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Originally Posted by Tazzz2
Firstly thank you for all the compliments gang....
I'm doing the rims for my 1970 Formula Pro-touring car and mine will have a polished lip 1974formula ....
Keith K, I really have no idea of costs to reproduce at this point....I'd hate to tell you how much has been spent so far to build the prototype set......We computer modeled the rim and had to make quite a few changes....The rim while looking stock in many ways is far from it.. It looked odd when modeled exactly and we had to change the pattern to make it look like the stock rims (was a real optical illusion issue when left at stock dimensions and just increased in size......Then came the computer stress analysis and the week points,,,,adjust for stress and back to the optics again LOL.....Back and forth, backk and forth, man this was more than a mouth full and has been going on for a little over 9 months now....
Then of course the original purchasing a set of three piece rims from another manufacture,,,the removal of their center section and now carving actual center sections out of solid block of high grade aluminum.....
If these are manufacture for others, my rims (centers) will have to be used to make a plug/mold for poured center castings and then rim halves would have to be purchased or spun in order to produce rims for others......It is highly unlikely that the rims could be produced for roughly the same money "Year One" sells a cast one piece rim for....Logically a three piece rim has always been more expensive than a one piece cast rim and I'm sure that would be the case here as well.... The good news is I'm having fun doing this (don't have to make a living at it) and will look at offering them to others if I can get the price point down to realistic levels....This will be determined by costs of rim bands and costs of center sections as cast pieces instead of carved aluminum...
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Tazz... sounds like you've done a lot of good work. I'm not surprised at the issues and iterations you had to go through to get the balance of appearance/structure. And yep... the way you're approaching the production they will be expensive.
You should take your design to the SEMA show in November. All of the Chinese/Asian wheel manufacturers are there (the "Hall of Wheels" is a mind boggler...), and they would be happy to talk to you about tooling a one piece version. I'm sure that's where Year One is sourcing them.