by jeruw » Fri Apr 03, 2015 2:21 am
You could get lucky with the 3d printing, it really depends on your area. A few people have been able to go to their public library or university library and get the parts printed only for material cost - around $8. Unfortunately, 3d printing is time intensive. The plans say to expect it to take 10 hours to print all the parts. As such, any place doing this as a business is going to charge you a lot more. Even though there's little hands-on time expense, there's the availability of the machine to take into account. I got a quote from a local UPS store for $300, and they didn't have all the parts accounted for or the correct quality settings taken into account. Around the same cost as purchasing through one of the online 3d print shops like Shapeways.
There's also 3dhubs.com as an option. This aggregates local folks offering 3d printing services. Prices vary quite a bit, but might be a reasonable option.
A lathe isn't going to help much. A CNC mill of some kind would allow you to create the parts from aluminum. If you're good at woodworking you could attempt creating the parts in wood. You'd probably want to review my designs as a basis. A laser cutter or cnc router would make the job easy, otherwise it'll be a bit of work. You'll probably want to use a piece of aluminum as the pivot shaft rather than a dowel, but that's just a guess.
Other than all that, I'd suggest waiting a bit to hear about zdayton's plans. He's currently doing a complete redesign with the idea of doing crowd funding to produce a injected molded version of the throttle.