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has anyone made his own pad refills?


FamilyBiker

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see,i am not a business guy(and you´ve seen that from my posts).i am a guy of doing stuff.you´ll never get things in my head that for your thinking are just normal.you could be my neighbour asking me to swap over some potatoes for his tomatoes,that´d work.

maybe i am just to simple minded (drops tear),and not made to exist in such a world.....

baaaaaam!(shot head)

:)

nah,honestly,i am sure a few dudes on here are with me with my -in your opinion inaccurate- way of thinking that life and trading as a part of it could and should be way simpler than it is now.

i am not keen on working/consuming/repeat and dying after that without doing something with my life i am happy about.

(which btw i am doing as we speak,making pads for everyone,just for the fun of it :) ).

That's cool that's your "just doing it for the fun of it", but that's mainly because what you have is an incredibly simple setup compared to even a small 'real' business. A big part of it is overheads, and as you're a one-man-band doing things on your own, yours are minimal. However, if you look further down the line and think that your prediction of €500 a month comes true (if that's based on your initial surge of buyers, you also need to bear in mind that if your pads last for - say - 3 months, you've got a couple of months of very few sales in that period), if you ever wish to expand and do more varied products your costs are going to go up, and consequently you wouldn't be able to keep the same low price for things. All the well-known trials company are going to have a minimum of 2-3 employees, and generally some kind of dedicated warehouse/office space they use, so even just taking that into account it means that they couldn't get by just rattling pads out for a tenner a pair. It's just not something that works.

Going back to your "first world eats third world" thing - that's not particularly true in the sense that the "third world" (China are "second world" btw :P) producers set the price, it's not a case of the "first world" saying "We're going to give you ÂŁX for Y." It's not just a case of then getting that part at that price, applying a set percentage for your margins or whatever and rolling with that. I can think of quite a few products from some specific suppliers from my time at TartyBikes where the products had to be sold with virtually no margin at all simply to keep the price realistic for customers. Apologies if I've misunderstood what you actually meant with that...

For what it's worth, I'm not some massively pro-capitalist fanboy or anything like that. I don't really agree with a lot of the ways that the world we live in works, but I'm just trying to point out the realities of the situation for companies, and that basing your idea of what's the "right" price for a product on a totally different set of circumstances won't give a fair or accurate representation of what it's like for other companies.

Sam - that 'Pareto Principle' thing is pretty interesting. I didn't know that it had an actual name, but I/we at TartyBikes were definitely aware of the massive disparity between people who bum products before they're released and the number of people who actually buy that product when it's available. In some instances (e.g. with the GET2 DVD) there was a really high uptake, but for most things the public reception for products was markedly different to actual sales. V-brake users are the absolute worst for that too, haha. "That frame/fork would be so much better with a V-Brake option" - then no-one actually buys them...

EDIT: Something else while I remember it - customers won't actually buy things if they're "too" cheap. How cheap is "too cheap" varies depending on the product itself and competitors products, but there'd be plenty of times where I'd be on the phone to customers and actually recommend a cheaper, better product but they wouldn't want it because the lower price tag implied to them that it was worse.

EDIT 2: Sorry that it was actually a book this time round :P

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The Pareto Principle is mad really, the fact that's such a general sweeping statement that spans across tonnes of different industries and even concepts within the industry.

Obviously the 80/20 bit is more of a figure of speech than an actual definitive statistic but the whole thing where 80% of complaints come from 20% of customers was so true when I used to have to deal with customer complaints for the airline I worked for.

An amusing trivia gem is that a chap who introduced the term to me was actually a guy who was in my uni group project team, he had a large section in his part of our group presentation that was talking about the Pareto Principle, however it didn't actually have anything to do with our project at all and made no real sense in that context. The bit that's both amusing and incredibly ironic is that in our group of 8 students he is a part of the 3 member segment that contribute f**k all work to the project. Which means in this case it's more of the 38/62 rule... But yeah. Not far off.

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part of the reason I didn't use any pigment was the lack of colour option that haven't been done, would be wounding if someone asked "how'd you get them lgms to work so well?" haha

pm me an address dude, will send some out to you :) you'll need to cut the backing shape in yourself though...

you get first pick i guess, while the others are spoken for (Y)

p4pb10906159.jpg

funky pads the the flash on :P

Love the look of these pads, they remind me of the pads that used to come stock on the old cromo monty's back in the early 90's. Loved them and don't think I ever replaced a pair. How well do they perform?

Edited by Dazza1414
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holy sh*t,we put a set on my mates front brake today,smooth rim.

they gripped like the rim was tarred,but it wasnt.

things are going very well atm,very very.

made 10 sets in the last 3 days,i need that damn mould to make more at a time,absolutely sucks to wait 2 hours for a single set to cure :)

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Trimptastic :)

Got mine earlier..

20140512_183223_zpsf2ea1d03.jpg

It took me around 5 minutes to fit them in to the backings, pretty easy and straight forward.

I swapped out my tnn's and ajusted the slaves to suit..

20140512_185327_zps5df606bc.jpg

Aaand then I stripped the thread out of the mount! f**mesideways!

I won't be able to try the pads until I've sorted some time-serts out. (If anyone has a kit I could borrow it'd be much appreciated :) )

Edited by *gentlydoesit
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ha,nice.few other peoples pads are underway now.david hoffmann will kindly test some for me,too.need some pro level testing :)

also i´ve changed the mould design to fit heatsink backings also,just waiting for confirmation of the cnc guy

Edited by FamilyBiker
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  • 2 weeks later...

After a brief interlude, (and an out of pocket experience) I've finaly tried the trimps out :)

They perform really well (Y) loads of initial bite and noise :) didn't feel them slip once. I haven't tried them wet yet. They bedded in fairly quickly on my harshish grind, so they may ware down quicker than id like, guess I'll find out.

Interested to see what other people think of them as I'm not exactly gods gift to trials :P

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to be honest the wet performance is their downside,only thing i could complain about.

hope yours dont wear down quick,i´m running mine since th beginning of may now with no visual wear so far.

been riding 2 times a week for 3 hours each since then.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Got my pad material now, courtesy of ath rubber supplies of Doncaster. It's a 12" x 6" sheet of 85a polyurethane. It needs a clean as it's an off cut. Got it for nowt as well!!!

null_zpsedccea28.jpg

I have a set off tnn backings now to shape them into

I've just tried it.. it wears quick but what a pad (Y)
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  • 3 weeks later...

nope,industrial rubber compound for ball mill liners and stuff this time :)

its like honey, iÄşl have to pressure cast it in the future.just moulded 5 sets just to see what the new stuff is like.

dammit,48hrs to cure fully ;)

Edited by FamilyBiker
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