E5i50blitzWhen we do custom mold work for customers, there is time that goes into discussing the design and action of the bait and such that the customer wants. With doing this over time we have learned a lot of things to do and not to do to make a bait perform a certain way. That being said if you find someone that knows a little of what they are doing and have been doing it for a while they will be able to help you with your quest, and make your project as easy as possible. As far as cost goes you are correct these molds are extremly cheap for what you are getting. The reason for that is we rely on selling multiples of these molds over the years. When doing custom work the customer is charged for our cad and cam time and then we also charge for our machine time and material. As far as cutter wear well lets see i have been running a lot of my cutters for over 3 years and they have not wore out yet so we do not factor that in. If I am wearing out or breaking cutters that fast I need to be optimizing my tool paths to eliminate that.
I would rather have a detailed drawing with all of the deminsions that you want met of your design to work from than anything else. We have found using drawings from Cad engineers take us a lot more time to get the mold ready than it does from a drawing. We do not need all of the detail that they put into a drawing. We have to keep it simple as we only need one boundry for our tool path creation and when we deal with there drawings we normally have to go in and remove numerous boundries (lines) that we can not use. We try to saty within about .002 with our tolerences if that woud work for you. We create the 3d model and let you inspect it first. We then will create the mold and calculate all of the tool paths and cut a prototype mold . That mold will be tested here to make sure it works properly then sent to the customer. Sometimes you get lucky and nail it on the first shot . If changes need to be made they should only be minimial and usually the second go is a charm.
If we can help or answer any questions give us a shout.
Bear