You won't believe how much these cost. Take a guess...

[hhiibel]

i’m still thinking get a total length 1/2” stud and re-thread the end. not as deep a cut in the head. a single stud seems sounder than splicing two. don't know socket depth for either scenario. too bad not metric. belmetric lists lots of step down studs.

[TimeWarpF100]

I just made these myself.  Took me about half a day to machine a fixture to hold 10 nuts, and then another day and a half to write the programs and do the machining.  Figure I've saved myself a few hundred bucks on these prototypes, and if I can't get the production pricing down to some reasonable level, I'd make these myself.  They are cut from ETD-150, which is a specially heat treated version of 4140 steel, as I understand it anyway.  They are 130,000 psi tensile strength, so no heat treating is necessary, although as mentioned previously heat treating is not that big of a deal, for me anyway.  The only thing I don't like about these things is that they aren't black, but I have found a local company who can do black oxide coating, so as long as they don't charge $10 per nut to do that ( ), I'll probably do that in production if I can't get these from somebody else at a reasonable price.

You may have noticed that I'm really wound up about this whole situation   To me, I'm trying to bring a fairly significant product to market for the benefit of myself and other FE high performance enthusiasts, and things like these stupid high-dollar quotes from companies in the automotive aftermarket just get in the way of what I'm trying to accomplish.  I HATE that.  You would think that 10 special steel nuts would not be equivalent to 10% of the cost of a good pair of aluminum cylinder heads, but that's how it would come out if I went with ARP for these things.

OK, rant off.  Here is a picture of the nuts that I machined, and also a photo of a couple of them installed in one of my heads.

Jay, I have a good friend who is local with huge machine shop probably would not hurt to give him a call to see what he says. I will send you PM with his contact info. R

[mbrunson427]

I'd send them off to Drew P when you're ready to do a production batch. He did some random bolts for me as a favor a while back. I'm sure he'd be more than willing to do you a favor Jay, even though it's not Holley carburetor parts.

[Drew Pojedinec]

Mike, I have two plating barrels now.
One can do about 5-10lbs of bolts per hour, the other can do 35-50lbs per hour.

[Stangman]

Jay just curious if you called maybe a company that makes wheel locks or lug nuts. The nut that you made (which looks great by the way) looks like a cross between a wheel lock and lug nut.  If you needed a bunch maybe they could give you a deal, and who knows maybe they have some kind of blackish or dark coating. You may have already gone down this road already but was just thinking out loud looking at your nuts. .

[jayb]

...was just thinking out loud looking at your nuts. .

LMAO!  I didn't think they were showing... 

[Stangman]

Ha Ha. But really did you look into that.

[JERICOGTX]

                               Nicely done Jay.Time to wash your hands

Says the guy that has destroyed multiple chairs that didn't belong to him...