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Gaging interest: Crowdfunded model kits


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Hi guys. I think its been a while since I've been around here. I've been hanging out on a couple other sites experimenting with some new modeling subjects and trying to build up my crowdsourced model company, Out of the Box. I've been posting on a couple other sites with some success in crowdfunding model kit projects.

 

Here's how it works: people submit their ideas for a model kit they would like to see produced. We post the ideas on our website and give them 30 days to sell x number of units. Generally, if at least half of the units sell in the 30 days, then we go ahead and produce the kit. If it doesn't get enough orders, we refund everyone's money at the end of the 30 days.  All of our kits are 3D printed, and we have 3 main printing options for most projects.

 

We just funded a 1/72 Yak-9T kit, and a 1/350 USS Atlanta CL-51 kit in under 48 hours, and we hope to have that up for sale to the public in a couple months. 

 

I was just wondering if you guys think about the concept? Would you like to be involved in future projects? Either by nominating new ideas or just by updating you guys when new Crowdfunding campaigns get launched. 

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21 minutes ago, modelingbob said:

You will NEVER see me participating in a crowd funded modeling project. Sorry. 

Thats fine. I appreciate your candor. This is the exact reason I post all of my ideas on forums, so I can understand varying opinions on my ideas. If you don't mind elaborating about why you're disinterested? That would be really helpful to me.

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Funding (or putting money upfront) is something I will never do for modeling projects because of "vaporware". Others may do this, but I won't. Way too many modeling companies are going this route and not delivering. You may very well be legitimate, but I have no way of knowing that. In addition, I won't pay for a modelling project until I lay eyes on said kits contents to insure it meets my requirements and needs. I've been promised the "world" many times by modelling companies, but not very often do I see the "world" actually delivered. 

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For some reason, this sounds strangely like John Andrews' Golden Eagle Society which sadly died a very quiet death.

 

Cheers, Dave, proudly holding on to Golden Eagle Society membership car #125.

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17 hours ago, modelingbob said:

Funding (or putting money upfront) is something I will never do for modeling projects because of "vaporware". Others may do this, but I won't. Way too many modeling companies are going this route and not delivering. You may very well be legitimate, but I have no way of knowing that. In addition, I won't pay for a modelling project until I lay eyes on said kits contents to insure it meets my requirements and needs. I've been promised the "world" many times by modelling companies, but not very often do I see the "world" actually delivered. 

 

That is a completely valid concern. And I totally get it. Thats why I guarantee refunds to anyone who funds a failed project, and anyone who isn't happy with the finished product. I want to reduce the risk as much as possible. And for the record, this isn't the first time that i've gotten this exact concern from someone. There definitely a lot of shady people in this industry, and with economics the way they are, I know a lot of railroad model companies are taking pre-orders for a product that isn't even developed yet, gage whether or not to produce the product, and more often than not, it does become vaporware. 

 

I'm not saying that Out of the Box is immune to that, because that would be impossible. We have two Crowdfunds that still have no bites, and a few that only have one funder. The way that I try to keep our crowdfunds from becoming vaporware is to keep the number of required funders as low as possible (25 or less), and keep the price as low as possible. We eat a lot of costs for our funders, like shipping and 3D printing costs. It helps that we have pre-negotiated rates for different types of projects with our engineers, so we know how much its going to cost to develop a given type of kit. 

 

Even if you don't feel comfortable making a financial contribution, if you come to us with an idea for a crowdfund, and we'll put it up free of charge, and do everything we can get it funded for you. 

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I put my money into a crowdsourced project by a known company. They wanted to produce an injection Reno racer in 48th. Unfortunately it didn’t get off the ground. I got my money back. 

 

Id certainly love to see a few subjects that are unlikely to be don’t by the big companies. I’d also love for someone to do some conversions (I’d pay a lot for a f4u-3 conversion that was 3d printed)

 

There was a guy in here a few years ago who tried to get a crowdfunded model off the ground but the price/benefit model was off. I think he was only offering a credit to finders. They would also have to buy the kit once it was produced. No one saw a benefit to that  

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How are you going to do the CAD? Take 1/48 F-4E Phantom II if you need an example. The level of scrutiny here will dictate that you will need access to a lot of accurate drawings/scans, people with specialized knowledge etc. 

 

Perhaps you can walk us through the steps. Say you got 100 people to agree to the above model. Then what?

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On 6/8/2018 at 7:16 PM, Janissary said:

How are you going to do the CAD? Take 1/48 F-4E Phantom II if you need an example. The level of scrutiny here will dictate that you will need access to a lot of accurate drawings/scans, people with specialized knowledge etc. 

 

Perhaps you can walk us through the steps. Say you got 100 people to agree to the above model. Then what?

 

Absolutely. Lets start the beginning. With an idea for a kit. We have 2 options for people who want us to make a model kit. One option is the customer can pay the full price for a custom model kit, for the model to be made. Or, if its something that I am really passionate about, I may cover part of the cost of the commission. The the other option to to submit an idea for crowdfunding, which I explained above. We usually don't need anywhere near 100 people to commit to a model. Never more than 25 people are needed.

 

If the person paid up front, or the crowdfund became fully funded, we would move on to the development phase. Most customers are very diligent about collecting their own references for their passion projects, so we usually have something to go for when we start doing CAD.  We work with a number of freelance mechanical engineers who do all of our CAD for us. All of them are very thorough and detail oriented. In your example, we would collect as many drawings, measurements and photos as we could, and work from that.  We are constantly iterating on the design and checking with the customer who started the project to make sure all of theirs needs are met, and we're not missing any details. This process usually takes a few months to complete. The main difference here, between a crowdfunded project, and a privately financed projects, is how we do status updates.  For a private project, we would email updates and screenshots to the customer, where as for a crowdfund, we would post the progress on a forum, and listen to the input of the other members on what needs to get fixed and areas of focus. 

