83-85 honda 200x seat/frame rectangular rubber thingy's

[Shep1970]

Before i make a bunch, i've searched around and can't seem to find anyone that has these. so my question i guess is, would they be a wanted/needed item? or would i be wasting my time? I dont make much $ on this stuff but its nice to have a hobby that pays for itself.
Took 5 fails to get the mold working right- then proceeded to make five great ones. After they cured the great ones were (guessing 10%) softer rubber than the nos one i have.
I now have the correct density rubber and started pouring-
so what do u think?
thanks for your time,
i've never done much searching for 83-85 parts so i really have no clue.

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[oldskool83]

Most are dry rotted by now. Put them on ebay somone will buy figure put your profit with taking 13.5% off the top then your states sales tax plus your shipping cost. If you start small more items will follow. Own the market 8f you can.

[ps2fixer]

I agree, throw them up on ebay, if they sell slow, who cares as long as you enjoy making them. That's what I do with the not so great items I make/sell, might get 1-2 sales a year, but just giving the option for people to buy them is nice. Hit enough random parts and you're bound to find one that has higher demand. A lot of people search amazon and ebay for parts, so I'd target those markets to sell on and like mentioned above, don't forget to take your costs + desired payment for making them add shipping on top of that then the fees. Note, ebay counts shipping costs as part of their fees. Once the listing is made, it's done, just check for sales every so often (set your handling time to how far apart you plan to ship out, once a week = 7 day handling time). I ship 3 times a week, so my handling time is set to 2 days, but that doesn't make sense if you have low volume of sales and/or you live far from the post office.

Anyway, parts are parts, there's atleast a tiny bit of demand for just about everything. Advertising on facebook and such might help short term sales. If you do make an ebay account, link it in your sig and people will know where to look for shep made parts. For selling on ebay, I'd say jack the price up fairly well and if things sell well drop the price, else keep it higher to off set the costs of making them and storage room being used up. Also remember don't matter how great your parts are, you'll still get some returns, so count that in the price too. Everyone has their own way of calcing the retail price, and there's always just knowing the market and throwing a price on yourself. Generally stores mark up parts around 50-100% from their costs, so that should be a fairly good base line to follow.

If you do setup ebay and such, shoot me a pm about it and I'll promote your products on my site. It's still a work in progress, but it's getting a fair bit of traffic.

[Shep1970]

My wifes got some of my rubber items on ebay now-
its crazy, - shipping a couple rubber pieces just about anywhere in the country costs me 4 bucks + or - a little.
packaging- driving to Post office
I dont end up making much/ just really buys more of this type hobby stuff. (which is fine)

I gotta sell these dashes next, i poured them last wk-end. I make some coin on these- of course my dash (cap) mold just bit the big one yesterday, and i have no idea where i put my new one for a new mold is (think i put it somewhere i wouldnt forget where it was) thats alright though it'll turn up eventually. 263847
and PS2- im still sending them your way for the key switch part.
shep

[ps2fixer]

Yep $4 is a pretty good price to charge for shipping for first class packages. If you think that's bad, don't look how much it is to ship priority mail. Next best option is a small flat rate box of flat rate padded envelope in most cases. If the package is by weight and over 1lb and going a long distance (like MI to CA) it's like $15-20. Shipping isn't cheap any more. From my accounting for 2019, 56.3% of my costs were raw materials, 14.6% was shipping, 11.9% for ebay fees, 5.9% paypal fees, and 4.7% for vehicle expenses (gas, maintenance, etc). Of total sales, I had 1.8% of the value as returns (most for no reason, just didn't want any more).

When people say there isn't really money to be made in 3 wheeler parts, atleast for new parts there's not enough volume unless you hit a gold mine part. My best selling part accounts for something like 25% of my total sales and it tapers down fast after that. I currently have 90 listings, so something like 50 get around 2 or less sales a year.

You could always expand into quad models and such, I'm sure there's plastic/rubber parts that are high demand for some models, but I'm looking at it from more of a business standpoint than a hobby/past time.


I'm still interested in the dashes in bulk for making my fancy ignition switch adapter kits for the 350x/250r/200x machines. I doubt there's a huge demand for them, but it's a niche no one else has filled and I've had a couple requests for that kind of thing in the past.

