I had this very conversation yesterday with a friend who has experience making and selling cast products. My thought was to take my 1950s vintage T-grip for a K frame S&W and have a mold made to cast duplicates in one of the indestructible resins now available. That allows room temperature production on a kitchen table, with any color you want and a surface that would duplicate my smooth original. (If demand was there I'd find J and N frame adapters to copy as well.)
Molds for low volume production of this kind of product cost in the hundreds, not thousands, and material cost per unit would be very low, but production is mix-and-pour-one-batch-of-resin-at-a-time, so quite labor intensive. Still, he says in a weekend I could knock out hundreds of the things. (It's how he makes one of his products, so this is real world experience talking.) It still would need advice from a patent lawyer that there are NO legal (patent/intellectual property law) risks in doing this, and that fee would probably be the largest single expense.
From reading about the Tyler operation on various forums, it looks like they treat the business as a custom shop - you order a J-frame adapter and they go make it and send it to you. They appear to maintain no inventory - an unbelievable way to run a standard-product business that has been around long enough to know what the market demand is for each of its products. (Of course, maybe it's a you order a J-frame adapter and we wait until we have enough orders to make a run - if that's the case then somebody OUGHT to come along and put 'em out of business with a duplicate product that's readily available at a reasonable price.)
It's an interesting project to contemplate. Might lose a little money. But might get swamped with orders, and then where would I be?
