I wanted to start a discussion and gather some opinions on the topic of COTS (Commercial Off-The-Shelf) bumpers. Currently, teams have two options when it comes to building bumpers - they can either construct them from scratch using materials such as pool noodles, fabric, and plywood, or they can purchase pre-made bumper kits. While building bumpers from scratch allows for greater customization and flexibility in design, it can also be time-consuming and require a significant amount of resources. On the other hand, purchasing pre-made bumper kits can save time and effort, but may limit a team’s ability to create a unique and personalized design. Additionally, pre-made bumper kits can be expensive, especially for teams on a tight budget. With all that being said, I would like to gather your opinions on the topic of COTS bumpers.
Please take a moment to share your thoughts and opinions by participating in the poll below. Your input is greatly appreciated!
See my form response. This would be a business venture along the same lines as remote bespoke tailoring, and would likely feel both expensive (to teams paying $500 for their bumpers) and cheap (to the business working for $5/hour to make the bumpers). The best version of this would happen in a densely populated region of teams with the Bumper Tailor traveling to each team and making them on site. I’d probably charge $1000 per team to do so and still feel grumpy about it.
Yeah, I’ve explored the idea of making a cots bumper solution and you really nailed the problem. It’s really hard to make them professionally and have it be a profitable venture.
I would be interested in a survey of what teams would be willing to pay. You then also have to deal with the wear and tear issue. Say a team spends $200 per bumper, but the noodle collapses after two events, or your numbers start peeling. Can teams justify that expense then? This year was hard on bumpers, and teams were replacing them mid season.
The bumpers would have to be of exceptionally high quality to be saleable as COTS items. We make ours for about $300 in materials costs for two sets and these use poplar (i.e., hardwood) boards, finger-jointed, glued and screwed at the corners, the pool noodles covered with heavy Dacron sailcloth, applied insignia-cloth numbers, and backed by a custom hardware mounting system. This makes for extremely durable and solid bumpers, so much so that we’ve never had them fail since we started making them this way, even under extreme stress (like taking a dive from the traversal bar straight on to them, on the bumper gap side, in 2022). It’s highly doubtful that you could match their quality and performance at anything like a price we’d be willing to pay. That’s the catch to this whole problem: teams that can afford good COTS bumpers can simply make their own cheaper and better (or at least as good) while teams that can’t do this also likely can’t afford the price that COTS bumpers would need to be priced at to be of sufficient quality that they could surpass what low resource teams can do on their own.