:Do you HAVE a website at which we can oggle and be stunned?
The website is in the works. Since most of our stuff is wholesale, the website thing has been pretty low on my list of priorities...but my web guru tells me it should be completed by sometime next month.
:How small is a typical normal small production run?
The size of a given run varies wildly depending on exactly what we're making at the moment...we cast quantities from one piece to thousands.
About 20% of the business at the moment is "custom" work which usually consists of 1-10 pieces. These are items like art reproductions for sculptors, animal casts for zoos, or prototype vehicle parts, which will later be manufactured in large quantities (100,000+ pieces) via a different process such as injection molding. It is cost-prohibitive for a company like Chevrolet to proto pieces using injection molding since it can cost $10,000 to $30,000 to get the machines setup to cast even one piece. If there is a problem with the piece
(a hole needs to be moved or whatever), then the company has to shell even out more money to have the machine dies re-tooled & the process restarts. Ouch.
Most of our other production pieces are cast on-demand as orders are placed...then I don't have to worry about making 1000 pieces of something that isn't selling. These runs are usually 25 to 500 pieces, depending on the buyer and the product.
