jordanfromreno

Have you seen Peat's Santa Cruz? Looks nothing like the Ticket

A Hydroforming machine can cost anywhere form $1000-$150000USD, the price changes depending on the material and size of material being worked with.

Something that needs to be taken into notice is how bike frames are made, many of the aluminum framed bikes are welded by hand, and the rest are done by robotic welders. On average a welder makes around $22.80 USD and hour, and a 6m pole of 6063 aluminum costs around $64. It can take an experienced bike frame welder about 45 minutes to weld a simple hardtail bike frame. Say you pay an engineer $60K USD per year, and you have a team of 3 of these engineers over the design of a frame for a hardtail bike, it takes them 3 months to design the prototype, that's $45K to pay them. And another $6K for design software totaling in around $51,000 USD for the design process. Now the company building these bikes wants to build 1000 for launch, rounding the welding time up to 1 hour per frame and with the estimated materials for each bike costing $64, the price per bike is $86.80 to make, being about $86,000 for all 1000 bikes. The company still needs the break even, with the price of a standard TIG welder capable of welding aluimium being about $900, and assuming there is about 20 welding stations, that's another $18000 in deficit. And with a cost insurance estimated at around $60,000 for the welders only. That makes the companies total deficit around $215800. they would have to sell each bike frame for $215 to break even, and companies need a profit to thrive. Many companies sell their hardtail mtb frames for 200% and sometimes more the price to manufacture. YT bikes isn't like this, they are shooting for a profit, but not ripping off the consumer market like big brands such as Specialized, Trek and Cannondale.