Originally posted by TRDirks
I think the bar looks great. I have been waiting for several months to see the final product and I am impressed. The one thing that is discouraging is the price. In a previous post the statement "it WON'T be $400-$600 for sure" was made and if I had known how much it would be I probably would have gone a different route. Now that I have waited and heard the price I am back to being undecided.
Well, in my attempt of getting all of you information on the swaybar project as early as possible, it looks like I said too much. I remember saying "won't be between $500-$600 range, even though it's worth it/should be", but I could have said the above quote as well at some time. When we first looked at doing this, it seemed like we would have no trouble beating the "wolfe" price of $399. That was exactly our intention. As we got into this and did some extensive research & testing, we found out differently.
The biggest change was that we had to use rod-ends instead of poly on the up-links. That took 8 pcs of poly at a couple bucks each up to 4 rod ends at many bucks each. Then we found that all rod ends are NOT created equal. Some are made from mild steel, some from alloy steel. Some are cheap 2-pc, some 3, some with teflon liners, some cheaply injected in, some with reinforcement, etc... Of course, we use only the best that is deemed necessary without "gold plating" stuff. We use premium rod ends with the good kevlar reinforced teflon liners, alloy steel, better 3 pc design, self lubricating, with custom fit for smooth lasting action. These added approx $50+ MY COST to the kit.
Then there was the powdercoating quote and the bending quote I had. They both doubled once they actually went to do the parts in qty, because they were a LOT harder to do than expected. To get the bends necessary to make it fit & look good, they actually had to modify their tooling specifically for this job. I basically had to buy their tooling to dedicate to this job to keep prices from going higher.
Then because of the rod-end design, our upper mounting plates went from a somewhat simple laser cut part to a multiple piece laser cut assy that gets welded, desplatted, machined, and deburred. This also over doubled the necessary mounting hardware and plating for them.
THEN, we found out the bar in it's "purchased" form is designed to allow bending/forming without damaging or weakening it. Well, it lost a little of it's "memory", and after working on the car, it came back to it's original shape all but a small percentage. This was enough to cause concerns/issues & needed resolved. We found that heat treating the bars fixed this "memory" problem quite well, and also added a little more strength to it. Of course, that added more cost to the kit, but it was needed.
THEN, the heat treat changed the bending angles slightly, and the bending tooling needed modifyied AGAIN to get it to come out right after HT. It also called for closer tolerances & added time/attention to the bending stage.
THEN, almost everything I have worked with since time began, gets cheaper in higher volumes. It works with machining, laser cutting, packing, etc, etc. BUT NOT when it comes to the bending, heat treating, and powdercoating (of course). I expected to save on those operations in the higher qty runs, but that quickly dissapeared.
So, I understand that we didn't quite hit our target price range. I hope now that you (all) might better understand why. We didn't just "pad" the price or decide to make more profit. We actually make a decent amount LESS profit, trying to keep the retail pricing as reasonable as possible. We ended up adding $80 to our target price, but had over $90 increase in our costs to make them, and lost some of the savings we were hoping to get on top of that.
These swaybars/anti-roll setups are jam-packed with quality, performance, and value. To be in line with what's out there currently, our retail price SHOULD have been in the $550-$600 range to be comparable. I still believe this is one of the most dramatic "bolt-on's" you can do to these cars, and one heck of a "bang for the buck".
PS- We also planned to do discounts on packages & other setups, but haven't had time to get it all together. Adding any other suspension component to the anti-roll setup will gain some savings. The more you put together, the more the savings will be. We actually planned to "grandfather" this deal back about 6 months for those that bought uppers/lowers already. Best way is to call in your order for special situations.
I usually don't like to explain myself or products like this, but I figured the people that have been following this for a while should know some of the details of what happened.
Thanks-
