Curless Auto
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Ttt
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Not trying to bust your balls here, just trying to improve my knowledge. $85 seems a bit steep for a little gear like this, but somewhere along the way you mentioned you were waiting for the tap to show up. Is the thread pitch on the shaft some goofy thread pitch that is hard to find a tap for, and is that what is driving the cost up?
The tap is a metric thread which was made specifically for Ford for this assembly. Yes, I could go to China and have them made for pennies and then have to order 10,000 at a time, wait for 6 months to get them, only to have them show up the wrong size, material or something and then get told too bad. Here's the breakdown...
1. go buy a pedal assembly from a junkyard
2. tear it apart and get the gear out
3. figure out what thread pitch it is
4. have special tap made
5. purchase bronze to have the gears made
6. find a machine shop that makes gears (there are not that many out there)
7. drop off tap and material
8. go pick them up after they are produced
9. write out complete instructions for instal
10. figure out how to market them
11. answer ridiculous amounts of questions regarding fit, price, how to, etc etc
12. go buy packaging, paper (for instructions)
13. set up paypal account, e-mail, phone number
14. each time you sell one head off to the post office to ship it out
15. repeat each time you sell one.
$85 is CHEAP!
Considering the cost of a new pedal assembly which WILL break again in the future since Ford still uses the same cheap plastic gear in the service parts, the small market we are, the time it took to set up production of this on a small scale (small scale custom manufacturing is ALWAYS more expensive per part) and time to provide support and all that makes this cheap. Try to go to a machine shop and have them make one for you, I can guarantee they won't come anywhere near $85, and if there's special thread pitches needed, you're looking at several hundreds.
None of the aftermarket manufacturers bothered to do this, as the market just isn't big enough. Curless is as far as I know the only one on the planet that is making custom gears that fit, so yeah. The price is pretty fair to me. I think there's much greater value in spending money on a replacement that will outlast the vehicle, than to spend more at the dealer for a replacement that will break again after a year or two.