JRitt |
02-22-2013 10:37 AM |
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mister_Sir
(Post 750004)
$600 for this!?!?!?!? YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME...
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Posts like this always provide me with a good laugh. How much do you think it costs to design and manufacture the product we're selling?
I'm not sure that you realize what is involved with the design and manufacture of our harness bar. This is not a 'metal bar' that some 'group of guys' decided to shove into the car.
- Our Engineering Director (who has designed championship-winning products for some of the top race teams in the world for the past 20 years) sat at a computer for hours and worked out the best design possible, looked at load paths, mounting points, etc. to make it as stiff and light as possible.
- All of the pieces are custom made to the specific size we needed, within thousandths of an inch
- When you look at the picture, it looks like a simple bar. That is not the case. There are 53 pieces of hardware in our harness bar kit!!! The bill of materials (the component list) for this kit is an entire page long!
- The end plates are custom cut from solid hunks of billet aluminum on a CNC mill
- Everything is TIG welded
- The hardware is all top quality grade 8
- After the pieces are manufactured, cut, welded, etc. they are shipped off to be anodized or powder coated, then shipped back to us. Shipping large, awkwardly-sized hunks of metal back and forth is not cheap.
- None of this even takes into account the time spent measuring, re-measuring, test-fitting, writing the instruction manual/taking pictures, labor cost to assemble and package, or actual packaging material costs
- All of the work put into this kit was done by USA workers, providing jobs to our peers
- Oh...and we bought a $27,000 car so we could have it handy to pull apart, measure, check fit, etc. and get these parts out to our customers who need them before the first autoX season even started.
Sure there are cheaper options out there, but if you lay them next to our kit, I can assure you they won't look anything like ours. Many of the other harness bars on the market are a bent metal tube with flanges tacked on the ends. Personally, I would never strap myself to one of those products. Then again, I wouldn't wear a $50 helmet, because I rather like my head. The worst part is, if you look at our competitors' prices, they aren't too far off from ours!
Oh yes...and as d1ck mentioned we would actually like to make a few bucks profit as well, so we can stay in business and continue to provide parts for these cars that our customers actually want and need.
It's true that it would have been easier for us to buy a $50 made in China, POS, flimsy extendable curtain rod from Lowes and repackage it as a harness bar. If we did that though, we'd have to mark it up to $75. That would leave us with $25 to pay for labor to go buy it, take pics of it, load it up on our website, add it to our price sheets, write an announcement for our dealers, take the time to post here on the forum about it, hold inventory, repackage it, pay for our building's mortgage, electric, water, and phone bills, keep the computers for our staff up to date, pay their salaries, and make sure we have our customer service staff on hand from 8-5 every day to answer any questions if people ran into any issues during install. Still though, $75 wouldn't be too bad for a cool looking curtain rod with an Essex sticker, would it?
Our harness bar costs the same as a set of race tires. The difference is, the harness bar will last for the life of the car, and you'll be able to sell it when you're done with it and get a good chunk of your money back.
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