Sorry that was supposed to be a text to someone. Multitasking...
Here's what I ment for here;
Anyhow yes there are several companies that make things that we have mentioned, I can think of at least a half dozen companies who make skid plates, and roofracks and battery tray/boxes ect. But I think what we are going for here is useful mods that pertain specifically to the GX...
ARB skids are worth the time imo, not much better than the stock skids the GX already comes with, and their price makes them not even a viable consideration. Now I am a huge ARB fan, I have their air lockers their bumper their snorkel, their air compressors and the list goes on right down to hats and shirts. They are a great company so I don't want to sound like I'm bashing them cause I'm not. But those skids are not something I spend my money on I could go into depth on why but i see no point. As far as roof racks go, there is frontrunner, labracks, eeziawn and at least one other direct bolt in rack and then there are the yakima and Thule and other racks that work with the existing crossbars. And right now there is a company in the rack market that is making a point of going around and claiming that they "invented the shape round" and is suing and running out of business anyone who makes a new roof rack and markets it successfully... They are spending their time and money choking out the competition rather than being innovative and coming up with new designs. Instead they let the. Competition do that and them squash them, and take their idea and call it their own and patent it under their name.
Realistically if we kept small(ish) volume (and that shouldn't be hard with the GX market) it would be doable. I know for me when I ventured out into my own business I had kinda this same idea... Make some racks and grow from there, maybe get into sliders, and or skid plates and then move onto bumpers... We soon found out that even racks was a lot more challenging than we initially thought. We didn't have any CAD and everything was freehand dawn and made by hand, making adjustments as we went and as we saw it coming together. It was hard, and then we had to make a jig once we got what we wanted, well after all of that(and that was just for roof racks mind you) we did some quick math and found out we were not even gonna make enough money to cover our costs of materials and fuel to get to the shop, let alone the rent of the shop and power bill that was thrown at us(we were working under someone who already rented the shop and was paying the power bill -father in-law of my business partner) so we were basically forced out before we could get started.... What I'm saying here is there has to be enough in it for someone to want to do this, but at the same time not big enough go full scale operations. So the simpler the better. There is a lot that goes into design and manufacturing that most people never consider. And so some of the things we have suggested might not be viable.
