[sdiy] Making kits of parts

[David Griffith]

I've made and sold vintage-style computer kits[1] for a few years.  Last 
year I looked into having Mouser put parts into individual parts thus 
saving me the labor of sitting at the kitchen table sorting hundreds of 
tiny parts into individual bags.  The price?  Apply the volume prices for 
what I was buying, then add a dollar per kit.  Fast forward to now.  I 
want some more kits, so I went through my BOM and swapped in cheaper parts 
for ones that inexplicably became much more expensive.  When I asked for 
the kitting to be done, I was offered NO volume discount and each kit cost 
around $4 more per kit.  Naturally I was pissed.  I was even more pissed 
to be told by Mouser that the deal I got last time was a mistake.

I'm in the process of copying my BOM from Mouser over to Digikey.  Digikey 
doesn't stock everything I need.  I'll have to buy some stuff seperately 
and stuff them in the bags myself.  I can handle that.  I don't know if 
Digikey will play nice with me because as I type, Digikey's website is 
broken.  Just type something in the search box and watch it complain.

So, here's a question.  For those of you who have offered kits of 
synthesizery stuff: how did you go about putting together the parts bags? 
Did you do the kitchen table marathon or did you get the supplier to make 
the kits for you?

[1] http://661.org/p112/

-- 
David Griffith
dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu