We sell about 10 SHO Big Bore Butterflies per year. Granted, it is a mature product and we sold hundreds over the past 6 years.
Even if we did not have to pay machine time (which we do), someone still has to do the work. We have seen people complain about our CNC cut SHO Big Bore prices at $189 and then spend 12 hours of their own time with a jig saw and a dremel to brag how they built their own set for only $58. We get a chuckle out of these people since their hourly rate is pretty low at that point and their BBBs are not very pretty or effective being hand cut.
Buying the correct reamer would be a good start if you wanted to do-it-yourself, but you still need the machine to operate the reamer and some sort of tooling to hold the LIM. Then there are the plates to be cut. You can buy off the shelf plates, but they wont fit your rods, or you can try to cut freehand. In our case we use CAD and CNC cut the plates to fit. They are all identical. Unfortunately, the cost to make 10 is almost the cost to make 100 since setup and programming costs are a fixed cost. If you wanted 500 LIMs made instead of 5, I am 100% sure I could knock the price down significantly over what we are asking.
The only reason we ask for money up front is we have been left holding the bag on other group buys. You would think Vulcan UDPs would be a hot seller, since there are more Vulcans than SHO, but we have only sold 1 or 2 above our original group buy number, and we bought significant additional inventory to make the group buy happen (thinking they would sell). We may still have Vulcan UDPs in stock when a Taurus gets old enough to enter in an antique car show:crazy:.
Another recent group buy that failed was the ATX y-pipe buy. We had 10-12 people who said they wanted it. When we were ready to go to production, we had TWO paying customers. Everyone else vanished.
I don't want to be too negative. I know the economy is in the tank. We run SHO Source as a second business (thankfully). We do it because we love the orphaned cars, but it can't be a charity. We run on extremely thin margins so we can compete with the big internet suppliers. We might only make $10-20 each on the Contour LIMs. If we get 5 buyers, that means $50-100 for probably 20-30 hours of our time in emails, design, shipping, etc. Not a great hourly wage (and we laughed at the dremel BBB boys). If we hold just one LIM as inventory, we actually lose money. To hold 5-10 on the chance they would sell is beyond what we can afford.
Mike
