Designing a kit, how hard could it be?

[Cape Byron]

To put that another way, designs are relatively easy; plan packs might be not so hard; kits are a whole other ball game.

Having just attempted this I will say that getting a plan pack ready and getting a kit ready to the stage of collecting the parts together is pretty much identical. Actually putting the parts in a bag or box will net you more money than selling a plan pack. I also think the kit market is much much larger than the plan pack market.

Neither option will make you enough profit to cover your time in design/illustration/writing instructions unless you sell a shedload or consider your time cost free.

 

[jqavins]

Ditto! A clear concise illustration is worth many words….as mentioned text only goes so far….you need illustrations as many people do not follow text well unless along with pics or illustrations.
In art school we had an assignment to just illustrate (no words or symbols allowed) a simple procedure like lighting a match from a paper matchbook…it is harder than you think.

In a job interview after I got my degree, I was instructed to write instruction for lacing up a shoe, then parked alone in an office. Not knowing how to describe the process, I took off one of my shoes and removed the lace, then laced and tied it, slowly, describing the steps I followed as I went. I consider my own artistic ability to be similar to that of the average first grader, but I was none the less able to make sketches that were worth having at the steps where they'd be most important, two of them I think, all in about 45 minutes. (I was offered the job, but ended up takimg a different one.)

No, I'm not bragging or showing off. I expect that most of us are able to carefully describe what we're doing if we watch ourselves while we do it. I've read a bunch of build threads here that would make very good starts on instructions. First take out all of the chit-chat, obviously. Then change all of the first person past tense statements ("I did this") to the imperritive tense ("Do this") and you'd be better than half way done.

OK, we're not all equaly facile at this sort of thing, and some people will find instructions hard to write. But give yourself a chance. "I'm just bad at writing" is just as wrong as "I'm just bad a math".

Having just attempted this I will say that getting a plan pack ready and getting a kit ready to the stage of collecting the parts together is pretty much identical. Actually putting the parts in a bag or box will net you more money than selling a plan pack. I also think the kit market is much much larger than the plan pack market.

Neither option will make you enough profit to cover your time in design/illustration/writing instructions unless you sell a shedload or consider your time cost free.

Obviously you'd know better than I. I was not referring to packing parts into a bag or box, but also sourcing parts, cutting fins to shape and tubes to length or dealing with a cutting service, inventory control, shipping, service after sale, and so on. I understood that getting a design up to plan pack maturity is the same as getting it to kit maturity; the difference, in my mimd, is that with a plan pack you're then done, where with kits you're never done as long as the kit keeps selling (even in small quantity). Am I wrong?

 

[Ez2cDave]

It seems to me that kits would probably sell better than plan packs, since so few people scratchbuild, nowadays.

Dave F.

 

[Cape Byron]

I understood that getting a design up to plan pack maturity is the same as getting it to kit maturity; the difference, in my mimd, is that with a plan pack you're then done, where with kits you're never done as long as the kit keeps selling (even in small quantity). Am I wrong?

No, you aren't wrong but there are things to consider...

The following is horribly simplified, but bear with me...The below ignores the almost identical work that has gone into getting both to the same stage.

Now:

I can box up (say) six kits in fifteen minutes. I'll make $10 profit on each one. That's $60 profit.
I sell six plan packs at $5 and that's $30 profit.

Six kits are easier to sell than six plan packs; the market is simply larger. Where is my time best spent? Will I be able to better keep my business open with kits or plan packs?

I think there's more money in kits. Maybe not even enough to pay me $10 an hour for the background work, but that's the reality. It's a hobby, buddy. It will always be a hobby.

That's what I'm looking at now, and realistically if I could buy Big Bertha NCs I wouldn't have even looked at Brocket as a plan pack. I'm looking at another plan pack now which I'm 50% likely to just give away. Unless Brocket is a runaway seller I'm probably better off just making kits.

Besides, making kits is fun. When it stops being fun I won't do it any more. Probably.

 

[Cape Byron]

Obviously you'd know better than I. I was not referring to packing parts into a bag or box, but also sourcing parts, cutting fins to shape and tubes to length or dealing with a cutting service, inventory control, shipping, service after sale, and so on.

I was already doing most of that for scratch builds, as are most of us. It's just the volumes that are different. It's also uneconomical in Oz to buy anything rocket related in 'My use only' quantities. This isn't the US and I can't walk into a hobby shop and buy anything but a small selection of motors and Estes Skill level 1 kits.

 

[jqavins]

No, you aren't wrong but there are things to consider...

The following is horribly simplified, but bear with me...The below ignores the almost identical work that has gone into getting both to the same stage.

Now:

I can box up (say) six kits in fifteen minutes. I'll make $10 profit on each one. That's $60 profit.
I sell six plan packs at $5 and that's $30 profit.

