Staggering price

[Crazyraceguy]

These are pretty special. They are part of the conveyor system to the main edgebander. They are not that big, maybe 1" wide, with some kind of polymer drive teeth. Metric width and pitch, I'm sure.
When they came in Friday, I was told what the cost. (it takes 2)
I'll let a few of you throw out a wild ass guess first.....

 

[woodferret]

150-200 considering staggered tooth double sided timing belt.  Considering it's a replacement part and made of two PUs, I wouldn't be surprised if it's even more obscene.

 

[waho6o9]

475.00 for the pair, up to 650.00

 

[squall_line]

$750 for the pair, plus installation of $150/hr from the manufacturer who won't let a client do it themselves.

 

[montyss]

$1250 for the pair plus shipping cost

 

[ChuckM]

$550 plus tax?

 

[Tom the Remodeler]

It would be helpful to know brand/size of the edgebander, but assuming it's a commercial-grade (not industrial grade) European machine, I'll toss out a guess of ~$1,700.00 each, plus shipping, plus tax, plus however long it takes to disassemble the machine, replace the belts, then perform whatever calibration/indexing is necessary to register the components.

Edit: I'm guessing that, if anything, my estimate on the cost is too low....

 

[Duckler]

How much does the machine alone cost?
For how long is the machine good before it needs the replacement belts?
Cheap is not always a good way to make a buying decision.

 

[Muttley000]

475.00 is my guess

 

[luvmytoolz]

Whatever the price is, from an Australian supplier double or triple it!

Or about $2.60 from AliExpress!

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[oberlin1]

$1500 a piece

 

[Cheese]

$351.52 each plus installation and the service call...it's probably close to $1200 total.

 

[mino]

$500-ish per pair

How much does the machine alone cost?
For how long is the machine good before it needs the replacement belts?
Cheap is not always a good way to make a buying decision.

This.

Say they sell 1000 machines like this over a decade. Part needs replacing once in 5 years.

Custom belt needs a semi-special manufacturing process, 200 pieces a year sold, cannot have too many in storage as these things age. So say a 100 pcs run each 1/2 year. Rest of the year the dedicated tooling is idle. The manufacturer needs to keep the know-how inhouse.

Materials cost:
  in the $10-$20 range/pc with top materials
Production cost for a custom order, including tooling and labor:
  easily in the $100-$500 range/pc

This is the problem with low-volume specific parts.
Vast majority of the cost goes into the tooling and the testing/validation before usable parts can be made then to sustain all that.

Think of all the space stuff and why it costs $100M with $1M materials in it. The R&D costs get "spread" over a "run" of one + spare. So making one to send goes $100M. Making ten would go $200M, barely. But there is no use for 10, so just one is made at $100M a pop.

 

[Crazyraceguy]

This is definitely a big Industrial grade unit, as the belts are part of the conveyor system that returns the parts to the operator. It has been a few years since I posted the pic, but it is a Homag.
Surprisingly enough, they are pretty good about allowing us to service the machine, but they are effectively the only source for parts.
This is the first replacement, so they have lasted 5 years.

[member=28131]montyss[/member] only missed it by $50. Yup, $600 each plus shipping.

To me, this is insane. Somebody is making big margins somewhere, they have to be. I know that one of the electronic parts from the storage system's gantry crane is like that. It's a cable actuated measuring device that regularly breaks the cable (yearly?) This part is an "off the shelf" item, from another manufacturer, but somehow "ordinary people" are not allowed to purchase it? Some kind of contract as an "OEM/supplier only" situation? The second time it broke, our purchasing guy found them at about 20% of the cost, but as soon as they found out we were the end user and not a supplier, the deal was off.
It's not like these machines are cheap to start with, but it feels somewhat like buying new batteries for your DeWalt drill. For less than the cost of 2 batteries you can get a new drill, 2 batteries, and the charger. It just doesn't make sense.

It goes back to the old saying "Don't think of your car as a $10,000 item. It's really $25,000 worth of replacement parts, holding hands" You can tell how long ago I heard that the first time  [scared]

 

[Packard]

Short production runs are a problem.

We had a very well made and versatile machine that was made in Italy.

We had one job that required we install a special cam.  Removing the normal cam and installing the special cam took more than 8 hours and required two setup men to accomplish. When we were done with the production run, we had to put everything back.

When we had the original production run of 250,000 pieces this was fine.  But changing over the cam cost close to $3,000.00.  And the service production run was just 100 pieces, so $300.00 per piece for the setup.

We had a minimum of $1,500.00.  So $450.00 per piece.  And the machine had to earn $1,000.00 per day and we lost over two days production.

Repair parts are expensive, because short runs are expensive.

 

[Muttley000]

My day job is at an equipment manufacturer. Parts suppliers are very willing to give special part numbers so google doesn’t lead to a cheap replacement. The company I work for has chosen not to do that, we do a $250 minimum spare parts order and mark up 30% to cover the overhead of handling the order which is both quite fair and uncommon in our industry.

 

[mino]

...
Parts suppliers are very willing to give special part numbers so google doesn’t lead to a cheap replacement.
...

I would argue it is not so much about "cheap" but about "unqualified for the machine" replacements.

