Well the last few posts were a lot more interesting than mine haha. And now I want some tubes to play with darn it.
It seems to me something like my project would top out around $20 per unit, and I'm looking at $60 per unit now. I also have an incoming qty of 50 of another smaller model that turned out to be too small to serve any great purpose. It's useable but not what I really wanted at all. I can see I'm probably going to have to sell those at a loss because those turned out to be $35 per unit and that's what prompted me to switch manufacturing. That and the location of the new place was highly convenient vs. Canada.
Being a part time innovator is really time consuming, in the future I will most definitely know to get these details out of the way up front. Now I just hope when I do release this everyone likes it, it's adding a whole new edge talking about it.
The really good news is I just got a quote for something I made for the Spinneret and it's a couple bucks per unit haha. Oh man no kick starter needed. Soon as it's done you're getting samples. Thanks again.
Sorry for hijacking your thread with historical reminisense.
End of the story might be that the business world can be very hard. Every shark wants to eat every other shark.
However sometimes it comes down to man to man trust.
If I understand correctly the reason why we have a 747 Jumbo Jet is because the boss of Boeing and the boss of PanAm had lunch together and one said "If you can build it I will buy it"
Yep, trust and a handshake counts for a lot. Where you don't have it, now this thread contains a bunch of goodies for you xanadu.
@Heater, yeah! Honestly, I would totally groove on a prop, running a tube driven display. Maybe the best would be longer persistence phosphor, with vector and raster options, green screen, big!
I really like CRT displays of all kinds. Shame they are rapidly getting hard to find. (goes off to post up a WANTED: before it's too late!)
Just wanted to thank everyone for posting their experiences. I graduated with a EE a few years ago and there is a lot I know I don't know and even more that I don't know I don't know. Hope that makes sense. Reading this maybe I can save myself some trouble in the future.
Just to let everyone know that there is STILL some manufacturing in the good ol' USA.
I work at Greenray Industries In Mechanicsburg PA.
We manufacture ultra-precision oscillators. Been around since the 1960's (space race, first man on the moon stuff).
We do everything from design to fab (full metal shop) to build and test.
It is a great place to work, we need to bring back more manufacturing to the this country before we get any worse...
We don't do much bulk stuff. A lot of orders are 2 pieces. Expensive, but they are worth it.
Just to let everyone know that there is STILL some manufacturing in the good ol' USA.
I work at Greenray Industries In Mechanicsburg PA.
We manufacture ultra-precision oscillators. Been around since the 1960's (space race, first man on the moon stuff).
We do everything from design to fab (full metal shop) to build and test.
It is a great place to work, we need to bring back more manufacturing to the this country before we get any worse...
We don't do much bulk stuff. A lot of orders are 2 pieces. Expensive, but they are worth it.
Bean
If you did sheet metal I'd be calling right now. Any recomendations for such? I'm keeping it USA.
I use GP Manufacturing, Orange CA. They do all kinds of really nice metal fab, enclosures, panels, etc. They can send out for powder coating, silk screen etc.
I had a small machine shop doing design, engineering, machining, and fab, but it's such a cutthroat...er competitive market that it's hard to stay in business. I was under capitalized and couldn't afford the time it took to get my name out and be successful. I pretty much started over from scratch after splitting from a business partner with a bad name. I had customers from before, but many more new customers, I just couldn't wait out the economics.
I worked on the premise (which was proven true) that there are no walk-in machine shops anymore. I did a lot of business with walk-ins, and they told friends and other shops referred me all the time because they couldn't afford to do walk-in work. It was fulfilling work, but not highly profitable. I have learned that the only way you could do that again is to be cash-in on everything, specifically the building.
I realize this is an old thread, but I just had a great conversation with a friend who did this. We met in the mid 90's, when I was teaching mechanical CAD design regularly. At that time, it was still new, having just been made possible to do on an ordinary PC instead of an SGI, SUN or HP UNIX workstation. Fun times actually. Parametric, history based design was all the rage and people were lining up to get going. At the time, this friend was a student and we got along well enough to keep touch over the years.
In short, he worked for somebody doing prototype and small quantity fixtures, tooling and such. That business person didn't manage things well and entered into an expansion that wasn't warranted given the business and went under. He bought some software from the folks I work for, and I did a few house calls to get him all setup and rocking. He put his house up against a mill and some shop gear, rented a small place and hired on a few other great people.
What ended up working well for them was to add automation to the list of skills they employ. Just machining and building wasn't enough to really get the margins they needed to build and grow, or even sustain. They added a couple of EE guys to the mix and that turned out excellent!
Today, he just paid about half a million cash for an older building, split with one of the early employees who saved a lot of what he was paid, financed some new equipment and now have about 15 people. I was called out to see the new digs and to setup some new software and systems for them. Impressive really! They went from a rented garage to a fairly nice business in the space of about 6-8 years.
