Turning and Milling Quotes from the Drawing
A turned shaft and a milled bracket are priced from the same ingredients: stock, setup, cycle time, secondary operations and margin. What changes is how each ingredient is measured. This page shows how QuoteBuddy builds a turning or milling quote from the drawing, with your machines and your rates, and which parts of the calculation you can check and change.
Watch the one-minute demo
Turned or milled: the part type sets the route
When QuoteBuddy reads a drawing, it classifies the part. A round part with a main axis is a turned part, priced on the lathe. A block-shaped part with pockets, slots and faces is a prismatic milled part, priced on the milling centre. The part type decides the primary operation and the stock shape, and you can see and correct it before the estimate is calculated.
The stock
The finished envelope of the part is rounded up to the next size available in your stock catalog: a round bar diameter for a turned part, a plate thickness or a block for a milled one. Machining allowances on diameter, length and sides are added first, and the stock is priced by weight with the material price you set. A part that needs a 41 mm bar is therefore priced on the 50 mm bar you actually buy, not on its finished size.
Setup and cycle time
Setup and cycle are kept apart because they behave differently. Setup is paid once per batch: fixturing, tool loading, first-piece checks. Cycle time is paid for every piece. QuoteBuddy prices both at the hourly rate of the machine that does the work, and adds CAM programming as its own line.
This is what makes quantity tiers meaningful. With several quantities on the same estimate, setup is spread over each batch and the cycle multiplies with the pieces, so the unit price at 10, 100 and 1,000 pieces comes from the same model instead of three guesses.
Holes, threads and features
The features read from the drawing become operations or time on the machine: holes, threads, reamed holes, counterbores and countersinks, pockets, slots and chamfers. On a turned part, drilling, tapping, reaming and facing are priced on the lathe when your shop has one; on a milled part they run on the milling centre. If you own a 5-axis machine, it covers the work a 3-axis machine would do.
Heat treatment, finishing and inspection
Some drawings change the sequence, not just the time:
- Heat treatment. When the drawing calls for it, the machining is split: roughing, then the heat treatment, then a finishing pass with its own second setup. If you do not treat in-house, the heat treatment is marked as outsourced with your uplift factor and stays flagged until you confirm it.
- Coatings and surface finish. They are placed after machining, as their own lines.
- Tight tolerances. A critical inspection step is added as the last operation, so the time to measure the part is priced instead of forgotten.
Every line can be checked
The estimate lists each operation with its time and cost. If your lathe is faster than the default time, or a setup takes longer in your shop, change the line and lock it: a locked operation keeps your value when the drawing is read again. Overhead, risk and margin are applied afterwards with your rules, and the quote is produced as a PDF.
Test it on a part you know
Take a turned part and a milled part you have already quoted, set your real machine rates and stock prices, and compare. The stock size, the setups and the cycle should look like what you would have written; where they do not, you see exactly which line to adjust.
The trial lasts 30 days, with unlimited quotes and no credit card. Drawings are uploaded as PDF, PNG or JPG.