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I am not the expert on this, but I understand that you need a precision seat for the bearing or you will ruin it in use. Rodel and Bob (the engineer) work with bearings every day at work, they are experts in bearing failures. I would imagine if we press it in with a taper like you said, the bearing could come loose with heating/expansion or just vibrate loose. That is probably why everything had to be specced to press fit. As for the "bushing", though we call it a "bushing" it does not take any loads. Its just an sleeve/adapter for the bearing. The a-arms pivot/swivel on the bearings, not on bushings. This is the same design basis as the Midori front a-arms. We verified our design with some finite element analysis, and it has a pretty large safety factor. We had thought carefully about the easiest/cheapest way to make the a-arms, that will not compromise its reliability, this is the best we came up with. Any way, the machining of the bushings and the bearing seat just has to be done, and is one of the $$$ costs, remember you need 8 of each for a pair of a-arms. If you are familiar with CNC machine costs, you know this isn't cheap. Then try obtaining 1" left-hand fine-pitch allthread... we had to have it special ordered (ie. manufactured on order). And yes, we have a bunch of jigs for the welding, etc... that is a cost that has to be amortized over the number of arms we sell. And we are not talking about 100s of pairs of arms here, if we sell 40 sets I would call it a miracle. Add the costs of the metal stock, the cost of the bearings, and I think you can appreciate why we can't make it cheaply. Yes, we will make a small profit from this, but it is way way *way* less than the $150-$300 mentioned in another post. From a effort/return point of view, its hardly worth our time, main reason we did this was to hookup the local area Z guys with these upper arms. Of course we can make them cheaper in a larger production run, which is why we are trying to setup a GB. Lastly, I just want to say that if we could sell it for $200, we would... I know that we will sell alot more at $200 than $300. There is just no way... I invite you to try and work out all the costs yourself...
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