That's a how long is a bit of string question but from double to five times the cost is not unheard of.

Quote from: acko22 on February 14, 2017, 08:57:44 AM
excuse me for my lack of knowledge what is the kind of difference between the costs of hard Vs soft tooling?

And if you meant what is the difference physically.  Hard tooling is made from tool steel, which is very difficult to machine and requires more exotic processess such as EDM or fairly complicated heat treatment.  It is also much more difficult to modify if you need to make changes.
Soft tooling is either a softer grade of steel or a medium to hard grade of aluminium.

Tool lives of as much as 10,000 impressions aren't unheard of for soft tools, but it depends a lot on the shape of the part and for models that's the one thing you can't change much (at least on the outside).

It also depends on the machines and facilities the particular company has.  Some places specialise in soft tooling so have got very efficient at inspecting tools for wear, repairing part worn tools etc.  For some other manufacturers this would require them to change the way they work quite a bit so it would either be expensive or it wouldn't get done, resulting in possible quality problems.

QuoteIf this is the case then is there not a danger of it biting any manufacturer in the back side as any savings that could be made from soft tooling would be immediately lost in having to produce a second set?

Surley the cost of the tooling is included in the price of the end product so any further runs would  include the cost of a new tool,but would still be cheaper than the initial run as the tooling design has already been done.

Quote from: themadhippy on February 14, 2017, 10:21:00 AM

QuoteIf this is the case then is there not a danger of it biting any manufacturer in the back side as any savings that could be made from soft tooling would be immediately lost in having to produce a second set?

Surley the cost of the tooling is included in the price of the end product so any further runs would  include the cost of a new tool,but would still be cheaper than the initial run as the tooling design has already been done.

Not necessarily. Because the cost of the tooling is so high it would make the RRP of the initial run way too much if it was only factored into that run. So it's amortised over the expected life of the tool (i.e. multiple runs) so the cost of the product per run is lower. That means though that you have to bet on the model selling enough over multiple runs to cover the money that you've invested.

Quote from: themadhippy on February 14, 2017, 10:21:00 AM

QuoteIf this is the case then is there not a danger of it biting any manufacturer in the back side as any savings that could be made from soft tooling would be immediately lost in having to produce a second set?

Surley the cost of the tooling is included in the price of the end product so any further runs would  include the cost of a new tool,but would still be cheaper than the initial run as the tooling design has already been done.

Pretty much. If you have to remake the tooling for second and subsequent runs, you lose the potential savings available from reusing the original tooling. A hard tooling costs more initially but offers the potential for savings in the long run.

The question is whether there will be a long run. I suspect there is no single "right answer" to this issue, just different ways of cutting the cake. Conventional wisdom so far seems to be that hard toolings are the way to go with 2nd and subsequent runs being more profitable.

However, as the number of prototypes that are popular enough to justify repeated production runs continues to fall, it remains to be seen if this will continue to be true. Take the Pendolino being made for RevolutioN by Rapido. The Kickstarter for the project reached around 800 sets which (while short of the 1000 target) was considered enough by Rapido to justify proceeding. In spite of the great value price tag, this model only just squeaked into production (due in no small part to the efforts of Ben and Mike of RevolutioN). The Pendolino has some duplicate vehicles in the rake meaning that some of the toolings with be producing multiple thousands of vehicles (4 Motor Seconds in an 11-car rake and 3 in a 9-car).

I would love to see a GWR 4700 (annoyingly Heljan are doing it in 00 rather than Bachmann or we might have seen it as part of the Farish range eventually). They were long lived and distinctive but there were only 9 of them (plus a new build taking shape at Didcot). Could 1000 be sold? Possibly. Could 10,000 be sold (even spread out over several years)? I am not sure. Maybe a soft tooling that would last enough for perhaps 2 runs would be adequate and allow the model to produced at a commercially viable price whereas a hard tooling would be too expensive as there might be enough runs ever done to repay the tooling costs without a prohibitive price for the finished loco.

With all said, on the soft tooling been cheaper but with shorter runs available it does offer some advantages which cant be denied.

However thinking with a business head on its a big risk as what can any company call niche?? As with any model you don't really know the numbers until they actually start selling, I am sure Mike and Ben can vouch for that fact just look a the TEAs people held off and well how many regretted not getting some when they had the chance.

With the emergence of 3D printing and some of the new techniques been made there soft tooling seems like a risk for niche models which wont sell the 1000 minimum needed for hard tooling, which while more expensive allows for multiple runs without a fresh set of tooling as and when there is sufficient demand.

