How hard can it be to mold a bunch of clear strips???

 

:LOL: Spoken like someone who's never tried to manufacture with plastics before

You can try a rubber mold and get a handful of sets per mold before a new one needs to be made... quality may or may not be decent. Assuming someone else is doing the work, expect to pay about $1,000 for the mold and $50-$200/piece molded.

You could go the quality route and have an aluminum mold made... expect to pay $3-$5,000 for that (easily), but per piece cost drops to a few dollars.

It's a fairly small piece, so that helps cost, but it's also a very complicated piece (the reflector prisms), and that really jacks up the cost.

I highly suggest finding a pre-made solution rather than attempting to cut/mold your own.

 

macs got it about right. and his 3-5k is good; cept double that give or take cause these are 2 different things; so you need 2 molds.

the tougher part is as odd as it sounds; urethane has a minimum thickness that it can withstand before it wont work. and these ride that edge; specially for clear resins. and no air bubbles, another tricky part.

I did try this myself; I bought the silicone to make the mold, and the clear resin to pour it.

cost about 200$ for all this. unfortunatly I couldnt even get it close, I needed a degasser(vacumm chamber) and then a heated pressure pot capable of 100PSI and about 3-400degrees. these arent exactly easy to find items. so I decided to contract it out.

 

I'm about to make a bold and stupid statement about headlights, their costs, and offer my amateur opinion. However, I just realized that I know nothing about headlights and so I won't say it.

 

I'll just say this... stock healight housings cost in the area of $10-$30 in raw materials and manufacturing. The $30-$50,000 spent on molds (actually a high estimate considering their in-house capabilities) is easily amortized across the 100,000+ cars they make each year. Figure a car run of at least 3 years before they change anything, and the molds themselves add in less than $1 to the total cost.

You guys are looking at having 100 pieces made... the economics of it become scary at that point.