Have I missed the Midlands Show?

I haven't seen any advertising bumf for the show at Castle Donnington. Have I missed it?

Bill

Reply to
Bill
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Nope. 18th to 23th October inclusive.

That will be one N in Donington if you want to websearch

Sorry I don't have the opening hours or prices to hand and it is not on the organiser webpage either DOH!

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Reply to
Bob Minchin

How many Ns are there if you don't want to websearch?? ;-)

I will be there again, selling my DivisionMaster controllers. There will be a show offer - £30 of the price of the controller.

Regards, Tony

Reply to
Tony Jeffree

Oops - that will be two effs in "£30 off".

Regards, Tony

Reply to
Tony Jeffree

Flyer says 10:30 am - 5:30pm daily, Wed open till 8pm phone for advance tickets 01926 614 293

Cheers Tim Tim Leech Dutton Dry-Dock

Traditional & Modern canal craft repairs

Reply to
timleech

Shall we call that one all Tony?

regards

bob

Reply to
Bob Minchin

Thanks for that.

Bill

Reply to
Bill

Reminds me of the joke that went the rounds during the fuel delivery drivers strike.

"What's the difference between petrol & paraffin?

There's 2 effs in paraffin, but THERE'S NO EFFIN PETROL!!"

Regards, Tony

Reply to
Tony Jeffree

From the published glosseis, there's about £50 of electronic components in them, if that, so that with a £30 discount, that's only about £150 over what they're worth, then?

Reply to
Airy R. Bean

Airy R. Bean writes

Can someone help me, please, with 'glosseis' ?

My dictionary jumps from glosseCtomy ( - surgical removal of all or part of the tongue) to glosseMe ( - smallest meaningful unit of language).

There are no entries in-between.

Reply to
Mike Whittome

Development costs ? Marketing costs ? Production costs ? CE certification costs ? Patent costs ?

considered them ?

For a small scale product you need AT LEAST a three times mark up on direct costs to selling price to hope to stay in business and continue to stay alive. The ratio changes if you get into a larger market, but considering the volume Tony is probably selling, then he must be there or there abouts.

Many a 'back bedroom good idea' has floundered by the inventor failing to realise the true cost af taking things to market.

Andrew Mawson Bromley, Kent

Reply to
Andrew Mawson

Doesn't matter what they are worth or what they cost sunshine, at 50 quid it's still far more than your unemployment benefit will stretch to. There are two types of people in this game, those that have and those that have not and the divide is getting greater because those that have help each other and even help those that have not if they want to be helped. It doesn't take a lot of working out to see which side of the line you are on.

How's your gear hobbing project getting on ? Got tons of help with mine, parts supplied free of charge or at cost, people really helpful. If you can afford the download time have a look at the drive head at about

3 months ago. If you can't afford the download time wait until you go to the Job Seekers club and use their computer.
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-- Regards,

John Stevenson Nottingham, England.

Reply to
John Stevenson

Having been involved in similar projects, I know that Tony's prices are quite reasonable. I ended up doing PIC processor programming at £3/hour for 500 hours on one job (back in the days when I enjoyed doing it :-). The £6000 cost of the dies for the plastic casing and the membrane keyboard for the project didnt help either. On a production run of one hundred items that's £75 per item before you've bought any components at all and it's all up front cost.

Mark Rand RTFM

Reply to
Mark Rand

Christ, is he back out again?

Just another example of how "care in the community" doesn't work :/

-- Steve Blackmore

Reply to
Steve Blackmore

It's not clear to me what you think goes into one of my controllers, or what the bits actually cost, but I would love to see you build one to the same standard/functionality for £50 even at component costs (and no corner-cutting by using stripboard - its gotta be a proper professionally produced PCB).

While you're building it, keep a record of how many hours it takes, and multiply by the minimum wage. If that calculation alone doesn't exceed the price I charge by an order of magnitude or two, I would be very surprised indeed.

Regards, Tony

Reply to
Tony Jeffree

You'r spot on Andrew. And at £800 or so to rent a stand at Donnington, plus accommodation/food at rip-off prices, the marketing doesn't come cheap either.

Actually, I am currently working on a mark up of about 2.5, so I am working on the wrong side of that line. Time to revise my prices, methinks.

Regards, Tony

Reply to
Tony Jeffree

That's probably less than you should be getting for it as a commercial item.

One of the problems we found with our own kit was that at the lower selling price bands you don't have the kind of margin that you need to be able to put money into improvements/developments. Consumers have an endless appetite for more and more features and have less and less money to pay for them! Thank god we are not in the PC industry....

We got out of the low-end charger market some time ago, and never touched the consumer markets at all. Most of our current products for the rail market are over £3K each, and our newest product, a battery tester goes out at near £10K, but the development time and PLC programming means that the first one sold at cost, the second one will make a small profit. If we sold a further 10 or so we could make a decent margin, but the problem is that as the price goes higher, you have a smaller market :-((

The original post was a typical cheap/ignorant poke, just ignore it.

Peter

-- Peter & Rita Forbes snipped-for-privacy@easynet.co.uk Engine pages for preservation info:

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Reply to
Peter A Forbes

Absolutely.

I have the luxury with DivisionMaster of not having to rely on income from it for my livelyhood, and therefore I tend to write off the time I spend on it, and to a great extent, I view the challenge of adding new functionality as spare-time recreation. Clearly not something that is sustainable long term though. I guess the next step is to ship the design out to the far East & have them build the controllers for £5 a pop, but I am reluctant to go that route.

Yep - that is the dilemma. My prices obviously place the product in the high end of the amateur market (most ME's are pensioners these days), and at the low end of the professional market, so almost the worst of both worlds. One of my first customers reckoned that the controller I sold him saved its purchase price in the first week he had it in use, so in value terms, a 10 X markup would have been more appropriate for him, but that would obviously take it right out of court for the amateur market.

Too right!

Regards, Tony

Reply to
Tony Jeffree

You're equivocating - you didn't dispute the estimated cost.

Insofar as this group is for those who do technical things for themselves, the time spent is neither here nor there.

How is using strip board corner cutting? The use of stripboard or a PCB is not material to the functions being performed.

Reply to
Airy R. Bean

In a hobbyist NG, and not a commercial NG, such a markup would seem inappropriate. One wouldn't expect to do that on machine tools traded herein.

In a NG devoted to technical self-help, trading with such a mark-up seems cynical - who would be dumb enough to pay it?

Reply to
Airy R. Bean

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