well under a GI bill for us wounded vets and small business entrepreneurs it looks like i may get a government grant to begin my own business. this is nothing new, i have been working on this for a while but just never told anyone here about it. my idea is to make up a user friendly Internet program for people to design and order custom parts for their motorcycles. the computer program would have templates for most of the most popular motorcycles from Suzuki, Kawasaki, Honda, Yamaha, H-D and Buell to begin with. the program will allow you to enter your bike with manufacturer, model, year and type of mod. then you could pic out your mod and it would be custom made and painted(if necessary) for your bike. so you could go online, enter in the info, what you want/need for your bike and it would be built and shipped to you. this would allow the customer to use their own talents to create the part(s) you wanted for your bike. the template would become the patent right of the business and not the person ordering it. i was thinking of a data base with possible mods, future mods and pics. if you designed a mod and put it on your bike then you would have the right to name the mode and take artistic credit for it. so i throw this idea out to you guys to think it over and let me know your opinion of it. my idea was to use material like, aluminum, carbon fiber, steel, chrome, paint and other things like that. to be honest we are only limited to our imaginations.
so please let me know what you think. in return i will keep you abreast in how this little idea of my is progressing. i am going to ask for 1/2 million to get this going. some of you out there have talents that i may need to get this up and running. so i am depending on you.
frankie
TBH frankie you may need more than that. cost of machinery, facility, materials. unless you are going to outsource production
omg of course it is to be outsourced.
I hope this is sarcasm.
oui :)
You can do a lot with a CNC router and foam or MDF if then proceeding to fiberglass or carbon molding.
Still, it's going to need a lot of hard data about what the mounting points of all these bikes look like, and some schmart people to go from "unfeasible solid models cooked up by random people" to something that can be built.
Your best bet, if you can is to get yourself in touch with a design company that works for a car or bike manufacturer. I personally know the guy who designed the headlights for the bugatti veyron but if you could get a day or a week with someone like him to see how they work.
Basically the company designers send them this fantastic artistic plan of what they want doing and then they use that, plus their brief and own imagination to make something which fits what the manufacturor wants but whilst its still producable. Because alot of the time what the manufacturor wants and what can actually be physically produced are two completely different things and i think this is going to be your biggest problem.
People at home are going to draw you up a lovely idea of what something should look like on their bike and send it to you and 99.9% of the time what they want aint gunna work. Its going to have to be adapted by yourself. And then sent back to them to see if that fits what they are looking for. I hope your a good artistic designer and have plenty of mock up bikes to test parts against.
But yea you need to get in touch with an out of house design company and find out how they go about producing a part with the aim of getting it as close to what the customer wants whilst still being feasable to produce. They will show you the quickets and most effiecient ways to do it.
I very much feel that this is far more a design buisness idea than a parts creation buisness tho. I think your skillset needs to lie in design, CNC etc... rather than custom parts fabrication. You might be good at making a custom fender in the workshop with the bike there in front of you and the customer on the end of the phone coming to see what your coming up with. But designing stuff to fit what someone wants and making a perfect piece first time is going to be hard.
other than manufacturing i was thinking of linking up motorcycle microfiche parts aftermarket and stock. so you can order custom, after market and stock parts shipped to your home.