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Thread: Thoughts on these mezanine supports?

  1. #16
    Quote Originally Posted by Martin Wasner View Post
    I should start a crowd find account for a cnc. "Say brother, can you spare $150,000.00?"
    It's too much like internet pan handling to me. I could never think of using anything like that. I will just work more and save more.

  2. #17
    Quote Originally Posted by Mark Canada View Post
    Well, if you have product idea and a good marketing strategy that will sell the items to fund the cnc - why not? "Hand" crafted wood products are back in style! You can get a hell of a cnc router for 150k!
    About what it costs to get into one that will actually hold a full sheet good with room to spare and have a big pump and numerous tool holders.

  3. #18
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    I think there's a small misunderstanding about the "Crowdfunding" in the context of this situation. I don't believe that the OP means asking for money in the way that many folks do when something bad happens, etc....ie, donations. I believe it's referring to something more akin to Kickstarter (or PledgeMusic in the music business) where by folks pre-order an actual product and the deposits in turn fund the setup and initial production. These early buyers are essentially investing in the business with the expectation that they will receive a product in return for early support. There are many things for sale these days that started out with Kickstarter type funding for the manufacturing...you may even own one or more of them and not realize it.
    --

    The most expensive tool is the one you buy "cheaply" and often...

  4. #19
    Quote Originally Posted by Darcy Warner View Post
    About what it costs to get into one that will actually hold a full sheet good with room to spare and have a big pump and numerous tool holders.
    Yep, and more importantly, punch out a sheet of parts in 6-8 minutes.

  5. #20
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    Yup, dead on - like I said before, crowd funding in this instance (unlike the "uncle jimmys house burned down and he has no insurance" kind) is just a pre-order system with big discounts. I've done 2 on Kickstarter previously and this time I'm on IndieGoGo because Kickstarter's post campaign tools and support are awful. It makes fulfilling orders very difficult.

    I'm selling some of my existing products under half price, but without the high level of finish on them that I normally offer (one step back from fully finished). This is still a much higher quality finish than all the other products on the market. I'm also launching 2 new products, and offering smaller discounts on other existing items. It's very niche, but I have good connections I've built up over the past year that makes marketing to the relatively small community pretty trivial. I have a very good reputation in the community, so people are happy to support the business restarting in another country in return for a significant discount on items they might have been wanting for a year or more

    Its very humbling to have the support (even if they are just after the discount!), especially after all that has happened year or so (loss of child, almost loss of wife, heart attack from stress, forced to move country because we got behind on residency application because of other things happening...)

  6. #21
    Quote Originally Posted by Jim Becker View Post
    I think there's a small misunderstanding about the "Crowdfunding" in the context of this situation. I don't believe that the OP means asking for money in the way that many folks do when something bad happens, etc....ie, donations. I believe it's referring to something more akin to Kickstarter (or PledgeMusic in the music business) where by folks pre-order an actual product and the deposits in turn fund the setup and initial production. These early buyers are essentially investing in the business with the expectation that they will receive a product in return for early support. There are many things for sale these days that started out with Kickstarter type funding for the manufacturing...you may even own one or more of them and not realize it.
    You are still using others money to try to get a product to them at some point. It's not much different. Something goes wrong no product gets delivered.

    What happened to borrowing money from a bank or investor? It's like spreading the risk out to a bunch of strangers this way.

    I just don't get it. I would never consider doing it or even looking at a kickfunding crowd thingy.

  7. #22
    Quote Originally Posted by Martin Wasner View Post
    Yep, and more importantly, punch out a sheet of parts in 6-8 minutes.
    I will toss you a buck, only 149,999 people left to give you a buck.

  8. #23
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    No fire sprinklers needed, possible living quarters, looks like you town could have another " Ghost Ship" fire at any time. I do not direct this to the op. since I doubt he plans to have wild drunken parties at night to raise extra money .
    Bill D

  9. #24
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    Quote Originally Posted by Bill Dufour View Post
    No fire sprinklers needed, possible living quarters, looks like you town could have another " Ghost Ship" fire at any time. I do not direct this to the op. since I doubt he plans to have wild drunken parties at night to raise extra money .
    Bill D
    Now that you mention it... I have an idea to raise extra money! Thanks!

