Welcome to Holey Trinity machine art! Our premier product is a cube inside a cube inside a highly polished aluminum cube. This began as a school project at New Century Careers in 2019 with a 1.5 inch piece of scrap, just to see if I could do it. It took a couple days to do the math and assemble the tooling, then program the cuts. Later at my first machinist job site, on lunch breaks and after hours, I made about a dozen smaller cubes and gave them away to family and friends. The next year, I refined the process to use cheaper 1 inch stock, then added engraving to highlight the core values at my church, Grace Life Church in Monroeville PA. Nate, a fellow New Century student, has helped me polish the cubes and is now learning to run the CNC as well. We have now given away over a hundred cubes and hope to take sales orders very soon.
How much do you think a cube should cost? Plain, pre-engraved, or custom engraved pricing? Comment your opinion for a chance at a free cube.
The machine shop I worked in charged $95/hour for machine time. The first cubes I made took 2 hours or so without engraving but I now have the time for an engraved cube down to about a half an hour.
The machinist whose video inspired me was charging $150 for one of his cube projects, without any engraving or polishing.
Currently, my material and tooling costs are about $10 per cube plus machine time. So I am leaning toward a retail price range of $50-$75 per engraved cube, and $30-$50 per basic polished cube, a one-time setup fee of $100 per custom engraving for any number of finished cubes, and a volume discount for orders of 50 or more cubes. Custom engravings will take 1-2 days to produce and ship the first parts, with larger orders taking longer to ship the full quantity. On a good day we can finish engraving and polishing about 30 pre-cut cubes.
Please consider these costs, but be honest about what you would actually pay for one either for yourself or as a gift.
If you have any suggestions for engravings, you are invited to comment with those as well.
Thank you,
Richard Simpson