At Roger's suggestion, I'm forwarding this on to the vintage race
group.
To: wheel2wheel@abingdon.eng.sun.com, autox@autox.team.net,
british-cars@autox.team.net, ata@emi
Well, the time has come to place another order for Panasports. For
those
who've been around a while, you may remember the last time I did
this.
For those who are new, here's the story:
I am gathering orders for Panasport wheels from the denizens of the
wheel2wheel, autox,
and british-cars mailing lists.
Panasport is a premier maker of road wheels for racing and street
purposes. I bought
4 for the race car about a year ago. Those who get SportsCar can
take a look through
the ad section in the back and see a picture if you don't know what
they look like.
If you've got web access, http://www.emi.com/~bownes/spit.html has
some pictures
of my race car with them on it.
Panasport offers two types of wheels, street and Lights. Lights are
for racing.
The race wheels are marked as such and are NOT DOT approved for
street use. Most
of what we bought last time were Lights.
Last time I gathered orders over the net and went through a local
guy who offered
to sell them with little markup. The Lights prices ended up looking
like this
(more or less,as I recall)
13" $130 + S&H
14" $145 + S&H
15" $155 + S&H
There were a couple of oddball wheels we ordered that were not in
this range, so
it's not +/- 3 sigma or anything, but it's close. (The 17"x13"
stick in my mind...)
This time I'm going to try something a little bit different. If we
can get enough
wheels ordered, I will get them directly through Panasport and set
0.030" Over up as
a distributor. But I expect that that's going to be something on
the order of
20-30 wheels, which is about the volume we has last time. So, we
are faced with
a chicken and egg problem. I won't know the pricing until I get a
wheel count, and
most of you are bright enough to not commit to something without
knowing what it's
gonna cost. If we don't get enough, I'll go back to my local guy
and see if we can
get the deal again with whatever count we have. But my gut feel is
that we'll have
enough.
So, in the spirit of the net, consider this an RFI, Request For
Interest. If you'd
be interested in purchasing some Panasports @ roughtly the above
prices (probably
within 10%) please let me know. I'll total up the # of wheels and
publish the
results to those who are interested by the end of the week. If you
know of another group
who might benefit from buying as part of such a bulk order, pass
this onto them.
(The italian-cars mailing list comes immediately to mind)
Once I have a non-binding count of interested partes and some
firmer prcing, I will
pass it on and put up a system for taking orders. It's gonna be
cost+S&H, and
probably cash ahead of time only. Sorry, I just can't talk the
spouse into
fronting $145*25=$4400. Those who are worried about this can check
with the folks I
did this with last time and make sure I'm honest...
And as the standard disclaimer, I'm not gonna try to make any money
of of this. I
might pick up enough in the assorted roundoff to pay for S&H on my
one or two
wheels...In my dreams.
Anyway, let me know and I'll try to put it together this week.
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