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Mike Smith is MSP.
Mike is extremely concerned with quality, and he personally does the final machine work on every manifold he has sent out.
He does not stop at the way they come from the foundry, and he is never happy with the machine work performed by a machine shop after the foundry. So every set gets final machine work performed by Mike himself.
Castings do not come out the same every time, sometimes the cores shift, ect.....
If you do not care, than you can send them out the way they come after being poured.
The problem with that is the holes are not always square with the bolt holes, or large enough.
If a set can not be machined perfect due to the ports being too far off center (this does happen) than Mike does not send them out. If the pour has too much scaling, Mike scrapes them. Ect, Ect, Ect.....
Mike pours his whole heart into making the manifolds, the time it takes him to achieve the final product is insane!
At the price point the manifolds are at, Mike is lucky to make minimum wage for his hard work.
Mike is low on inventory, and the sets he has need final machine work. He personally owes me 7 sets that he has not had time to finish, because he is working on the turbo suction pipes.
At this price point, it does not make any sense for Mike to drop the price lower, just to put added stress on him to try to get a group of manifolds done in a near time frame.
Mike is spending every moment he has available to try to get the new suction pipes out on the market.
As a one man show with limited funds, he is making all the molds and plates himself to try to keep the cost to a minimum, but he is killing himself with the time required.
I believe that most have no idea what Mike personally does to offer his products.
For the quality of the material, the quality of the machine work, and dedication to making the product as perfect as possible, the price point these are currently selling for is very cheap.
The price point Mike figured was reasonable for the manifolds after recouping his R&D costs, should have been $775.00
The current selling price should have been the group buy price.
Mike and the dealers have all lowered the margins to the point where it almost does not make sense to continue making them.
I know some folks think that guys like Mike and myself make some crazy amount of money, this simply is not true.
We have a passion for what we do and we are doing are best to try to make a reasonable living at it.
We are fortunate to be busy during this slower economy, but we are mostly spinning our wheels. We are working much harder for less.
I sometimes think it would be better to go work at Home Depot and bring home a steady check and have less stress.
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