Important information for customers of Muller Machine
Updated: March 30st, 2008
As most of you know, the "sport" of karting has changed fairly dramatically over the years... especially since around the year 2000. The quantity and variety of engines has increased significantly,
and the rate that new engines are introduced has become quicker. Participant turnover in our sport is also faster than ever.
As karting has "evolved", the demand for what I do has slowly been decreasing (my busiest year was 2002, and I've been doing machine work for karting since 1977).
I attribute this mainly to the general "trend" of karting to go toward sealed and/or spec engines.
As we all know; the rules for TAG engines are quite restrictive, so it's logical that as TAG becomes more popular, the number of cases going through my shop would slowly decline... and that is exactly
what has happened over the last 5 or 6 years or so.
In 2004, I started looking around fairly seriously for something to do "outside" of karting.
In mid-2005, I bought a wire edm machine, and managed to have it fully installed in my shop and running by late 2005. I have been up and running since then, and the amount of
work I have for that side of my business is steadily increasing.
So.... where does this leave you, the customer of Muller Machine?
Well.... while I have absolutely no intentions of getting out of case blueprinting, it will take a bit of a "back seat" to my other work though. That means a couple of things:
1) turnaround times may be longer at times, and
If you are in a time crunch to get particular cases machined, please contact me via phone or email before you ship any cases so that we can discuss my current turnaround time.
Also, I will unfortunately be implementing a modest price increase effective immediately (between 5% and 15% depending on the engine model). For the last number of years, my price
for blueprinting a Yamaha case (probably the standard by which to gauge pricing) has been 23% over what I charged in 1978. In that same period, the economy has had an inflation rate of 237%.
I have always done my best to make the cost for my machine work very reasonable to the engine builder so that there is adequate markup available for that builder. However,
I am quite certain that engine building prices to the end user have inflated much more than my machine work, (as has food, gas, and everything else we buy).
None of the above have been easy or quick decisions, however these are necessary changes because of the direction karting is going. Thanks for your understanding.
Sincerely,
2) I will not be accepting any new customers.
Pete Muller