khyros
Well-Known Member
What are you planning to do with it? My overall thought is that I want a reputable brand for carrying cargo. To put it in perspective, pretty much any main brand roof rack company charges ~$200-300 for the crossbars alone. Now, I'm not stating that they're not inflated prices, but to get an entire ladder rack for $300 raises a red flag to me. Why is it SO MUCH cheaper than name brand competitors? Looking at eTrailer, here's an Erickson similar design: https://www.etrailer.com/Ladder-Racks/Ford/Ranger/2019/EM07707.html?VehicleID=201993275
Looking at the pictures, they look like complete clones of each other... so why is that one half the price? Call my OCD, but when I'm putting several hundred pounds of gear elevated on my truck, I want to have the peace of mind that it's all secured. I can ensure that the gear is well secured to the rack, and the rack is well secured to the truck, but I can't do anything about the build quality of the rack... Except buy from someone who has a reputation to protect.
Worst case for spending extra $$, I spend a few hundred extra bucks on my rack. But we do that every month when we carry more insurance $$ than we really need. And this is a one time cost to cover me for its lifetime.
Worst case for saving $$, your rack fails on the highway, and I'll leave the consequences up to your imagination.
Note - this is not an endorsement of the Erickson rack that I linked, just a caution against the one you linked.
Looking at the pictures, they look like complete clones of each other... so why is that one half the price? Call my OCD, but when I'm putting several hundred pounds of gear elevated on my truck, I want to have the peace of mind that it's all secured. I can ensure that the gear is well secured to the rack, and the rack is well secured to the truck, but I can't do anything about the build quality of the rack... Except buy from someone who has a reputation to protect.
Worst case for spending extra $$, I spend a few hundred extra bucks on my rack. But we do that every month when we carry more insurance $$ than we really need. And this is a one time cost to cover me for its lifetime.
Worst case for saving $$, your rack fails on the highway, and I'll leave the consequences up to your imagination.
Note - this is not an endorsement of the Erickson rack that I linked, just a caution against the one you linked.
OFC Ranger
Well-Known Member
Racks are not complicated and are primarily made of two factors:
1. Material Thickness (Gauge)
2. Construction Type (Weld vs Bolt, Steel vs Aluminum)
Some racks command a higher price for no other reason than what company sticker is on it.
I'm not saying R&D is not involved, however you can only optimize basic science of an item before you are left with no other advertising options than using whatever buzzwords are currently the fad. ("Tactical" is a good example). At some point a company just gets the price they ask for because people are willing to pay it. Not many people are inclined to learn to weld or bolt things together, or spend the time to do it, so its more of a convenience price tag is my guess.
Think of it like a child attending school. Some kids get Walmart brand sneakers while others get Nike. No kid wants to be the kid with the bo-bo brand shoes. But they are both shoes and do the same thing.
My $50 overalls from Walmart have lasted just like long as my $150 Carhart overalls...
The lightbar industry is another absolute terrible category where price ranges make no sense what so ever. Lets use two name brands. Diode Dynamics and Baja Designs.
Both are considered top tier, but one averages at minimum double the price tag as the other. One has been around longer, so has more exposure in the off-road community, so can you guess which has the jacked up price tag?
Don't get me started on Jeeps... I've posted it numerous times. Jeep could release a limited run Rubicon with a giant Penis sticker on the side and ask for a $5,000 markup for a "graphics package" and they will sell out.
1. Material Thickness (Gauge)
2. Construction Type (Weld vs Bolt, Steel vs Aluminum)
Some racks command a higher price for no other reason than what company sticker is on it.
I'm not saying R&D is not involved, however you can only optimize basic science of an item before you are left with no other advertising options than using whatever buzzwords are currently the fad. ("Tactical" is a good example). At some point a company just gets the price they ask for because people are willing to pay it. Not many people are inclined to learn to weld or bolt things together, or spend the time to do it, so its more of a convenience price tag is my guess.
Think of it like a child attending school. Some kids get Walmart brand sneakers while others get Nike. No kid wants to be the kid with the bo-bo brand shoes. But they are both shoes and do the same thing.
My $50 overalls from Walmart have lasted just like long as my $150 Carhart overalls...
The lightbar industry is another absolute terrible category where price ranges make no sense what so ever. Lets use two name brands. Diode Dynamics and Baja Designs.
Both are considered top tier, but one averages at minimum double the price tag as the other. One has been around longer, so has more exposure in the off-road community, so can you guess which has the jacked up price tag?
Don't get me started on Jeeps... I've posted it numerous times. Jeep could release a limited run Rubicon with a giant Penis sticker on the side and ask for a $5,000 markup for a "graphics package" and they will sell out.
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khyros
Well-Known Member
And material type and more importantly, material quality. In my industry though, I've seen plenty of good parts manufactured right along side of bad parts - it comes down to supplier quality control. But that costs $$. I don't even have to deal with material type and material quality because that stuff is well controlled for me. But steel is not the same as heat treated steel or high strength steel. Not to mention all of the different steel alloys.
I'm not even going to touch on R&D because it truly looks like that rack is a 100% copy of another... Which means that they didn't do the R&D, which means that they don't know why some decisions were made. Which means that they probably cut costs in places that the team that did the R&D knew they couldn't cut costs. Whenever we have 3rd parties come in and audit our product for cost optimization reasons, over half of what they include as "fat to be trimmed," is actually stuff that was added due to R&D test failures.