Walk ins are still accepted. I think that speaks back to when he was small trying to get established. Not sure they make much on them, but a few of those walk in's have resulted in some nice runs.
IMHO, the key to this is to build solutions to problems, not just offer up manufacturing services. In my line of work, I get to see, talk to and work with lots of companies each year ranging from just the small guy starting out to top tier manufacturers / suppliers. A lot of niche stuff is trending back to the US. I know this isn't a US only forum community, and I can't speak to what is happening elsewhere. If you can, do that! I would like to read it.
If I were in a position to do this myself today, I would couple the mad EE skills here with some good manufacturing and target a niche or two. The big advantage to build on is low latency and obviously solid solutions. Often, companies will pay a small premium for a shorter delivery cycle and sourcing locally eliminates language barriers and can enable direct interaction with the teams on either end. My friend often ships completed products with a person. It all gets debugged, tuned up and tested right there, up and running quick. From there, they keep all the data handy, documenting more than usual so that future replacements / upgrades / changes happen in a familiar low cost low noise way.
Cash in on the building and such is why I decided to post this here. One of the major growth costs was people and a place to work. Equipment can either be financed, leased or obtained used and refurbished. Lots of options there, particularly if a person has access to, or is multi-discipline capable, but rent and people require a fairly thick month to month cash flow, which is very difficult to boot-strap into viability.
The other alternative, and the one that worked for this guy, was to secure just one major contract to service that rent and fixed monthly costs. It meant running the place very lean, with the core crew making time equity investments, only taking what they needed out of the business, keeping the rest in there to get through slow times. Doing that paid off very nicely though.
Had they been able to get a place early on, it would have been a whole lot easier to build it up, potentially half the time. Just thought I would share that for the potential builders here. Pedward is spot on, IMHO.
The other trend really taking hold is the hacker spaces! A growing number of people are seeing a parallel between those and the library. The library is an information commons everybody can pull from and leverage to do things of value. Today, information happens over the Internet, which has diminished though not entirely marginalized the library. The big problem now is just production. Information and software to realize designs is mature and cheap and capable. Actually making things isn't. Enter the hacker spaces! For a rental or subscription, or even free access, people can make stuff for cost of materials, some light training or consulting / mentoring and time.
IMHO, starting up one of those might be viable too, or there is simply using one to get product concepts and small quantities done. Damn cool, if you ask me.
What I find particularly interesting is the design for manufacture possible now. With 3D printing, laser cutting, basic milling and turning getting scaled down and cheap, and the growing acceptance of basic materials, it's possible to solve problems in a much leaner way than was possible in the past! Design software helps in this too, simply because exploring the possible options is now inexpensive enough to warrant exploring the lean and possible options too! People are starting to explore what can be done in these smaller scale spaces with very good results.
I think this all means lots of niches are sprouting up, each presenting an opportunity where lean, smart solutions can improve on established, thicker ones. Great time to be into this stuff, IMHO.
As a computer technician I have several different types of clients that I deal with on a daily basis. One of them happens to be a Engineering/Machine shop. The owner is the nicest guy in the worls and I have been doing work for them for over 10 years now. I have in the past come up with some of my own ideas that some day may make it to market. Since they are an Engineering and Machine shop I needed their input and possibly their expertise in designing and manufacturing. Before I showed them anything, even with how close we are, I had them sign an NDA. Although some say they are worthless, it is better to have one that not to. Just my 2 cents worth!!!
Comments
It seems to me something like my project would top out around $20 per unit, and I'm looking at $60 per unit now. I also have an incoming qty of 50 of another smaller model that turned out to be too small to serve any great purpose. It's useable but not what I really wanted at all. I can see I'm probably going to have to sell those at a loss because those turned out to be $35 per unit and that's what prompted me to switch manufacturing. That and the location of the new place was highly convenient vs. Canada.
Being a part time innovator is really time consuming, in the future I will most definitely know to get these details out of the way up front. Now I just hope when I do release this everyone likes it, it's adding a whole new edge talking about it.
The really good news is I just got a quote for something I made for the Spinneret and it's a couple bucks per unit haha. Oh man no kick starter needed. Soon as it's done you're getting samples. Thanks again.
Sorry for hijacking your thread with historical reminisense.
End of the story might be that the business world can be very hard. Every shark wants to eat every other shark.
However sometimes it comes down to man to man trust.
If I understand correctly the reason why we have a 747 Jumbo Jet is because the boss of Boeing and the boss of PanAm had lunch together and one said "If you can build it I will buy it"
With no lawyers in sight it was to be.
Do not be disheartened because of one setback.
