Well, I've hit a few dead ends. The process we want is called "deep drawing". You take a flat sheet of metal and stamp it into a cup shape. It seems in this undustry, a short run is "less than 60,000 pieces". Some companies have "standard" sizes, which means "we made it for somebody once". They don't stock anything, even for touchy-feely samples. Minimum lot sizes are huge.
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- Tom S.

"Never trust and engineer who doesn't carry a pocketknife."