[dhutton]

Originally Posted by mgarblik

Agree number of units sold drives the cost to some extent. My contention is simple. If YOU know the production will be very limited, and YOU know the quality of the casting will be suspect, and YOU know the pattern makers, cores, and core boxes will be second rate. Then for God's sake make the damn part with enough material in it to repair all the problems that WILL be in the final casting. Don't essentially produce a throw away part that stands no chance of even working, let alone working properly without hundreds of dollars of welding required to fill in all the mistakes. And on top of that charge top dollar for it and pretend it is an EXACT duplicate of a factory part. I can fix one of these manifolds and make it usable. But for a customer, it's going to cost them the manifold and $600.00-750.00 to weld the top of all the ports, fill and move the runners so they align, surface the mounting surface and weld up and re-drill all the mounting holes. Talking 2-3 days of work to fix.

My comment was not directed at you, hence my quote. I get what you are saying....

Volume is a huge factor in cost but shouldn’t drive quality. Although it is hard to make a business case for top quality tooling etc when the volume is low without further increasing part cost.

Don