PPP price increases

[gtr2]

That's fine but why not make standard colors standard and carry a running stock of them at competitive prices?

[pickdropper]

That's fine but why not make standard colors standard and carry a running stock of them at competitive prices?

I totally agree.

I don't mind buying 10 boxes at a time, but I wish the quantity discounts could apply across different enclosure sizes and finish grades. 

I never expected they were powder coating one box at a time anyway.  I'd like to see their process flow.


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[sturgeo]

I never expected they were powder coating one box at a time anyway.  I'd like to see their process flow.

I'm not sure, they offer a massive selection of colours and pretty much any enclosure you want. That would be a lot of stock sat on shelves on the off chance someone ever wanted one.

Its not economically viable to do things one at a time, I can fully understand the drilling setup fees, it takes time to create the model, sort the code and then zero in the box & set the mill off. I always try to mill in small batches to make the best of my time.

If anyone wants smallish runs of drilled, powder coated & possibly printed enclosures I can hugely recommend Matthew @ Disaster Area. Excellent service and a quick turnaround.

[pickdropper]

I never expected they were powder coating one box at a time anyway.  I'd like to see their process flow.

I'm not sure, they offer a massive selection of colours and pretty much any enclosure you want. That would be a lot of stock sat on shelves on the off chance someone ever wanted one.

Its not economically viable to do things one at a time, I can fully understand the drilling setup fees, it takes time to create the model, sort the code and then zero in the box & set the mill off. I always try to mill in small batches to make the best of my time.

If anyone wants smallish runs of drilled, powder coated & possibly printed enclosures I can hugely recommend Matthew @ Disaster Area. Excellent service and a quick turnaround.

I think we might be talking about slightly different things here. For what it's worth, I completely understand that PPP needs to structure things to be profitable.  I think we're just throwing out different ideas that might make things more palatable for DIYers without hurting their profitability.

1.)  Stock standard colors for popular enclosures - Obviously, this can't be all enclosures in all colors.  But maybe 3-4 colors of the most popular enclosure sizes.

2.)  Quantity discounts across multiple enclosure sizes.   An operation like this almost certainly can't do just in time delivery on raw enclosures, so odds are that they have a fairly large stock of raw enclosures.  The labor would appear to be in the powder coating.  Running a batch of a single color of different sized enclosures wouldn't seem like it would to be better than running different color batches of the same size enclosure, but the discount pricing is setup on the latter.  I admittedly am making some assumptions here.

3.)  For drilling and printing, that's just time consuming for setup, so I don't blame them at all for changing their pricing structure on this.  I can't imaging that will change.

[sturgeo]

1.)  Stock standard colors for popular enclosures - Obviously, this can't be all enclosures in all colors.  But maybe 3-4 colors of the most popular enclosure sizes.

2.)  Quantity discounts across multiple enclosure sizes.   An operation like this almost certainly can't do just in time delivery on raw enclosures, so odds are that they have a fairly large stock of raw enclosures.  The labor would appear to be in the powder coating.  Running a batch of a single color of different sized enclosures wouldn't seem like it would to be better than running different color batches of the same size enclosure, but the discount pricing is setup on the latter.  I admittedly am making some assumptions here.

Agree with you fully, grab a mixture of A, B, BB, etc and blast the lot with powder, pop them in the oven and have them sat on the shelf, people are always going to want those sizes in black, white, etc. I see they have a "powdercoated stock" section, perhaps a small selection of colours will appear here, if not I imagine they'll be losing a lot of custom.

That discount structure doesn't make any sense, I imagine its because the ecommerce solution doesn't support applying a discount that way. They need to charge for the colour rather than the paint charge, that way they could apply a discount.

I've never understood the pricing structure as it is at the moment, yes a 1032l uses more powder than a 1590a but with the quantities they buy it'll be cents. If I were them I'd ditch the paint charge completely, have flat rates for standard and premium colours, then adjust the enclosure charge to include the extra powder cost. Put the quantity discounts on the colours and bingo.

Edit: oh and offer reasonable postage charges for international customers

[alanp]

A special on Colour X, changing as stock runs low, might also be an idea for B and BB enclosures, as those are the two most common sizes.

Powdercoat a bunch of B's and BB's one colour, have them on special 'till stock gets to a certain point, then repeat with a different colour.

[aion]

If anyone wants smallish runs of drilled, powder coated & possibly printed enclosures I can hugely recommend Matthew @ Disaster Area. Excellent service and a quick turnaround.

+1. Disaster Area is the best. They did about 10% of my Lab Series enclosures and they were spot-on. I wish I knew about them sooner so I didn't have to go through the debacle with Mammoth. They took over two months to produce 100 of them - and then they weren't even printed when they finally arrived. I had to ship them back.

[wgc]

I've done a bunch of powdercoating. The labor on the powdercoat is pretty minimal, at least for one coat colors.  But when you get into the customs it could be as many as three coats, and if there's any brushed or similar effects it's likely you might have to scrap some.

Same with the milling, once you have fixtures and templates it's pretty quick to change things on the fly.

So beyond 3 coat colors, I imagine most of the labor is in simply tracking the parts as they move through the shop. They're still figuring things out but if they manage to find an efficient tracking system that's mostly automated they could probably be more competitive.

To the buyer, it makes sense they should get a discount but to the seller, a high mix low qty is actually a lot more work.

All that said, they have likely identified a sweet spot with smallish pedal companies and the onesie twosie orders aren't much worth it yet.

I'm also guessing they do other powdercoating and machining work that makes better use of the facilities and the pedal stuff is just a little gravy.