I work for a refurbishing company. One of our jobs is to refurbish Nokia radios for the telecom industry. On these radios, there is a metal twist-on cap that covers an SFP port to weather proof it. Unfortunately, these caps are NOT sold individually by Nokia, or the 2 manufacturers we found who make them. Now we're faced a few problems, but we need help deciding which route to go
Route 1: 3D print the caps ourselves using PETG filament. We're actually doing this already as a temporary bandaid, however, there are some legal implications here. We have redesigned the part from scratch, however, we're not sure if this would possibly infringe on an existing patent that might be out there. I have attached an image of the printed part for reference. Also, the OEM caps have a rating of IP67. We did a rudimentary test here in our lab to see how well it would perform under the same conditions, and the results were surprisingly positive. We could perhaps convince our customer to allow us to use these caps if we got them IP67 rated AND cleared them legally. But how would I go about finding a patent of this particular part?
Finding these caps are proving difficult. I don't think they're sold completely on their own, but rather with a small kit, which I was able to find the datasheet on. Here is what we need:
https://radiall-files.s3.amazonaws.com/tds/fibreopticcomponents/R2CT107000_21-08-18B.pdfHowever, I also found something interesting. I found a plastic version of the kit here:
https://www.mouser.com/datasheet/2/516/R2CT105000_24_12_18C-2501011.pdfNow, keep in mind, in these data sheets, I ONLY need the covers, not the entire thing. The plastic version says there is a patent pending, the metal version does not. I've looked on Google Patents for an hour now looking for anything at all that relates to these kits / caps, but I cannot find anything. I'm wondering if maybe I'm going about this wrong and perhaps need to look elsewhere? We'd rather not print these caps as we can only produce 30 a day with our current setup (which could be expanded), but preferably, we'd like to just purchase them.
Route 2: Send a 3D model of the cap we're already 3D printing to a real manufacturer and have them produce metal versions for us in mass. We'd be looking at purchasing around 50,000, but that sounds like it has the potential to be very costly. Not that we're not prepared to spend money on it, but anywhere we could save a dollar would be great. Now, this also has potential patent problems. Would a manufacturer help look into patenting issues for us, or is that typically the responsibility of the customer? If we only produce a part of the patented kit (like the cap), would that still fall under the same patent protections, or are we allowed to do that because it's not cloning the ENTIRE patent? Any estimates on cost per cap to make?
Route 3: Simply find a place online that we can purchase these caps in bulk from. We've already been looking for a few months now, but we can't seem to find a reliable cheap source. Not really much to say about this option, as it would be the easiest, but very unlikely that we'd find a good source, but hey, you guys would know better than me. Any suggestions on where to find these?
That's basically the rundown of what we have going on. I'm not looking for any definitive answers here, just guidance on what to do next. None of the options are optimal, but I'd like to exhaust all my options before telling our customer "too bad so sad". Any insight would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!