Better have a very good lawyer. The liability issues alone keep most from building and selling motorized bicycles. Someone buys one from you then gets hurt riding it and their lawyers will be breaking down your door. Especially if they're illegal in your state.
Be careful, be very, very careful.
Tom
Well, yes and no...
I have been a self employed 'work from home' entrepreneur for near 30 years, the first ~26 years in Computers and the last 2+ years building and repairing MB's in Phoenix, AZ.
Location of course is crucial and I don't mean the street you are located on, I mean a 'bicycle friendly' place to ride, population, laws, and comfortable riding days in a year.
Other than maybe So Cal Phoenix is a pretty tough place to beat for all of those things.
I don't make any
real money yet, but it pays for my rent, food in the fridge, clothes on my back, and the utilities on.
You have to be able to wear a lot of hats to pull it off however.
I do it this way:
First and foremost you better be darn good with a wrench and be able to look at a bike and figure out the best way to install a motor on it or if it can even be done, have the right GOOD tools including the plethora of bike specialty tools, use the best parts, and for heavens sake build them safe!
Second you need some very good internet and marketing skills.
I am extraordinary lucky when it comes to wearing this hat.
I have my own co-hosted Windows server I get for free and over 10 years into building custom web sites on it.
As for advertising I have ~$100 a year budget.
As mentioned before my web site is free, I just pay the $12 a year to renew my domain name.
I spend my ad money on motor stickers and business cards, lots of business cards, I hand one to everyone that even looks at one of my bikes and few to everyone that buys one.
All the rest of my advertising is online via the web.
CraigsList is my best friend there but there is an art to that too.
Did you know a CL ad is a simple Internet HTML code page?
You can tell every ad is a simple html by the 'unique ad number'.html page.
I can write HTML code in my sleep hehehe ;-}
You know what a basic CL ad looks like, mine don't look that way, I build a web page for every ad on my PC and just copy/past the HTML into the CL form. Here are a couple of recent examples:
http://phoenix.craigslist.org/nph/bik/3249164405.html
http://phoenix.craigslist.org/nph/bid/3256441637.html
How fancy I get depends on how much time I have and the price of the bike.
I pretty much build to order and seldom have anything pre-built to go but I post them up on Craigs anyway and when a customer calls to buy it I let them know that ones sold but I can build them one just like it or or anything else they might want ;-}
Third on my list is good cheap help because with everything you will need to be doing above I at least can't do all the basic wrench turning grunt work and test riding, especially when I only like to work from 6am to ~2PM on bikes and pretty much just making sure everything is done to my standards.
I was again very fortunate with this.
When I moved into this new place a couple years ago I meet the neighbors and such and one of them happened to meet a couple local guys on self made MB's and told them his neighbor (me) built them to so they both rode over and met me, came in the shop, had a couple beers with me, and one of them was so impressed with my work he started coming over every weekday just to help out for free.
After a year he got pretty good and wanted me to pay him so I offered him $20 a day.
He was good with that for a few months but I was spending more and more time wearing other hats (on the phone and computer) than turning wrenches with him so he wanted more.
Just for giggles and grins I checked CL for posting a Help Wanted ad.
They want like $40 to post an ad but then I found the Gigs link, it's free to post to so I wrote up an ad saying (literally) 'chump change $20 a day' but they would learn a bunch and could build their own bike here with my tools for parts costs and was inundated with calls!
I tried a couple people and my shop mate got the hint, there was an endless supply of $20 a day workers for here.
My current shop mate is my age a my best friend since Freshman year in high school (1974) that fell on hard times. As a bonus he has a drivers license and a pick-up truck so I even offer $20 pick-up and delivery service now, which is a bonus right in his pocket ;-}
Forth is Legal and Liability.
Ya, yet another hat to wear and the hardest one yet for me.
State Legislators decide what the state laws are every year so to change them you need to reach out to them and keep pushing. Ya, lobbying.
Here in Arizona there is only a one month window to get new legislation introduced, and that is the month of January.
I missed it last year but have a couple ducks lined up now to help this year and have had this Petition to relax our laws here.
http://kcsbikes.com/AZRS28-2516.htm
Please sign this no matter what state you live in, and use it for an example when you lobby your state reps.
Ya, damn tough hat to wear, but nothing you want gets changed if you don't make it happen or hire someone else to do it for you. That is just life.
As far as liability goes I have a pretty straight forward philosophy...
Use the best parts.
Build them safe (nothing leaves here with just 1 brake, some coaster brake bikes have 3.
Pound operation safety into new customers until their ears bleed and implore them to always run a blinking front light especially in daytime operation, I know first hand your chances of someone cutting you off is almost completely eliminated if you do that one simple thing so I keep some pretty kick ass great lights in stock for $55 for just that purpose.
As far as being sued goes I am not a licensed storefront business (yet), there is no questioning my parts and work quality, and most importantly I just flat don't have anything to take hehehe ;-}
I know, that was pretty long winded but I had time today (rare monsoon rain day), and just figured there were hundreds of you out there thinking about try building MBs for a living and just laid it all out with no BS.
I hope it helps you make an informed decision Alex, and welcome to the forum, aren't they great? Like a box of chocolates you just never know what you'll get ;-}