[Shep1970]

PS2- I have noticed just recently theres some guy outa texas? doing 200x harnesses and such on ebay. You must have seen his stuff- i hope he doesn't cut into your sales.
my problem with dashes is there not an easy thing to do, the caps are very tough (time consuming) when i do a hand full of dashes im done/they ware me out....sadly im still looking at about a gallon of plastic mix left that'll go bad before i get to use it. Maybe i'll go fill a pothole up the street with it i keep damn hitting everyday.

My next batch i'll be in touch, maybe we can try to work something out.
263848

shep

[ps2fixer]

I haven't seen the 200x ones, but I've seen a guy making trx250r harnesses. Both are the same build style, fair chance it's the same person making them. I'm not a fan of building harnesses using heat shrink for the tubing, it's not exactly high heat resistant like the tubing I use. Not sure how well they would hold up long term. Either case, I'm not too worried about the harnesses, they are really one of my not so good products, tons of efforts and little pay vs effort. Maybe I'm too picky with my build style, I know there's a demand for the "it just works" grade parts. My focus has been on easier products to prepare and basically reselling other products like light bulbs as whole machine kits. I'm hoping to get my site built up with some super useful info/guides, etc and get enough traffic to make a small profit off it. Right now it's just breaking even on hosting costs + domain fee. I have a good $1000 in manuals but there's so much tech info I can post from them, it will be a long time till I'll be fully caught up on them.

Kind of side tracked from the thread, but my latest thing I'm messing with is an interactive wire diagram which I plan to have basic troubleshooting info included on it. Also little things like highlighting the wires or circuits when things are clicked, give tech specs on hover (pin out etc), and links to guides and such on how to bench test parts, like the starter solenoid, or ignition coil. The hope is to have the site be the goto place for tech info. Service manuals are great, but downloading a pdf then finding the data in it can be a challenge for a end user, so trying to make that info more accessible. I promote my ebay listings and other ebay listings I find good/useful via ebay's affiliate program, and some google ads on the tech info pages. I have all of the tech info built into a database, so I can compile tables and such pretty easily. Like if I wanted to, I could pull all of the atv's with the same coil ohm specs, or make a table of how long each machine is, etc. I'm making the site for anything atv related, 3 wheelers , quads, side by sides, etc. Anything mass produced and falls under the "atv" label. If I get systems worked out well, I might make a similar site for vehicles too, but that's more of a long shot lol.

[oldskool83]

your lucky you can ship for $4. Most of my items require flat rate boxes.

Year to date ive spend $289.53 on shipping $592.17 on state taxes, $777.74 on ebay fees, $287.46 on paypal fees...i still made a $2323.72 profit but you can see how they can take a good bit away. (thats with using free ebay listings) I kinda which is was not 10%, id be ok with 5%

[ps2fixer]

FYI, ebay is rolling out new managed payments. They claim it's cheaper than the paypal fees, and the funds go direct to your bank account. Paypal is doing some dumb things so I'm looking to cut them out anyway. Ebay isn't really better though, I'm ready for another ebay clone that's actually good to replace them even if the fees are similar. So many features are broken on ebay because I don't use Chrome. Youtube recently broke things on their site too for firefox users, atleast for me it's all screwed up. So annoying modern sites barely work, the old school sites, still function fine from 20 years ago, they just look like garbage now xD.

I haven't tracked what I've paid in sales taxes yet, I know that's an area I could save more money off taxes at the end of the year, just so much more manual accounting.

[oldskool83]

i upload loaded a vid of my kid riding her 1st atv and needed to rotate it....well that feature went away. I needed to figure out how get code to show, edit it then edit the vid....Technoligy is cool but not every site needs to be built and designed for the crazy smart to use. Upload, rotate, rename....simple right.....? Wait that was youtube 2005....

I'd like to see facebook buy craigslist then call it market place and get market place off facebook because thats the only reason I am on it. I hate FB. I dont care what anyone does or how their food, dogs or how im feeling today posts are lol.

Buy sell trade.

[ps2fixer]

Facebook would never do that, you having an account with them gives them data, phone number and such. That data is valuable to them so they want as many people as possible signed up.

Craigslist could just fix their site to "modernize" it and add in some ads to keep it free. Add a facebook login option, and it's effectively fb market place on another site.

