[Coco] miniFLASH product

[Mark J. Blair]

On Sep 10, 2013, at 14:12 , Al Hartman <alhartman6 at optonline.net> wrote:
> Nobody is going to make enough of them today to make the tooling costs worthwhile. I would use a vacuformed case if I had to today. 3D printed cases would be too expensive.

I've done a couple of injection molded designs at work, manufactured by a company called Proto-Mold. I would guesstimate that if I duplicated the original Program Pak enclosure, say, just the top and bottom without the sliding door and the undercuts/side actions that it requires, the tooling would probably cost about $7k-&10k. After that, boxes would cost around $5 each in small quantity with a cheap resin like black ABS, plus $500 setup per run ($250 per mold, if I recall correctly). A longer enclosure would cost a bit more.

Custom molded plastics for a CoCo project would only be doable if a rich person chose to dump money into the tooling with no hope for financial return. I might dump a hundred bucks into having a single case machined out of a couple blocks of plastic for a personal project, but I think it would be hard to find a hundred people willing to spend a hundred bucks each to have a small run of custom molded cases made. It's too bad, because making custom plastic is kinda fun.

Incidentally, both of my work projects were custom enclosures for evaluation kits for my company's chips. One was a small two-piece box made from clear polycarbonate, and the other was a larger 4-piece box made of a white ABS resin called Lustran. Both had the company logo molded into the top, and both turned out great. I was pretty happy with the results, considering that I have no formal training in industrial design. I'm an electrical engineer by trade, but my hobbies and interests include machining and mechanical design, and Proto-Mold does a great job of giving their customers a crash course in molded plastic design. They also have great design rule checking of submitted designs.

-- 
Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net>
http://www.nf6x.net/