@NURB - Thanks for the welcome. The photo below shows some of the iteration. There were more but those are the only prototypes I could find offhand. Anyway, you can see I kind of overbuilt the first few, so it was mostly a process of whittling away. The change between the bottom two was primarily production-driven. The original design required a 1/4" endmill for the center slot, which was painfully slow to machine, so i redesigned it to allow for a 3/8" endmill, which shaved about two minutes off the production time, which is huge. I still laugh at the mantlepiece-like shape of that original version. Not sure what I was thinking there.
@Scott - Completely agree on the R&D aspect. I did all the prototyping for the follow focus on a converted CNC mill I bought for $2500. Had I paid a shop to machine the prototypes, I would have easily burned through $10,000. How did you find the transition from outsourcing to running the equipment yourself? Were you planning to do that all along, and if not, what was the thing that changed your direction?