[Coco] Sacrificial carts - opinions?

[Mark McDougall]

On 9/06/2014 4:17 AM, Mark J. Blair wrote:

> That would be "hard tooling" (steel) vs. "soft tooling" (aluminum). The
> $10k I estimated would be for soft tooling, good for maybe 100k injection
> cycles. I've never done hard tooling so I can only guess, but I gather
> that it is MUCH more expensive. Maybe around 10x.

According to my colleague, who has had some molding done recently for a new 
product, it is the *engineering* costs that make the tooling process so 
expensive, rather than the actual production of the mold. So for the tooling 
process, you're paying the wages for an engineer to design the mold to your 
specifications; if you can do that yourself, it's a lot cheaper. Mind you, I 
think there's more to it than simply drawing up your case - the design has 
to be 'mold-ready' for the plastics and the injection process, so you need 
some knowledge of the job at hand.

Regards,

-- 
|              Mark McDougall                | "Electrical Engineers do it
|  <http://members.iinet.net.au/~msmcdoug>   |   with less resistance!"