I'm building another engine stand that I can use to test an EFI engine when I buy it .....you know, the proverbial "it was running great when removed" type engine. I also want to be able to make a simple test and maybe break in after building a new overhaul. Initially I want to be able to hook up a stock OEM computer with the Vats deleted and then use it to also start the new ones enough to check them out. I don't feel I need perfect tuning just for that type of running. I figured I would pick up a used cast aluminum intake and set it up so it was easy to stick on /remove rather than deal with the ugly truck intakes they usually have. Anyway, I started searching Facebook for a suitable intake, but didn't have much luck. I started looking at new ones, and decided that all the familiar and well known brands just didn't have my interests at heart. So I looked on Amazon and a whole bunch of Chinese ones were available. Some of them looked pretty decently made and they were ...as expected...much cheaper. I found some called Victor Jr ............but they apparently aren't made by anyone named Vic. Anyway, the Chinese Vics were on sale ..............and then my genius computer flashed up with a notification that the same manifold was available on Ebay cheaper still............AND THEN......Ebay said I could make an even lower offer.......so I did! Now I've always been someone who wanted to buy American made stuff. But I'm tired of paying rediculous mark ups. When some of the more successful USA aftermarket companies finally realize that when they raise prices too much they create a market for these off shore companies to come ashore and hijack their customers. Intake manifolds are one of those markets apparently. Edelbrock intakes for a Cad went from about $300 to over $500 in about 2 years. I paid $300 for a used one. Now I'm looking at intakes for LS motors........I mean some of the plastic intakes are over a $1000............bet it ain't long before people stop buying them. I think "buy American" needs to become a two way street, not just an opportunity for manufacturers to play on our sentiments and use them to gouge us...........
Just because American product prices are higher doesn't automatically mean that we're being gouged. Everything has been hit by inflation. On top of that, Edelbrock (and some others who manufacture in Cali) now have to pay $16/hr for minimum wage employees, more for experienced staff. U.S. pollution and safety regulations are much stricter than China's. Finally, American manufacturers invest in Research & Development. Many Chinese manufacturers simply buy a single copy of an American product and copy it. Until the government blocks the importation of products with stolen IP, buying Chinese copies simply forces U.S. companies to subsidize their Chinese competitors. Don't be surprised if American manufacturers pass that cost onto their customers.
Edelbrock Equipment is Edelbrock in name only. The family sold the business to Industrial Opportunities Group, a private investment firm. Manufacturing of manifolds, etc., went to Mississippi although the castings are still done in San Jacinto, CA where the Edelbrock family had established a foundry. When it was owned by Vic and his daughters for sure they expected a profit but with the coming of an investment group there were stock holders, more executives, lawyers and a host of others looking to maximize their dollars. Pretty much the same situation across the board for anything you can think of, mom and pop are gone. @RodStRace has it right , stick around, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
I agree with that. Look at what inflation has actually done though. As a rough estimate of all commonly needed items in the USA, pricing has risen appx 40% (+/-). The cost of an Edelbrock intake for a Cad 500 went from $300 to $526.95 at Summit. (on sale for $474) . Edelbrock sells a similar size and shape alum intake for a BB Chevy for $438 ($395 on sale) They also have a similar size Edelbrock Performer for $391 ($352 on sale). So there is a lot of room there for price reduction as the manufacturing costs are about the same. Looking at pricing for an aluminum 4 barrel type manifold for the engine stand I'm building. Holley HLY-300-255 $651/$586 sale (includes fuel rails) Holley EFI single plane $424/$382 sale (no fuel rails) Holley EFI LS single plane $631/$568 sale Holley LS HLY-300-132BK $455/$410 sale (shown below) (very similar to what I ended up buying for about $150) What I bought ......... Another Holley .......$631/$568 sale Heres an Edelbrock Victor....$484/$436 sale These are simple castings that get stuck in a holding fixture on a CNC mill and machined very quickly. I don't expect them to sell them as cheaply as Chinese copies but I'm not going to pay 3 or 4 times the price because they play on my patriotic sentiments. I hate buying anything made in China, I'm just trying to say that as long as we let them do it...they will. A lot of times the Name Brands are made in China too. Yes, but the idea of manufacturing parts is to make them cheap enough to sell a lot of them while still making a decent profit. Having worked in a procurement office as a buyer for parts for govt weapons, I can tell you that left unchecked , manufacturers will take advantage............I had a lot of items that were rediculously priced. LOTS OF THEM. There was one that was pretty simple to make and the company was charging us about $20/25 K apiece. Contacted a local machine shop nearby and got a quote from them to make some. Memory tells me that they quoted $4/5 K each and the guy told me it was a lucrative job for them. Nuther job the Federal Supply Sys was paying $20 some thousand ea and they made them for less than half ($9K) and still made a large profit......they ended up getting the contract to make all of them for the Federal Supply Sys. Too many to relate......BUT the point is that what gets a companys attention is when customers let them know that they expect better pricing and they don't have free rein anymore. Yes, they do...and its wrong. But they would not be looking at making those things if they didn't feel there was a large profit margin already and easy to sell their product. Most of the major manufacturers have sold us out long ago....hopefully thats going to start changing soon. Exactly right...........and then I won't buy their products. We can't live without food and shelter etc..................but I can live without having Edelbrock on my intake. Anyway, I WANT to Buy American..........but a lot of these companies need to find ways to be efficient and realize that raising prices only creates a market for the Chinese. OK, Soapbox is going back over in the corner......