 

We see our customers mostly commissioning oddball subjects, or models that used to only exist as vacuform models, so I don't see us ever doing something as famous and well documented as a Phantom, but I also wouldn't rule it out either. We do try not to step on anyone else's toes, so we don't usually want to do a subject that has been done by a lot of other people, unless they all butchered it. 

 

Once we finish development, everyone who contributed to the crowdfund get their model, and then we put it up for sale in our web store 1 week later.

 

Hope that explains things a bit better. 

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If somebody seriously wanted to do a 1/48 F11F Tiger, I could get them about half way on the main airframe components. I have wings, horizontal stabilizers, the fin with the fairing at the base and the ejection seat already mastered. I also have plenty of digital photos of the real thing to do it right.

 

That being said I'm not thrilled about paying up front for a product that I might never see and with no real guarantee that the finished thing would be worth the investment. 

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I'd snap up a good 1/48 F11F in a heartbeat. But, as noted above, good is the operative word. We already have mediocre in the Lindberg version, which I do have. At least Corky Meyer said it had an accurate shape for the prototype.

 

Can you post any images of previous models, before and after construction? After all, we're all about the "show me the plastic/resin/pe..."

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6 hours ago, Chriss7607 said:

If somebody seriously wanted to do a 1/48 F11F Tiger, I could get them about half way on the main airframe components. I have wings, horizontal stabilizers, the fin with the fairing at the base and the ejection seat already mastered. I also have plenty of digital photos of the real thing to do it right.

 

That being said I'm not thrilled about paying up front for a product that I might never see and with no real guarantee that the finished thing would be worth the investment. 

 

I completely understand that, thats why we do 2 things. One thing is that we guarantee refunds to anyone who is not happy with the finished model, or gets cold feet during the process. The other is full transparency, with regular updates of the progress of the project, including screenshots of the CAD model as we go. Its very normal for our customers to review our CAD models and find issues, than we then go back and fix before even get close to doing our first test print. 

 

As far as examples from us, we're still working on our first aircraft project, a 1/72 Yak-9T That is just starting its CAD process this week. If it helps, I can start a thread here at ARC and show you the whole process. 

Edited by Orion Field
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This sounds great at first look. I think you are going to find that a lot of the posters here are passionate about this or that particular subject, and if you ask for feedback on a project you'll get great help. 

Myself, though, I'd have to see your track record of producing actual finished, existing kits for sale before I take the risk with my wallet.

I wish you well with this.

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18 hours ago, Tracy White said:

 

Check out the link he dropped in his first post. There are some photos of a tank print on the 3D printing options page.

For this purpose, those photos are equivocal at best. And CAD visualization images can only tell you it's not horribly designed...

 

I've found that you good raking angle lighting of the original part, along with primed and then painted, are needed to really understand the detail and surface quality. Here's a photo I took of a part from Attack Squadron's printed rotor head on their excellent 1/48 MQ-8B.

 

Orion Field, can you post some images? I am interested.

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On 6/9/2018 at 1:39 PM, dogsbody said:

I'm guessing you meant gauging instead of gaging, is in something about to make you vomit.

 

 

Chris

Not to be THAT guy, but he's correct in using the term gaging. It's another acceptable form of gauging. The word you're thinking of is gagging, as in "gagging me with a spoon" .

 

Ok, carry on. 

 

Bill

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3 hours ago, dnl42 said:

For this purpose, those photos are equivocal at best. And CAD visualization images can only tell you it's not horribly designed...

 

I've found that you good raking angle lighting of the original part, along with primed and then painted, are needed to really understand the detail and surface quality. Here's a photo I took of a part from Attack Squadron's printed rotor head on their excellent 1/48 MQ-8B.

 

Orion Field, can you post some images? I am interested.

 

The short answer is yes, I can post some photos of our 3D printed products. They're all train models at this point, but I can show you two of our 3 printing options that we have now, still getting the 3rd one up and running. Let me put something together and post it later today. In the mean time, check out 3D Printing Options page for some photos of our 1/160 scale M88A1 Recovery Vehicle. 

Edited by Orion Field
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8 hours ago, niart17 said:

Not to be THAT guy, but he's correct in using the term gaging. It's another acceptable form of gauging. The word you're thinking of is gagging, as in "gagging me with a spoon" .

 

Ok, carry on. 

 

Bill

 

Ah, American word usage. I'm Canadian.

 

 

Chris

 

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Ok, the request for photos was for Orion Field not the F-11 stuff I mentioned. My bad! 

 

I think I'm on the same page as most people- the idea is interesting but I would like to have a good track record of kits produced to be more confident in making an investment. I'll keep an eye on this topic. 

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1 hour ago, Chriss7607 said:

Ok, the request for photos was for Orion Field not the F-11 stuff I mentioned. My bad! 

 

I think I'm on the same page as most people- the idea is interesting but I would like to have a good track record of kits produced to be more confident in making an investment. I'll keep an eye on this topic. 

All of the photos of printed models that I have are on the website.  Maybe the development thread will help you as well, once my engineer gets the first screenshots of the CAD progress I'll post them...somewhere appropriate on here.

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