Hey guys I know this is technically the wrong section, but only got 2 responses over in the buy/sell section so I figured I'd give it one more shot.

I hand tooled this spring seat for my 48, and I was thinking about potentially starting to do this on the side because I enjoyed working on it so much. My question to you guys is, what would you pay for a hand tooled seat like this? Used DK customs leather and seat kit as a reference for the cost that I put into it so like 140 for the parts currently. This one was more for me but I should be able to pretty much do any design I really want to, just takes time and patience so I don't know how much that plays into the actual cost vs. what someone is willing to pay for a seat.

Any ideas are greatly appreciated!





Finished product, black and white so you can see the design easier.





Heres an almost dont picture, but its in color so you have an idea, just used straight black on this.





And this is pre-dye so you can see the design more easily as well.

 

Cool, however … not really my style. I could be way off, but I’m thinking somewhere around $249 is your price point. Try making a few and put them on EBay as a Buy Now or Best Offer. That’s a low investment for materials and likely your best gauge for feedback. You should at least be able to cover your initial costs without difficulty. Have fun and good luck.

 

I'd say a 100$ profit on parts is really not a lot unless he's able to wrap this up in less than a day

How long did it take you start to finish?

 

Or you could take the seats to Shark Tank

 

Before you go much farther with this, I need to remind you of our policy on selling a product on HD Forums. From the rules:

6. Selling or solicitation of ANYTHING in the general forum, by Private Message or in Chat is considered Spam and is not allowed. Anyone found posting excessive links to their websites, or suspected of "sneaky" advertising will be warned and will possibly lose their posting privileges. Using the name of your business as your login is prohibited unless you are a current Sponsor of HDF. Please post your private party ads in the HDForums Classifieds forum sections. If you are a business and have a product or service that would be of interest to our members, visit our Advertising/Sponsorship page to learn how you can join our team and help support our community. We offer a variety of low-cost packages that can be of great benefit to your company.

We will allow this thread to play out a bit, but if you start to promote this product/service, you will fall under the above rule.

 

Thanks to the moderator for not yanking this thread. I think it is legit. I followed his other thread about his seat.

I think I paid about $300 for a semi custom seat. Now if I wanted to add custom tooling I would expect too pay another $150. Have you looked at rich phillips or mother roads seats? They sell a lot of tooled seats. But I guess there is a difference in buying a tooled seat and coming to a person and asking them to put your design on it. I would think the latter would be more expensive.

 

Legit or not. He is not allowed to promote a product/service unless he's a paid sponsor.

 

Izzoquazzo, I'm not trying to argue with you so relax. I was saying thanks because I agreed with you. He was asking for genuine information on pricing and was it a viable business. Plus he is supporting a well respected sponsor DK Customs.

 

Not arguing, I'm clarifying.

 

Thanks for not yanking the thread, this was something that I just was trying to get a ballpark idea on for a side hobby to do in my area not selling or trying to get free advertisement on here. That being said I don't know if you can as a mod look into pm's of members or not but feel free to verify it in my inbox and stuff, really not trying to be sneaky if thats the way it came off I apologize. I guess my thread title didn't help anything, didn't realize I screwed it up until today haha I meant to put what would you guys think would be a fair price for this, maybe I looked over that edit option but I dont know how to change it now. But either which way, trying to be above board with this and not steal advertisement, I also posted in the sportster parts for sale section if you need to shut the thread down.

I wanted a spring seat and made my own via DK Customs stuff and just really enjoyed the process and was a little on the proud side that I did it myself and thought it might be cool to sell a form of "art" on side. I just really have no idea what would be a realistic price point because I've been looking at Rich Philips stuff and its all basically 500+ and its obviously nice but I just don't know how many of his hand tooled things he really sells at those prices and if I'm just ebaying and craigslist crazy for a side fun thing I want to be able to actually sell finished work at a price that would be acceptable to someone and make me some money for my efforts.

But all in all it was a learning process doing it so I probably spent way more time than I should have trying to figure things out etc. but I probably spent about 30 hours if I were to ballpark it now, likely higher than reality but seems about right I think? I think I could probably get the tooling and stuff down to about 8 hours or so and finish totally around 12-15 hours since I learned a good amount on this one. If the thread stays up I'm really just looking for honest opinions on my work using the first seat as an example if its really even worth trying to make again if people like it or would even consider buying something like this. (not same design specifically but just an example of how it looks/ turned out after tooling.)