Thanks guys.
Am chasing up a "sample" size of the piece I need. Had a chat to the machinists about molding this stuff in and they were saying that doing so would be somewhat difficult due to the tiny size of the tubes.
As I described above, we talked about doing a press-fit clamp thing where the tubes are inserted into a molded middle plate. First we have a guider piece for the bottom. This is a mirror image of the bottom of the middle plate which has holes drilled into it just wider than the outer diameter of the tubes. This guides them and keeps them straight. The middle plate sits on the guider plater and keeps it supported for the later press-fit stage.
The middle plate has double drilled holes on top. One hole goes all the way through and is just wide enough for the outer diamater of the tube. The second drill hole is barely wider than the flange and goes part of the way in. The tops of the holes are also chamfered to facilitate water-flow.
The tubes are dropped into the holes and the flange nestles into it's diameter hole that's maybe 0.5mm in "shank" length. A top press-fit piece is then used on guide rails to ensure accuracy and even pressure and it has pins on it which clamped down onto the tops of the flanges. This pushes the flanges out-wards, forcing them to bite into the walls of the middle plate holes thus holding them firmly in place.
The first batch of the blocks are already under way and they'll be made with the milled approach. In the meantime I'll chase up the eyelets and see if this is a viable thing to do. Because it removes the polycarb tubes it means that the polycarb plates can be molded. Heck, if they can be molded, I may look into just doing integrated molded fittings and lose the brass barbs altogether and have polycarb straight-walled tubes coming out the top. You'd have to clamp your tubing onto it though if you were using a decent pressured pump.
utabintarbo, Since87, and bigben2k, if this works out, I owe each of you a free block.
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