Designing a kit, how hard could it be?

[icyclops]

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.

Yes, something like that….only had to do it in less steps…less is more kind of thing…steps 1, 2,3, 4, no 5, 6&7 together as one image, 8 , …steps 9, 10, 11 are not necessary as it was to show how to light a match, but nothing else….tricky that way. But you have the idea….good job!

 

[Jeff Lassahn]

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.

An interesting thing I learned on the internet: the last round of US tax law changes eliminated the ability to deduct expenses from hobby income. If you spend $15 dollars on a hobby project and sell it for $20 you owe tax on $20. If you make it a business you owe tax on $5. There are vague rules for what counts as a business that presumably come down to "the auditor thinks you mean it"

 

[Cape Byron]

An interesting thing I learned on the internet: the last round of US tax law changes eliminated the ability to deduct expenses from hobby income. If you spend $15 dollars on a hobby project and sell it for $20 you owe tax on $20. If you make it a business you owe tax on $5. There are vague rules for what counts as a business that presumably come down to "the auditor thinks you mean it"

The tax man seems to have strange ideas on what constitutes a hobby. If you make a loss, then it is a hobby. If you make a profit it is a business. Even a tiny profit.

Then you have to register for tax on your business and the extra costs and paperwork on your new business will mean you now make a loss and it is a hobby again.

Rinse and repeat.

 

[Alan R]

Check the grain direction on the fin templates, I seem to remember there being an issue.

The only issue was my convoluted comment. Leading edge goes with the grain. but i was explaining it backwards.

 

[tjkopena]

Quick comment to the point raised somewhere up-thread about a pre-order approach. That makes a ton of sense for a lot of projects, whether you're trying to gauge if there's enough interest to justify the effort, needing to buy supplies in bulk to hit quantity discounts, amortize equipment costs, etc, and make the project viable. In any community though I definitely wouldn't put much stock in people actually coming through w/ orders & money based on a headcount in a forum. Haven't noticed anybody using it for rocketry, but that's exactly the founding use case for Kickstarter: People make reasonably hard commitments to pay up if you hit the threshold needed to enable the project. It's a simple group escrow service. I would argue some significant downsides and abuses of the model have developed, but no question over the past decade Kickstarter has revolutionized and substantially democratized tabletop gaming and other fields by reducing the barriers to entry. I've run a couple successful small projects on it to create wargaming products (both physical and digital). It's pretty simple to setup and run a campaign, and I consider their fees reasonable. So that's a business approach to consider in putting out a kit, particularly if you aren't sure of the market and/or don't want to make a running business of it and just want to release occasional products or even just a one-off: "Check out this awesome design I made! If X people back the project on Kickstarter (i.e., put down credit cards) I'll make kits."

 

[dpower]

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....

So how's the HMAS Bonestell coming along?

 

[Pem Tech]

So how's the HMAS Bonestell coming along?

She is ready to release, if I could get the Destructions completed.