Quote from: Rabs on February 14, 2017, 09:38:10 AM

Quote from: acko22 on February 14, 2017, 08:57:44 AM
excuse me for my lack of knowledge what is the kind of difference between the costs of hard Vs soft tooling?

And if you meant what is the difference physically.  Hard tooling is made from tool steel, which is very difficult to machine and requires more exotic processess such as EDM or fairly complicated heat treatment.  It is also much more difficult to modify if you need to make changes.
Soft tooling is either a softer grade of steel or a medium to hard grade of aluminium.

Tool lives of as much as 10,000 impressions aren't unheard of for soft tools, but it depends a lot on the shape of the part and for models that's the one thing you can't change much (at least on the outside).

It also depends on the machines and facilities the particular company has.  Some places specialise in soft tooling so have got very efficient at inspecting tools for wear, repairing part worn tools etc.  For some other manufacturers this would require them to change the way they work quite a bit so it would either be expensive or it wouldn't get done, resulting in possible quality problems.

Thanks for the information, making things for clearer before I could ask!  Do some of the small cottage industry makers actually keep soft tooling for decades? And how long can hard tooling last?

I'm not aware of any cottage industry suppliers who use injection moulding.  Union Mills, Langley, PD Marsh, NBrassLocos and Gem all use metal casting (either investment or low pressure die casting).  Most low volume 'plastic' parts are vacuum cast with resin (although 3d printing is making quite a bit of headway here).
For these processes yes, I believe that the owners do keep the moulds for many, many years and will top up stock as and when sales demand.

The discussion above about injection moulding is only really relevant to the larger manufacturers Farish, Dapol, RevolutioN (via Rapido)

High grade hard tools that are producing a shape that doesn't cause much wear on the tool can cope with >1,000,000 cycles.  More generally you'd expect >100,000 parts from a hard tool with minimal maintenance.  I don't know the detail of the economics for model railways but I can't see why anyone would use a fully hard tool - the volumes just don't justify the costs.

Not very long (~10 years) ago soft tools could be limited to a few hundred impressions.  These days the better aluminium alloys will give at least a factor of 10 better life, which for a lot of industries turns what was a difficult choice into a very easy one.

Quote from: Rabs on February 15, 2017, 02:55:09 AM
I'm not aware of any cottage industry suppliers who use injection moulding. 

NGS (via others), Parkside Dundas, Chivers, Cambrian all spring to mind and there have been more (particularly in 4mm).

I know one of the large-ish RTR manufacturers uses soft (aluminium IIRC) tooling but when you understand their business model it is easy to understand why. The majority of the RTR factories use "hard" steel tooling.

Cheers, Mike

B H E use a very old plastic injection moulding machine to make their coach and D M U kits and it
has just been repaired so once the weather warms up me and Ray hope to get the stock built up again ,but its such an old machine that it is very tempermental ,sometime we can spend a whole Sunday and get hardly any roofs ,floors or sides ,but the next time we have a go we do reasonably well and another day we can get lots done .
I have got a bad chest infection at the moment and Val has been in hospital with pneumonia so that has put production back for a while as  its very cold in Rays shed and unfortunately health comes first.
Bob

Quote from: red_death on February 15, 2017, 10:07:07 AM
NGS (via others), Parkside Dundas, Chivers, Cambrian all spring to mind and there have been more (particularly in 4mm).

I know one of the large-ish RTR manufacturers uses soft (aluminium IIRC) tooling but when you understand their business model it is easy to understand why. The majority of the RTR factories use "hard" steel tooling.

Cheers, Mike

Very interesting, thanks.  I guess the economics must stack up a little differently than in the industries I work in.  Perhaps the use of hard tools is driven as much by the need for very clean, flash and defect free parts (which hard tools are usually much better at producing) as by production volumes.

Thinking about it, most of my experience is with parts that are quite a bit larger.  The costs of the tool go up in roughly proportion to the volume of the tool (i.e. roughly the cube of the longest dimension of the part).  That would suggest that the tipping point for hard tools for small parts (like n gauge locos) is likely to be at much lower volumes than I'm used to. For larger parts, hard tools can be enormously expensive and you need to be very confident that you'd go through several replacement sets of soft tools before it makes economic sense.  That probably isn't true for small scale models and might explain why your real world knowledge of what companies are actually doing disproves my theoretical ramblings above!