Well said...indeed, the molds are WAY more sophisticated than people imagine...I design plastic parts for a living and have comissioned many molds and watched them running.
Warning: long, technical post...not for the faint of heart!
There are probably a few things needed to re-create those molds:
For the Plastic/rubber parts
-technical drawings (2d drawings with dimensions, design details, tolerances so joints aren't too loose or don't bind)
-patterns (sometimes hand-sculpted features that are transferred with specialized equipment--basically imagine a person running a precise pointer over the pattern that is connected to an arm that runs a cutter for the steel...a sort of spyro-graph device...and this arm can be used to 'up-size' or 'down-size' from the orginal pattern. Many KOs are made using machines of this nature; they use the Takara toy as the pattern instead of the original and scale it up or down)
-Electrodes which are machined from copper or carbon and used to burn/etch cavities into the tooling steel. The electrodes are VERY important part of the tool...some of the parts I've designed are created in tooling ONLY by electrodes (as opposed to patterns). There are often dozens of them and they need to be stored carefully, catalogued and numbered. They would be very easy to loose. Modern electrodes are machined by a computer operated machine so they are virutally identical to what has been created via 3DCAD (computer aided design software)
-important note--when they etch or burn cavities they need to make them a little bigger than the final part because plastic shrinks during molding. Different plastics shrink at different rates. And we wonder why those KOs have such crappy joints!?
-tooling design which includes parting lines, ejector pins, moving cores, water cooling, and all sorts of sophisticated engineering to allow the tool to run on a rather large (couple of car lengths) machine lightly assisted by an operator.
-also of interest--some of the older Takara molds may require adaptors or special fittings to run on modern injection molding machines! Either that or they have ANCIENT molding machines lying around...
Metal parts (die cast)
Again, they really need all the drawings and specifications originally developed to make the toy work.
Die casting relies even more on patterns...patterns are used to create cavities in rather thin-shelled molds, then joined together in a sort of tree with a runner system...and several die cast parts are made at once. Some are spun or rotated as the motel metal is poured in to ensure filling.
My two cents? They aren't doing as many reissues as we'd like because they simply won't make enough money off these old designs.
The vast majority of consumers expect reissues to cost a similar amount to mainline toys (animated, movie) and they simply can't because they are making far fewer and have less opportunities to run them in the future with repaints.
Feel free to tell me if this is too much information.
People who are deeply interested in these processes should check out the TV show "how it's made" airing on Discovery on a fairly regular basis. They show how common consumer products are manufactured in volume. Very cool stuff.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bruticus82
As you see above, you can reverse engineer molds. But I'm told it's very expensive to do it properly. If you do it cheaply, you end up with molds that don't have as much detail as the original, especially in panel lines and things like that.
When we say mold we're not talking about the little silicon molds people make for resin, these are metal molds, heavy duty for manufacturing machines. They cost tens of thousands of dollars (or so I'm told).
It's just not worth them to spend the money to remake a mold just for a small group of adult collectors who want a reissue. There are not enough of us to justify the costs, or so we're told.
Despite what we think about all the tf fans we have, the truth is they need to sell new lines, even classics universe 2.0, to little kids and other people or they don't make enough money. Without little kids buying toys, there would be no market for us at all. Even then they usually end up releasing repaints to try and make back the costs associated with making the mold, prototype, design, etc. Reissues wouldn't have some of these costs, but the substantial molding costs have to be spread over the number of units they sell, and they just can't sell enough.
Need proof? Look at the habsro g1 reissues. What price did they go down to on clearance?
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