If you're looking for production quantities, pretty much every enclosure maker, whether plastic or metal, advertises their willingness to customize. There may be a hefty tooling fee, and they may or may not be interested in small orders. Find a company that makes something similar to what you want and ask.
If you can find a standard case that is close to what you want, look for a local machine shop that can modify it to your specs. This is good for moderate quantities, but might be too much for qty. 1 unless you have a friend with a milling machine in his basement. We did this a lot in a previous job I had, where we had typical production quantities between 10 and 200 units. Similarly, some pretty nice cases can be made from drilled and folded sheet steel or aluminum. Those could be fabbed for you by any convenient machine shop. One-time costs will be fairly low, and per-unit prices can be pretty reasonable if you keep the design simple to manufacture. These could be any scale of production from 5 to tens of thousands. If it's one-off or very low quantities, and you have the budget, you could go to one of the many 3-D printing places online, such as Shapeways ([1]www.shapeways.com). You might end up paying $100+ for a case this way, depending on its size, but it will be 100% custom and any shape you can imagine. Similarly, you could assemble a case from laser-cut parts from an outfit like Ponoko ([2]www.ponoko.com). As for software, the mechanical engineers at my workplace design cases in Solidworks. It looks very expensive. :-) Some of the hobbyist-oriented 3-D printing houses accept Google Sketchup, which (I think?) has a no-cost version. A sheet metal case could be designed in any 2-D or 3-D CAD package or even a drawing program if you're careful. Finally, Ponoko accepts Inkscape files, among others. Inkscape is Free (GPL, IIRC) and has both Linux/Unix and Windows versions. Stephen References 1. http://www.shapeways.com/ 2. http://www.ponoko.com/
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