Resurrecting lost moulds

[john redman]

I gather that for the reissue of the Bond Bug, the transparency sprue was found to have had gone missing. It was thus necessary to create a new one to re-release the kit. To do so, a new sprue was created by scanning in a vintage old one in 3D. The resulting sprue itself then appears to have been improved further. One or two build write-ups report that the side windows now have authentic ripples in them (because on the real car they were actually just vinyl).

This is pretty revelatory actually. If an old sprue can be copied and put back into production for a kit as inexpensive as the Bond Bug, and it still pays - well, can we look forward to resurrected reissues of a few other long-lost kits?

E.g.:

The Saunders-Roe S.R.53

The SAM-2 Guideline missile

SS Southern Cross

SS France

Free Enterprise

Hawker Hart (mould was altered into the Demon, so those are commonplace but Harts like hens' teeth)

Stingray cereal box giveaway

Fireball XL5 cereal box giveaway

That's not a complete list, of course (no cars on it for example). But all are now vanishingly rare.

More daringly, what is the situation with lost moulds of other manufacturers? For example, there was once a FROG 1/24 scale Bloodhound Missile. I gather this is one of the rarest tool of all. As it's long-lost, could Airfix scan one and reissue it? Who owns the rights to FROG designs now?

So how about it chaps?

[jopres57]

Making new moulds from scanning old parts has been mentioned before but I didn't know it was already being done. If it's possible to resurrect popular old kits like the ones mentioned above this would be a great idea.

[AirportsEd]

Agreed. If it is possible to reverse engineer long lost moulds then there's some great opportunities out there - including those John mentioned.

[Ratch]

Of course its possible, but is it economically viable?

[john redman]

Well, that's why I said "If an old sprue can be copied and put back into production for a kit as inexpensive as the Bond Bug, and it still pays".

The economics of whether it pays or not would be that x <= yz, where

x is the mould retool cost;

y is the number of units sold;

z is the unit price.

If units sold times unit price exceeds mould recreation cost, it pays.

For the Bug, Airfix got an otherwise unusable mould back into use - off which they could sell kits - for the cost only of the transparency mould. I don't know what the equivalent values of x, y and z would be for e.g. the SA-2, except they'd all be higher. There's more than one sprue and they're bigger, but 40 countries used or use the SA-2 so you could reissue it with fresh markings, double-bubble with a Vietnam-era Phantom etc. Also the price would be much higher - Hobby Boss do an SA-2 without the transporter and that's £25. Upgraded to S4 the SA-2 would be £21.49.

The rarest kits on my list are the cereal box ones, which are helpfully smaller, but whether they'd sell enough to pay in the 2020s I couldn't guess.

 

[Ratch]

If units sold times unit price exceeds mould recreation cost, it pays.

 

 

You are forgetting materials, labour, and overheads.

[leslie entwhistle]

i'm all for resurecting older model using 3d scanning

[Sailorman]

Interesting idea ........ who knows, we might see more of the older kits released. We have already had quite a few. Now it seems the Bloodhound missile is out too.

[john redman]

If units sold times unit price exceeds mould recreation cost, it pays.

You are forgetting materials, labour, and overheads.

No, these costs are subsumed into the value of your z,000 sales. They apply equally regardless of whether it's made off a resurrected mould or not, so they aren't factors in judging whether it makes sense to resurrect one.

The exam question is whether the effort of doing so pays for itself, which comes down to the value of the incremental sales you'll make versus the cost of the effort.

If it were prohibitively expensive to recover an old mould in this way, then by implication there should never be any new kits at all. The cost of designing a whole new S3 tool from scratch is certainly more than that of scanning an old one and then selling it in an S3 box. Yet somehow Airfix manages to keep producing new kits in all sizes, so for the right quantity of sales, the numbers clearly do stack up.

 

 

[peebeep]

Personally I would prefer that Airfix focus on new tooling and not try to replicate kits from the dim and distant past. Kits such as the Buffalo have a certain charm, can be great fun to build and I've invested in some Vintage Classics myself, but I'd take a new tool Buffalo over a replica of an old kit every time. YMMV.

There seems to be an assumption that doing a laser scan is some sort of panacea that gives you usable data to replicate an object suitable for injection moulding with a couple of mouse clicks. I don't think it's that straightforward. I've seen laser scans in my day job, they're impressive, but they generate lots of 'noise'. In the context of creating tooling for plastic models this noise has to be cleaned up and could potentially take up hundreds of hours of a CAD operators time.

From the stuff that Airfix have published on their blog it seems that for new tool kits their m.o. is to compare scans with models that have been worked up from first principles, i.e. using physically measured data and authentic blueprints. So I doubt they would scan an old kit then try and turn the scan into data to cut a new tool. In the case of the transparencies and again referring to the blog I believe they used the method as described above. I would think it's cost effective to work up a small transparency model from first principles because apart from the framing, there's not usually a lot of other detail to worry about, just basic shapes. The model can then be compared with the scan to make sure that the new parts are a good fit with the old tool components.

I can see that working up a relatively small frame with transparency components is doable in terms of replacing a lost transparency tool, but for a complete kit? I'm not so sure. You might as well think in terms of doing a new tool, which has been the policy since the Hornby takeover.

[Sailorman]

The Southern Cross model is not really worth re-issuing. It is to an odd scale and far from accurate.