CNC parts for GG
I'm half owner of a Haas VF3 CNC milling machine(you know the ones they contour mill the custom chopper wheels on TV's Jesse James from Long Beach and the Tuttle's from rural Orange County NYand the like- some of the shops have smaller machines and some have the VF4's which I think just have slightly larger table movement, but Haas seems to be THE machine to have) and the rest of the shop, manual lathes, mills, saws, MIG + TIG, oxy/acet is half mine too.
I walked away the situation few years back for family political reasons, but everything is cool now. The thing is, the only way you can make something like that worthwhile is to tool up and do a production run, but then you also have to have the market for the parts. I don't know if you mean just hand levers, or shift lever and brake pedal.
If you have a market for these items, I'd love to get some aftermarket GG parts out on the market, but you have to be pretty sure you(we) have a market before you tool up and start making pieces.
You might be better off finding a local machinist and seeing if he can turn out a one off hand made part for you that looks cool.
A running joke between my brother and I is this so called "Billet" craze. It's the people who know better that perpetuate it that are at fault. A billet of aluminum is similar to an ingot of steel. I'm no expert, but I've seen some that were 2'x4'x8'(approx). At best, what people call "Billet" is a part machined from a larger, solid piece of Aluminum, and at worst, a casting that has had the surface machined to have that close tolerance, one off part look.
I think the whole "billet" misgnomer started in the early days of custom cutting and contouring wheels before they had the prefab blanks to use. They'd take a large, squarish "billet" of metal and cut until it was a rough wheel, and then add the custom touchs. Cut from true billet then became simply billet until anything with pretty machine marks was billet.
Anyway, I tend to ramble. If we can get together on anything let me know.
Matt
