rusbravo

The main thing is the quantity. if you need prototype to small volumes look at quickparts.com. they have a $150 min order last time I quoted a rapid prototype. Next step would probably be Protomold, they do injection molds out of aluminum with high speed CNC machines and can do a 1 day turnaround if you have the money. There's another company I've worked with called Vista Technologies (vistatek.com) out of Minneapolis that did prototypes and then production parts. If you're going to higher volumes you can go to pretty much any injection molder and have them make you parts, some will roll the cost of the tooling into the per part cost. oh yeah, vista will also do urethane castings for low volumes of parts, like less than 100.

I would recommend getting a rapid prototype made out of a material that is close to what you want the final product to be. prototype early and prototype often, what looks good in our heads or on the computer screen often isn't quite right in the for-reals. Use quickparts, vista, or shapeways. Pokeno is still working the bugs out of their 3d printing, give them a couple of months. Shapeways requires you to submit a .stl file of your 3D model. Quickparts and Vista are a little more flexible. I would not recommend a home brew 3d printer, the resolution and the material choices aren't as good. Also, you just want your part not to screw around with a machine.

I've worked as a manufacturing engineer and as a design engineer, product development is what i do for a living. If you would like to talk things over some more, I'd be happy to sign an NDA and maybe point you in the right direction... at least a direction anyway.