I'm looking for a designer who can use a commercial caboose kit as a baseline to design a caboose not currently in commercial production. While I'd want a complete kit designed, the actual calculation work will be minimal, as you'll mostly be doing a little bit longer version of the existing commercial kit. Longer roof, longer sides, longer frame. Essentially, everything else would just involve duplication of the parts included in the commercial kit. My priority for this kit would be HO scale, but I don't necessarily want to limit the product availability to one scale. Please let me know if you're interested in this project. Pay scale = negotiable. I would need exclusive use of the designs in all forms, with credit to your shop in the design's description section on Shapeways. Thanks for your interest. Chuck Greenberg Excelsior Design-Orientation
Hi Chuck, I actually have some experience in this. I designed a model of the EBT caboose for someone who wanted to have a kit injection molded. Not only did I model the caboose for kit production, but also did the layouts for injection molding, priced and contacted several injection molding outfits and put together pricing sheets/budgeting etc. Essentially, I provided a turnkey estimate to the customer. Who upon receipt, realized the cost of an injection molded kit made no sense in terms of profitability due to projected low demand/sales. Regardless, I'd be happy to look at your project and provide an estimate for modeling etc. Best, Phil
Hi Chuck, Adding to Phil's post, you need to be careful about the "multiple scales" approach. Scaling a successful design from say HO to N will shrink everything roughly in half - that includes wall thickness. So if the walls were made as thin as possible to keep the HO costs down they will become unprintable in N. Conversely blowing up an HO design to O will double all the wall thicknesses and make it unnecessarily expensive. Also lumpy details that look ok in HO would need reworked in O to look good. And making these changes means essentially redesigning the whole thing for each scale. Not to mention that trucks and couplers require specific attachment designs for each scale. I think you are best advised to stick to one scale initially, and view any re-scaling as separate design contracts. Hope this helps!
Thank you so much for this cautionary wisdom! I'll keep this in mind, and just start with ol' number one: HO.
Phil: Thanks for sharing this and illustrating your experience using a kit as a baseline. I might have a designer identified for this project, but can I shortlist you in case the designer doesn't work out? I've got two handfuls of other projects that I need a designer for.