MCADXmag

Motorcycleaddicts Magazine (MCADX): Did you think, ‘I did the wheel core, how can I fail at anything else?’

Sheryar Durrani (SD): “No, I don’t think I was that naïve… maybe close. Everything I had heard, seen, and been told by those who I believe to be more knowledgeable than I said ring rolling is straightforward, go for it. Welding will be a challenge, but buff it out, you’ll be fine. I was not wise enough to ask the hard questions in the exuberance and afterglow of the success of the wheel core. I was intoxicated by that success and it really blinded me. It was my fault. Mea Culpa, all the way.

“MCADX: Let’s catalog the failures and challenges.

SD:”OK…”

• “Ring rolling magnesium is a dangerous business, and not for the faint of heart. We had many fires in the process. “

• “Laser welding would have been the ultimate solution for this, but the vendors just weren’t as much a part of this as they said they would be. I had suppliers that I had to call six times in a week for laser support and would never get a call back.”

•“(TIG) Welding became a problem because the heat of the weld distorted the rim.”

•“Buffing the weld was a challenge to do well, but we were finally able to get it. It just took a lot of time – something that we thought would take 20 minutes would take 4 hours. It could be done, but not cost effectively…It was a finicky process that did not give me the level of satisfaction that it was going to be a high quality product.”

• “We had all these materials coming in and a certain amount of time to pay for it. So we’re rolling parts, putting them together, working through the problems. When we got that first hoop to work in July after more than a month of trying, we said OK! The rolling works, now the welding ought to be a cinch, because we did a lot of trials on the welding. But we never tried to polish them out in the trials. Mistake. Real mistake, because when they were polished, the material got thinner and we saw some subtle warping we hadn’t seen beforehand. It wasn’t until we made about 20 or 30 of them that we saw the one or two that were a problem. They were very hard to find and could easily have slipped out the door.”

MCADX: How many rear wheels were you happy with?

SD: “Zero- not one that I was happy with. We tried a lot. We were able to graft one together as a demonstration wheel to show weight and shape. I wouldn’t let anyone ride on that.”

MCADX: Your first mockup wheel was made with a production aluminum rim. Did you ever think of just making the rims out of a more forgiving metal?

SD: “What would be the point? It would be easier to roll, but you’d still have to weld it. It would be cheaper, so you might hit your cost model, but it would also weigh more. There’s no performance gain. We didn’t want to be a company that made a wheel that just looked different. We have a performance message and vision that we are committed to delivering. It wasn’t an option.”[BREAK=What would you do differently?]

MCADX: If you had the opportunity to go back a year and do it all over again, what would you do differently?

SD: “That’s a tough question.”

MCADX: Good!

SD: “I definitely would have been much more conservative on the commitments – you know, hindsight and all that – and I would do much more homework on the undone processes. … I would have liked to have raised more money first.”

MCADX: Have you done anything you feel you should apologize for?

SD: “Yeah, I do. I am very sorry that we advertised early, because that’s where all of this springs from. The apology I would extend is in advertising early and not being able to deliver on top of it. I feel most regret for disappointing people.”

MCADX: But the response to the ad didn’t require you to take anybody’s money, you could have just taken their names.

SD: “We were exuberant over the big things. It was the smaller things that proved the Achilles heel of this approach. There was no intent to deceive, I thought we would be shipping wheels in a few weeks, and what was known was sufficient. It wasn’t. I ended up writing off $400,000 of material and investment.”

MCADX: What about the issue of accepting orders before there were wheels?

SD: “A fundamental mistake. We took a lot of orders, bought the machinery, ordered the supplies, and we thought we were ready to build the wheels. We called people, said ‘we’re ready to build your wheels’, and they said ‘go for it’. We started building them, and it didn’t work. And then, for about three months, we thought we were about two weeks away. Then something else happened, and then something else happened. I could cry you a river about all the things that happened along the way, that many a reasonable man and many a reasonable engineer would say, ‘Yeah, it looks like you could solve that in a week or two.’ Then something happened after that, and something happened after that. So, why did we charge the cards? Because we thought we were ready to ship the wheels in 30 days. And even though we said we estimate four to six weeks, that got lost in the white noise - we created an expectation: another big mistake on our part. ”

[BREAK=Living with a damaged reputation]
Durrani is the son of an inventor and the descendent of the kings, pirates, and poets of the Durranid Empire in 18th century Afghanistan. He is justifiably proud of his family name and history, and distraught that he has damaged that name.

MCADX: You have a famous name and a proud family, and you have now have a reputation that is sullied… not really by an outside source, but you kind of did it to yourself!

SD: “Yes. There were a couple of astute comments (in forum discussions) that were bitter pills to swallow, but true. We were writing letters to the customers to explain to them about the three major areas that were causing us delays, and it made it look like we were pointing fingers. We didn’t want to point fingers, but we didn’t want people to think we were groping in the dark, either. Because that’s the general view, that we didn’t know what the hell we were doing. .. I have some sadness that we kind of ‘outed’ things in a way that made it look like we were pointing fingers, and I’m sorry for that. It’s my fault we advertised early, and that’s where this all springs from – so I take 100% responsibility for that…The most important thing for me is that people understand that there was no intent to deceive, that I wasn’t saying, ‘Give me your money, I’ll hold it for as long as I can.’“

SD: “The pain and the pressure were real, but everybody got their refunds, nobody got stiffed: that’s the main thing. It took some time to get the money back, with our hiccups in funding, and I had to listen to and take some very harsh words at times from customers, who were entitled to say those things. Never once was there intent to not refund that money. Instead of days, it took weeks; but everybody got that (refund). That was one of the reasons we had to get (outside) funding…I had to survey what we had and all that magnesium and I had to say, scrap it all and give everybody their money back. We called or emailed everybody and said there’s going to be a large delay, because what we had didn’t work. We charged your cards. If you want a refund, let us know, it’s no problem. If you want to hold on, we’d really appreciate it, but we understand either way. And several dozen people have kept their orders in place, waiting till maybe April as a clearly stated target, not a commitment. All we can make is a sincere commitment to keep working with some pretty capable people here, but not a date…There were a lot of very understanding customers who very graciously and patiently waited for their refunds, because in some cases it took us a while to get it to them. The vast majority of riders in this sport bike community are more gracious than any people I’ve ever known… They were very understanding because they saw what we were trying to do, and they saw we were putting everything on the line to help the sport that we love. And that gesture of goodwill was the only fuel we had here for a while, because we all went without paychecks several times.”

SD: “We have found investors who have come in, and we’re grateful. The demonstrated capability was instrumental in our getting the funding to get us through the last three months. Not with a power point, or a hand waving engineer, but it’s that wheel on that bike and my ass on it at 150 miles per hour. We had orders out the wazoo, a byproduct of being late and not being able to deliver. That’s a serendipitous effect of having the sullied reputation. When we found we had to spend all our money that we had budgeted (to get to production with a revised approach) on refunds, I had to go look for more. When question came, ‘Yeah, but will this sell?’ then I was able to point to those orders. I love that people think that I was smart enough to do that intentionally, but I wasn’t.”

Part 1 - World of Wheels
Part 2 - Invention and Inventor
Part 3 - Wheels Going Off the Track
Part 5- Durrani Looks Ahead

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DrHall

I had not been following the Durrani saga. The insight into the invention to finished product process is fascinating!

I hope he can bring it to completion. "Nothing good is easy..."

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