Feeler - Adjustable Control arms

[986piper]

The hard part is having access to low cost/high quality aluminum. Can you afford to buy in large enough quantity to get the price low enough?

Not a problem at all, I actually find quality aluminum to be very reasonably priced and easy to get in my neck of the woods.

And do you have access to high quality machining at a low cost? I don't remember Canada as being considered a particularly low cost labor country.

I am a machinist with a garage machine shop. I will be building the control arms myself, it will be a labour of "love" not cost. I am sure that our low Canadian dollar will make purchasing these from Canada very attractive.

Will you have enough cash to build a large quantity at one time so the setup and other fixed costs of the machining can be amortized over a large quantity? Machining a small quantity of parts can be incredibly expensive.

Right now, I do not intend to manufacture large quantities, if that situation should ever come, I have several high production CNC type machine shops at my disposal to use (I personally know the owners). I recently sold out of my oilfield business and am not afraid of the start up (fixed) costs of getting this new adventure going.

Add in the cost for taking orders, managing orders, shipping orders, return orders, customer damaged goods coming back for free replacement (you need to count on this happening and if you don't give them free replacement parts they will flame you on every internet forum imaginable and ruin your reputation), answering customer questions, managing inventory, advertising, and the cost of your time to manage the business and you'll be hard pressed to make much of a profit.

Thank you for the advise...not to sound arrogant, this is not my first business and I am used to 24 hr working days to keep my clients happy.

There is a reason why Tarett and Rennline sell so many products - each additional product lets them amortize the fixed costs of the business over more products and revenue. With only a single product and a low volume, even with a very low overhead it will be very hard to make a real profit.

I am not sure I agree with this. Bigger, more volume, etc, does not always equal more profit...I have learned this more than once. Also, I plan on developing more than one product for the Boxster, stay tuned!

I say all of this based on my experience of owning/operating RoboTop for several years.

I really appreciate your comments, thank you for taking the time to chat.

And it probably needs to be 20% better/nicer than these for 30% less (currently $1,000 so you'll need to be around $700 sell price):

I easily can be in this price league with a high quality product.