You are forgetting one big advantage of castings which I admit doesn't seem
to be taken advantage of in the GTS front wheel, and that is that castings
can produce intricate shapes that billet machining cannot. Hollow spoke
wheels (like that on quality motorcycles these days) can be made much
lighter that solid ones for the same strength. Also IMO some there is no way
some tiny little company can make a few sets of billet wheels lighter and
cheaper than stock AND guarantee structural integrity and essentially
infinite fatigue life. Considering the liability issues and consequences of
failure, for a lightweight wheel, the engineering and design will be a
significant investment that will have to be recouped on the sales of the
wheel. Because of the volume of sales a major manufacturer can afford to
spend thousands of engineering and testing hours analyzing the forces on
hundreds of different permutations of different shapes, thicknesses and
stress raisers (i.e. radii, surface finishes, holes, etc). If only a few
were made the cost could be outrageous. Of course, if you skimp on the
engineering and testing (assuming this company even has the capability) and
offset this with lots of safety factor i.e. lots of metal (weight) you can
keep the design costs low...but then you don't have a lightweight
wheel...sorry about the lecture...yep, I'm an engineer....Joe
...Because of the better properties of the billet
material you can significantly reduce the thickness but still have an equal
or better part. Essentially you are paying more for better performance.
However when you look at the cost of CNC machining (lots of competition)
versus the markup on replacement parts (only game in town) billet may not
cost more...
I'll shut up now.
Bill
