24 Aug
2007
24 Aug
'07
12:01 p.m.
On Aug 24, 2007, at 2:36 PM, woodelf wrote:
Well, America has big wages if your title begins with "chief" and
ends with "officer". Rest in peace, American middle class.
Anyway, You
will end up spending all of your money on the tooling.
Even crappy simple molds are *expensive* - for the standard switch
handle (I am guessing you are talking about the paddles on a PDP-8/e
and such), I would bet that just the mold would start out at five
hundred bucks, from a discount tool and die shop (with a resulting
horrid job). For a good professional job, get into four figures.
<sarcasm> Ok America only DOES BIG BUISNESS today with BIG WAGES </
sarcarm> I would expect since you are making a copy of a
exsisting product
you could have small production run made cheaply. With just a
kitchen table
in my one-room apartment there is no way I could do any of the work
duplicating handles.
That is minor point however since nobody seems to have a interest
in having
handles made.
I have an interest, but only for a handful. Will is right; the
molds will be the killer. I worked on a commercial product a few
years ago that used a two-part plastic chassis that was about the
size of a small book. The two halves were very, very simple...no
weird shapes, and not difficult for mold design. The "cheap"
aluminum molds cost us about $10,000 to have made, and the good
stainless steel ones (last much longer) were to cost about $18,000.
Molds for small parts such as switch handles will be cheaper, and
there's a side benefit to their small size: we might be able to
design one mold that can make several different types of switch
handles (PDP8/e-PDP11/20 style, PDP11/45-PDP11/70 style, etc) in one
shot. DEC didn't use that many different styles of switch handles.
There's still the front-end-loaded cost of having a mold cut, but
after that, the community would never again have problems getting
switch handles.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL
Farewell Ophelia, 9/22/1991 - 7/25/2007