Six kits are easier to sell than six plan packs; the market is simply larger. Where is my time best spent? Will I be able to better keep my business open with kits or plan packs?

I think there's more money in kits. Maybe not even enough to pay me $10 an hour for the background work, but that's the reality. It's a hobby, buddy. It will always be a hobby.

That's what I'm looking at now, and realistically if I could buy Big Bertha NCs I wouldn't have even looked at Brocket as a plan pack. I'm looking at another plan pack now which I'm 50% likely to just give away. Unless Brocket is a runaway seller I'm probably better off just making kits.

Besides, making kits is fun. When it stops being fun I won't do it any more. Probably.

OK. The last thing I'll say on (this part of) the conversation is this: the OP's question in the subject line was "How hard could it be?" not "How profitable...?" Selling kits still sounds a lot harder than designing them, with selling plan packs being somewhere in between, and closer to the design level of difficulty.

 

[Cape Byron]

OK. The last thing I'll say on (this part of) the conversation is this: the OP's question in the subject line was "How hard could it be?" not "How profitable...?" Selling kits still sounds a lot harder than designing them, with selling plan packs being somewhere in between, and closer to the design level of difficulty.

True. It isn't the first, or last, time I get OT in a discussion like this.

Difficulty depends on experience. I think I answered the OP question in a previous ramble post.

 

[thobin]

I don't want to discourage, just educate and prep the OP for what lies ahead. I think it is a great idea to have more rockets kits. Having done it, I can only give my experience and convey what was hard for me and took the most time. Selling them was definitely the hardest part. Oh shipping sucked too.

TA

 

[Ez2cDave]

In art school we had an assignment to just illustrate (no words or symbols allowed) a simple procedure like lighting a match from a paper matchbook…it is harder than you think.

Like this ? ( no "artwork" . . . I suck at drawing ).

(01) An image showing a closed, handheld matchbook.
(02) An image showing an open, handheld matchbook.
(03) An image showing a grasped match being bent away from the handheld matchbook.
(04) An image showing the grasped match torn from the handheld matchbook.
(05) An image showing the re-closed, handheld matchbook.
(06) An image showing the re-closed matchbook being held in one hand and the detached match grasped in the other hand.
(07) An image showing the head of the grasped match in contact with the striking surface of the handheld matchbook.
(08) An image showing the head of the grasped match being dragged along the striking surface of the handheld matchbook and igniting.
(09) An image showing the ignited grasped match being used to light a candle.
(10) An image showing the grasped match being blown out.
(11) A final image showing the extinguished grasped match being discarded in an ashtray.

Dave F.

 

[Back_at_it]

I've designed a number of space planes over the years as well as a few dozen of my own standard rocket designs. I've only put one of them out there to sell and that was on Ebay back around 2005. It was a space plane design and included everything cut to size except the fins. I included templates and sheet balsa for the fins. I sold 20 of them over the course of a year and had maybe 5 or 6 people ask me to do another batch.

At the end of the day it was a hobby and not a money making project. If you count only the materials I made about $8 on each kit and maybe $5 on shipping. Obviously if you add in my time it was a money pit but that wasn't the point.

If I had a laser I might kit up a few designs or at the very least put the parts I've made for my upscales out there for people who wanted to do the same.

 

[icyclops]

It seems to me that kits would probably sell better than plan packs, since so few people scratchbuild, nowadays.

Dave F.

Really… is this really the way it is? After building my 10th boring kit I went on to designing and building my own and never looked back. I have a feeling with all the talk about simulations in this forum that there is more scratch building going on than you may think…..but of course I have no way of proving that statement.

 

[Ez2cDave]

Really… is this really the way it is? After building my 10th boring kit I went on to designing and building my own and never looked back. I have a feeling with all the talk about simulations in this forum that there is more scratch building going on than you may think…..but of course I have no way of proving that statement.

99.9% of what I build are rockets of my own design. In the past couple of decades, I could probably count the number of kits on one hand.

Also, I never us OpenRocket or Rocksim, unless required ( i.e. - when I make my Level 3 cert flight . . . after that, never again ). I hand draw my designs and manually calculate stability ( I'm "old school", having started in 1967, at age 6 ).

From my perspective,Rocketeers have become way too dependent on "technology" ( sim programs ), when it comes to building rockets. Learn the math and the aerodynamics , without relying on a machine to do the thinking for you !

Dave F.

 

[Jeff Lassahn]

Prototyping some layout and art style for instructions... here's my first attempt at a first few steps.

 

[neil_w]

Diagrams look good. What software are you using?

 

[Jeff Lassahn]

Inkscape.
It's kind of tempting to try to automate some of this, generate some SVG objects directly from a parts database of some sort. It's one of those projects that's not clearly on one side or the other of the "pointless software hacking that's more trouble than it's worth" / "really useful tool" line.

 

[Sandy H.]