I’m a Brit so don’t really give too hoots about buying American but I try not to buy cheap knock off stuff. Everyone complains about the quality of some parts nowadays and that shit quality is purely because people want to pay bottom dollar. You reap what you sow.
Not really true all the time. Amazon is a big thing here these days. They are successful because they provide almost anything and often cheaper than going to find one locally. They provide me access to multiple things that I would not know even existed. Look up the cost of some of the tools they sell. I have a bunch of tubing bending tools and decided I wanted some cheap ones that I might be able to modify for some really tight bends. I looked on Amazon and found some really nice ones with longer handles and a roller where the tube is bending. Now I already have a really large selection of quality tube benders, tubing flares and stuff that I bought either new or used. The Imperial shown below is one of the best for getting tighter bends and good quality.....but I only got the ones I have because I found good deals on used ones. Price some new ones............. Here is one of the two I bought new off Amazon for about $60 ea. Much larger and a roller. Good quality. (Note: The roller helps when making tight bends) Here is a Name Brand.............Rigid It's $300 and I have seen some others for $600. Price some decent 37.5 degree flaring tools and see how they compare. I'll tell you first hand that the benders I bought are good quality. So don't believe that times haven't changed globally and some of the products as well. Its time to shame the greedy corporate Bast**ds into looking at the fact that they can't control pricing the way they used to. Saw a few minutes of the news today...........restaurant chains are closing every day because of the price of the food..........companies need to rethink their marketing strategies or they price themselves out of customers. China isn't responsible for our food costs going up.........its corporate greed. Note: I can modify these less expensive benders by relieving the blue wheel just behind the hook so that my tube fitting can slip in behind the hook and the bend starts closer to the fitting. Wouldn't do that with a $300 tool.
I'll give you a bit of info from the other side. I worked for a very small mom and pop company that was contacted by the US gov't because they wanted to buy one of our unique products. This started with 4-5 phone calls where they conferred with the owner about the product and what they wanted it to do along with if it could handle the conditions. This was discussed at length at the shop. It was agreed that it would work. The buyer also warned that the paperwork from submitting the bid to final shipment was going to be a maze. They suggested getting a middle man ($) who could help navigate this. They also said that the whole process would take many hours over weeks to complete. The owner decided to research it, and try to do this himself. It did go through, the tool was bought and the feedback from it's use was positive. However, it all added up to probably 60-80 hours of his valuable time. They never sold another, it's probably sitting in a box on a base somewhere. It was good information and valuable experience, but it cost more than the total price (not profit) of the entire thing. They now know what it takes to get something bought and will be able to work through the maze better and faster, but you can bet that the cost to do so will be baked in, not to scam more profit, but to cover the additional time and effort to meet the gov't requirements (red tape and stuff like you must be able supply x amount for x time in x time frame even if we decide not to buy at any time, must warrant, must provide after sale help, etc.). The contracts are very much in the gov'ts favor, rightly so, but it tends to favor larger deep pocket companies who have enough business to support a dept for dealing with such things and survive issues. That overhead and might adds to costs. Is there padding? Of course, big business is in the business of profit and if possible, monopoly. The red tape is to ensure product is available when it's wanted, the procurement process is to ensure fair pricing, but both together are the antithesis of just going to a local shop and getting a quote.
