Diaper Machine

Tetra said:

1.5 million will not even cover the cost of a custom built diaper machine to manufacture your replica baby diaper , you would need a free distribution network in place and a couple of million dollars for intial raw materials to crank out your first product.

All in for the first run you better have at least 5 million available and the distribution network to turn them into sales because your intial run will either make or bankrupt the company with no second run and a multi million dollar machine idle and costing you money daily.


Sent from my SM-T810 using Tapatalk

Click to expand...

You can buy an adult diaper machine for $500k. It’s not going to be the fastest but it will do the job. The materials are the costly part. Getting the correct amount of pulp and all that would be difficult. Getting quality glues, plastic, etc to produce even a standard quality diaper will take a lot of time and money. Building relations with suppliers and consumers is another cost. It would probably be 5nyewrs before any profit begins. Before that it’s all over head and loss. There is also maintenance on the machine which costs a lot. Saying 5 million to get started is about right.

I know you have venders in China to do the production. I am looking at a way to produce a diaper but also try and hire ABDL's exclusively in this venture

Unless you are willing to take a loss on the equipment, it will be difficult to be profitable with this as an ABDL venture only.
that kind of equipment needs to be running nite and day to pay for itself and that means making baby diapers and medical diapers. You need those markets to subsidize the niche ones. So, I think it is still best to try and find a US manufacturer that you can work with. the XP medical A+ diapers were said to be made here. who is doing that? Or maybe we can come with a mostly hand made process. That could work in a niche market as well.

You'd have to work out a business plan to figure out the ROI on the investment. Interestingly, there's a sample diaper business plan readily available via a Google search, as well as links to US manufacturers and links to companies where manufacture machines.

Some made-up numbers:

Let's say a diaper machine puts out 15 diapers per minute and achieves 60 percent uptime. In an eight-hour shift, that's 4320 diapers on average.

Let's further say that gross wholesale price per diaper is $1.00, with a retail price of $2.00. Even if you sell direct, we'll still use the wholesale cost because the retail process ads a whole bunch of other costs. Let's say your materials cost per diaper is 30 cents, and your fully loaded labor rate is $20 an hour for an operator and $30 an hour for a technician. Having both people on hand during the shift is necessary, so say $50 an hour. Your $4320 in sales costs $1296in materials, and labor for the shift is $400. That leaves you $2624 per shift.

Let's say you're running two shifts, five days a week. Rent is $2000 a month for a very modest space, so about $45 a shift. Electricity is about $50 a shift. Call it $2500 a shift after those expenses.

At 540 shifts a year, that's around $1.3M per year, a good return on a $2M investment. Keep in mind that we have assumed no packaging costs, shipping costs, marketing costs, etc., and we've assumed you're selling all of your production at a dollar apiece, which is probably high. We've assumed no maintenance costs for the machine apart from labor and downtime - sensors are hundreds of dollars, machine vision cameras for quality inspection are thousands of dollars, and automation engineer to fix it when it's not room will set you back a couple hundred dollars an hour. Point being, expenses are going to be much higher than this.

If you're seriously thinking of investing six or seven figures in an enterprise like this, you'll want a very through business plan.

The first part of this plan will be the establishment of my first phase of a plumbing company.

Plumbing who needs it when we have diapers.

Sent from my SM-T810 using Tapatalk

Showers, sinks, HVAC, hot water, fireplaces and more.

I wonder if there are books on diaper engineering.

Dlforpurity said:

I wonder if there are books on diaper engineering.

Click to expand...

Yes there is, where do you think diapers come from !

Sent from my SM-T810 using Tapatalk

Dlforpurity said:

I wonder if there are books on diaper engineering.

Click to expand...

There probably aren't books per se, but there's a lot of information about how to design such things. For instance, in a few minutes on Google last night, I read that the pulp of choice is cellulose, that the degree of cross-linking and the particle size of the hydrogels are of critical importance to avoid blocking absorbency from the outer layers swelling and preventing the inner layers from coming in contact with liquid, and that the ratio of hydrogel (such as SAP) to cellulose is important because the cellulose fibers help to disperse the liquid through the pad. Apparently the ideal particle size for the hydrogel is around 400 microns, about .016 inches. I read that there are wet-forming and dry-forming techniques for creating the pad, both of which have their problems, and that the pad is usually spray-formed in a vacuum mold on a conveyor. I read that the backsheet is typically polyethylene, and the inner layer is typically polypropylene.

And all that's from twenty minutes on Google. I have the advantage of already being a fairly experienced engineer with lots of factory automation experience, although I've never designed a diaper. Maybe it's time to start. At any rate, none of it was rocket science - no heavy math, just a bit of basic polymer chemistry.

One interesting comment I saw was that early disposable diapers were extremely bulky because they used cellulose fibers exclusively, rather than hydrogel. Hydrogel/SAP is what makes a diaper swell as it gets wet; cellulose is what makes it thick when it's dry, and what makes it wick well.

Dlforpurity said:

I wonder if there are books on diaper engineering.

Click to expand...

maybe not books but I bet there's a number of research papers on them.

The more I ponder this idea. I am thinking of a way to do this in a garage to start if possible. I get a mill and lathe I should keep the machine going since I have experience as a machinist.

This is a great idea. I would fully support anyone that is trying to do this. Personally, i think with the young generation, such as myself, many prefer cloth backed diapers like goodnites, underjams, pampers etc, because we grew up in them. Having adult size versions of these would sell like alcohol lol

By law You need to have this too https://youtu.be/qaC0vNLdLvY @ 1:15-2:05 although I can imagine the last part being the process of literally getting your product into the hands of the consumer.

Experiment626 said:

By law You need to have this too https://youtu.be/qaC0vNLdLvY @ 1:15-2:05 although I can imagine the last part being the process of literally getting your product into the hands of the consumer.

Click to expand...

Took me awhile to pin it down but I remember that tune. Looney Tunes used part of it for scenes of industrial / assembly line production, when a character found themselves trapped on an assembly line dodging part of something as it was getting assembled by machines. Listen to 0:36 - 0:47 and you may recognize it.

bambinod said:

Took me awhile to pin it down but I remember that tune. Looney Tunes used part of it for scenes of industrial / assembly line production, when a character found themselves trapped on an assembly line dodging part of something as it was getting assembled by machines. Listen to 0:36 - 0:47 and you may recognize it.

Click to expand...

Exactly!! It was in so many Looney Tunes I would have thought Warner Bros Made it and not someone else!

I think once ready if forming an LLC with other ABDL's would be a good idea.

Wow, interesting info here. I wish I could have worked at Kimberly Clark on the fitted briefs line to see them produced in the 1980’s. I bet the place smelled excellent with all that perfume they used in huggies and their fitted briefs.

I will keep you all updated as I work on this idea.