When STC went out of business, I looked into this some. And again when Bestop stopped.
THe old man at STC wanted wayyyy to much money for his business, but it was for sale, all the patterns and sources and whatnot.
Way too much.
My mother-in-law used to sew seats for a OEM seat supplier, she knows how to sew heavy stuff, I looked into creating a business model to create the templates, small shop to sew in, creating the bracketry and whatnot, starting very small and working up (The full-size ford bronco and older ramcharger guys need tops too!) . It's not as simple as it sounds or on first look. There's alot of little things that is what makes a top a good top.
The first thing I looked at was, why did Bestop and STC stop making them.
Well, this one is not so detrimental. STC seemed to go out of business because the old-guy wanted to retire, from what I can tell, the lawsuit (which is why STC changed from Kayline) and something with his son not wanting the business or something, it seemed he went out of business because of reasons other than pure lack of sales.
Bestop seemed to stop making them because, and this is purely my opinion from research done by me, they are a huge giant company that seems to be headed in another direction. They now make seats, consoles, lots of other things besides tops (I wouldn't be surprised to see them change their name), they deal with high volume stuff they can sell alot of, which usally means late model vehicles only. Now, that said, It would not surprise me one bit to see them make a run of the K5 tops again, they still have their pattern for it, I'm sure if things got slow one week, they might make a run and make a few hundred of them again. WHen I inquired via eMail, a sales tech used very careful wording in the response, "we are not making these tops *right now*". You wouldn't say that unless you perhaps planned to make a run of them again, if it makes sense. Anyhow, so yes and no, they stopped selling because of low volume, but not that they couldn't sell any of them, just not to the par of most of the products this company sells.
Ok, so well, sales might not be so much of a problem. So...moving on, parts. If you look at what comes in an STC fastrac kit, there's lots of little pieces and stuff. Some of it is cheap fab (like the bows). Some of it is stock metal. For the stock metal, for some of the pieces, you need to buy high volumes to get some of the goofy c-channels and whatnot that they are. You not going to be able to buy a couple 20' sticks of that special thin c-channel I found. Min order on some of those pieces of metal was 10000'.
You'll need to make some jigs to perform the metals to the body, for in the case of the windshield frame.
I think the biggest factor in the whole deal is what people want and expect from it.
Everyone seems to want something different. I want a skyler type. I want a fastrac, I want a simple snap, I want a heavy can-back style so I can put stuff on top, I want this, I want a bikni. Everyone has their opinions on what they want, as any normal consumer would. One type and style doesn't seem to appeal to the masses. You have to factor than in when trying to create a business for it.
Now, when you factor in costs of material, time spent to reserach at least 2 different styles, creating those patterns, time to spend fabbing all the little pieces, learning curve, etc..in conclusion, at volumes of less than 500/year, which in all likelyhood this would be, I couldn't sell them for less than $1200, which is more than most people are willing to pay for a soft top. It was starting to look like it was going to be harder than previously thought. Now are there things one can do to reduce costs, I'm sure, but the inital figures wern't adding up.
I'm not saying it can't be done. I'd love to see it done. I'm more just sharing my input on the subject here from my own research. From the research I did, making a business out of it, it was going to be a tough go. YOu seem to have a different approach than I do with the one run, I'm taking orders up front, who will buy for sure type of approach, so mabey that is a better way to go.
Oh, BTW, if your going to utilize the existing rear window, you'll need some pretty stout framing to support that thing in its upright position (you have to think worst case where the window shouldn't break, like a sudden stop where no other vehicle damage would occur, there's alot of force at the top of that thing in a sudden panic stop situation). The other thing one might worry about, is alot of peoples K5's don't have a working rear window, some remove those components all together to save weight, along with a soft top, so keep that in mind.
(and I really miss the flipoff smilie):
