Hey Monster Beetle!
Cool part! It looks like a fun project. I looked at the pictures and I see a couple of details that may or may not be a show stopper. The details I speak of are the "internal hex" features. Your wheels are very small and as a result the internal hex features on the wheels would be extremely challenging to produce. It is likely that the wheels in your photos were injection molded.
We can make you a prototype in two ways. One is by using a "sinker EDM" process where we machine a graphite EDM electrode that would be plunged into a turned piece of aluminum. This would not be cheap! Just a rough guesstimate would be around $300.00
The other way would be to make a mold for you and have one of our local plastics companies squirt a few parts for you. This also would not be very cheap but you'd have a mold that you could make as many parts as you want and after the initial cost of the mold, the parts wouldn't cost very much to manufacture.
There is one more option... get rid of all the "internal hex" features and make this a simple part to turn and mill. We could probably turn one of these out for less than $150.00 (for one piece). It would obviously be cheaper as the quantities go up because the set-up costs get distributed over more parts. I could see these costing less than a dollar to produce if the quantities were there... but that would be a LOT of wheels!
I hope this helps. Let us know if we can assist in any other way.
Good luck,
Joe Senchuk, VP Sales and Engineering
Engineered MetalCraft, LLC
www.e-mcusa.com
