It Came From the Fab Shop: The Speculative Disc-Brake Shield

[cjforumadmin]

http://www.bangshift.com/blog/It-Came-From-the-Fab-Shop-The-Speculative-Disc-Vrake-Shield.html

[TheSilverBuick]

Re: It Came From the Fab Shop: The Speculative Disc-Brake Shield

That is awesome, glad it has the potential for a return now.

Funny you mention the risk involved in building things before a guarenteed sale. I've told many people that's exactly what crashed the oil and metal markets. Most places purchase large amounts of raw materials on credit then pay off the credit when the product is sold, and when the credit markets froze not many had enough money in the bank to purchase the raw materials needed to continue producing their product, so raw material demand dropped dramatically and so did price. It's starting to come around now.

[Ron Ward]

Re: It Came From the Fab Shop: The Speculative Disc-Brake Shield

Loren,

Man, I know EXACTLY where you are coming from! That was a very well written piece.

Our shop manufactures equipment racks and enclosures for the telecommunications market. We regularly have existing customers and potential customers ask us if we can build them a rack or enclosure "just like this." Well, we draw up the plans, have the pieces programmed, quoted and prototyped. The customer likes the initial price, but wants a "few" changes to make the product more universally appealing. So we make the "few" (coff coff) changes, have all the parts revised, reprogrammed, requoted at the new revision level and the customer falls over from sticker shock.

It reminds me of the 1971 Ford Pinto. This was a great little economical car with a manual transmission and a 1.6L engine. And then Ford, in all their infinite wisdom, decided they needed to hang air conditioning, power steering, power windows, rear window defroster and a huge 100 amp alternator on it among other creature comforts. The great little car wound up being a piece of junk because everything they did to the car was an afterthought and not part of the original design. Pop the hood on any '70's or '80's Ford and you will find everything bolted to the water pump. Every one of those things is an afterthought that wound up adding to the overall cost of the vehicle and required some creative bracket to make it fit. This was all done in an effort to make the car more universally appealing.

Anyway, back to the fabrication and design world. I hope your endeavor with the disc brake shields proves to be rewarding. I am glad to see that you saw this project through to its fruition rather than cutting your losses and moving on. You can't please everyone, so you might as well please yourself! You got guts!


Ron

[oldsman496]

Re: It Came From the Fab Shop: The Speculative Disc-Brake Shield

I create new Buffing pads..some sell some don't...But at least my R&D is super cheap!!! Right now I'm engineering a new mount for the backing material that holds the pads on the machine as they are sewn. Our competitors (3M) have a center hole diameter of 1.5 inches ( where the 5/8-11 mounting bolt is), Ours was a little over 2" - They have $17,000 computerized machines. I have 30 yr old Broad Street Machines. But now we have an exactly equivalent product. and it cost us about $200 bucks per machine.
I love R&D.. Thanks for that article...more please......well written too.

[nosnerd]

Re: It Came From the Fab Shop: The Speculative Disc-Brake Shield

as always, a great read!! thanks for sharing... 8)


al