Hacker News Reader

I would be remiss to not point out the obvious mechanical design challenges here. There are over a dozen injection molded parts that need tooling and shots set up. The NRE for this project could end up extremely substantial.

View on HN

You're probably right.

It looks like this project might raise well above the $48k, though. (It's at $108k as of now.)

I recognize that this can be both a blessing and a curse when it comes to Kickstarters. With regards to NRE, though - hopefully it's straightforwardly a good thing.

Yes. How is $48K even in the right ballpark?

You could do a dozen small parts at Protolabs for $50k, and that would get you through a small run of finished parts. But Protomold's tooling is proprietary and non-transferable. You don't own it, or get to see it. You would have to start fresh (with different design rules) to do a large scale production run. Which means a project like this could end up a victim of its own success.

Yeah that bit actually gives me pause. Injection molds cost thousands each. If there's a design flaw and some of the molds have to be redone, is there still money to do that?

The project is nearly double its Kickstarter goal as I write this so maybe that is accounted for now, but I would have guessed the goal should have been 2 to 4 times higher.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com