Question About Mech Mod Market

[Vapeaddikt]

With all of the talk of regulation and banning all over the world, you can't really blame the high end mod makers for keeping it small. Why expand your business if it may be on the brink of destruction. Not dooming and glooming here, but if electronic cigarettes get the thumbs up and become main stream, I would assume a much more competitive market would blossom.

Nailed it. Also the "high end" niche mods want to keep supply low to keep demand/prices up regardless of what they say. It's what makes them "high end" niche mods.

They cater to the elitists (which a certain percentage of people are inherently) who will pay very high prices for to maintain and further gain in that status among their peers.


Show me excellent quality at a reasonable price and I'll buy it even if its a $1000 so long as after doing research its actually justified past the cosmetic or elitist appeal. Especially for no offense meant here a battery tube with some basic mechanics with some finish and possibly even a serial number.

 

[PuddleSnake]

I bought this flashlight (Fenix PD30) a couple of years ago and love it. When I am ready for a mod, my quest will be for something that looks similar

I like the black, machined, industrial look of it. Size is 4.65"x.85"

 

[AttyPops]

I mostly view it as the difference between hand-made "one-off" stuff, and mass produced stuff.

If you get the sales volume and facilities to mass-produce something (and 90% of the time that isn't as cost effective in the USA as it is overseas) then you get labeled as a ..."China e-cig".

The hand-crafted mods are...more expensive to justify the individual work. If they sold a "high end mech" at $20.00 per unit they'd lose money.

Cars used to be like that before Ford. Even with assembly lines (pre-Ford) they were mostly hand built by a few craftsmen. After Ford introduced the moving assembly line and the high degree of specialization for each worker, the costs went way down. He also controlled the material costs and his ?brother? invented charcoal briquets to make use of the scrap wood. lol.

It's all about economics of scale. Facilities. Material cost. Sales volume. Craftsmanship. Labor costs. etc.

 

[BigCloudz]

I build plastic injection molds for a living. I have multiple high speed CNC machines, 1 wire CNC EDM, 2 CNC Sinker EDM's, a Robot (for production), 10+ surface grinders, 6 Bridgeport Mills, and a Lathe.

Combine we are well over 2 million dollars with all that equipment.

Buying steel here in the US is NOT cheap. Bulk or otherwise. Aluminum on the other hand is a whole different story. But 420 SS and other high grade SS's are NOT cheap.

Then you have the quality aspect. When an end mill gets dull, we sharpen or replace them. We use high grade reamers/taps for quality threading etc. The labor you pay a machinist in the US is probably 5x (if not more) than what the Chinese pay their guys.

A lot goes into it, but trust me, in my industry there is the never ending debate on Chinese manufacturing vs American manufacturing. Well, it's hardly a debate, the quality of our tools/molds are undoubtedly superior, but when big investors look on paper, they see the huge price difference and bam, off to China goes the work. However, 6 months down the road when their 1million dollar mold is already falling apart, and they send it back to us to fix, they star to re-think things.

I cannot speak for the Philippines or countries like Greece; but the quality of work, from the steel, down to the milling is hands DOWN much better here in the States.


edit: also, knowing what I know, I honestly do not know how much profit is achieved by any US made device selling for under a couple-few hundred dollars. Even in production, it's not cheap.

I am actually going to start looking into making some prototype Mech Mods. When I do, i'd be happy to post pure cost to make one.

 

[tj99959]

Lets say for instance that a person is a computer programmer by trade, but just loves tinkering with things in the evening/weekends. So he buys a little lath to play with on the weekends. How many mechanical mods would you think he would be able to produce?

Ok so maybe the guy is a lath operator in a machine shop ........ sorry but the work gets done before playing with personal projects.

So the answer is ........... how many of these mechanical PV's do you suppose are made by machine shops that are set up to ONLY produce mechanical mods?
The smaller the production run ... the higher the cost per unit.