I usually start to lose interest whenever a Tech thread morphs into an Enonomic and Marketing debate; All I was interested in at first was volunteering my heads to see what these pup's really flowed and sharing it with whoever might be interested. Good or bad, at least we'd know. If they wouldn't fall out of a tree, doom on me, but at least I shared so noone would need to make the same mistake. Apparently there was some interest, check the number of hits!

But since economics is the topic today, my .02 on it is that it looks as though I got 'em for a reasonable price. The real "ideal" saleable price is somewhere between what I paid and whatever they get for them. Retail was ~$1700 each (Summit once had them for $3400/pr), now it's apparently over $2000. That's too bad 'cause they're good heads pricing aside.

I can't really say that I blame Chapman, after all there is nothing "patentable" about their work, it won't take long for people to map out what they did and potentially clone them. After all, what's to stop Edelbrock from making knock-offs of them now? Edelbrock is a Public company and they have their own foundries and a whole supply chain in place, economy of scale as Fast correctly points out. So Chapman's only real shot on a limited production is to make back what they can, MP obviously doesn't have the vision to realize if they really made more than a half-a$$ed attempt at getting into the higher volume/lower margin aftermarket (i.e., go head to head with Edelbrock for the Mopar Market) they could do very well. By the same measure, Koffel could step-up and bring the off-the-shelf price to whatever the year-end price is, obviously they're not selling them at a loss for the lower price.

They are expensive heads, but to look at it another way we have a streetable head on par
in flow and price with a Yates Head and they don't exactly give those away either. I think I'd rather pay a bit higher price for something that works than a lower price for something that apparently doesn't live up to the hype without a lot of supplementary help(EX: Bulldogs).

The fact is, Most Racers aren't retail marketing guys, and in many ways I'm glad of that....think about it.