Ideas for manufacturing a slightly variable part

[seymourkendall]

Hello gentlemen and women,

I've been trying to think about how I would go about mass manufacturing a product I have in my mind. Basically, it consists of a handful of telescoping half-cylinders, about 12 inches in radius, about 18 inches long, and maybe 1/8" thick, probably made of LDPE. The issue is that each piece has a slightly smaller radius than the one it telescopes into, so injection molding is out of our budget because we would have to pay for 7 or 8 different relatively large molds.

Is there a process you might recommend for something like this? Everything I can think of would require 7 or 8 different molds (roto molding, compression forming, inj. molding, thermoforming, etc). I have a feeling the answer is no, but any ideas that allow me to not use 7 or 8 molds?

[Kelly_Bramble]

You need to do an ROI on all candidate manufacturing processes. Consider extrusion manufacturing in your research.

[ishmaeldada]

what about extruding them differently, and then merging them with hot forming? but that would require 7- molds as well