The beauty of retail...

We're not even aiming to do much retail honestly. It's a side benefit. I've sold seven seats so far this year and I've maybe broke even due to problems with three of them, all caused by distributor or manufacturer errors.

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Grant Hughes

Then on Monday I turned away a potential service project on a BMW rally car and we gained a potential service project on a 74 Corvette historic SCCA race build. What is this world coming to?

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Grant Hughes

I did send the BMW guy Dave Kern's way though. E30 with lots of custom home built but well built stuff and an E46 M54 engine swap with megasquirt ECU and needs wiring and plumbing for the supercharger and and and???

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Grant Hughes

Finding good Wholesalers is key, Atech, Motovicity, Rallisport direct and Tire Rack are among the best we deal with; fast, cheap shipping and competitive pricing. It also takes a while to get in good enough with your rep to start getting really good pricing. We sell HANS which was bought out by Simpson and they're much better to deal with than HANS was and have a vast product line we now have access to, Pyrotect is also great to us, G-force seems good as well.

You're right that you don't want to deal with price matchers, I won't hesitate to refer them to amazon etc... you also need to be picky with what you're going to retail, because everything is so specific that you don't want to step too far outside of what you know very well because you'll waste too much time researching.

Personal Safety equipment is pretty good to retail because people want to try on helmets, suits and HANS before they buy, but you need to have competitive pricing, a decent amount of inventory as well as some advertising to let people know you have a stocked showroom, its about 80% of our walk-in business.

Doing service/install work can be really good as long as you do a good job quoting and don't get in way over your head, these are customers are good ones to sell low margin parts to if you can make some decent money back on labor, usually we charge $30 more/hour if you bring the parts to have us install for a variety of reasons.

Keep your head down, you'll make it through this...

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NoCoast
I did send the BMW guy Dave Kern's way though. E30 with lots of custom home built but well built stuff and an E46 M54 engine swap with megasquirt ECU and needs wiring and plumbing for the supercharger and and and???

Ummmm...thanks? I can do literally zero of those things (unless car setup or driver coaching is part of the and and and), maybe Tommy would be a good referral for the wiring aspect of things? I know he's looking to pick up a bit of work here and there in between building his mountain house.

Dave

The intercooler Was too big so radiator is going into trunk too.
I think he's just busy so was entertaining paying someone to finish it.

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Grant Hughes

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NoCoast
The intercooler Was too big so radiator is going into trunk too.
I think he's just busy so was entertaining paying someone to finish it.

Oh jeez...save us all....

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NoCoast
I did send the BMW guy Dave Kern's way though. E30 with lots of custom home built but well built stuff and an E46 M54 engine swap with megasquirt ECU and needs wiring and plumbing for the supercharger and and and???

Ha! I sent that guy to you after he called our shop in Texas for some help. Come on, I'm trying to feed you the local Colorado guys that call us.

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Jason McDaniel

From the customer side of it all, thanks Grant for sorting out that seat issue with me so quickly.

I ordered a few seats which were drop-shipped, one with a bunch of chipping/voids along the edges of the fiberglass, didn't feel very comfortable with the product. Grant refunded me immediately and we worked out the physical product return at Rally Idaho. Can't imagine it was a profitable exchange overall on his end, but I recommend his business to all racers I know who are looking for seats/harnesses/stuff like that.

Same can be said for JVL, great customer service, great value, and you get free life advice with every consultation

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"Just add more 'Stop-Leak', it's a Duratec, it'll be fine..."

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modernbeat

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NoCoast
I did send the BMW guy Dave Kern's way though. E30 with lots of custom home built but well built stuff and an E46 M54 engine swap with megasquirt ECU and needs wiring and plumbing for the supercharger and and and???

Ha! I sent that guy to you after he called our shop in Texas for some help. Come on, I'm trying to feed you the local Colorado guys that call us.

I appreciate that Jason!

