hey now. don't make it too good, i need to be able to afford one once you get finished
no worries! That's why I'm doing what I can myself. My goal with this tank has been to try and price it reasonably close to what used tanks are going for on the market -- under $500. What complicates things with retail products is leaving margin for dealers. It's easy for me to create product and mark it up a little and then sell it direct. That's great but it is very short-sighted. To properly handle this product, I need to make it so that dealers buy the tanks and earn enough money to make it worth
their while. The dealer arena is important because they far outnumber me, sell a lot more tanks than I could alone, and they are most Ducati owners' first point of contact.
@He Man: That mold is essentially irreplaceable... to replace it would require a CAD/CAM company to reverse engineer it with 3D scanning. Then a designer would also need scans of the molds it mates with so as to best match up the flanges. Then re-design the flange of the top mold (shown above) for a good fit. Then have a semi show up at the tool maker's cnc shop with a block of aluminum. All of this is the same price as starting from scratch. SO... once these tanks are selling and I get paid up, we'll do JUST that: start from scratch on another design.
The company who made the mold originally are "done" with this mold /me /whatever. It's a mutual decision. I only wish that rather than take a ton of my money & tease me for 18 months that they would have just said no to begin with. BUT... the past is behind me. I don't have regrets, as where I am right now is OK. The folks working with me on the Hyper tank greatly expanded my knowledge about the design process. Better still, they share my ethic of doing great work, which includes doing great work on the first try.
@speeddog: Actually, those are just drill bushings. But mainly, I want to keep the old core to study and measure off of. There's going to be a goodly bit of math and CAD work on my part before cutting metal on the replacement. Also, there is no way to build on the existing part. In order for the appearance to be great, there needs to be a quality radius where the plug meets the flat surface of the tank. So I create the new plug and then have a flange around it. Then the flange is welded to the top of the tank and easily blended in.
I'm done with the first company because I'm done with cutting corners. I didn't
know that's what was happening until working with the new folks. I'm thankful that the MH tank went without big problems but this monster mold as created isn't up to my standards. It will end up costing the same as if I had all of it done with the new folks, but I have to get parts running from this tooling, there's too much money there to toss it away. So, I invest a little more money into fixing its small problems -- we'll have better parts and the mold will last longer, too.
Attended a wedding today & look forward to working on it more tomorrow -- hopefully cutting metal!
Chris