@Heater, yeah! Honestly, I would totally groove on a prop, running a tube driven display. Maybe the best would be longer persistence phosphor, with vector and raster options, green screen, big!
I really like CRT displays of all kinds. Shame they are rapidly getting hard to find. (goes off to post up a WANTED: before it's too late!)
I work at Greenray Industries In Mechanicsburg PA.
We manufacture ultra-precision oscillators. Been around since the 1960's (space race, first man on the moon stuff).
We do everything from design to fab (full metal shop) to build and test.
It is a great place to work, we need to bring back more manufacturing to the this country before we get any worse...
We don't do much bulk stuff. A lot of orders are 2 pieces. Expensive, but they are worth it.
Bean
If you did sheet metal I'd be calling right now. Any recomendations for such? I'm keeping it USA.
I worked on the premise (which was proven true) that there are no walk-in machine shops anymore. I did a lot of business with walk-ins, and they told friends and other shops referred me all the time because they couldn't afford to do walk-in work. It was fulfilling work, but not highly profitable. I have learned that the only way you could do that again is to be cash-in on everything, specifically the building.
In short, he worked for somebody doing prototype and small quantity fixtures, tooling and such. That business person didn't manage things well and entered into an expansion that wasn't warranted given the business and went under. He bought some software from the folks I work for, and I did a few house calls to get him all setup and rocking. He put his house up against a mill and some shop gear, rented a small place and hired on a few other great people.
What ended up working well for them was to add automation to the list of skills they employ. Just machining and building wasn't enough to really get the margins they needed to build and grow, or even sustain. They added a couple of EE guys to the mix and that turned out excellent!
Today, he just paid about half a million cash for an older building, split with one of the early employees who saved a lot of what he was paid, financed some new equipment and now have about 15 people. I was called out to see the new digs and to setup some new software and systems for them. Impressive really! They went from a rented garage to a fairly nice business in the space of about 6-8 years.
Walk ins are still accepted.
IMHO, the key to this is to build solutions to problems, not just offer up manufacturing services. In my line of work, I get to see, talk to and work with lots of companies each year ranging from just the small guy starting out to top tier manufacturers / suppliers. A lot of niche stuff is trending back to the US. I know this isn't a US only forum community, and I can't speak to what is happening elsewhere. If you can, do that! I would like to read it.
If I were in a position to do this myself today, I would couple the mad EE skills here with some good manufacturing and target a niche or two. The big advantage to build on is low latency and obviously solid solutions. Often, companies will pay a small premium for a shorter delivery cycle and sourcing locally eliminates language barriers and can enable direct interaction with the teams on either end. My friend often ships completed products with a person. It all gets debugged, tuned up and tested right there, up and running quick. From there, they keep all the data handy, documenting more than usual so that future replacements / upgrades / changes happen in a familiar low cost low noise way.
Cash in on the building and such is why I decided to post this here. One of the major growth costs was people and a place to work. Equipment can either be financed, leased or obtained used and refurbished. Lots of options there, particularly if a person has access to, or is multi-discipline capable, but rent and people require a fairly thick month to month cash flow, which is very difficult to boot-strap into viability.
The other alternative, and the one that worked for this guy, was to secure just one major contract to service that rent and fixed monthly costs. It meant running the place very lean, with the core crew making time equity investments, only taking what they needed out of the business, keeping the rest in there to get through slow times. Doing that paid off very nicely though.
Had they been able to get a place early on, it would have been a whole lot easier to build it up, potentially half the time. Just thought I would share that for the potential builders here. Pedward is spot on, IMHO.
The other trend really taking hold is the hacker spaces! A growing number of people are seeing a parallel between those and the library. The library is an information commons everybody can pull from and leverage to do things of value. Today, information happens over the Internet, which has diminished though not entirely marginalized the library. The big problem now is just production. Information and software to realize designs is mature and cheap and capable. Actually making things isn't. Enter the hacker spaces! For a rental or subscription, or even free access, people can make stuff for cost of materials, some light training or consulting / mentoring and time.
IMHO, starting up one of those might be viable too, or there is simply using one to get product concepts and small quantities done. Damn cool, if you ask me.
What I find particularly interesting is the design for manufacture possible now. With 3D printing, laser cutting, basic milling and turning getting scaled down and cheap, and the growing acceptance of basic materials, it's possible to solve problems in a much leaner way than was possible in the past! Design software helps in this too, simply because exploring the possible options is now inexpensive enough to warrant exploring the lean and possible options too! People are starting to explore what can be done in these smaller scale spaces with very good results.
I think this all means lots of niches are sprouting up, each presenting an opportunity where lean, smart solutions can improve on established, thicker ones. Great time to be into this stuff, IMHO.