It will be a cool car when he's done with it. There was a few things, Megasquirt ECU and wiring to put a 2006 BMW engine into an old E30 shell and such that we would never recommend someone to attempt and most would never pay the amount to have someone do for them. We could probably complete and execute the swap with a few changes but it would likely have a 5 figure shop bill. I do hope he finds the time to finish it and hope we can help him out with other aspects of the build as it'd be an awesome addition to the Colorado Hill Climb series and future events we hope to organize.
Here's Jon's build if any are interested.
http://johnfriedl.com/category/bmw-e30-rally-car/

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Grant Hughes

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NoCoast

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modernbeat

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NoCoast
I did send the BMW guy Dave Kern's way though. E30 with lots of custom home built but well built stuff and an E46 M54 engine swap with megasquirt ECU and needs wiring and plumbing for the supercharger and and and???

Ha! I sent that guy to you after he called our shop in Texas for some help. Come on, I'm trying to feed you the local Colorado guys that call us.

I appreciate that Jason!

It will be a cool car when he's done with it. There was a few things, Megasquirt ECU and wiring to put a 2006 BMW engine into an old E30 shell and such that we would never recommend someone to attempt and most would never pay the amount to have someone do for them. We could probably complete and execute the swap with a few changes but it would likely have a 5 figure shop bill. I do hope he finds the time to finish it and hope we can help him out with other aspects of the build as it'd be an awesome addition to the Colorado Hill Climb series and future events we hope to organize.
Here's Jon's build if any are interested.
http://johnfriedl.com/category/bmw-e30-rally-car/

Lots of time and effort into that build! Only odd bit is his talk of trying to run 25 or 30psi which is way more than it should need to hit his 400hp target. I'd bet 10psi would do it...not to mention that 400hp is huge overkill for a gravel rally car. Adding a spacer in-between the head and block also seems unnecessary for his HP goal and probably introduces another failure point.

Dave

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DaveK

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NoCoast

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modernbeat

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NoCoast
I did send the BMW guy Dave Kern's way though. E30 with lots of custom home built but well built stuff and an E46 M54 engine swap with megasquirt ECU and needs wiring and plumbing for the supercharger and and and???

Ha! I sent that guy to you after he called our shop in Texas for some help. Come on, I'm trying to feed you the local Colorado guys that call us.

I appreciate that Jason!

It will be a cool car when he's done with it. There was a few things, Megasquirt ECU and wiring to put a 2006 BMW engine into an old E30 shell and such that we would never recommend someone to attempt and most would never pay the amount to have someone do for them. We could probably complete and execute the swap with a few changes but it would likely have a 5 figure shop bill. I do hope he finds the time to finish it and hope we can help him out with other aspects of the build as it'd be an awesome addition to the Colorado Hill Climb series and future events we hope to organize.
Here's Jon's build if any are interested.
http://johnfriedl.com/category/bmw-e30-rally-car/

Lots of time and effort into that build! Only odd bit is his talk of trying to run 25 or 30psi which is way more than it should need to hit his 400hp target. I'd bet 10psi would do it...not to mention that 400hp is huge overkill for a gravel rally car. Adding a spacer in-between the head and block also seems unnecessary for his HP goal and probably introduces another failure point.

Dave

No wonder he din't msake it into medical school twice! Cloud 9 custom super-duper and evidently no desire or interest in learning some of the basics of how modern engines can do what they do on PUMP gas and no ass-splode...Hello Decompression plate, and hello detonation, good bye quench...
Where even to start...

That boy smoke a lotta da splif, Jah? How do guy get so far up in the clouds?

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John Vanlandingham
Sleezattle, WA, USA

Vive le Prole-le-ralliat

www.rallyrace.net/jvab
CALL +1 206 431-9696
Remember! Pacific Standard Time
is 3 hours behind Eastern Standard Time.

I thought that too, but I "overheard" some engine guys talking and they said for huge forced induction power, you want no squish or quench at all since it becomes more of a liability than an asset. But we're talking some super sky high combustion pressures here, not stuff you will see with only 25psi boost or so.

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Pete Remner
Cleveland, Ohio

1984 RX-7 (rallycross thing)
1978
Silence is golden, but duct tape is silver.