CNC work

[Wicked Wolf Auto]

I had one of my vendors in my office today who rebuilds alot of our cylinders and reverse engineers parts for some of our obsolete pumps along with various other rebuilds. About a year ago he invested around 200K in 2 new CNC's (I haven't visited his shop since he got them so I'll be going down friday) I asked him if he was keeping them busy and getting lots of use out of them and he mentioned he wished he had more production pieces to mass produce. He is into the exotic cars ferrari porsche etc... And he know the scene I'm in. So my thoughts went to all the parts we buy that are machined and how much we pay for them. Judging by what I pay for him to make me one off pieces I'm thinking I could get him to start producing some of these trick parts any thoughts suggestions or ideas from you guys

 

[6.2puller]

SOme things can be made cheaper than bought but a lot cannot. I work for a large machine shop and have access to 12 mills, (3 are verticles) and 11 Lathes (7 dual spndle dual turrett) as well as a bunch of manual equipment.
I just did a run of D60 high steer arms and will have to sell them at about the same price as Dunks to make any money on them. Steel prices are insane.

I end up ordering a lot of things that I could easily make because the prices are just to hard to compete with. NWF and DIY4x4 are almost impossable to beat on a one off even with my time being considered free.

That said their are things you can make a killing on also. We did a run of 7/8" clocking rings that the jeepers use to mate D300s behind the 6cyl tranny (ax15) Nobody else makes them they all use a spacer and regular 3/8" clocking ring. We sold them all real fast for 80$ a pc and they ran in under 5min each with a material cost of about 6$ a pc.

So basically if you can find a spinoff of something on the market that you can make better or fill a gap that nobody else fills their is money to be made but if you are just going to try to beat the market at their own current game I wouldn't recommend starting.

 

[NorthWestFab]

Hm, thanks for the tips on the spacer :P Actually Novak makes them, but they're about $170.

I didn't know we were too cheap! I'll raise the prices :P

 

[6.2puller]

Hey, you want to make them more power to you. We just did a run of 10 because I needed one for a friends rig I was working on. I looked at the Go2guy ring and spacer he had and just couldn't think of bolting on that junk. The thing was flame cut then tapped. The holes weren;t even round. No go thread gauge went almost all the way through. I didn't even use it to make the program as I figured that with those oval holes my BHC would be off.