RE: Kit Building Forum Activity
The kits vs. arf debate has grown tiresome for me. The problem for the manufacturers is that with so many choices available its difficult to fill a warehouse full of a kit that may fall out of favor in a few months. Kit cutters are a welcome alternative to the tedium of a scratch build from classic plans but they go out of their way to make it difficult. I bought some MAN plans for a Duellist that took 6 weeks to arrive. Trying to get a short kit for the plans I was told by several cutters that they required access to my plans for a quote, wanted exorbitant set-up fees and had crazy long lead times-just for some ribs and bulkueads. After all that I still had to make my own material list and shop for sticks, sheet and hardware separately.
IMO the laser-cutters are missing a huge opportunity. They should offer a list of complete, turn-key kits on their website. When you give them a credit card number they load the file into their laser cutter and cut out the unique parts, pull the sheet, sticks, and hardware from inventory and toss a freshly printed copy of the plans (registered with the owner for proper compensation) into a shipping box and hand it to the UPS guy. Imagine how many kits they'd sell! I know a few big warbird designers have something close to this now but I'm not in the market for a Ziroli P-38 with 14 foot wingspan, I just want a $150 Duellist kit. The beauty of this system is that there is no loss exposure to UNIQUE INVENTORY. Everything is created from generic stock AFTER being paid and noone gets ripped off.