gt orphanage wrote:
Maybe jt191 could see if bills isuzu can produce the rotors as a bulk deal as someone has done the tooling and hard yards this is
So if bills isuzu can supply a bulk order maybe they are affordable and they can recoupe there efforts and money.
I paid a little over one thousand US dollars for my rotors in 2008. In case anyone has not been paying attention, everything has gotten a little more expensive since then (like steel and iron), and all I can comment on is what the price was four years ago.
The material is an iron alloy, not steel, and it's more expensive than steel. And the weight of the piece the disk was cut out of was three or four times the weight of the end product. The metal is sold by weight. It's many times more money for the little length of round bar of metal to cut the rotor out of, than it would cost for a common mass produced disk from the auto parts store.
They did say that they could do more for about $30 less in labor costs, since they now had all the manufacturing steps worked out with the first pair. You can chuckle about that, I did when I heard it.
I have a little experience with metal casting that relates to the conversation.
I had a small bracket, that I wanted to slightly change the design of, and have a small production run made, cast in steel.
It was going to be $2,000-3,000 to digital scan the bracket into the computer and make a positive plug.
Then it was going to be $2,000 setup and tooling and attach the plug to a board, and the material (steel) would be $30 per piece produced.
Excluding the scanning cost, it was going to be $130-160 per bracket for a run of 20. With the scanning cost, $260+ each.
And this was not a finished product. I quickly learned that any and all critical surfaces (mounting faces, flats, where ever it fit against something else) would still have to be machined. And, the outer eighth or quarter inch of material on the surface of the casting is not as clean and pure as the material inside. The face of a rotor where the pad rests and presses against to slow the car down, that surface would have to be machined also, to take the crust off the outside. If it has to be balanced because it spins around in a circle, all surfaces would have to be machined to make sure any and all irregularities are removed. Threaded holes would still need to be drilled and tapped. Non-threaded holes would still need to be drilled.
Casting doesn't mean that you pump out a finished product in one step and it's done. Casting reduces material cost because the entire thing isn't cut out of a solid, and it's down to the last steps of machining without wasting all that time removing huge amounts of material. But every single piece still has to be machined.
The costs mentioned were for a smaller piece and in steel, not a fancy iron alloy like would be needed for a brake rotor. And the material did not have to be checked for metallurgy like a rotor would have to be checked, to make sure the casting cured correctly. It's a simpler shape, so there might not be much cost for just machining a plug by hand, instead of scanning and producing it with a CNC machine. But as a price example, I don't think a price of $130 each + the cost of turning, drilling, and tapping per each rotor, is what people are thinking of when they talk about a "bulk discount". If you want to get down into the price range of mass produced rotors from the auto parts store, then bulk discount means 2,000+ quantities.
By the way, when the guy puts a note next to the picture saying it's not for sale, it doesn't mean he won't sell it. It means he won't listen to complaints about how much he's willing to sell it for.
