it all depends on how many faces I have to cut and what machine is available to use.
If I have to put it on the 3axis machine it will take longer too do, will have to flip it two or three times.
If I use the 4axis mill, it shaves off a few hours of labor. It cuts the first face, than rotates to the second face and cuts that, than the third than the forth and I just pop it off the machine and trim the sides to square.
Price ranges from $4,000-$7,000 depending on how the model is designed.
tight corners and angels means lots of tool changes and setup, so time is a big factor.
Never ever ever go with a scale model from and toy company, all those models have been manipulated to look better when they are smaller. Tho it may seem like everything is the same on the tiny model and the real car, once it get scaled back up, the details will sometimes be bigger or smaller when blown up 1:1 your better off working with a 3ds model, from there you can tweak what you need done and its already to scale.
Yes the plug is out of foam, cheapest form of material to use. use anything else is like going to the strippers and giving your money away lol. Your using less material, but using alot of stock material to start with, most of it just ends up on the ground. You can use clay, buy than your spending more time adding it to the foam, it takes forever for the clay to stick to it. the foam has to be nice and warm not cold. You can also use this blue type of clay, its a non drying plasticine. you don't want it to dry out or you will be wanting to drop kicking the plug every morning. But I don't use none of those, I just spray on a self leveling hard coat and be done with it, hard as rock in 24 hours and chemical resistant.
