Drive Train Gearboxes

[thinker&planner]

Thanks for all your responses.
When we talked to machinists that make 45T hybrid magnets, they said that we would need precision down to at least .0005". Is this truly necessary for FRC gearboxes? I think that they are used to metric gears with much smaller diametral pitches where that kind of precision really maters.

We were told repeatedly that you can't waterjet gearboxes, because you just can't get the precision that you need for press fit bearings.

Basically, all our machinists said that they would not make a gearbox for us unless they would be mass-producing them. I understand that calibration and setup takes a long time, but if there's no fancy lightening pattern, couldn't you just put two plates together and make all the holes relative to each other? Later, you could cut it out to the right dimensions (roughly), as long as all the holes were correctly spaced.
Thoughts? Thanks!