Nerves grow like St. Augustine grass. They grow laterally for a while before setting down new roots.

The USA is not a team. If it is, then it is highly dysfunctional because you have as many directions taken as people involved.

Always available to help people of like mind. Good luck on your ptoject

Thanks, term, for the benefit of your experience.

Not all tinkering really qualifies as inventing something new -- but it's a very useful hobby if done right.

I can offer this comment: For any given product, there seem to be many multiple companies "selling" it, but most likely only a few real manufacturers. What I do is ask for quotes and look for the lowest prices, which would logically be the manufacturers. I ignore the higher priced ones.

Be very careful to specify in great detail what you want. If its not specified, and this is made more difficult by the language barrier, is likely NOT to be made the way you want. Steel specs, welding specs, painting or finishing specs, not to mention dimensions that they can actually inspect to. In my experience, the chinese will do exactly what you want IF you tell them in advance what the specs are.

I support individuals, not countries.

Your comment is valid, term. The shipping that the vendors on alibaba charge for the chassis we need do make them barely competitive with US fabricators. I doubt that the ones we have found there are anything more than middlemen; I would hope that a factory could have done better both on the chassis and on shipping. In fact, the best value I found for our prototypes is a manufacturer in Europe - about 30% lower than the Chinese vendors' non-customized chassis. I suspect we will end up having the custom chassis made here unless our success makes for high volumes and lower prices overseas.

You can try Alibaba.com to search for chinese mfrs. Thats what we use to see what overseas prices would be. Something large like that might have significant sea shipping charges though which could make it impractical to go overseas.

Try pawel.kazanowski@sapagroup.com regarding aluminum, and tell him you know me. He is in the same town as AIDome.

I can't answer that.

I'm looking for a chassis manufacturer (steel and anodized aluminum) who can cut my costs on a relatively simple custom chassis significantly on repeated orders of 100 units. Do any of your manufacturing contacts do this? (Thus far the fabricators here in GA can compete with what I have found overseas for the volumes that I currently need.)

Interestingly enough, I was reading that nerves can regenerate at a certain number of millimeters per unit of time. If the distance from one side of the break to the other is shorter, recovery is faster.

Sounds like u have a good idea

I remember having to twist and turn things to show how it’s “substantially similar” to existing products in order to get the 510k. If I had come up with something really new, as a small company I could never gotten through the process

The 510k pricess doesn’t help anyone really, it just makes it cheaper to get premarket approval. It means that something radically new and better will only be made by large companies and not startups

My company came up with many products not similar to ones being marketed already. That’s why hospitals bought from us. But we essentially convinced the 21 yr old wannabe regulators that black was the same as white to get them to sign off. The whole process was a bit stupid if u ask me

A patent, in my opinion anyway, is an artifificial monopoly granted by a government for an arbitrary period of time to the first person to jump thru the government hoops.

I point to the patent battles between the wright brothers and Curtis. Curtis exploited and improved upon wright brothers work, while the wrights pretty much rested on their patents and went nowhere

The Chinese seem to be more like Curtis in terms of really getting out there and making the best of new ideas. Maybe it undercuts the artificial governmental monopolies granted by patents, but in the end arentvwe better off to let competition work its magic ?

Thanks. As Klingons would say, "Kapla!". To our success!

I totally understand the need to deal with federal agencies such as fda , osha, epa, irs etc. one of my partners in the last business was such s person. In today’s world, the product is an essential part of a business, but it’s worthless without the permission to sell it to willing buyers- as granted by the governmental looters.

I hope your device is successful as it sounds like it would help people whose nerve pathways have been mechanically interrupted

Ironically, in the medical device field, the patent and FDA approval processes favor the innovators over the inventors because of the 510(k) approval process. It is far easier to prove that your technology is conceptually similar to someone else's to get through FDA than it is to truly invent something totally new.

However, even if I get a PCT international patent, many in China don't honor it. There are many in China who are honorable, but just like with terrorists, it only takes a very small minority to ruin things.

I wasn’t thinking you were a prosecutor Sorry if I came across that way. I just have a small company and am upset at being targeted with tariffs to solve problems I didn’t make and can’t be fixed by the use of tariffs. Tariffs should be zero, period, at least in a rational world of free competition

As to sensitive technology developed by private companies, it’s theirs to protect or trade away, in my opinion. That’s all

It's appropriate that you should mention the patent office. I have a meeting with my partners today to discuss an alternate synthesis method to our patented technology and whether, if someone else had the idea, they would be violating our existing patent. I think that we will have to write another patent to properly block out future competition.

Yes, he did it with Kim Jong Un, with the Chinese, and now the EU. It is a game he plays better than most, but nonetheless, do I, as a businessman inventor, have the time to wait for a success?

I am perfectly OK with buying my items from China, and I can put them together into products worth selling anywhere. All that tariffs do is raise the capital cost risk for me as a businessman.