[Coco] Sacrificial carts - opinions?

[Tormod Volden]

On Sun, Jun 8, 2014 at 5:48 PM, Mark J. Blair wrote:
> I strongly doubt that it would make economic sense to produce new injection-molded cartridge cases due to the tooling cost, but if I was stinkin' rich then I would do it just for fun. I've done plastic enclosure design at work and had them manufactured by ProtoMold. The tooling for a simple two-piece CoCo cartridge cases without the sliding cover would probably be around $10k. I don't think that the CoCo hobbyist market is large enough to absorb that cost. But it sure would be cool...
>

For injection molding there are the "real" molds in steel that can be
used to mold millions of parts, but there are also lower quality molds
with cheaper tooling cost for making smaller volumes. I think they are
called low-volume injection molds or rapid injection molds. Might
still be too costly though, and possibly what you were using already.
If we had some design files we could get some quotes, not limited to
injection molding. I think finding an existing case, combined with
bulk "post-processing" could be a viable option.

I know people get new cartridge cases made for Commodore 64. They have
a larger community though... Are there other computers which have
similar cartridges to the CoCo/Dragon? Can somebody design a iPhone
case that also can serve as a cartridge case? :)

Joel Ewy, are you around? Did your OpenSCAD design work out? Could you
contribute some dxf files?

Tormod