As with any enterprising endeavor.....start small, then increase volume and scope if and when it's feasible to do so. It's all too easy to get in too big too soon.....
Quite true on all thoughts but what part of this endeavor makes any sense or is feasible? Nothing in this market has proven to be yet, thats years out I suspect. In the case of the hoses, straight hose without access to the same quality formed hoses is a loosing proposition. The formed hoses are more susceptible to failure but the straight hoses dry up and allow air to be drawn in on cool down. The SRI hose challenge ended being 'in for a penny, in for a pound' in my mind. I will wait and see if there are any more thoughts before making a decision on a direction. Thanks.
My unqualified 2-Cents. Probably NOTHING I have NOT said before. [As usual, off come the gloves] Dave, You cannot be all things to all people. That is the good Lord's job. Sorry, buddy. YOU have a business to run and mouths to feed and an INSATABLE DESIRE for the Best of the Best in ALL THINGS. These are Not always compatable, contrary to First Blush. Now my harsh 2-Cents. Start going where the money is. Volume. How many made is where it is at. Cruel example. 360's are a dime a dozen. I predict they will wind up with a worse rap in the long haul than the GT4. Their volume did more to ruin the exclusivity of the brand than Ferrari labled feminine hygene products. MAKE THOSE HOSES. Lots of cars should (in theory) equal LOTS of volume. The F40. How many made? A Thousand or so? So what? Let um burn. No money in it. Forget um, at least initially. YOU need to turn a profit to keep creating these wonderful innovations that keep these cars on the road. ONLY $$$$$$ Flow does that. It is not being evil or greedy, it is just the nature of our system. Build your SRI Innovations and flow around the car's volume of manufacture. Tossing money down a rat hole, no matter how noble or guilded, certainly won't help you and then you can't continue to help us. "YES," I am being perhaps selfish. So what? If you go broke or get so discouraged you give up, then you can't help ANY OF US. When things start paying for themselves and you have some spare cash laying around, THEN YOU can go back to trying to be All Things to All People. THEN you can throw it at "clear losers" like the F40. Some here may not like what I think and said .... OK. Tough. I save the PC Crap for the P&R forum. [Gloves go back on; headed off to P&R. ] Just my 2-cents EU. P.S. You might look BEYOND F-Cars as I believe there is much more money elsewhere that can in the future feed your and our F-Car affliction.
I think if you beat your head against the wall hard enough you will be no good to anyone. I think I'd like to see you have profitable ventures but if you did things for the love of the art and no profit at least make product we can't do without. Your hose is very special but in the eyes of many hose is just hose. I know that I can bend a straight silicone hose to fit the bend of the 550 under plenum hose. It won't be a pretty and maybe even take away marginally from the flow but is will work just like you could use a nail for a cotter pin. The two top hoses for the radiator on the 550 I can buy the bend in aluminum and buy stepdown silicone hose from summit racing and gettho together the factory "s" shape. It ain't pretty but it will work. So if there is some obscure formed heater hose I just can't make I'drather have that option to buy vs. something I could rig cobble together. But if SRI is willing to wait until 2110 to get a return on investment I'd be glad to buy the radiator and under plenum hoses.
Do the parts of the hose project that will fund the next project. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Save one life or save 100, you're still a hero..
Once again, thank you for the thoughts. It really is helpful to get some insight from others not looking down a tunnel as I am. Yesterday I found a section of wall that was padded. Craigslist found me a mandrel bender where I can make the small diameter tooling in house during my "free time". I needed the bender for the race car projects regardless so this might be the answer to the small hoses. The tooling for the small hoses is by far the most expensive and difficult to make as it can not be done by milling a block of T-6, it just isnt rigid enough in the small diameter. Mark's insight, as usual, falls in line with my own. Stepping back after reading the replies I can see I have a little time on the 360's before they become a time sensitive project but one that is required as the budget permits. PS, the F40 hoses were the second car we dealt with after the Mondials, those were done 2 years ago This all came about because of a dear friend that just passed on and his hose eating Mondial Cab. I vowed he would not have to deal with another blown hose in the mountains after the last episode. I wish he could have seen this all come together but he knew the passion we had to see it through to the end. Payback became a thought only once we decided to make this public. It was a passion driven design intended for our own use only. It was not until well into the project that it became evident just how good this was turning out to be and that there was a need for it outside the shop.... it was designed and made for the right reasons. All of these hoses can be clugged together if someone wanted but that is a paddock level repair, not a Ferrari repair, and the reason the marque is getting the reputation it now has. Kinked hoses in the valley have a max life span of 3 years, we have replaced a few that were tried that way. We have all done it in a pinch in the past (myself included) and every time it comes back to haunt us. There are cheap alternatives out there for those looking for cheap, I have no interest in dealing with that. We set out to make something that was the best that could be made and offered value in longevity. There are a dozen ways I could have built this cheaper, they are not visual and no one would ever have known..... except Niki and myself. That would then defeat the whole purpose of doing this, to make something that far exceeds expectation and meet a promise I made to Jim. Time will tell if this is worth the effort invested but for the first time we have a quality option to choose from where none existed before. We still put on a few OE rubber hoses in the shop where the budget doent allow for quality but now that is by choice of the owner. With my Craigslist find and some lag time on the 360's before they reach critical status on the molded hoses (the bleeders are there now as with every other model) I may have just found the direction that meets everyones advise. Thank You again.
