Where to get custom plastic bobbins made?

[David Schwab]

you can always build your own injection molder check out rhe hack a day link Home injection molding - Hack a Day A very nice machine

Time for a new group buy! Oh, RedHouse?

[Bruce Johnson]

You see??? Next to him, I'm just a normal guy (who lives inside a building full of machines...).

With a small machine shop and some time, you can build almost anything.

Last week, there was a nice used injection molding machine on ebay at a machinery dealer near me. It was a little bigger than necessary for pickup bobbins, but not too much. I think it would mold about a 6" cube part. When I checked, the auction price was still under $100. The catch: the machine was 12' long, weighed 20,000 lbs, and had a 25HP main drive motor. That'll give you an idea what a typical injection molding machine is. As the parts get bigger than an inch or two, the machines get huge, and the tooling gets very expensive.

Going way back to the original posters' question: To get a typical guitar pickup bobbin injection molded, the tool (mold) would cost $5K to $10K. Then each production run would cost a few hundred bucks for the setup charge, and maybe $0.02 to $0.05 per part. So, you can see that for a few hundred parts, it's way too expensive (like $25 each!). For 10,000 parts it becomes reasonable ($0.65 each), and for a million parts it's cheap ($0.026 each).