Hi, sdibbers is to be commended for his efforts in resolving some parts issues and offering them on to others. However cliveP62 is right in the difficulty getting it all together to make it worthwhile for anyone to take on. I remember the time and efforts taken to get uprated anti roll bars made, there were just about enough people interested to get a short run produced at a price that was comparable with commercially available items and IIRC it still came to nothing.
Colin
I made my own design of ARB for my car a few years ago. I came to the conclusion that the costs or manufacture with correct tempering etc would result in a $300 part if I sold it to others. At the time I realized that wouldn't make it economically viable.
The trouble is gauging real demand for parts, whether for Rovers or Ferraris! I spend a lot of time researching and developing products before we even get them to market. Sometimes we have a win, sometimes we have miss. Its a bit of a black art. For me the easy bit is the engineering and fabrication. The tough part is distribution, finding an established company that sells parts for a certain marque is best. They already have a name, people tend to seek them out when they need a part. It does a lot of the heavy lifting for us. I wonder if that would be a good approach for us as a group. Find a way to partner with a larger supplier that already has the economy of scale for manufacturing, a vendor network for manufacture and a distribution network and sales front that would make sense. Either by helping the likes of JRW, MGDB or Wins Int'l grow to that size (if the owners want that headache!) or by helping another vendor move into the P6 arena (Rimmers, Moss Etc). I'd offer, but I'm on the wrong side of the pond and don't have deep enough pockets to fund that sort of expansion.
With AR I have sort of a three branch approach.
1] 'Volume parts' Parts we can setup 'on-demand' manufacturing with a manufacturing partner. Mostly our 3D printed plastic parts range.
2] 'Special projects' These are normally parts for very rare high end cars. We know that only one or two of them will ever be needed. The cost of development, machining, fabrication is still high. But I can't spread that cost over a number of sales. That's how we end up making parts for Zagato Alfas, Cunninghams, Enzo period Ferraris etc.
3] 'Restoration support' I offer services to restoration houses such as body scanning, body buck creation for their body shop guys etc.
Enough of my rambling.... What's your thoughts?