    Its pretty much this way all over the UK from what I've seen.

  10. #25
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    Quote Originally Posted by Darcy Warner View Post
    You are still using others money to try to get a product to them at some point. It's not much different. Something goes wrong no product gets delivered.

    What happened to borrowing money from a bank or investor? It's like spreading the risk out to a bunch of strangers this way.

    I just don't get it. I would never consider doing it or even looking at a kickfunding crowd thingy.
    Investors want a chunk of your business. To get a bank loan you need to have a credit history - as someone who just moved country, I don't exist in credit reports. For the small amount of money I was hoping to raise, I could have gone to the government for a startup loan, but as I have no credit history they would reject me. I don't like owing the bank either... never a good place to be.

    Crowd funding can also be a great way to launch your product and build hype around it, get a lot of media attention you otherwise would not have received. I've designed parts of some crowd funded products where the company is now worth over half a billion dollars. The bank would have rejected them for the idea. This was the case for my previous campaign, and it worked out great.

    If you need a significant amount of capital, like say launching an electronics product in a plastic enclosure, you may not be able to raise enough money from the bank, or have enough "street cred" for investors to back you. If you have $150k of injection moulds, $200k of electronics components and another $50k of board/assembly fees in order to make the product at a cost that the market will bear you might not get the funding from traditional sources. The risk if you did could be very high, you could end up with a large warehouse full of $500k of stock you can't move because you misjudged the market. By crowd funding you both prove demand, and raise the capital needed to make the project happen as well as building a customer base ready to order. In addition, you prove yourself to future investors, retailers and distributors as having a product that is in demand.

    Furthermore, if you have a product that you know needs significant development input but have taken it as far as you can financially, you may need funding to finish it up. I'm really not a fan of these sorts of campaigns where its "almost ready" but there is still a year of development left. That being said, there have been some very large campaigns that have gone on to great success after doing so. Taking a bank loan of potentially millions of dollars and then running at a loss for a year to then produce the product isn't viable for many companies. The interest on a couple of million dollar loan is enormous, if you could convince the bank to give you that in the first place. A startup certainly would not get funding from the bank in that amount, and if they did the interest rate would be enormous.

    On the flip side, backers can get significant discounts on the product, early access, exclusive versions, etc. There is of course the risk that the company fails to deliver, and some have failed spectacularly. I've backed about 60 projects on crowd funding websites, many were late but all delivered. Out of the billions dumped into crowd funding every year, there's only perhaps a few tens of millions of dollars worth of major campaigns I can think of that completely failed to deliver.

  11. #26
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    Since most got right to workflow aspect and then plotted their next crowd sourcing scheme, I'll take a stab at a mezzanine answer. I'm not a structural engineer but I have dealt with enough structures to know a few things. First, I can virtually guarantee that the beam sized to span 12' in its current configuration is not going to span 24'. The mezzanine structure you have there is pretty light weight. I'm judging simply on scale and photographs, but I can certainly tell it was added after the fact. The columns bolt to the slab rather than down through the slab to a footing, so the columns are not transferring a lot of load. Again, I am going on photographs so you may tell me this was built at the end of an old airport runway and the slab is 20" thick, full of reinforcing and no need investigate further, much less to cut it out for footings. I suspect, however, this isn't the case and you have a lightweight mezzanine system sitting on a 4" - 6" concrete slab. If you were to consider removing columns, you are likely looking at larger beams to make the span work, PLUS you run the risk of slab damage as you reduce the number of bearing points and concentrate the load on fewer slab areas (or you are cutting slab to install footings at the remaining locations). If you really have a clearance issue for a specific machine / area, you could have a structural engineer take a look at shifting a column or two, but I wouldn't start planning your space with entire column lines gone... you're not going to get there.
    One further caveat to keep your hopes alive if you are really entertaining these modifications, you are in a vastly different place than any I have ever worked so construction methods may differ enough to give you more flexibility than I see. I would still be very surprised to see any columns go completely away, though... sorry!
    Last edited by Carl Baker; 02-13-2018 at 4:19 PM.

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