[Coco] miniFLASH product

[Ron Bihler]

On 9/10/2013 10:55 PM, Mark J. Blair wrote:
> 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.
>
I was machining Rogers cases for a few bucks each.  This works for small 
numbers, Injection molding is the best for larger qty's but the initial 
7-10k is difficult to handle.

If anyone needs a small project case for the Coco I still have a few of 
the cases around.

Ron Bihler