Like you said though, less is more, adding simple to the end user things is great, but don't try to make the site a fully featured video editor unless you hide it behind an "advanced" button or something similar. The general population doesn't care about the advanced stuff. I'm fighting with me self slightly on that for my site. I want to add tons and tons of info for each model, but at the same time, most of the info people could care less about unless that's exactly what they are looking for. I have some ideas to work around this but for now I'm just trying to get the framework up and the info added. Reformatting is pretty simple after that.

[Shep1970]

Well, i've got about 20sets done. I still don't understand why the large hole in the middle of them, but it is what it is.
So just sayin' i've got em' if anyone needs them. I guess if they dont sell i learned alot doing them.
Wife will list them later today on that auction site.
but u know were to find them locally,[emoji39]

https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20200808/47251e35d18ebd5113ec60ff0d2678a6.jpg


shep


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[ps2fixer]

Nice, I suspect the hole is to make them weaker than a solid block so they spring a bit more. I think it's more padding than a spacer. Good luck with sales =).

[jasong_10]

My wifes got some of my rubber items on ebay now-
its crazy, - shipping a couple rubber pieces just about anywhere in the country costs me 4 bucks + or - a little.
packaging- driving to Post office
I dont end up making much/ just really buys more of this type hobby stuff. (which is fine)

I gotta sell these dashes next, i poured them last wk-end. I make some coin on these- of course my dash (cap) mold just bit the big one yesterday, and i have no idea where i put my new one for a new mold is (think i put it somewhere i wouldnt forget where it was) thats alright though it'll turn up eventually. 263847
and PS2- im still sending them your way for the key switch part.
shep

Those look great, I actually just ran out to the garage to see if mine was cracked anywhere, lol. Mine is in good shape, but if you have any extra of the mounting screw covers I'd be interested in purchasing a pair of those. You could send them with the headlight shell when that is ready, any idea when you'll have the time to run another batch of those?

[Shep1970]

Those look great, I actually just ran out to the garage to see if mine was cracked anywhere, lol. Mine is in good shape, but if you have any extra of the mounting screw covers I'd be interested in purchasing a pair of those. You could send them with the headlight bucket when that is ready, any idea when you'll have the time to run another batch of those?

Small headlight shell batch will be this week- end of wk. yes i have extra dash caps (i'll toss them in the box) when i send u a package.
I've gotta resurect my kids old chinese 70 atv for my wifes/cousins/step daughters 9yr old son first of the wk. That oughta be fun (NOT).

shep
ps- your 87 honda 200x rubbers are different than these anyway (yours are still available new)

[jasong_10]

Small headlight shell batch will be this week- end of wk. yes i have extra dash caps (i'll toss them in the box) when i send u a package.
I've gotta resurect my kids old chinese 70 atv for my wifes/cousins/step daughters 9yr old son first of the wk. That oughta be fun (NOT).

shep
ps- your 87 honda 200x rubbers are different than these anyway (yours are still available new)

Sounds great, thank you. I got lucky, my father-in-law did all the resurecting of my daughter's Eton before he gave it to her, lol. Sorry I should have been more specific, I went out to check my dash. I've learned that just about everything is different between the gen 1's and gen 2's, haha.

[Shep1970]

Sounds great, thank you. I got lucky, my father-in-law did all the resurecting of my daughter's Eton before he gave it to her, lol. Sorry I should have been more specific, I went out to check my dash. I've learned that just about everything is different between the gen 1's and gen 2's, haha.
Gotcha-

I've got a box of new china parts im throwing at this thing, been sitting outside for 7yrs ish. The engine has always ran beautifully so tires/brakes/switches/new tank, carb, lines and more- she should be good to go....Its amazing what $160 in china parts gets you. I figure a camo paint job too and i'll ship it out/away for good. Never to return.......

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The kid should enjoy it for a few yrs. Good kid but spends too much time indoors/think i'll show him a fun outdoor activity.
His dad is long gone, took off for good yrs ago.
shep

[jasong_10]

Gotcha-

I've got a box of new china parts im throwing at this thing, been sitting outside for 7yrs ish. The engine has always ran beautifully so tires/brakes/switches/new tank, carb, lines and more- she should be good to go....Its amazing what $160 in china parts gets you. I figure a camo paint job too and i'll ship it out/away for good. Never to return.......