Inkscape.
It's kind of tempting to try to automate some of this, generate some SVG objects directly from a parts database of some sort. It's one of those projects that's not clearly on one side or the other of the "pointless software hacking that's more trouble than it's worth" / "really useful tool" line.

Interesting question for sure. I made a routine that I could use to import fins from Openrocket into my CAD software for laser cutting. It wasn't too hard to do, but it didn't work great for curved/swoopy fins due to the way the table of coordinates worked.

I 'imagine' (not a fact for sure) that if you could make some modules to autocreate some ISO drawings like you showed on the motor mount assembly instructions from a CSV (or similar) you would have a few huge fans. I think it would have to be a labor of love, though, as it would have to be pretty crazy powerful for people to buy the plug-in, I imagine. I guarantee I'd love to see it, just from an educational standpoint.

[Side Track] For a while, I managed the controls department at my company. After evaluating costs and why certain things took longer than expected, I first implemented AutoCAD Electrical, not just the base AutoCAD product they'd been using. I then sent them to training. After that, errors went down (auto numbering was HUGE!!!) but it still took a long time to create drawings, as every machine is fairly custom, so copy/rename isn't that good of an option.

Anyway, I was an AutoLISP guy from the mid 90's and have written a ton of routines to automate tasks. I spent wayyy too much time developing some VBA in Excel and Lisp in AutoCAD. The big boss was pretty peeved when he found out, until I ran the routine for him. It autogenerated 75% of the drawings based on the data the software guys already had to create for doing the software. About 100 drawings in less than 10 minutes with zero typo's that weren't also matched in the control software. There was still some hand work to be done on each drawing at first, but by the last iteration it can autogen 85% of the drawings required with no hand work, 10% that require minor hand tweaking and 5% that are 100% manually created. The task of generating the electrical build drawings went from 8-12 weeks to 8 days, give or take. My 'wasted' 500 hours pays itself off every month or two and has for the past 4 or 5 years. Also gives purchasing more time to find subcontractors without going off schedule. . .

And it all started because I thought it was a waste of time for the guy to have to re-type the I/O names when they already existed in a spreadsheet. The original goal was to just fill in text on a drawing that was still manually created. A huge case of feature-creep, but very cool feature creep after it was all said and done. [/Side Track]

Sandy.

 

[Jeff Lassahn]

Another option I've considered for a different style of illustrations is to massively abuse OpenRocket as a renderer:

 

[neil_w]

Another option I've considered for a different style of illustrations is to massively abuse OpenRocket as a renderer:

In the dev version you can also use the alpha channel, so if you need to make things translucent to see things behind other things you can.

I tend to think well-made drawings might actually be clearer for the user, though.

 

[Jeff Lassahn]

Ohhhhhh. Alpha channel?
Can I set the alpha of the background in photo studio?
I've been creating images for cover art by rendering twice, once with lighting set to zero, then merging these to make an alpha masked image:

 

[BABAR]

I am curious, a cost that hasn't been mentioned is liability.

You design a great, stable kit. Somebody buys it and builds it (wrong, but that happens), comes it goes cruise missile and then comes in ballistic and to keep the macabre out of it, let's say it lands on a car owned by someone stupid enough to bring an antique sports car to a rocket launch. Say the rocket pokes hole in the convertible top. Gonna cost thousands to replace.

Anybody can sue. They often can't WIN, but it doesn't keep them from suing. Doesn't matter how good your instructions are and all the warning labels in the world, they may SAVE you in court, but there are "nuisance" lawsuits where the lawyer sues you for less than it would cost you to defend yourself. You CAN countersue, but I have heard (not that I can quote a reliable source) that the standard for winning a nuisance lawsuit is pretty high.

You probably WIN the suit, but just the hassle and expense of defending yourself could be an issue. I wonder if Vern Estes was ever sued?

 

[Cape Byron]

I am curious, a cost that hasn't been mentioned is liability.

Liability insurance will cost you more than you will ever make selling model rockets. #askhowiknow

Another reason to say publicly (as on this forum) that it is your hobby, not a business.*

*I paid for this advice and I’m giving it away free. It helps in liability cases here. Outside NSW, Australia I have no idea.

 

[DaHabes]

I've been surprised at the per-unit cost for getting things 3d printed. Services generally quote prices above $20 for even relatively simple objects. Perhaps I'm not looking at the right suppliers, for example it seems like Launch Lab's Bullet Bobby must be printing their parts cheaper than what I'm finding.

The only 3D Printing service I have found to be at all reasonably priced is 3D Printing Service Marketplace | Craftcloud® by All3DP . They find the cheapest supplier on that day for what you want to print. Small er stuff is reasonable, bigger stuff still can get pretty pricey, but not stratospheric.

Everyone one else is geared for printing for businesses, either prototypes or actual parts for actual products. I did find a local high school kid who was printing parts on the side on this service, really cheap, but he is long gone, either went to college or started chasing girls, or both.

