Disc molding cost

[JHBlader86]

Wondering if anyone knows how much it is to create a disc mold, and get the plastic and all that good stuff. I'm considering designing a few discs, and then if its not too much money contact McCormack and see if he could help mold them and I pay him what he needs. Maybe get some friends I know to help design discs and pay as well. I know Innova and Discraft couldnt give two shits.

 

[Greatzky]

It's been a while since I looked into this, but It's a lot. Like 10K+ just for the molds.. not counting the machines and plastic and whatnot.
I might be wrong, but I remember it being very expensive.

 

[JHBlader86]

It's been a while since I looked into this, but It's a lot. Like 10K+ just for the molds.. not counting the machines and plastic and whatnot.
I might be wrong, but I remember it being very expensive.

Just for 1 individual mold its 10K??

 

[dgdave]

For a good quality mold its in the 10k range, so I've heard. You can get them out of softer metals, like aluminum, cheaper, but they wear down fast. I believe quest used aluminum and that's how they afforded to crank out so many new molds when they first came out. The cost is also why there are discs that are X top and Y bottom.

 

[JHBlader86]

I've got some money, but I'm not willing to spend that much.

 

[SpikeHyzer]

One time I was speaking with Dave Mac and I think he said that the aluminum molds are about 10k. And the heavy duty molds are in the 15-20k.

 

[PRES 101]

Once you have a mold you can cut different inserts to make differnt discs out of it. Depending on the design it is still around 2K to cut some inserts. You can make putters, mids, and drivers out of the same mold if you cut the inserts to fit the same mold.

This is how we made the Ion, two different sets of inserts that we change out of the same mold!

We made the ion inserts for somewhere around a grand but we own the tooling company. We had the mold from a previous part and modified it to work for our disc. It can be done!

 

[keltik1]

Mold cost usually includes Tool Design/Development time, the Cost of Steel/Metal stock, the cost of the machine shop's time to cut it. The bad news is if this is going to be a one off so you can pretty much double the cost, maybe even triple. If your friends are competent enough to generate fully dimensioned drawings and the CNC code then you can still save a good bit of money. The other problem is they may or may not have enough experience designing a plastic mold and the damn thing may just come back wrong from the machine shop. You would still have to find a good machine shop that would be willing to do a one off like that and they will tee off on your ass coming off the street. Times are tough and i'm sure many smaller shops are losing contracts and business so they will see your "prototype" as a big paycheck. And if it does come back wrong they will charge you for "retools" as well. Also you should really get your contract/deal with Gateway or whoever is going to mold it for you set up first so you can get the machine tooling matched up to your mold. Going Aluminum will definitely save you cost, but I seriously doubt it will be 10K.

damn I miss having a job.

 

[Marmoset]

Yeah.
$10-20k.
You can save money by doing various parts of the job yourself IF you are competent. Otherwise it will make it more expensive.

I work in a machine shop, can make the CAD drawings myself, can program and run a CNC and it would still cost me more than I have to spend. Especially considering the unknown shrinkage factors that will mutate the pulls from your perfectly designed mold into something you probably did not intend.

If you are asking questions like the OP then you probably should not be dabbling in this arena. Unless you are super wealthy. In which case... did that I mention I work in a machine shop, can make the CAD drawings myself, and can program and run a CNC?

 

[JHBlader86]

My dad is friends with a man who owns some kind of metal shop so maybe he could help in some way. I'm really not looking to start a business, but maybe just design molds. I figured if I and/or some friends could design some molds, have them prototype them, then maybe work together one day.

 

[DiscGolfTeeSigns.com]

Maybe if you took some preorders??

 

[SkaBob]

Who's gonna pre-order enough of a disc of unknown quality and flight to cover making and molding enough of them to make it affordable?

If it's thousands per mold, plus the cost of plastic, plus the molding shop's time and materials, you're looking at easily upwards of $20,000 for the first batch of discs, which won't even be PDGA approved yet...

So figuring he runs them in premium plastic and charges average prices for it, he has to sell about 1430 of them just to break even...and that doesn't even take into account that each batch that gets run is probably going to be 50 or 60 discs, with each additional batch adding additional costs, not to mention the throw-aways you always end up with when manufacturing anything...

 

[dgdave]

Who's gonna pre-order enough of a disc of unknown quality and flight to cover making and molding enough of them to make it affordable?

<Insert dgdave joke here>

 

[DiscGolfTeeSigns.com]

Hahaha ... I was kiddin Bob :mrgreen:

 

[SkaBob]

Who's gonna pre-order enough of a disc of unknown quality and flight to cover making and molding enough of them to make it affordable?

<Insert dgdave joke here>

:lol:

 

[Barbikes]

Wondering if anyone knows how much it is to create a disc mold, and get the plastic and all that good stuff. I'm considering designing a few discs, and then if its not too much money contact McCormack and see if he could help mold them and I pay him what he needs. Maybe get some friends I know to help design discs and pay as well. I know Innova and Discraft couldnt give two shits.

I work at a small factory that makes tools for airplanes. We have a machine shop. I was a machinist for 10 years. Most of the tools we make are "one offs". About 30% of my time I'm the Estimator. Since we don't do molding the first thing I would suggest to you is that you find someone that has a "rapid prototyping" machine (google it). If I was going to design/manufacture golf discs I believe a rapid prototyping machine would be the best way to produce a small run of prototypes. If you still were interested in using our shop (NOT rapid prototyping) then the procedure would be that you would have to specify the material you wanted to use. (I would suggest around an 80 duro polyurethane. These would be STIFF discs.). You would have to supply us with 2D cad files (.dwg or .dxf). My (totally ballpark) guess right now would be that one disc would cost you around $1200 including plastic. We could probably do three (exactly the same) for about $1700.

I just wanted to give you info of what you might expect if you walked into a machine shop and wanted a bid. I can tell you for sure that our shop would not really be interested in doing it for you. Most people that walk in off the street are shocked at how much the costs are to build "one off" stuff. If you can supply a CAD file to an online Rapid Prototyping shop for a bid then the costs may be way less for a small run of a few discs.

By the way - $10000 for a mold sounds about right.

 

[Marmoset]

I haven't seen a Rapid Prototype (RP) that will spit out a material durable enough for a golf disc. If you know of a material please let me know.

Also, each disc would cost at least $250 if the RPs we have made are any indication.

 

[Barbikes]

I haven't seen a Rapid Prototype (RP) that will spit out a material durable enough for a golf disc. If you know of a material please let me know.

Also, each disc would cost at least $250 if the RPs we have made are any indication.

This seems like mostly good news to me! If I'm reading you right that means that if JHBlader66 designed his disc then he could have one "proof of concept" disc made for $250. That's cheap for a one off prototype! I know little about the materials available for RP. I wonder if there's a material that feels close to DG plastic with about the same density that is strong enough to just stand up to 50 or so throws over a nice soft grassy field (I could care less about how a tree hit effects it since that's a plastics test not a disc design test) then at least the designer would have proof of concept and could then decide whether or not it was worthwhile to invest in having a mold made. With the advances being made in RP I would guess that if such a material is not available now then it will be within a year!