I realize that this is a fantasy "what if" thread, and I'm not trying to be a Debbie Downer. I've been around manufacturing (metal or wood) just about all of my life, and even as a youngster did odd jobs in machine shops. Whenever I hear "Why can't they just make a ____" I feel compelled to answer. I'm just passing along some information, make if it what you will.Atone wrote:I don't know why (well maybe I do) but I was thinking about this today. I think one thing that should be relatively easy for a manufacturer to do is make a metal device with interchangeable parts. There is no reason why these should be custom at all. They should just be configurable. If I want a different size ring I should be able to just order it. Same with the tubes and everything else. While this will not make any device perfect it would make it a lot better.
Manufacturing process and development is *very* expensive. Despite the ability of people to design 3D drawings, the simple fact is that it takes hours of work to figure out how things should fit together, *especially* for a product which doesn't have any predecessor. Most drawings are in 2D, which is much cheaper, but still requires a lot of forethought, planning, and re-fitting. And then there's the transition from paper (or CAD) to the actual machining. That's when you realize that you can't get tools to make little features, or that they need to be custom made - and sometimes, even the custom tooling (which also needs to be designed and tested) doesn't work as planned. Machine time in US job shops runs from $40 to $90 per hour (depending upon type of work, material, delivery, and backlog). In my shop, it's not unusual to spend $500 just to get tooled up and ready to run the first part, and that doesn't count material.
If an engineer wants to design a way to hold something to something else, there are a lot of things he can fall back on, mainly similar designs, most of which have become standardized through common usage. Unfortunately, there aren't many existing designs for chastity devices; you've got "trapped ball" devices, full belts, and piercing-dependent (Lori's) models. Let's take the CBxxxx line for an example.
The original CB2000 was built from purchased acrylic rings and rods. Once they figured out a design model, it was easy to manufacture parts to that design: they simply cut, drilled, and glued parts together. After the product became successful, it was a simple step to have it cast (molded) because a) they already had a design, b) plastic is easy to work with, and c) it's easy to create a mold to cast rods and rings - we've been doing it for years.
Few people understand how big a jump it was to go from that to the CB3000. Rods and rings are simple and symmetric, but the 3k needed an organic shape. I can't even imagine how much is cost to design the first mold, test it, modify it, etc., but I'm going to guess somewhere around $20,000 for the top and bottom half, plus the rings. This is a huge investment, especially considering that until then, pretty much all other devices were hand-made.
My guess is that the Millers figured out a one-size-fits-all model and left it there, because they would have to invest maybe another $5,000 to $10,000 for each new set of molds. If you wanted a Small, Medium, and Large selection, that could have made the price of the 3ks go from just under $200 to maybe $400 per unit. And from the marketing angle, it's possible that only 2 of those sizes might have sold well, so the investment in the other size would have been a loss.
With me so far?
With metal devices, there's another issue: it's difficult (i.e., costly) to machine organic, non-symmetrical 3D shapes; this is why some devices look like plumbing fixtures. It’s easy (i.e., fast) to work with tubes and rings because you put them in a lathe and the parts come out round. Or you put them in a milling machine and you do round things to them (drilling holes, for example). But to machine the top and bottom half of a CB3000 out of a chunk of stainless steel would take 3 different setups (i.e. fixturings), each of which is a process that needs to be designed and tested, and a total of, maybe 30 to 45 minutes of machining. That’s about $700 to $1,000 just to get to the first part (which needs to be tested), and chances are that some modification would be needed. Then you would need matching cuff rings, plus some way to attach the top and bottom (the part could not be easily machined in one operation). I could easily see it costing $10,000 to design several interchangeable options for a machined, stainless steel CB3000 line.
And once you’ve figured all this out, you then need to machine up a bunch of them. Now it’s just a matter of paying for material, replaceable tooling, setup costs, and machine time (shop labor). So, now you need to spend *another* $10,000 in order to have inventory, and hope that people will start buying them soon, before the bank asks you to start repaying the loan. The alternative is to make them as people order them, which means each order is a separate setup, bringing economy of scale down and the price up. Oh, and it might also mean several weeks (or months) wait depending upon the shop that’s doing the work.
Now you have some idea of why I don’t make them in my own shop (as people frequently ask me).
tl;dr: It's a lot costlier than you think to make a product line.
