I don't think an ounce of carbon tetrachloride is going to turn anyone's back yard into a Superfund site.

And if you understand what he's trying to do here, you'd understand that for other people to duplicate his effort would be seen as success.

>If John gets thousands of orders how, when and where take on all the growing pains, not just cutting out panels. Unless John is an industrial process engineering genius, Asian manufacturers could do this for 1/10 of cost and in 1/5 the time.

If the point isn't to strike it rich, but rather to spread knowledge; John might consider that a quite satisfactory result.

Why does he need to have a "business model"? This isn't a startup. This appears to be essentially a hobby business; something that can be sustainable for a single person and maybe a few employees but not something that can scale considerably. By using CNC routing to cut out the boxes, it can scale beyond what he could cut by hand, and thus he can offer a Kickstarter, but this doesn't really appear to be something that he's intending to scale up beyond the Kickstarter, just a way for him to be able to sell some of his sets to people who wouldn't be able to go there in person and buy them directly from him.

The liability concern is greater. He can personally talk to those who walk into his store about safety; less so those who order this over the internet. No one is going to be building a bomb however; all of these samples are in quantities of 30 ml or less. That's less than the 3 liquid ounces you're allowed to bring on a plane, and that limit was set because you can't actually build anything all that destructive with only a few ounces of material.

I'm not sure how you are determining that there are no solid or liquid disposal instructions; did he post the contents of everything that will be included?

Who cares about patents here? He's shipping a chemistry set that is identical to one from 1936, plus a couple more that he thinks are useful. How are you going to patent that? It's just a collection of chemicals, and an instruction manual. The patents on producing all of these materials have long since expired. There's nothing patentable here.

And sure, other manufacturers could do this for a fraction of what he's doing. As you point out, there is some liability concern; liability concerns are greater for a larger manufacturer than for him, doing this as part of his hobby business, merely because they are a bigger target. Asian manufacturers would probably have a hell of a time getting this past customs. And again, who cares? If someone else produces an awesome chemistry set, great! The whole point is to teach about chemistry, and get kids engaged by allowing them to experiment and explore rather than swaddling them and protecting them. The point is not to get rich. Despite what you may think reading about lots of startups on Hacker News, some people just desire to do a good job, not to build a scalable business that makes them filthy rich.

So, the two main concerns I see are liability, and his ability to scale if the Kickstarter is wildly more popular than he anticipated. Even if CNC machining the case cuts down on a lot of the labor, assembly and finishing will take time. However, I don't see this as being particularly more risky than the average Kickstarter; in this case, he's already been making these for a while for sale in person, so it's far past the prototype stage that many products do a Kickstarter at.

I don't understand the liability issue. He isn't selling it as a toy, it is a science kit. Anyone can walk into any store and buy stuff that is dangerous if ingested or misused... cleaning supplies, cooking knives, etc.

Parents should be responsible for teaching their children how to work with dangerous things that we encounter every day in a safe way. The chemistry set should be used to teach science. I don't see the issue, but I guess I'm not surprised in our litigation happy society.