Since I don't know what the BBC intakes were before the price hikes, I can't compare them. Since the Cad 500 intake has to amortize its tooling over a much smaller production, I expect it to be more expensive. The BBC intake is priced @ 83% of the Cad 500. Is that reasonable? I suspect its a little low (implying that the Cad is somewhat overpriced). Some MBAs think that lower production items should have higher margins. This bias can make them forget their Price Elasticity of Demand lesson: (consumers will only tolerate a certain level of price increase [which varies by item] before they look for alternatives or do without). The scary thing is that, having gotten a bonus for raising the margin on that slow-moving product, they see that sales have dropped off and recommend dropping the product. We've seen that recently in other automotive parts. Government procurement has little connection to reality. Between absurd paperwork demands and contractors covering costs of other products, you can get to the infamous $6,000 hammer, even without greed (not to say it isn't there). Stack 'em high & price 'em low works in volume businesses, but not so well in specialty ones. In our case, LS manifolds are a volume business, Buick & Cadillac manifolds are a specialty. I worry that the number crunchers don't distinguish between the two (see my comment above about MBAs). The average wage in Chinese manufacturing is the equivalent of $4.82. Even in lower cost Missouri an entry-level worker (someone who just loads the CNC machines) is $12-15. SAWS, the Chinese equivalent of OSHA, is far more lax. Transportation costs are lower, too. Add in minimal R&D, and the likelihood of export subsidies and the Chinese can be quite profitable at prices far below American firms. I'm not sure how companies can stay in business by eating their costs. They get passed on to the customer one way or another. Without a level playing field, the market for knock-off goods will always exist, unless we stop buying them. This looks a lot like the mom & pop speed shop issue. Jeg's & Speedway had selection and saved some money, so lots of us switched to them. After a while, we looked around and the mom & pop shops were gone, and the regional chains had only fast-moving inventory in stock, not to mention employees who know only what the screen in front of them tells them. Will we turn around in a couple of years only to discover that all that's available in the aftermarket is SBC & LS stuff? The U.S. mania for mergers and acquisitions, driven by the insatiable quarterly earnings reports madness, leads to higher prices and fewer choices. This harms specialty markets even more than mainstream ones. I try to avoid politics here, but the uneven playing field and the quarterly earnings madness are things only government can fix. That said, we have to face the consequences of our choices. I'm hoping this works out in our favor, but I'm not betting my lunch money.
Everything you said is correct. I've been on the govt end of that. Still its an oversimplification. First you have to realize that as a buyer (and formerly a Project Manager) you get lots of calls from small businesses that want some work/business. Now they are going to be making parts to support our troops....in this case the Navy. Those parts not only have to be available when needed, but they have to work when they are in the weapon or installed on the ship. Its imperative that we have vendors supplying parts that are reliable and deliverable on time. To do that, a new vendor must furnish information to show they can .....and will do the work thats needed/when needed. Sorry, but peoples lives depend on this stuff. What your employer did wrong was that once he established his company as a credible supplier, he should have bid on other jobs. Now that he had navigated the maze, bidding on other jobs is much easier. We had many companies we dealt with. An example.......I had a component, a specialized material small gear that I had ordered thru the Federal Supply System. Thats basically a way to maintain stocked parts from known sources. They assured me that the parts were out for bid and would be available. The contract to purchase many different parts was due to expire at the end of the year, and all parts had to be in stock and paid for. I had everything else, and they told me several times they were on order. They lied. I contacted a friend in another department and they told me that the parts had not even gone out for bid. I talked to my local guys and they did not have the capability to make it. My Boss was pissed......at me. In all this fiasco, a company contacted me and told me that they make the exact same part for the Air Force but out of a different material. It was almost Thanksgiving and we shut down a week before the end of the year. This guy told me he could make them and deliver them before we closed down. About a week before we shut down, the parts arrived and were first quality. They now became a supplier for that part. This guy had supplied other parts and had established his small company when my a** needed someone to get me out of a bind. After the New Year, he contacted me again and asked for some more work. I had a new job (for us) that we needed a supplier for. I sent him the info and asked for a bid. He was a little unsure how much to bid and asked for some help. I did the best I could to guide him, and he submitted a bid. His company got the contract and best I can remember the initial order was just North of a quarter million dollars..........and I think he became a regular supplier for that item. ( I took another job within the company shortly after that) Once you establish your company, you have to follow it up, not just give up. Had another local guy. He did specialty fiberglass work for a company repairing radar domes for a company that interacted with us. The company became unreliable as they wanted to use our work as "fill in" work and weren't supplying on time. The guy quit and started his own company doing fiberglass boat repairs. He made us his first priority and things went well. Later he asked if we had any other types of work . I told him we bought a lot of wooden shipping crates, and we had one local supplier who was rather pricey. So I let him bid on a small group of crates to see how he would do. His crates were much higher quality than what we were getting and the people in the shipping dept told me about the quality. So I gave him some more orders, and some more orders, and some more orders. The crates actually provided him more income than the original work. When I took the new job, the buyer behind me began going back to only the other company. (I was using both) He called me for help. I went and talked to the buyer and explained that his company was the sole source we had for repairing the radar domes and that we needed to insure he stayed in business. She went and checked him out and began sending him work again. Sorry for the long stories, but I wanted you to see that even with the government, you have to prevent companies from charging excessive prices. Yes it takes some work to establish that someones small company is capable and reliable............but then it opens up opportunities..........you just have to follow up. Let me say this as well. I don't know what product you were producing or what its use was to be, so maybe they wanted to test something. Lots of unknowns as to how this was done. If they were just buying one item, there are ways to make simple purchases without qualifying as a government supplier. So I feel like there is more to this than the govt only needing one and no more.