Dave, I think when you make things we just can't get from Ferrari or anywhwere else like 355 throwout bearings from hill that do not explode like the oem ones, or SRI hoes that will survive a maintenance cycle (3-5 years on belt replacements), or gold connectors the public can't buy at any price, you will have customers for life. While the market for these items may seem thin due to the small audience of Ferraris a similar audience may not even exist with say the 10 time higher number of say corvettes. There is no $2500 tubi plus install costs on a corvette because no vette owner in his right mind would spend that kind of money. I don't think you could sell the proper hoses for half the cost if there were twice as many buyers. There is more to it than just numbers.
Quite true but.. the mindset and thought process of other marque owners is different. The Vette's have always been an incredible icon car for the American public but a plastic car ownership is a different mindset. I own a 72 that has been in the family for many years and is being passed on to Niki to restore. I understand yet highly respect the Vette's having tracked a FI split window for a time... it has always been a front runner American car. Same as the Triumph / MG market, you can write a check and buy one on a whim for about the same price as a standup Yogo. The owners would rather replace a cheap part 4 times in as many years, regardless of the towing costs, than do it right once. It has nothing to do with the ability to pay for it. Ferrari is a car that most often is dreamed about for a decade prior to it becoming a reality (3 decades for me) and this affects how they are maintained. Its a passion, not transportation. The last few decades has seen the thinking change from when I started doing this in the 70's. It is a contributing factor in why this marque is starting to get the reputation regarding less than stellar reliability. Change that thinking and the reliability too will change. Look back and read some of the FCA newsletter banter from the 70's.... the paint was falling off the Ferrari's but the engines were getting new needle bearing roller rockers (same price as a paint job back then) on the street cars. Today there is a lot of carbon fiber and flashy wheels on cars that can only make it one way of a round trip. Ferrari is a major contributor to this when Fiat taught them 'Disposable Mentality' and how to make money at this by cutting corners in the late 70's and on. The base package is well engineered and sound but there was some serious job security and planned obsolecence engineered in regarding OEM and aftersales parts quality. What once was a frustration is now a nightmare in this market and is what I am trying to change by offering an option. There is quite a short list of folks thinking this way, Paul Hill being one of the front runners. It goes against 90+% of todays business models and most everything being built today. Time for a change (NO!, not that kind of change!) in thinking.
With the drop in value most of these cars have seen, they've become more affordable to more people. We're also seeing a trend of people doing less "collecting" and more driving of the models built within the last 20 years. When you put these two factors together, along with the lack of quality in the oem parts...and insane costs for most of them...even with a small client pool there is a huge opportunity here. People are going to be VERY interested in using non-oem, upgraded parts especially if the pricing comes in under OEM. These people want their cars to be drivable, because thats why they're now buying them...and they're not going to pay big money for questionable parts. There's a huge void in this equation that Dave is working on filling. It'll be hugely beneficial for the business, car owners and service shops. It's just a matter of setting a pace that allows the products to continue being developed...and not runnign dave into the ground so that he CAN continue to develop them. The 308-550's have suffered these inadequacies for 15+ years. As nice as it would be to be as current as the 360, these cars can wait their turn.
So true. I remember trying to get a couple of single pistons a few years ago. Couldn't find anything close on weight to the originals. Come to find out, when Ferrari had a piston that didn't match weight on the assembly line, it was held back for replacement parts sales later on, so I was told. To me, that meant that they cared about the initial quality of the car, but didn't really give a **** later on if replacement parts matched.
And there in lies the problem. I have had the molded hoses in hand for a number of weeks now doing test and quality checks. It was not until yesterday that I found out what I was paying for them. Purposely I went forward matching the straight hose design and quality without asking pricing..."just do it". When pricing and margin affects design on this type of thing.... real world reality but..... obviously things go down hill, never up. There are a few hoses I will loose money on as the cost to produce them (Hell, the tooling cost alone would never see a payback) is more than what Ferrari is selling them for. A case of Apples and Oranges, Ferrari used Old rubber for these particular hoses and I have completely redesigned them in silicone. Cheaper than OEM rubber?.... nope. Comparable to OEM rubber? Not even in the same ballpark. Stack it against Ferrari's OEM silicone on the newer cars and I can beat them in both quality and price hands down. One must be sure to compare Apples to Apples.
