Machining Costs

"Chris Carver" wrote

RIMCO is the only place I can think of that has prices posted on their site. I have no idea how these prices compare to other machine shops. Here's the page with their prices:

-- Scott

Send it to RIMCO in southern California. They do excellent work and have the best prices. Even with shipping it's a good deal.

----------------------------------------------- Jim Adney snipped-for-privacy@vwtype3.org Madison, WI 53711 USA

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Thanks for the advice, but no way am I sending my case to CA when I have a multitude of machine shops here in NC.

I was basically trying to see what the averages were for different things and that website gave me a good reference to go by.

Thanks for the help!

"Spidey" wrote

Where in NC and what shops have you found? For the NC/SC area, Kevin Shull in Columbia, SC comes highly recommended, although I haven't used his services yet. I plan to take the original engine from my '72 to him for an align bore, if I ever get around to it. Here's his site:

-- Scott

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Hahahahahahahahahahh ha a.. hack... wheez....

Thank you, Spiderman Number 1138. Best laugh I've had in months.

-Bob Hoover

I wasn't going to respond to this at first, but I must know, why the attitude for no reason at all? I gave you absolutely no reason whatsoever to give attitude. Why not just keep your negative response to yourself? I simply do not understand the reasoning behind it...

On Sat, 23 Aug 2003 12:29:36 -0400, Joey Tribiani left Mt Vesuvius in a state of jealous awe as he began spewing from the mouth thusly:

I think he was referring to this exchange:

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Hahahahahahahahahahh ha a.. hack... wheez....

Thank you, Spiderman Number 1138. Best laugh I've had in months.

-Bob Hoover

-- Travis (Shaggie) '63 VW Camo Baja...

On Sat, 23 Aug 2003 12:36:58 -0400, travis ran around screaming and yelling:

still a damn shame that someone *other* than the poster has to supply a quote so others know what he is trying to say... thanks shag... J

On Sat, 23 Aug 2003 12:44:45 -0400, Joey Tribiani left Mt Vesuvius in a state of jealous awe as he began spewing from the mouth thusly:

No problem, and I learned something from the post, too. I learned that Bob needs to quit smoking, and that if that's the best laugh he's had in months, he needs to get out a little more. ;-)

-- Travis (Shaggie) '63 VW Camo Baja...

On Sat, 23 Aug 2003 18:19:41 -0500, John Willis left Mt Vesuvius in a state of jealous awe as he began spewing from the mouth thusly:

Apparently Spidey didn't know how great RIMCO was and Bob Hoover laughed at him because he didn't know and then sarcastically thanked him for the laugh. Bob Hoover *knows his sh*t* when it comes to VWs, but in my eyes he does come off like a jerk the way he responds to people sometimes, just like in this case. Because he knows so much about VWs he's given a little more slack than most people out here when he shows his @ss. Sorry, I call them like I see them and he'll get no @ss-kissing from me. Bob, I think you sounded like a jerk in your reply. I'm sure I'll get flamed by several people over this post, but life will go on, and I "probably" won't lose any sleep over it.

-- Travis (Shaggie) '63 VW Camo Baja...

Perhaps Mr. Hoover is familiar with all the shops in NC and knows that none of them can do an adequate job of machining your case. Or..maybe he found your name amusing. Who can tell?

Dave

I have lots of machine shops here, too, but I send my cases to RIMCO because they do LOTS of this work, have done so for decades, and have more experience with it than any other 10 shops you can name. Experience really makes a difference.

Sure, I can get someone to align bore around here, but many times the job will get back to me faster if I send it to RIMCO. UPS from here takes a week each way and I get the case back in 2 weeks. It doesn't sit around there waiting for someone to try to remember how to do this particular job.

Plus they can do all the case work and you don't have to explain anything to them. OTOH, they have often explained options to me that I had not thought of. They have a lot of tricks up their sleeve that are really useful, and your local shop probably never heard of them.

Sure, you may actually have an exception locally. If that's the case you should really advertise them here so east coasters can take advantage of them, but you might want to ask them how many cases they did last week. The answer is more likely that they think they did a couple last month. RIMCO may have done a couple of dozen yesterday.

I've also found in the past that I could ship UPS both ways to RIMCO, have them align bore, provide the bearings, and install case savers all for less than what local shops quoted me for installing just the case savers.

OTOH, even RIMCO's prices have gone up markedly in recent years, and I see that they advertise a lot more watercooled services than they used to. I worry that they don't do nearly as much aircooled work as they used to and this is a bad sign. We need to keep places like this in business for all our sakes.

----------------------------------------------- Jim Adney snipped-for-privacy@vwtype3.org Madison, WI 53711 USA

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Dear Jim,

A key point here is that they still have the tools AND the people. Riddle Machine Company is not specific to air-cooled Volkswagens and never was but they invested heavily in tooling for that purpose and those tools remain on site. The declining population of air-cooled Volkswagens means that where they used to overhaul a thousand heads a week they now may do only that many per month. Fortunately, the smaller numbers have had no impact on the quality of their work, only on the batch size and scheduling, with work for other engine types beginning to dominate.

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I recently had an interesting conversation with one of those Porsche types peering down several yards of nose as he explained the inherent superiority of his 356 engine, the stirling qualities of His Personal Mechanic (Fred, over in San Marcos) and the exclusive nature of those fewly rare shops capable of meeting the superior Porsche standards of accuracy and precision until I was ready to sick-up all over his hand-made shoes. Because that rare shop, known only to the Select Few with its superior accuracy and precision is located at

-Bob Hoover

PS - One reason for the Porsche-types attitude was the fact my wife had just blown him off the road in her KG :-)

PPS - The 1582cc 356 engine is a good one; hand-built by people who know their stuff. But it's simply no match for a 2074cc engine built to the same standards, installed in a well-tuned KG chassis with disks instead of drums.

But don't tell that to the Porsche-types. Especially if he's a physician and your wife works in his office. Although it's okay to blow his doors off when the light turns green... and leave him dwindling in the mirror when you get to the twisty bits :-)

On Sat, 23 Aug 2003 21:02:15 -0400, "EuroBug" ran around screaming and yelling:

thank you "Dan"....typical....if i wait a few days then read every thread then, yes, it would be the one right on "top" that he was replying to...are you new to usenet? after the other message was read it is not displayed anymore...so when i read the "new" message it happened to be all by itself...got that? that means *NO* message on "top" of that one....so thank you so very much for popping in to tell me how usenet works...i love it especially coming from a top poster that can't even trim his quotes...thank you wise one for showing me the proper way to do things...maybe *you* and the OP should check out "posting on usenet 101" have a wonderful day J

If you don't want your cat to piss in your breakfast cereals, try locking it out of the kitchen. ;)

j/k, take it easy now.. hehe

Jan

On Sun, 24 Aug 2003 20:19:39 +0300, Jan Andersson left Mt Vesuvius in a state of jealous awe as he began spewing from the mouth thusly:

For some reason that reminds me of this quote... Who can tell me what movie it's from and who said it? "I eat little pieces of sh*t like you for breakfast!" heh heh Still cracks me up. :-)

-- Travis (Shaggie) '63 VW Camo Baja...

On Sun, 24 Aug 2003 20:19:39 +0300, Jan Andersson ran around screaming and yelling:

i don't eat cereals, but i do have cats..

no problem....don't want you to delete my posts...especially the one you responded to...it was dead on even if stated with a bit of a sarcastic tone...hehe J