263915 263916

The kid should enjoy it for a few yrs. Good kid but spends too much time indoors/think i'll show him a fun outdoor activity.
His dad is long gone, took off for good yrs ago.
shep

Ah, yeah I think my father-in-law spent $400 on my daughter's Eton and then probably stuck another $400 into it but it's been flawless for three years now. All I've had to do is put a new fender on it after she hooked left into a barb wire fence (not a scratch on her luckily). I agree, camo seems like a good choice. I hope to get mine through two more daughters so I might have mine a while yet, lol. Yeah, I think a lot of kids spend too much time inside on devices/phones/etc., my wife and I try to limit TV as much as possible, and are going to hold out as long as we can before they get phones. It's great that you're willing to step in and be a male role model for him, it will benefit him greatly, kudos shep.

[Shep1970]

jason- aiming for monday at the latest for headlight shells. This little guy has been tempting my patience, every bushing was frozen from sitting it all came apart and was greased but fought me all the way, dry bearings (replaced). It got a $10 rattle can paint job.... still need to replace carb, and electronics cause they're cheap and have it already..263980
Just need to finish this first (almost done).263979
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considering this china atv is 13 or 14 yrs old she's in pretty good shape.
pictures loaded wierd-hmm...

[jasong_10]

That works for me.

I'm the same way, once I start a project, I can't walk away from it until it's done, lol. That does look good considering it's "experience", he's going to have a blast with it.

[Shep1970]

jason, i guess i lied about monday:rolleyes:
I've gotta mount 4-tires today, grab a battery tonight, motor spins over nicely by hand (elec start only) Then gas her up tomorrow/ so aiming for mid wk for shells/ sorry.
welcome to my day:D
get this china thing done/
pouring tri-z rubber throttle cover things/in house-
my youngest is home taking an on-line drivers ed course, 6 hours per day x 5 days.
im in the hot sun on the driveway/to hot for mosquitoes though....

oh- found out this chinese rear axle has the same exact splines as the honda 200x. (honda 200x) hub on there now (temporary) thought that was interesting.
ok now that i've typed way to much i have to get back to work.
stay healthy (all)
over and out-
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shep

[jasong_10]

jason, i guess i lied about monday:rolleyes:
I've gotta mount 4-tires today, grab a battery tonight, motor spins over nicely by hand (elec start only) Then gas her up tomorrow/ so aiming for mid wk for shells/ sorry.
welcome to my day:D
get this china thing done/
pouring tri-z rubber throttle cover things/in house-
my youngest is home taking an on-line drivers ed course, 6 hours per day x 5 days.
im in the hot sun on the driveway/to hot for mosquitoes though....

oh- found out this chinese rear axle has the same exact splines as the honda 200x. (honda 200x) hub on there now (temporary) thought that was interesting.
ok now that i've typed way to much i have to get back to work.
stay healthy (all)
over and out-
264014 264015
shep

No worries shep, that works for me. Too bad you didn't have some extra 200x 8x8s with some 18x10s laying around, that would look pretty cool, haha.

[Shep1970]

Jason- i'll set aside the best one for you, i'll trim and drill that one first (this wk-end). I can never seem to put pics in pm's, not sure if its even do-able. i'm assuming putting one here is ok with 3ww :D
stay safe.....
264209

shep

[jasong_10]

Jason- i'll set aside the best one for you, i'll trim and drill that one first (this wk-end). I can never seem to put pics in pm's, not sure if its even do-able. i'm assuming putting one here is ok with 3ww :D
stay safe.....
264209

shep

Thanks shep, those look great. Just let me know when you're ready to ship and I'll get you $$ and my address. Have you ever considering making the tank shrouds?

[Shep1970]

Jason- tank shrouds are available through a member here, he has them listed through ebay. I made a set of tank shroud molds this year "but" there just for personal use.

shep

[jasong_10]

Jason- tank shrouds are available through a member here, he has them listed through ebay. I made a set of tank shroud molds this year "but" there just for personal use.

shep

Ah, I jumped over to Ebay and checked my watch list, that seller name does look familar, :)

[jasong_10]

263847

Almost forgot, just wanted to remind you that I'm still interested in a pair of the screw covers/plugs if you've got a set that isn't matched up with a dash.

[camy]

Do you still make the seat bushings??

[Shep1970]

Yes, i've been running low on a few things the rubber has been hard to get this year, i will check on those this am and PM you my cell# (easier than PM-ing.

shep