Hourly pricing rate with tiny bench top mill and scanner?

[FigureMaker]

I have a small roland modela MDX-15 CNC mill.

Any suggested hourly fee for the machine operating as a mill?

Using machinable wax as the material. End mils come from harbor freight. And my operational overhead is negligible.

I’m using the CNC mill to create positive mold cavities to create negative latex rubber molds. And then plastic resin parts.

So far designing sculptures and articulated toys. Already have a rate for the 3d design work.

Just trying to determine a rate for the machine as it is slow and requires that I manually change the bits. Reminder that this is not a large fully automated machine that produces results in mere minutes.

Also curious what kind of rate to charge if using the machine as a scanner. Each pass again is painfully slow. And the point clouds then have to be assembled manually.

[Dualkit]

That thing will scan and mill for the listed price? That seems real cheap. You really can't set an hourly price. Some jobs your machine could be the right machine for the job and you could charge $75 an hour and bill all the time, as no one can do it faster than you. On another job you could charge $10 an hour and my price could be cheaper than your's charging $75 an hour, because my machine is 10x faster. So to answer your question what you can charge per hour will vary greatly if you hope to land work while earning as much as possible.

[FigureMaker]

Thank you for replying.

Based on what you've suggested should I just raise the hourly cost of designing the model and mold within the applications I use. And ignore the time and effort of even using the mill?

[Dualkit]

Originally Posted by FigureMaker Thank you for replying. Based on what you've suggested should I just raise the hourly cost of designing the model and mold within the applications I use. And ignore the time and effort of even using the mill?

You should charge out all your time, even in this bad economy. Just raise and lower the rates depending on your success rates getting jobs. Quote your design and programming time at 100% as it looks like your machine is quick at that, on the machining end you should factor it by your machine's efficiency compared to a small sized machining center like a Haas Mini Mill. You might just have to post drawings and ask other people what the part would take in machining time on a more rigid machine with a tool changer. After a few of those you should get a general idea of what to bill run time at on certain jobs.

[inventor1227]

How are you doing with your machine MDX-15 CNC?
I'm also thinking about owning Roland, but I was looking at the MDX-540.