As a welder - you know the effect that a good vs. bad weld can have on the overall strength of the joint. You also know how you have to prep the surfaces properly and take your time to get it done right.
And if we're talking about bolting it together, we have the same discussion with fastener material and class to ensure that they're up to the job, and hopefully they have some genuine locktite and are assembled with DC tools to reliably achieve required torque. But it's a lot cheaper to downgrade the classification of fastener, and using a nickel one at that. And faster to just use an impact gun - plus, who really knows what torque it should be at anyways, it's not like they did the R&D on the rack
. So yes, in theory, a rack is simple. You have some uprights that connect to the bed rails. You have bars that run fore/aft. And you have crossbars tying it all together. Pretty simple. And as a self made rack, I can almost guarantee you overbuilt it because you built it for yourself. Except a company trying to mass produce these is going to want to optimize material thickness... I don't really need 3/16'' thick piping - I'm fine with 1/8''. Which perhaps they are, if they've done the R&D to confirm that. I bet you just went with nice and thick materials, and spent plenty of time prepping all of it, and laying it all out. If you had to estimate, how much do you think you spent on materials for your rack? How much time do you think you spent putting it all together? (I'm not talking about v2 and v3... just a single start to finish rack assembly).
Running through a quick home depot shopping list of what I think it'd take to start with...
Fore/Aft... 1in x10ft black steel pipe - $20 x 2
Crossbars... (cut above in half) - $20 x 2
Uprights... (cut above in quarter) - $20 x 1
So $100 gets you a skeleton. And probably another $50 at least in order to get it to the barebone basics installed on a truck. And I'm not a welder, so I apologize if my times are completely off. A quick google search shows that a 3'' pipe should take about 15min to weld, and since it's going to be the perimeter that matters, a 1'' has 1/3 of the perimeter, so I'm going to estimate 5min. Again, at minimum, you have 4 joints at the uprights to the rack, and 8 for the crossbars, so that's an hour of welding. Google shows that the average pay for a welder is ~$20/hr in wages, and the rule of thumb is that total employee cost is 150% more when you consider benefits and stuff. Except then you're going to need something to help stabilize it all, some nice triangle pieces should work well, and some feet for it to rest on the bed rails, so let's go ahead and double that. You're now at $210 for an ugly, but bare bones functional ladder rack.
Sure, the company is going to be paying less in labor and probably getting better rates, but has to pay to ship it as well. My rocker rails just shipped from CA to MI and cost $110 to do that. And that was just ground shipping across the country. I have to imagine that shipping a rack (even if it's not fully assembled) is going to be similar.
And if we look at the rack listed... it looks like each fore/aft bar is 11' with a through hole drilled. The front crossbar has been bent at either end to 90 degrees (we never even discussed bending metal tubes) and pinched to slide into the fore/aft bars. End user will assemble the fasteners to complete that. The second crossbar seems to have formed metal strips welded onto each end, allowing the end user to position and clamp it onto the fore/aft bars. The 3rd x-bar has the same, but then a triangle reinforcement plate welded onto the side. The 4th x-bar looks like it just has an oversized pipe welded onto the side, and looks like the back of it has a hand knob with probably a setscrew to hold it in place. Oof, that doesn't look too secure to me - those hand knobs have a habit of loosening - make sure that you frequently check to make sure that the bar isn't loose. The uprights appear to have a slight bend in them, tie downs welded to the sides, two through holes drilled, and the rear has an oversized pipe, while the front has the same as the 2nd/3rd x-bar. Front one also has 2 more through holes drilled, while the rear has a drilled tab welded on. I see the guard rail secures at the front through hole and at the back tabs, and it looks like some sort of bolted plate halfway through, but I don't know how those vertical supports are attached - they look welded, but there's no way that's the case since the guard rail is bolted on at the front/rear. The plates see to be an L extrusion with 3 (?) holes drilled, and a tower welded on, with 4 through holes. I don't know if the underside has any blocks or is just a u bolt pressing into your side rail. So, the reason I went through this, is to just demonstrate that even this rack has a TON more than my stupid simple calculation above, so that cost of $210 really isn't a complete rack since you're going to have so much more to deal with that I didn't bother detailing out.
OFC Ranger
Well-Known Member
Well all I can say I learned is, doing some basic research and buying the components and building myself is astronomically cheaper than buying something of similarity off the shelf.
A really good comparison specifically to the OP's inquiry is to take a look at simple roof rack systems. Rhino, Yakima, Front Runner, etc etc can charge you upward of $1000 for a basic roof rack with items like 80/20 extruded cross beams. Its common knowledge that people have been building just as rigid and robust systems with unistrut from the local hardware stores long before I got into this game.
All that to say this; if you find two products with wildly different prices, do some research. If reviews and features are similar for both products, buy the cheaper one.
R&D recoup cost and other similar explanations for price differences are only going to work to a point with me before I just laugh. The goal of a company is simple; make that money. What does irk me is the great lengths some companies will go to convince customers why they should buy their product at far more expensive price tag. If we could use a filter what they would really say is, "Bro, we both know you want our name on your stuff. You are paying for the prestige."
Which for the record I am totally cool with. I just have a personal quirk with people who are fake. Ever had a friend or known someone who is not intentionally being rude, but is just overly blunt. Well, that can be me sometimes. People, products, companies, its all the same to me in how I look at them.
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