Try finding an A series connecting rod in the parts chain..... They all went on new Factory race cars and the bricks were saved for after sales. There isnt enough metal in the blasted rod to make an H into an A. Cherry picking parts was SOP and the racing dept. had first dibs.
This is another huge issue. Low volume and market development/education. The worst thing that can happen is you invest and develop the marketplace and ferrari decides to copy and blow you out of the water. Look at poor apple. There are moves by the fed to make it legal to hijack an Iphone while apple is similtaniously attacked by a company in china making android based Ipad copies dumping them on US shores via mini-merchants from china selling them to US customers for 1/4th the cost! Now that is pain!
Didn't you say before that the early 355 heads were scarfed up by the challenge teams too? I had an early 355 here to rebuild last year, it had later style heads. The story the owner had was that the previous owner had the car in for service and was told the heads were cracked and they swapped them out under "warranty". The heads were cracked, but with no symptoms. A likely story, I thought.....
Dave, first off: I really, really appreciate what you are doing (as I hope to keep driving my Mondial for many years to come)... I believe I understand what you are saying....in the vast majority of business models the numbers are the numbers, but the successful business for some people (as was true for me in a previous endeavour) is more than just the numbers, there is personal satisfaction in fulfilling our passions....and than satisfaction can overcome a shortfall in the profitability of some projects.... This community certainly recognizes this in you and we all respect you for it. you are correct, for this particular niche market, quality is probably the single most important factor for success. However, what I am saying with "the numbers are the numbers" is that there are limits to the $ loses that most of us can overcome to follow our passion.....i.e. we want you to stay in business and there numbers matter... Hope I understood you correctly. Cheers
Point well made but... Why would Ferrari waste their time with this, they are dropping items at an alarming rate on much higher volume/profitability parts. There is sound reasoning I had this made in the USA, the quality and consistancy cant be beat, period. It is far cheaper to have done elsewhere but this experiment was not about finding cheaper, it was a quest for the ultimate quality. Weather there exists a market for that level of quality is what is in question. In another time there was no question, today is a whole new concept. IF it makes a difference and is accepted as the best available it will be copied, one needs only to look at Troy's HyperFlow products as an example.
""under "warranty"."" Wow, that's pretty big of them, team players no doubt!!! I cant remember ever coming across a cracked 355 head. Broken rods, ventilated blocks, broken cams, all abuse related but no cracked heads. Order the foam rubber plug well gaskets for a 94 and it was often followed by an offer to buy/exchange the heads.
Correct on all fronts. Change any of the parameters we have today and this experiment would never have left the ground. In a better economy my engineers would be too busy to even look at this, production wouldn't think of breaking into a huge run to do something of this scope and it would take years to have the tooling done by the extreme level professional machinists helping with this. If I had a big overhead to feed I would just have to accept what we are given and ignore the need. Something of a perfect storm where everything falls together coupled with my stubbornness to reach back in time when things were built with pride. If it falls flat I will have few regrets what so ever as the knowledge gained in this quest is nothing short of priceless as are the relationships I have made with some incredible folks. We made it for ourselves and we accomplished what we set out to do. It was my local customers saying "you door knob, owners need to know about this" that took it public. We are going no where and this doesn't amount to a straw of back breaking capability. This is simply the ground work for a much larger project. Longevity and reliability are the essential first steps before 'fun, performance work' begins, one without the other is just another half baked concept. I want to make sure we take this as far as there is a need/want for right now as qty manufacturing amounts to reduced end prices.... hence the questions posed. The chance of seeing a return on this from the Ferrari marque alone is low as I have narrowed my prospects to a narrow group searching for exceptional. Ferrari is my passion and my day job but not my only target. With the exception of a few things we are making, our products have a much larger audience than this market alone. The problems we are dealing with now are universal and industry wide. Announce a new devolopement to the most demanding folks in the market.... if it passes critique here.... the rest is just a matter of logistics.
I've found that these hoses you provided us with, are FAR superior to even the silicon hoses we've been trying to use in non-oem/race applications. Same thing with the electrical connectors. Since receiving and using these items I've already started running a mental checklist of all the different cars and situations I can integrate these products into. Not to mention all of my Ferrari Major Service Estimates will now include the SRI hose/electrical kits as an option...which is STRONGLY recommended. I was amazed how much better these products are than anything else we have on the market...not just specificly to Ferrari. I think THAT is the key to this endeavor.
Cheaten damn Panzer's. Air cooling is for lawn mowers, not race car's. Worry not Fatso, they are suffering the same fate regarding fuel and electrical. Im already backside deep in that... as Bruce chuckles away. I swore those off back in the early 80's and here 20 years later.
BUT..... if it doesnt find a need/want in this market, it wont anywhere else. Might as well start with the most demanding crowd
