I am experimenting with techniques to mount new style and resin cast heads on old style fused bodies.
(Resin heads are less than 1/4 as expensive as regular heads, but they are traditionally used with screw type bodies that are 2x as expensive as non-screw type bodies.)
My best solution so far is wood. A wooden dowel, rounded off at the bottom and notched about a quarter inch up to stick in the neck. It'll get trimmed where the holes are in these images, and then glued in to the neck.
I can make posts this way for about fifteen cents each. They're easier to use than ones cast in plastic, and about the same amount of work to make.
Next up I'll be looking in to methods for cheating at clothing manufacturing, starting with heat sealed/iron on decals and designs.
Going with this method means my head's cost roughly sixty cents, the neck post another fifteen for a total of seventy five cents.
My bodies are $4-6 depending on where I get them. (Unless/until I start making my own.)
So a body and a head runs $5.50 or so. Then I'll have $2-3 in clothes and another $2-3 in accessories for a total cost per unit of roughly $10.
We've set our price point at $35 loose, and $50 with packaging, so that's a healthy margin.
Granted, I still have to figure out how to make the packaging. I want to do boxes and cardbacks, in addition to tent fold bags. (The generic tent fold bags will be how we sell the "loose" figures.)
I'm exploring poster board and spray adhesive as one option for box making.
There seems to be a lot of demand for cardbacks, though. I'm not sure how I'm going to go about cardbacks.
Oh! And it turns out that the founder and the current president of the company we're modeling these toys after is going to be in the building for the show.
I haven't decided how I feel about that yet.
franklin (girl's name) @ajroach42 have you seen the knife guy on YouTube? Who makes knives out of random materials like jello?
He does a pretty neat makeshift vacuum box, which he uses to form plastic sheets into whatever shape he wants (for the plastic half of the cardback)
@68km !! I have seen that channel, but I haven't seen his vacuum former.
I was planning on buying the plastic bits to glue on, or even buying clamshells to put the cardbacks in to, and just making backs.
I just... Finding the right consistency of chip board, and getting printing done that'll reasonably adhere to it is something that I'm still uncertain about.
@ajroach42 yeah, not really solving the problem you need but it's still a pretty cool technique he demonstrates: