Posted by Marty on Sunday, April 10, 2005 at 12:13PM :
In Reply to: Rear fender dies revisted posted by John S on Sunday, April 10, 2005 at 10:38AM :
I doubt anyone has actual blueprints or scale drawings of a rear fender but probably it would be easiest to bring him a real fender to give an estimate for fabrication.
I've gone into this fairly extensively & the problem is that you have a few different ways to proceed...none of them easy.
1) Try & get say 100 or so orders for sets of fenders ahead of time & have everyone prepared to pay for the fenders up front & willing to wait for several months until they are finished. They wouldn't be cheap...at least $1000 a pair.
2) Have a spare $100K or so to do it on your own & mark the price up accordingly to cover your risk & investment like Dave Maher has done in producing his fabulous 1st series beds.
3) Do small runs of fenders as you get orders but a good fabricator will charge $1000/fender to build an exact duplicate of ours. Doing it this way is obviously way more labor intensive than to set up for doing 200 or so but at least it's feasible.
#3 was the only option I looked seriously into & they were going to cost $2400 Canadian/pair.
Lots of work involved if you want them exact with the wire rolled into the lip & all the proper tooling marks etc.
Talk to Dave Maher...this is his business & he can explain the difficulty involved. I think Dave would have built them if he thought he wouldn't lose his shirt!