about the things I have built and put up for sale. No offense taken BTW. Its a good question.. The thing that I believe is being overlooked is that it is no longer "Ash in his garage with a wood router..." as someone once so eloquently put it. Being part of a larger organization has its plusses as well as its negatives, but in the end I think a lot more is gained in trying to accomplish the feat of putting a new product out there..
As an example:
There are several(and thats way more than a couple) thousand dollars of piping here that was produced by an outside source.. The couplers, clamps, and hosing alone for the kits were over $1000. That doesn't even include the price for the MAS units. Doing one-offs, or a few at a time in my own garage, building them myself and sending them out has little overhead. But at a certain point in time I felt that I was getting in over my head on being able to do all of these things by myself after working 40+ hrs/week for 'the man'. ECU upgrades alone were taking a good portion of my evenings after work to get taken care of. Its not an exercise to just charge more for something for no reason, it simply costs more to produce at the business level. The price is still very competitive and the product is superior to whats out there else I wouldn't have ventured into ordering 30 sets of them to be built. We work very hard down here to produce unique performance parts with better performance and better price. We have been succeeding in doing that so far in our ventures and we will continue doing it until that changes. Another thing to consider, now seeing what the cost of doing this in a larger scale than in my garage, I can honestly tell you that I would have been knee deep in s**t if I had taken this job on by myself. Making just one of these assemblies requires a couple of hours by hand to produce. That combined with ECU upgrades would have been impossible. The DOOLZ perhaps would have been short lived at best if it even made it to assembly for the masses. Having them made by an outside source comes at a greater cost than 'Ash in his garage'... This same explanation applies to all of the things I have developed. It is somewhat bitter-sweet due to the fact that the Ash "The Fab Whore" inexpensive projects that I built as one-offs for myself in my garage have now been produced for purchase, I hope this provides better understanding of why the price of some of these things isn't what I paid out of my pocket to produce the first time with my wood router. If I were to produce Midori-sytle adjustable upper a-arms for $350 a set, sold at that price through Z1 Motorsports, do you think you would be inclined to buy those rather than the $600 or so for the actual Midoris? I've actually been designing these over the past couple of days because I think we can pull off a product like that for a much better price than what you can buy any of them for (Stillen are like $400 and they are prone to slip)... Thanks for your post.. I hope I clarified things for everyone..
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