casting process

[geemoney]

so how does the process work?

lets say you make something that is so cool that it catches the eye of a noted caster.

does the originator get anything for his efforts?

like multiple duplicate parts, percentage kickback?

their work immortalized, etc.

just curious.

[Mark]

You have to make the deal, at whatever is agreeable to the parties involved.  I did a '62-'63 Ranchero body for Modelhaus years ago.  It was a simple deal ('62 front end on a '61 body, not hard to do) but I cut a mint unused '62 body to get part of the front clip, and those were never really easy to find.  And this was a few years before Ertl reissued the '61 Ranchero in 1997.  The V8 engine issue Ranchero hadn't been available since '78 or so, so that kit wasn't exactly common when I did this.  I swapped the finished body only (which had the hood molded as part of it) for two complete kits, one '62 and one '63.  The only difference between the two was the bumpers.  Modelhaus sold them as complete kits at first, with straight copies of '61 kit parts for the rest of the kit except the bumpers.  They included my name in the price list when it was first available, but not when it was put back in the line after being dropped for a few years.  Having my name on it in the first place wasn't something I'd asked for, so when it wasn't included the second time around it didn't matter to me.

When I was doing castings, I'd have people offering me stuff to do but I turned nearly all of them down.  I remember looking at a shortened wide-box Dodge pickup bed that had a huge gap between the front wall and the bed floor where it had been shortened, and I didn't think the wall was in there straight.  Sometimes people think that stuff can be fixed in the mold-making process.  Too, they'll load the primer on and wet sand the part to a decent level of smoothness, but the primer is then hiding a lot of sandpaper scratches and such.  The mold material will shrink the primer down and reveal all of the flaws, which will then be reproduced in every casting.  When I did the Ranchero body, it never had any primer applied to it anywhere other than where I'd joined the pieces together.  I'd cut the Ranchero body so as to leave the lower half of the front fenders alone (with the "Ranchero" script intact), and spliced the '62 clip at the narrowest point, the center of the front wheel opening.  The rest of the splice was along the top of the body side recess, and very close to the door line.  I never even sprayed primer on it, just dabbed it with a brush along the cut lines.  90% of that got sanded off. 

Another guy sent me a Ford pickup wheel that had five angled slots in it; I don't think any two were the same width or at the same angle.  I'd wanted to do that wheel myself prior to that, so I agreed to have that one sent to me in return for three or four sets of castings.  Doing the castings for that guy wore out one mold, and I didn't feel like trying to fix the piece he'd sent me.  So I made another wheel myself and never used the other one to make a mold again.  All of the Ford pickup wheels I sold were off of my own original part.   

[mrindy77]

I used to charge $100 a mold regardless of size(up to a 1/24 scale body). I kept the mold. Parts produced from the mold were sold to customer at an agreed upon price, usually based on resin used. I factored my time into the part cost. Typical car body was about $20. A mold without intricate cut ins usually lasted about 40-50 castings before it startede to 'chunk' out.  Find out if you get the mold and make sure the caster is ethical and won't sell your product underneath you.