any recommendations.
stratguy
Yikes! Thanks Peter, I appreciate the info. I may have to rethink this project.

Steve
I had a chassis and faceplate made by these guys. They did a great job and the price was quite reasonable. I designed the faceplate on a CAD system, and they used their CAD reader. They may be able to do it from any computer file that you can specify the dimensions on accurately. They silkscreened the lettering and all.

http://www.par-metal.com/
Maybe see if you can find someone in your area who works as a CAD designer and a guy who works a CNC mill who could do it for you. The material as such shouldn't be that much.

I'd post on Craigslist in your area and see what you can find. I always got great responses. If you were around Grand Rapids/MI I could help as work in the CAD field.

Do you have any idea of what the plate's gonna look like, dimensions and all that? You could start by taking off the original face plate and taking all the dimensions, where the holes are, hole sizes, ..... as all this would be needed to create a CAD model.

If you had a good sketch with exact dimensions I'd be happy to do the CAD work for ya. Doesn't really take all that long and I enjoy doing it.

As far as making it goes, there are a lot of shops out there who could do it and as times are tough right now many of them might be willing to do it for a good price. However, as Pbnaudio said, it costs money.

Most of the shops however wont be able to do the printing on it, unless you'd be happy to basically engrave the writing. Still leaves the problem of filling the engraving with the right paint to make it readable.

As far as the anodizing goes anytime we've done that on parts we were either charged by weight of the part or charged a minimum amount (usually the later was the case as our stuff is pretty small).

Think your best bet would be to start with the design and then go to a few machine shops or try Craigslist. The good thing about guys like frontalexpress would be that they have the experience and if te quality isn't good enough they might just make it again. The machine shops out there may not always be used to this kind of work as a good finish is important.