Friends,
Well...it looks like a lack of haste made some serious waste this time...i.e., a waste of our $$$. The Mundorf parts costs aren't as bad as I feared - although they're still expensive as heck. After some investigation it looks like we'll get a decent deal on them after all. The biggest source of the whole snafu was due to a delay in Mundorf shipping our parts.
We had a ship date that they quoted and that's what we were basing our planning on. Apparently, they didn't have a custom value cap in stock and had to make it from scratch. Had we known, we could have had them supply lower values that, when combined in parallel, would give the value we needed. Anyway, they delayed shipment based on making that one part. Arrgghhh.
Well, we had to have them this week so Mundorf switched shippers to make up time. In the process they managed to pick a forwarder that charged for every little thing they did on this end - "up the sphincter." If Mundorf would have stayed with TNT as originally planned, all of those extra costs would have been included in the shipping costs that we had already paid for.
Upshot: Lesson #1 in our new World economy - Importing stuff SUCKs!!!
Anyway, we're still evaluating costs and how best to proceed, but the light at the end of the tunnel may not be a train after all.
-Bob