I want to get my hands on an old top to an old westy VW bus. I wonder if it would fit?
I'd be willing to crawl through my sunroof to get to it every night no problem!
:sombrero:
To get an idea of what it would cost to produce a custom pop-top, I ran something by my brother-in-law. He has a plant in TN and manufactures whitewater kayaks. They're in the process of buying a large thermo-molding oven that could easily handle the size of a poptop. What would be needed is a prototype to be used as a plug to make the mold off of. I know plenty of fiberglass people who could tackle that. Once the mold is made, they can crank out as many as they want. For bulk manufacturing purposes, a good mold costs about $10K, he mentioned that you could get one for less but quality over the life of the mold would suffer. I threw some numbers at him, but basically at a cost of a thousand each you would need about 15 people before you broke even and paid for the mold, after that it's just materials/labor. That would be just for the shell, any outfitting/hardware would have to be outsourced.
Lots of us think it's a great idea and would love to have one, but I'm not quite sure that there are enough 80 owners that would be willing to commit to make it worthwhile. I might be heading up to Colorado next month and was thinking of running the idea by Christo Slee to see what he thought of it.
Scott