I can’t answer your questions, sorry, but I do want to ask: Aren’t there a lot of aftermarket watch bands already? I’ve never had trouble finding el cheapo glorified rubber bands at any watch or department store I’ve been… how would yours be better?
Maybe someone more knowledgeable here can help, otherwise bring a sample to your toolmaker and get them to match it.
Do you mean a rubber mold, like an RTV mold? Or a mold for running thermoplastic rubber parts? Do you want 20 parts or thousands?
What volume are you thinking about? I don`t know if you could do it yourself. You could do small runs with a domestic company or if your volume is high enough you could surely save money having the tool made in Asia.
Yes, a mold to cast rubber watchbands. Re volumes I’m thinking a few tens to a few hundreds of a few colors to start and test the market which is why I’m trying to keep upfront costs low.
Re the question about “difference”, many sport & dive watches are fairly expensive and come with high quality, precisely made OEM synthetic rubber bands. Retail replacement rubber watchbands are generally quite generic, lightweight and relatively poor quality compared to these heavy duty OEM bands.
My thought is to offer a selection of high quality replacement bands in various colors. The problem is that the market for this bright idea may well be way too small to make it a viable business proposition. Plus I’m not sure how to get access to the high quality synthetic rubber used by Seiko and others.
The only way this would be viable for me to undertake as a business idea (which may well fail) is if the upfront costs are relatively small, which is why I’m trying to get a handle on mold costs to see if I can mold them myself in small batches. If I have to use an outside supplier I’m guessing they are not likely to be interested in runs of less than several thousand at a shot and mold tooling costs would likely be through the roof.
Along the same lines as what Reply suggested, maybe you could find a source for existing high quality “synthetic rubber bands” and just market them?
I don’t know anything about watch bands. From a quick search it seems like the cheap bands are made of PVC and once source said found usually on children’s watches. I can recall really cheap bands made of PVC… is that what you’re calling the cheap band? Thin and insubstantial and not particularly elastomeric?
What I’m still not sure of is what the higher quality bands are made of. Maybe someone who knows will come along but I haven’t seen anything to suggest they’re not made our of normal TPR.
You could consider doing a RTV mold for 10s of parts, probably not 100s. I don’t know how cheaply you could do that at home or if the quality would be sufficient. At a rapid prototyping shop you might pay $10-20 per part, so it would really be an expensive market study and not “testing the waters” of a new business. You’d presumably lose money on every part, right? What does a watch band go for? But you might not lose a LOT of money, and it would be a much smaller investment than making even a short run aluminum mold from the start.
If you had a successful market test, you could have a soft tool made for between a few thousand to under $10,000. They’d probably want to do production runs of 1000 minimum, and I’m not certain how they’d respond to your desire to run in more than 1 color.
Costs for molds can vary widely. I recently had 11 parts tooled. 1 American company quoted $85,000 to tool with their partner in China. A company directly in China quoted $23,000 for the whole project. These are hardened steel tools with a number of cam actions, so don’t let the price scare you. I was trying to tell you the price difference between vendors on the same parts.
No help here, but I did a check for watch bands on eBay a few weeks ago, and those rascals cost more than most watches that I use, so it may be a money machine for you. Best wishes and I hope you get rich!
hh