 

[DaHabes]

I'm playing around with a plan pack at the moment.

My thoughts on a plan pack is that it is way to easy to clone anything if you have a plan in hand. As soon as that plan gets input into a Rocksim or Open Rocket file and posted somewhere, the plan pack is DOA. My opinion, YMMV.

 

[Scott_650]

My thoughts on a plan pack is that it is way to easy to clone anything if you have a plan in hand. As soon as that plan gets input into a Rocksim or Open Rocket file and posted somewhere, the plan pack is DOA. My opinion, YMMV.

Plan packs seem to work if you either include decals - Sandman’s now OOP Goony packs - or offer unique, narrow appeal prototypes - The Launch Pad’s myriad military missiles - or both - the plan packs with decals that Shrox used to sell (Apogee now has kits of a few of Shrox plan pack designs).

 

[neil_w]

Ohhhhhh. Alpha channel?
Can I set the alpha of the background in photo studio?

As far as I can tell, yes. Just set the alpha value in the RGB, HSL, HSV, or CMYK tabs of the color picker. Save image as PNG.

 

[thobin]

Prototyping some layout and art style for instructions... here's my first attempt at a first few steps.

Looks good.

 

[Pem Tech]

"Sometimes when I'm scratch building a rocket, I think "this is a cool design I should turn it into a kit and sell it"

Usually, the sensible part of my brain immediately thinks "that's way harder than you think it is, and besides you don't want to run a business" and I forget all about it.

I still don't want to start a business, but I'm really curious about the details. How hard would it really be? What kinds of problems does a kit design need to solve that a scratch build doesn't? "

This will be the short answer since I'm at work and need to be running my MDLs, like I have for the last 4 days.

Short answer:
BWHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAH!!!!
(wipes away tears)

Informative answer:
As I am sure someone else on here has said that designing a kit isn't the issue. The difficult bits are standardizing the kit to fit available and affordable parts, finding vendors that will wholesale at your order size (some have a minimum order number for wholesale pricing), purchasing sufficient quantities of parts without selling a kidney, pricing your kit so that is affordable yet you make a little over cost, generating photos and text then publishing the destructions, purchasing the properly sized 4 mil bag to hold all the pieces of the kit, producing header cards and artwork, beta testing your kit (finding people to do it is easy but dealing with/correcting issues that they find is a challenge) and marketing.

Be prepared for the crushing disappointment that strikes when you realize that the business is sucking the joy from the hobby.

More later....

 

[Pem Tech]

If you want entertainment try Pemberton
Cheers

Many, many thanks for the mention. I strive to make the reader wet themselves while reading the Destruction manual.

 

[Pem Tech]

I "kitted" my Tiki rocket for a secret santa gift. Thought it would be a lot of fun for somebody. But that somebody had to have some serious experience and skills.
No laser cut fins, they'll have to make them old-style and cut the balsa from paper patterns. Nose cone is unique shape, 3D printed with a shroud on top of it.
I spent a couple months writing and tweaking and re-writing instructions with no illustrations. Ended up being pretty dense copy about 2 pages long, and even then there was a few places where it basically said "just use your best judgement."
Spent some money on motor kit and body tube and paying shipping. No idea what the total cost of this was.
It was something I wanted to do as a one-off gift.
I'm like you, I think it would make a great unique kit, but it has some custom parts (graphic wrap, nosecone) that would make it pretty expensive for someone to even gather the parts.
Was thinking I might give a half-kit to some friends. Just nosecone, graphic and patterns. You supply the rest.
Having done it once I can understand the problems other people have.

View attachment 498021

YOU!
You are the one.
You are my Secret Santa!
It looks like it will be fun to build and fly. Like the body wrap.
Check the grain direction on the fin templates, I seem to remember there being an issue. Haven't seen my Tiki since Yule morning.
And thank you!

 

[icyclops]

99.9% of what I build are rockets of my own design. In the past couple of decades, I could probably count the number of kits on one hand.

Also, I never us OpenRocket or Rocksim, unless required ( i.e. - when I make my Level 3 cert flight . . . after that, never again ). I hand draw my designs and manually calculate stability ( I'm "old school", having started in 1967, at age 6 ).

From my perspective,Rocketeers have become way too dependent on "technology" ( sim programs ), when it comes to building rockets. Learn the math and the aerodynamics , without relying on a machine to do the thinking for you !

Dave F.

Yes, I hear ya. I bought the first version of the rocket program (rocsksim) that Apogee sells years ago and realised how limited it was…never used it to design anything. I’m sure now they are much better but found that using the old principles and a good swing test did the trick for me. Many of my roc’s are odd or different in some way other than 3FNC, so I find old school to work best for me also. I try not to say too much about Sim programs as it just makes me look like an old grump