We can talk about this till the cows come home but the only way we will ever find out is
to get a quote from a gear grinder. I've got a back ground in machine work and I'm pretty
sure you could bring this in well under a thousand dollars especially with the CNC
equipment available today. There are programs that pretty much do all the calculations for
you and tooling is pretty much standardized with this equipment so set up isn‘t a really
big factor. The billets and heat treat would make up most of the cost.
I’d have to disagree with ya Bill as far as selling these. Everybody, well at least 80 or
90% of the guys with 3/4 and one ton trucks would be more then glad to shell out five or
six hundred bucks for a 4.10 gear set and they would be beating down the doors if you
could squeeze a 3.90 in there. These gears used are getting harder and harder to find and
in many cases by the time you pay three or four hundred bucks plus freight your not that
far away from what a new set would cost you. And you would have the peace of mind in
knowing that your getting a new gear not one with X-amount of miles on it.
As far as Patrick selling his inventory of gears for the 1/2 ton, he's the only one that
would know how that’s going and I wouldn’t be surprised if he wanted to keep that a
secret from the competition. I'd bet a dollar to a donut that he doesn’t have them on the
shelf for very long. When there are tens of thousands of prospective customers and your
the only game in town your not going to have a hard time unloading a very popular and
invisible up grade item like this.
As far as the actual numbers of vintage Chevy trucks go, I don’t think anyone has been
successful in getting an accurate count of the registered vintage Chevy trucks still on the
road. But when you conceder that ½ , ¾ and 1-ton trucks from 1947 to 1972 could benefit
from one of these gear sets the numbers have to be staggering. Who would have thought
20 years ago that the hobby could one day support hundreds of vendors selling
reproduction parts for these vehicles.
Denny Graham
Sandwich, IL