True,and I agree that our govt needs to address the situation.......they can stop it. You should also realize that many many many things are not exact copies/knockoffs but actually their version of the same kind of product. Don't think for a minute that all the companies in the USA don't look at their competitors products before producing their own version. You think Vic never got any of his ideas from his competitors? An intake manifold is a very simple part to manufacture, has no moving parts, and requires very little and not overly precise machining. I'm just taking a stand and saying that I won't pay those prices. Everyone else is welcome to continue doing so if they wish.
Interesting thread. If you read between the lines, you will see that there's more going on than many have noticed. To build hot rods successfully, you need open eyes and mind.
It would be less of a decision to use exclusively USA-made parts and tools if there was a guarantee that the USA-made equipment was of superior quality with better performance and longevity. Unfortunately, it has been my experience that this simply is not the case. At least not any more. Perhaps there was once a time when USA-made was synonymous with a quality tool that would last a lifetime or more, and conversely, there was definitely a time when Chinese or Asian-made tools meant something cheap, low-quality, and something that may not last through one job. Times have changed. And it's hard to justify the substantial additional cost of USA-made tool or part when there are foreign made options that will work just as well and for just as long, for much less cost. Anecdotally, it has been something that I've noticed when purchasing parts for my daily drivers. Rock Auto has always been my "go to", but that has been supplanted in large part by Amazon, due to the speed of shipping and free Prime delivery. The parts I've received have functioned as well or better than anything I've gotten from Napa or Advance. In fact, when the alternator went in my 2008 Escape at 230K miles, I replaced it with a unit I thought would be quality from Rock Auto. Instead, I found myself having to replace it again at 277K. This time I replaced it with a cheapo from Amazon. So far so good. When I was putting my 61 Olds together, Amazon was a consistent source of parts and supplies, many foreign made, the arrived quickly and have proven thus far to be of good quality. That helps keep the project moving and the budget in check.
Let me tell you another story about procuring a small part for govt consumption. We had this part that was a thin piece of sheetmetal about 1" x 1" x 1/16 thk. It had a small dimple in the center of it like the little dimple on a Christmas Tree ornament for hanging it. OK, looking at it from the perspective of the supplier: They have to buy a sheet of steel much larger to make the part. Then they have to perform a "set up " to make the part. Then make it. Then inspect it. Then handle it, pack it, ship it, bill it and whatever else I forgot. When we would order "ONE" of these, it costs us $136. (now I'm gonna use rounded off numbers here) Thats a lot of money for a 1" square piece of sheetmetal with a dimple. (Thats how we get $6K hammers) But realistically, they had reason to charge that or even more. So when this part became my buying responsibility, I decide to get quotes on buying 1,10,25,50 and 100 of them. So rounding it off, the quote came back : 1/$136ea.........10/$13.60ea............100/$1.36ea I talked to the head of our (local site)company, and explained that this kind of thing was costing the company and the govt lots of money.....especially on higher dollar items. He called the procurement department in and we discussed the buying process and he told the buyers that we should try to find better pricing. They told him their hands were tied by regulations and company policies. He was a really good manager.......so they got rid of him. Sometimes a company has to charge a lot because of the production cost involved vs the quanity ordered. When doing production runs, cost should come way down per piece. In the story I just told, the company would buy a sheet of steel and cut it into however many pieces they could get. Then store them in a bin and sell them to us one at a time. If they had only made one part each time the cost would have been even higher. We had a local small machine shop that made lots of parts for us. They were smart, and every time we ordered something they made as many parts as the material was capable of making...and stored the extras. They knew we would soon need another and another. They could out bid other companies because they didn't have to keep doing individual set ups and machining. When Edelbrock makes Cad manifolds, they do a production run and make a bunch of them. There is almost no difference in the cost to produce various manifolds.
As a blue collar guy my whole career I would think the costs of R&D, tooling and more are folded into pricing. Is the price of a product “adjusted” based on the number of sales expected?
Yes, thats correct if the company actually did the R & D. Often companies don't really test the product they design or only test to see that it works OK and fits what its supposed to fit....OR they may just be making a product to a drawing spec that they purchased from a company that was closing. The quantity of sales is taken into account, but thats usually over a reasonably short period of time. When you produce the same product for years and years, you only need to consider the production costs after a while, so the profit margin is even larger as time goes by. Just believe that the Chinese are smart enough that they don't jump into producing known products unless there is a very good profit margin to work with in that market. Also, why are even larger American companys buying up these formerly family owned businesses as well? I started out as a blue collar guy as an apprentice .......and I never changed my mindset even when I managed to move into some office jobs.
The Jalopy Journal
