Raby 2056 kit, Price increse??? Options

[mike_the_man]

Hi all,

I've been needing an engine rebuild for quite awhile now. I finally pulled out the tired old 2.0L and I'm in the process of putting in a 1.8L to drive while I do a rebuild.

My plan (dream?) the entire time has been to buy a Raby 2056 kit and do the build myself. I'm pretty sure the last time I looked, the kits were around $3600. At that price, I'd say it was a no brainer. I had another look at the Type4Store site yesterday, and I see the kits are now $6000. I know Jake builds great stuff, and I'm sure the price is still worth it, but it's a little harder to justify the cost at the price point.

Does anyone have any insight as to why the cost has jumped? Is Jake still active on here (haven't seen him post much lately)? Any suggestions on alternatives? What should I do? I was hoping to get some more power out of the 2.0L and I know that's not cheap.

Thanks,

[Jake Raby]

I lurk here everyday, just seldom post... Been really busy updating our property, remodeling our first building and getting building #3 ready to move into this month.. And on top of that its the season we hate when everyone rushes that should have been preparing for spring back in October...

Haven't you noticed that most everything has went up in price?? Hell, last week I noticed the price of a candy bar went up by 20 cents!

What you don't realize is the fact that you are now comparing apples to oranges... In times past we had a 2056 kit that was available in four different levels of output. When I restructured the engine kit program I omitted all of the 2056 kits except for one, which was the "914S" kit, it just happened to be the most expensive, but also the most popular.

So, today you are comparing the old price of the cheapest offering of the four to today's price of the only remaining 2056 kit, which is of course the most expensive... So the prices really didn't change that much, just the other kits were pulled from the line up. The "914S" kit is only 400.00 more than it was in 2008.

The 2056 kit that I kept was the most popular small displacement kit we had for the 914, because it was designed for use with the stock EFI system exclusively. For the money the 2270 kit is a much better value, but you can't use stock FI with it.

I restructured the entire kit program, updated the offerings to produce the latest power from my line up and then ended up streamlining the entire buying process and the way we carry out prep and service.

With the economy taking a dump the cost of the kit components increased on our end and at the same time the supply of parts that we use to comprise the kits diminished, which made it a nightmare to fill orders. Our business has stayed amazingly strong through the economy, but it has indirectly impacted us because our suppliers are hurting and no longer fill our orders in a timely manner. When the orders are filled 1/2 the parts are placed on back order, it makes for a real bitch to operate a kit program and a turn key engine program on a determined schedule.

We didn't sell a single kit for over 8 months and I had thought about killing the program because it was such a pain to fill orders and the prices went up so much... People screamed when I wanted to kill the program, so I spent the time to totally reconstruct it. I knew if I did kill it that someone else would take advantage of all our hard work and success over the last decade with the kit program, so I had to keep going. Since I had to keep going I made it better.

Here are the pages with all the updates made including the newest power point presentations, I just finished these last week.

http://www.aircooledtechnology.com/index.p...7&Itemid=67

The biggest change to the kit program was the way we support the build, its now a very defined process with exact standard operating procedures. People took advantage of us for two years, so I changed the way we support the kits.

The kit program had buyers before we even released the new program, we now have a 3 month waiting list already, something I had hoped wasn't going to happen.

All the details are on my site, in the store and of course the best place to look is on our forums.

Yes, the price went up. Yes, EVERY kit we offer gained at least 5% more power than it's predecessor from the 2008-2009 kit program.

This post has been edited by Jake Raby: Apr 5 2010, 11:55 AM