*** The Official Elite: Dangerous Thread ***

[Dano]

I believe the part you need to give the engineer is called meta alloy and it's only available from a few places and quite pricey or you can try to mine it I've not done it myself yet as I'm farming materials first.
If you go on to the galaxy map, you can change route options from economical to fastest to greatly reduce the amount of jumps, couple this with a fuel scoop and you can get around a lot quicker.

They're easy to find now, just go to a titan ruin and there's usually loads kicking around.