"How much would it cost to get a plastic sprue fabricated?" Topic

Seeing all the great stuff that's being produced in plastic these days and all the great kickstarters that are being launched, and yes, even the Defiance Games debacle, I'm wondering – what is the cost of bringing a plastic box set to fruition.

I mean, cost of hiring a 3D sculptor, the cost of getting the tooling made (through renedra? or others?) the cost of having them cast up, the cost of getting the packaging printed, the cost of having them packaged and shrink-wrapped, and brought to market.

What *are* the total costs? The breakdown of costs?

Assuming you were good at raising capital, or had some startup capital of your own, how much would you need to raise to get a box of Wargames Factory Zulu done up and brought to market?

The mold would run somewhere between $10,000 USD and $100,000 USD dollars including the sculpting.

Production would then be pennies per sprue with packaging a couple dollars at most depending on if you can sell 10K or 100K of them at a time.

Its an awful lot of money to spend and then not have the product sell. I was just looking at a post on here about the horrors of 3D sculpting by people who don't know about mold making, but I can't find it now.

So you might want to do further research before doing a kickstarter that has no hope of ever being fulfilled.

Between $10,000 USD and $100,000 USD? Is that because the price varies per piece on the sprue? How many pieces would you get for $10 USDK?

Studio Miniatures seemed to do alright with their zombie kickstarter…

The price varies according to the size of the mold. I have a friend who works in a plastics factory and he showed me the different size molds.

The small ones weight about 100LBS, the larger ones weight nearly a ton and have to be lifted into the casting machines with a fork lift.

Say you just want some human figures you might get a sprue of 8-10 in one small mold, something like a WH40K tank with lots of parts might take a medium size mold to cast enough parts. Doing a huge model kit like The enterprise in 1/56 scale might require the larger mold. The ones they had there were used for big plastic car parts like shrouds and interior pieces.

Unless your able to get a distributor to be willing to push these for you your going to have to spend as much on promotion as you do mold making to even begin to break even on something like this.

I should know I have yet to have anything produced pay for itself marketing on its own and I'm not doing plastics. There is no way I can afford them kickstarter or not.

With my little pinky finger in the corner of my mouth --
"One million dollars"
evil laughter, evil laughter, evil laughter, evil laughter ………

My information is somewhat dated. In an article in 'Fine Scale Modeler' about 20 years ago, the heads of Revell-Monogram said it took 55,000 units sold to pay for a mold (break even). This was for a 1/24 car model, so there were many, many little parts.

the complexity varies too ChrisValera. simple moulds have two plates that come together. others have blocks that are made into plates so you can swap out sections without redoing the whole half. the most complex have sections coming in from different directions so you can do things like hollow barrels. more complex = more dollars

You might want to contact Reaper Minis they just had like 30 made, for the new line.

I have heard avg price is around 75k these days, but only through grapes and wine.

Once made the cost per sprue is in the pennies per part I have been told.

I know Reaper had the molds made in China but bought the casting machines themselves and are making the minis in Denton, TX.

Which made me happy to hear.

Good luck

I think the kickstarter run was done overseas. They had those shipped in while they got the state side stuff up and running.

I've had quotes as low as $5 USDk to make a mold. It all depends on the quantity and quality of the mold. You want an aluminum one that runs 4000 parts and is tossed? Its a lot cheaper then a tool steel on that can run 2-5 million parts.

The machines are different as well. So Aluminum molds cost more per part. Setup fee is probably about the same but the aluminum runs a lot slower. Less parts per hour means increased cost. The Steel ones get more detail because they can put more pressure behind them and run them faster.

The big chunk of the cost is the engineering and that has been steadily dropping. Anyone with good solid works skills can make one. I think it even calculates the plastic flows so you can adjust them.

Everything I have read about aluminum molds, is you should get about 100,000 shots from it, and from my own experiences I believe it. If you have a very precise tolerance where tab "A" must exactly fit in slot "B", or you are running a very abrasive additive in the plastic, I could see you getting less than that. For anything miniatures related, I don't worry.

These are a lot of articles that talk about the myths of aluminum tooling. Aluminum transfers heat more uniformly than steel, so cooling is a dream in my opinion.

As for details, if you scratch a mold, you will see that scratch. I have put so small of detail in parts that they are hard to see even under magnification.

I would say the bigger issues are:
Who owns the mold once it is done
Do they make the mold over if/when they wear it out
What is the price per shot/sprue

The real issues show up in design, and what happen when you don't catch the issue until the mold has been made.

If you are making millions of parts, make it out of steel.

Immortal were asked a couple of years ago at Salute how much their Hoplites mould cost. The questioner was another metal figure maker who was considering going down the plastic fret road. The terse response was – £30,000.00 GBP – and that was them designing their own figures.