speaking only as someone who helped facilitate this and not as a staffmember, i can categorically tell you that no one has made any money on this yet. CP4 ASTM B265 titanium is incredibly expensive, but an amazing looking and acting material. i fronted the money for the material, and then the beast helped me out by getting some cut for plates, but we worked hard to make sure that everyone knew that this was the first time this had ever been done by all of us, cutter, the beast, and that there was a risk that something might not turn out.
again, no one has made any money on this. however, a wealth of knowledge has been gained. my material source didn't even know how the material would react to high powered laser cutting, as unalloyed titanium has very interesting behavior at high temps. for example, i approached a heat treater early on and she told me that titanium develops so much scale at heat that heat treating actually completely blows out all tolerances on your stock, by a factor of ten more than eg steel alloys.
so, please please take your lemons and make some lemonade. skcheng has offered to modify the two plates that have minor mistakes with his 12k$ ultrasonic drills _for free_. that is lemonade folks. and yes, there is more material, and yes, it also costs money. if you want a round 2, 3, 4 etc. to happen, taking up skcheng's extremely generous offer and not haranguing the cutter or the beast more than absolutely necessary is probably going to be a better way to go about things than to do otherwise.
