@scott.smith posted:The tinplate tooling is not for sale. Mike plans to produce it himself.
@Jim Waterman posted:Hey Scott, we've heard horror stories about the Chinese selling tools for scrap in the past, maybe just urban legends - do we know exactly what remains of all the tooling Mike paid for (and the Chinese are holding?)
@scott.smith posted:I assure you Mike knows. Keep in mind he spent large portions of time each year monitoring his investment and production quality.
Since I'm not privy to any inside info but really like reproduction tinplate, here are my thoughts...
One one level, the comments above make sense - MW seems to have a soft spot in his heart for tinplate, and doesn't seem ready to completely walk away. I hope that everything is in good hands, just waiting for the right moment.
On another level, I'm not so sure...
1) Even if Mike carefully monitors the possession of the dies, they're thousands of miles away in a country where the concepts of intellectual property and ownership are "flexible".
2) IMO, using the dies to produce tinplate in China would be a lot of management work (almost as much as producing everything?), so why would he retire and then continue with producing for a sliver of the train market?
3) Since it's such a small subset of the market with low production numbers, could he produce tinplate at a price that would generate enough sales?
4) It seems that a big factor in curtailing production of tinplate was because the market was saturated - how many more paint schemes for a 400E will people buy? Unless different items are produced, which would require a lot of work and expense, is there enough of a market? I'm guessing not.
And then there's parts...
