grinderpete wrote:I believe that with everything put together (development, molds, etc.) The cost of a head is roughly 2 bucks. I wish I was smater. I mean smarter.
Ill do a cost breakdown from my design project from last year. We were making chopsticks out of polymer chips (polystyrene) in an injection molding machine, spitting out roughly 16 chopsticks per minute of operation.
We'll say they make 10 heads per minute, on a single machine that operates for 8 hours a day (no stop-time/shutdown)...for 200 days a year.
That's 16,000 heads. Each head requires 1/3 a pound of material @ .75 for nylon (.25 for polystyrene)...so the raw material cost is $12,000 ($4,000 ps). Then machine cost plus plates is $150,000 give/take.
So $150,000 + $4,000 ($1,333) = $154,000 ($151,333).
Development costs are negligable depending on if you wanna consider Mikey Powell shooting balls against glass bottles on his website "R&D"...but to skip ahead a bit....
16,000 Evo Pros @ $79.99 = $1,279,840.
Machinary can be used on multiple molds with relative ease of changing material volumes via computer.
Oh btw, broken heads...I am willing to bet that they throw them into a "recycler" or sell them to a recycler and stick em right back in and sell them for the same amount. Odds are...a 2nd Generation head is truly 2nd "Generation". That's right...nerd punny-ness.