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Roger Upton on what is going on at RUCC. I have always said that RUCC is a small operation, but with a very high quality kit.
To produce a high quality kit you have to have skilled employees. The RUCC backbone chassis is a complex chassis to cut, fit and weld. We have had a hard time keeping a good welder fitter. Which in turn keeps putting us behind. So to solve the problem I was going to weld up the chassis myself and just produce less kits a year.
RUCC had a good fiberglass guy, that had been with us 4 years, that stuck with RUCC and worked excessive hours including weekends for the last couble of years, trying to help make up for the lost time of welders that RUCC either had to let go or that quit. He quit at the first of this year. So may decision was to just have a limited production kit and build the kits myself.
RUCC quit selling kits in March until we could have all the back order kits and parts caught up. So RUCC could solve its late delivery problems and as many back order problems as possible. All kit car companies have some parts back ordered from time to time due to suppliers which is beyond their control.
RUCC offered the customers that had kits ordered that where not already started their deposits back since the kits where going to be late. We have been later than I expected because of unforeseen problems and medical reasons.
I apologize to the people that sent in for the information packet. RUCC has not cashed any of the checks that people have sent in for the information packet. The end of last year RUCC changed what came with the different stages and the pricing. Our computor crashed and lost the latest information. I had sold the last information packet RUCC had with out knowing it was lost in the computer. But, thanks to the customer that ordered the last kit sold in March sending us back a copy of the information packet we are now getting it redone. I also thought it better to take care of the customers we had than to keep spending time making the new information packet, shop visits and calls trying to sell more kits. It did take longer than I thought it would.
There was several parts of the kit that I wanted to improve so I spent the time to re-engineer the parts and have them made. So the guys with the late cars would have the new improvements as and upgrade at no additional charge.
RUCC had motor mounts adapters for the 429-460 motor back ordered. Due to having to fab a new design because the rubber mount we where using was discontinued. We where also way behind on headers and sidepipes and our supplier on them was not helping at all. So I had to find a new supplier. The new supplier and RUCC are having to re-jig for all the engine types that we are offering for the kits. The new sidepipes have better baffling that we can have either quieter are louder depending on what the customer is looking for. The new sidepipes also are much nicer looking and have better attaching methods to the headers and to the chassis. But our new supplier does lots of work for the racers including IRL, Wiston Cup and the Truck series. So we had to work with them around the racing season. The new sidepipes are definitely worth the wait.
Our fiberglass guy started working for us again and we are now back in production with a better kit than what we had before and should be completely caught up by the middle of February. We will start taking shop visits again then with a very few in-between now and then.
I sincerely thank all of my customers for their patience. And apologize for their inconvenience.
Roger N. Upton
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