MANUFACTURING IDEA!

[nhk750]

I have a great idea to help more people get into building and increase sales for all manufactures.
Design, laser cut, make instructions, and produce electric conversion kits for all existing internal combustion balsa kits available.
I have built and designed a few so far myself for my builds and I'm really not that smart, so imagine if the smart manufactures did this? People like Sig, Flight Test, and Horizon Hobbies could tap a gold mine here as so many RC guys are turned off by the challenge of conversion and the selection of electric kits is limited.
I really think the guys at flight Test could take off with this as they have the tooling and people to pull it off, plus they could get into the balsa scene this way.
If I had the tooling and skills to draw plans and engineer I would totally be all over this.

 

[rockyboy]

It wouldn't take much effort either and would help them extend the value of their intellectual property (for the ones that own the plans rights anyway).

I've been thinking about a forum challenge like this where people pick plans from Outerzone and build/release mod plans to bring them up to date for modern electronics. Maybe this is something we could try to go with (or as a modification to) the Balsa Build along this fall?

 

[Hai-Lee]

Sadly whilst your idea seems good and logical on the surface, as a budding manufacturer I can assure you that the reason such things do not already occur is purely economic. Whilst the market might seem large enough to recoup development and tooling costs, considering the size of the global market, it is the transport and inventory holding costs that make the retail costs far too high and the market far too small.

When you add those issues to the growing use of home 3D printing, Vacuum forming, Carbon fibre usage, Laser cutters and the like all combined with the sharing forums like this which distribute such designs and the market almost totally disappears.

Why would any business invest money in a design that can be easily copied and distributed worldwide whilst the enforcing of copyright on the design which can cost huge sums of money for each and every individual customer. Sadly it was such a approach to design infringements that effectively drove the Wright Brothers out of the forefront of aviation design even before WWI.

The current range of Balsa kits are all laser cut and of high precision and yet they cost less, (in relative terms), than the box of sticks and a copy of the paper plans that was a kit just 40 or so years ago. Even the venerable wooden ARF planes are starting to become rare except for the upper end of the hobby in both size and expense.

Apart from the increased cost of tooling the current trend of injection molded foam models are difficult to copy or reverse engineer and so have become the medium of choice for manufacturers of small to medium size RC model aircraft. Unfortunately the spare parts holdings are extremely adversely impacted by the transport and distribution expenses and so do not seem to be available for very long!

Everything comes down to cost and profit for a manufacturer and that includes transport and inventory costs. We all would love that perfect design with unlimited parts availability but sadly we are not willing to pay its true value.

Manufacturing something is easy but making a profit is not!

Have fun!