I was for some time intimate with the 3D printers business (Prusa) and it was a complete mess. They have to test&measure every single shipment of bearings and rods and MATCH them for reliable manufacturing. Different batches from the same maker can casually have minute differences. While still within a "spec" this means the components would just not work together well if both deviate in the "wrong" direction. Sure, you can order items to about 2x higher spec at 10x the cost - if at all (!).

The issue is that if you spec a "standard part" as a spare part, people will put a bottom-of-the-barrel $5 "standard" belt, that is not-all-that-standard, into a $100k machine which then breaks (the machine, not the belt). And the machine maker has a problem. Not Mr. Bezos, nor the belt maker.

If your machine is sufficiently robust to handle semi-standard parts. Great. Many/most common machines are. But in reality most manufacturers of bespoke stuff simply do not know if they are as robust. Testing costs a lot of $$ which is just not economical to do for a few tens/hundreds machine runs. They are often lucky to find a parts-combination that works reliably in the first place.

---
For a Festool example.
Not sure how many folks took apart a TS/TSC 55 series saw. It includes an ISO "standard" main bearing. Right? NOPE!

The main bearing in these saws is custom-manufactured to tolerances for which there is not even a (public) standard specified. So while they are marked with the ISO standard type label, they cannot be replaced with an "ISO" standard bearing of any type.

And this continues.
I also have an el-cheapo €60 Parkside/Lidl tracksaw which is mostly a clone of the TS 55. Guess what, it comes with a main bearing - of the same type as TS 55 - which is still "tighter" than the highest quality ISO nomenclature can even specify.

How I know? The Parkside was vibrating .. I tried to get a "high accuracy" bearing of the type and got one for a lot of € (more than the Festool spare part) which was in reality worse than the original Chinese one. Eventually I replaced the bearing with a Festool one and the vibrations went away ...

So much for "standard" parts ..

 

[smorgasbord]

It goes back to the old saying "Don't think of your car as a $10,000 item. It's really $25,000 worth of replacement parts, holding hands" You can tell how long ago I heard that the first time  [scared]

It's worse than 2.5X in automotive, and has been for decades. Understandably, there's overhead in cataloging, storing (for years), finding, packing, and shipping parts. But, there's also overhead in not having the assembly line volumes and efficiency.

I was for some time intimate with the 3D printers business (Prusa) and it was a complete mess. They have to test&measure every single shipment of bearings and rods and MATCH them for reliable manufacturing. Different batches from the same maker can casually have minute differences. While still within a "spec" this means the components would just not work together well if both deviate in the "wrong" direction. Sure, you can order items to about 2x higher spec at 10x the cost - if at all (!).

If the design requirements are a tighter spec, then the company has to balance the cost of the higher spec parts against the cost of sorting through parts to find ones that meet the higher spec. For the 10x price you quote, I could see where hand matching might be cheaper overall.

However, if the company is hand matching lower spec parts, then repairs will be much more difficult. Perhaps they could sell matched bearing and rod combination as replacement parts, insisting that you replace both at the same time, but that's its own hassle and additional cost.

 

[mino]

...
If the design requirements are a tighter spec, then the company has to balance the cost of the higher spec parts against the cost of sorting through parts to find ones that meet the higher spec. For the 10x price you quote, I could see where hand matching might be cheaper overall.

However, if the company is hand matching lower spec parts, then repairs will be much more difficult. Perhaps they could sell matched bearing and rod combination as replacement parts, insisting that you replace both at the same time, but that's its own hassle and additional cost.

They were doing it the right way. Is a reason they got a reputation for reliability ..

For initial manufacturing they matched the batches - the batches were mostly consistent "inside" batches, just you had to throw-out those 5% which are not good-enough on assembly and it was fine. That way you can get actually better "matching" than even with the "proper" bearings+rods Mitsumi offered for $200+ a set ..

For spare parts they used /was 3 yrs ago/ a "middle" ground "match" to make sure all spare parts match. You correctly guessed that you need to replace both rods and bearings (of that type) at the same time as both wear out so it all works fine .. until someone gets "too smart". None of this information was marketed/mentioned anywhere - non-engineering people would not understand this to begin and just cause a support nightmare while those who were already tuning their printers order from Aliexpress anyway..

Yet, *all* those parts were actually "standard", just not good-enough for the specific use case.

The thing is that in most high-end/cutting-edge/bespoke manufacturing you tune/setup to your supplier or you are out of business - otherwise you have to over-build/over-design stuff that makes you more expensive. This plays out more often than not and in more industries than may seem obvious. I just used a specific mass-scale example that is not much of a secret.

---
The moral is: Unless you have an inside into the actual price creation for a specific part, there is no way to tell if you are looking at price gouging, the parts are sold at cost+ or even at a loss. Just from looking at the "market" versus "original" prices alone cannot answer that.

 

[woodbutcherbower]

My van’s going into the shop Thursday for a new cambelt. The belt costs £22 according to Ford’s EKAT parts schematic price listing. But thanks to genius Ford design, the mechanic will have to take off practically the entire front end of the van to access the belt housing - and then put it all back on again once he’s spent 30 minutes swapping out the belt.

So £1350 UK - $1750 US.