Somewhat random topic:

It seems to me the major costs in the advancement of homebuilt aricraft, particularly composites is in the time spent creating moldless composite parts or everyone building their own molds. Essentially every part is some custom "one-off", making the time and costs to produce and eventually repair extremely expensive.

I was wondering if any group of homebuilders / homebuilt kit manufacturer has thought about building a set of molds that a group of people can pay to use per use or possibly to lower the costs more have investors pay for the costs of building the molds and over time they would make their money back (+ plus some profit to incentivize initial investment).

I know local motors has crowdsourced design and distributed micro factories to build custom projects where essentially the tooling, facility, and materials are crowdsourced or investor crowdsourced.

I imagine something similar could be done for the homebuilt market that would be attractive to outside investors.

For example: Let's assume Rutan's Skigull or some other homebuilt experimental begins to build a large demand base. The costs for certifying such an aircraft drive costs very high and with such small production runs as aircraft (think some of the largest runs for GA aircraft are < 100,000 units) are destined to it drives those aircraft out of reach for a majority of buyers and/or builders. To keep quality high and costs down composite molds are necessary for repeat-ability and "higher-speed" production but molds can be extremely expensive to produce. So get a group of investors (homebuilders) to pay for the tooling to build the molds upfront based on projected demand cycles. Then homebuilders could fly in to some facility, pay a fee to use the mold, which accounting for a time factor, would be MUCH cheaper than hand layup over foam core or building your own molds. Then the part could be crated up and shipped back to the homebuilder. The fee that is paid in would, over time, pay back the investors who paid for the mold.
As far as possible production damage to the mold is concerned I know in Europe some large molds for racing sailboats are insured against failure, so a similar market could exist.
r
This would greatly speed up production times for homebuilt aircraft and create a financial market for non-traditional investors as well. I believe this could be applicable outside of homebuilt GA as well to boats, bikes, cars, furniture, etc...

Just a random idea I had...does this already exist? Curious to hear the communities thoughts on it.

-J