[gary]

Hi Trent,

If you are building anything electronic, don't even start to think about the expense of
designing enclosures and ejection molding before you have CE, FCC and C-Tick
compliance or at least pre-compliance. That means a gauntlet of tests by a NATA
accredited lab such as EMC Technologies here in Sydney. Be warned, it is
extremely expensive but without the compliance folder backed-up
by an accredited lab, you can't legally sell in just about the whole western world.

The reason for dong that first is that if you require additional shielding but have
already designed and tooled a plastic enclosure, you will be blowing a lot of money
if it can't be retro-fitted.

Designing the cores and cavity for injection molding requires lots of expertise and
years of experience. Forget anything you know about 3D printing being carried
across. Draft angles, ejector pins, movable cores, shrinkage and a mind boggling
array of complex technologies, techniques and hard-won skills come into play.

Consider the task of the humble industrial designer. Many people see
industrial design as being the outer appearance of a product. But the
complex, subtle intricacy of how it is to be successfully, reliably and consistently
injection molded is where the real skill and experience is required. A good industrial
designer is thinking ahead as to how the tool maker will make the tools and how
the injection equipment used will operate. Sometimes there are moving parts
in the process. When you talk to an industrial designer, they can point out the
subtlest of details they have incorporated into some inner part of an enclosure
that the general public will never see but can make a world of difference as to
whether the enclosure is going to fit together or otherwise be too structurally
weak at a certain point. Where most of us are thinking in terms of some static
object, these guys are thinking in terms of plastic flowing into the tools and
how it is cooling and so on. They see the fabrication of an enclosure as a
dynamic process, almost like it is a living thing.

So there is the expense of the industrial designer, the expense of the tool maker,
the expense of the tools (sometimes half a ton of steel can be involved in the
tool for a plastic enclosure you can hold in one hand) and the cost of the molding
itself. Prices have come down over the years but are still not for the feint hearted.

Getting back to the industrial design process for one moment. Consider the humble
lunch box. About as easy a shape as one can imagine. The box itself typically has
a natural draft angle. But consider that sealable lid for one moment. It is often
features like that, which we take for granted when we peel off the lid
and eat a fresh sandwich, that an industrial designer and a tool maker know how to do.
For the rest of us, we would eventually figure out how to do it too, but only after
dozens of iterations and millions of dollars.