There may be some upcoming Otterware suited to metal casting.

I talked to some guys who Really Know About Stuff, and they use Reaper (who is great). Sadly, a production mold starts at about $180 US, with about $.25 per-piece pull. That's crazy town expensive - even a sizable order of 100 thingies would require a $2 markup to achieve profitability. It would save me a crapload of time and fuss, though.

I recall Reaver or E&C mentioning a more reasonable metal casting service in the UK.

Who can help a brother out?

I've been poking around Griffin moulds.

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I've used griffin before - there quality is excellent, but prices are pretty high; not much less than you've been quoted by Reaper.

In the US, Tom Dye of GFI/Minifigs is supposed to be good, and Historifigs are also reckoned to have decent quality - plus they are cheap (75 dollars for a production mould) and specialise in smaller scale stuff.

Regards,
Reaver

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Thanks guys, you're great.

Here's a snippet of text from Hasslefree's forum of doom. Sally is discussing production costs for their really cool saber tooth tiger...

"Here is a penny by penny breakdown of costs for getting the 28mm metal Tigress into production.

The master mould cost for this was £50 plus vat which comes to £58.75 plus 10 spins of the master mould to get enough to use for production run plus converting gives a cost of £42.70 plus vat which is £50.17.

Total mastering cost is therefore £108.92

Production moulding is £45 plus vat and we needed 20 spins at £4.27 each to get a 'starting stock'.  There are 4 tigress in every mould and with some miscasts we ended up with 76 sellable tigresses for a production cost of £139.00.

Cost therefore of 76 tigresses unbagged is £247.92 giving rise to a cost of  Ã‚£3.26 per Tigress for the initial starting stock.  

Any stock after this first run will come in at £139.00 divided by 76 which is £1.82 per Tigress.

We have priced the Tigress at £4 per unit as we feel this is a reasonable price to pay for her and anything more would of course increase our profit margin but would also price her out of the market.

Okay so technically we make 74p per Tigress for the first 76 sold.  However out of this comes bagging cost plus shipping costs to get the stock to us plus any fees from Credit card or Paypal payments.  Also we sell to retailers at 40% discount so if any of them want some of these first 76 Tigresses then we actually run at a loss of 86 pence per unit.

Okay you know the actual unit cost of the Tigress for casting but also out of the profit for her we have to pay taxes, paypal and credit card processing fees, bagging and basing costs, staff wages and everything else attributed to running a business.

Yes of course some figures we make more profit on but with the recent prices rises even the smaller less complicated figures come in at around 70 - 90 pence per unit.  Yes we can get them made cheaper but then the quality goes.

Now also dont forget that Kev actually sculpted the Tigress so we didnt have to pay him any sculpting fees, however if we had paid for her to be sculpted this would have added to the unit cost and it would probably have meant we had to sell about 200 of her before we started making any profit."


It's kind of sobering, and also a valuable reality check about needing 100 sales or so to become profitable.