Lone Star Racing - Stepping it up!
Interview and Photos by Lance Farwick
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| Some of the people behind LSR. Dan Fisher, (top and right) is the man in charge. |
ATV Scene: How many employees
do you have?
Fisher: 55 employees right now.
We run a skeleton crew on second shift mainly to make parts that we need for
the next day to make sure they're ready.
ATV Scene: We noticed on your
website that you’re carrying other products such as Laker Custom plastics.
Are you trying to reinvent Lonestar and change the business into a parts distributor
business?
Fisher: Not really. We'll stock
a little extra stuff but it’s for the customer that doesn't’t want
to go around calling everybody up. It makes it a lot easier for our international
customers to deal with us direct. I want to mainly focus on parts manufacturing
but we'll offer a little one-stop-shopping along the way. It makes sense.
ATV Scene: What would you say
is your best selling product?
Fisher: Our axles are definitely
up there. We can’t produce A-arms and swingarms as fast as the axles.
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| Here is the starting point of LSR's magic. This steel and aluminum stock is treated like gold at LSR. |
ATV Scene: How many items are
in your product line?
Fisher: It’s pretty much
infinite because we do such a variety of a-arms and swingarms. We’ll build
customers a swingarm or A-arms to almost any length they want.
ATV Scene: How often is the facility
equipment running?
Fisher: Through the thick of the
season we run 24/7 to keep up with demand but usually run 2 shifts throughout
the year to keep up with everything. Right now what is killing us is the material
vendors. We can't get the material fast enough.
ATV Scene: How expensive are
all these CNC tools and machines?
Fisher: We have equipment in here
from $50,000 up to about $150,000. We just ordered a new machine that has a
bar feeder. You can load 40 feet of material and it will just keep turning parts.
It will also have a parts catcher so that employees don’t have to baby-sit
the machine. Most of our tools have parts catchers, but we only use them on
parts like axle spacers and other small pieces.
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| This machine is where a genuine LSR swingarm is first born from a raw hunk of metal. | The birth of a Lone Star hub. |
ATV Scene: How big is the drag
quad business for you?
Fisher: With the dunes and everything,
it’s up there with all the other sectors. Dune riders tend to spend a
little more money too. You have to do a little more to a drag quad, there’s
more chrome , more time consuming details - more of everything. We even make
full titanium frames for the drag quads. Right now we’re helping out a
customer with his drag quad. He’s putting a 300 horse snowmobile engine
in a full titanium frame! We are also building a drag full titanium frame with
a Yamaha R6 street bike motor in it. We like to do real crazy projects like
that. Our doors are open for wild creations all the time.
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| There aren't too many of these in other shops. This is one of Lone Star's specialties. It's an all titanium frame. We're told serious dune riders are all over these babies. |
ATV Scene: Tell us more about
your giant CNC Laser.
Fisher: It's the newest member
of our team. It can cut just about anything, for example plastic, wood, even
paper. We mostly use it to cut sheet metal. This tool has opened up a lot of
doors and possibilities for us. We can bend our own metal now, before we had
to shop all of it out. We had to buy certain quantities of product to keep the
price down. Now we can offer more custom stuff. And we can control what gets
done and avoid delays.
ATV Scene: What do you need the
sheet metal for?
Fisher: It’s for everything
like shock mounts for a-arms, frame tabs, skid plate mounts for swing arms and
all our brackets.
ATV Scene: Can you talk more
about your tooling and pattern area?
Fisher: This is where we make
all of our fixtures. We just recently got them down to a science. It’s
nice to have because it makes redesigning of parts process go much faster.
ATV Scene: What are the fixtures
for?
Fisher: After we design a part
we need a way to repeat that part over and over. That’s where the fixture
and directions, on how to use a certain fixture comes into play. This fixture
will force you to repeat the process to the exact specs as the last part that
was built. Also it will prevent you from reinventing the wheel every time you
sell that particular part. So needless to say, if you are building production
parts you need a fixture or fixtures for those items.
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| This is a custom made drag frame with a built to the hilt snowmobile engine wedged in tight. |
ATV Scene: Can you tell us more
about your titanium quads, specifically the spotless CRF450 that you have here
in your building?
Fisher: Sure, this is our CRF450
hybrid with an all titanium frame and A-arms. All the nuts and bolts are titanium
as well. The weight of it is only 305lbs. It’s never been ridden either.
We use it just for display at the shows we go to.
ATV Scene: What kind of application
would the CRF450 titanium quad be for?
Fisher: It’s a full motocross
bike. Believe it or not, everything will hold up fine on the track. We've been
working with titanium a lot lately. We are now making grab bars out of titanium.
So look out for that new product in the near future.
ATV Scene: Aren't aftermarket
frames a waste of time now that most of the riders are racing with production
frames?
Fisher: We are still doing a lot
of custom frames. Since ATVA rules require riders to use production based frames
the demand for our frames is definitely not as big as it used to be. We used
to ship out about 15 frames per week, now we are only doing about half that.
ATV Scene: Do you even bother
to build replacement frames for new production race quads?
Fisher: We are building up a fixture
for the YFZ. And we also will be making a sub frame for both stock and custom
frames. We will be making a six point sub frame for the stock YFZ. The points
are referred to the amount of places the sub frame bolts on to the frame. It
should be done shortly. We are getting a lot of international orders for this
type of thing.
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| Here a LSR hub gets cut to precision. |
ATV Scene: How come there are
so many different A-arm manufacturers and yet only a handful of axle manufacturers
including Lonestar?
Fisher: It’s all about
having the correct equipment. Definitely building an arm is more basic, but
in order to do the long travel you have to know a lot about suspension. They
have to be designed to have the least amount of bump steer, camber gain and
other things. There are a lot of manufacturers that are just matching them up
to stock and getting them out there. There have been a lot of people that have
been copying our design and others. Some companies have basically the same design
but they change one little thing. Its hard too prove they copied the design
and it would be costly to pursue it in court, plus there are so many arm manufacturers
now. It’s definitely getting much more competitive.
ATV Scene: You mentioned bump
steer? How do you test for that?
Fisher: We have two ways of testing.
First we will get a bike on a granite table and install the new A-arms. Then
we have a list of measurement to go through and find out how much bump steer
we have. If we are unhappy with the results we will make certain changes in
what we think will improve the front end and test it again. We will do this
till everything reaches the specs on what we are trying to achieve. Next it
is time to get Keith Little and Scott Butler together and get some track time
with the new front end. They will go through several set up changes to find
out what they like and what they don’t like. If we are not 100% happy
we will start at the beginning again till we are. This sounds like a lot of
work, but we do have it down to a science after doing as long as we have.
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| LSR's professional welders take pride in each and every part they touch. Here a swingarm gets tweaked to perfection. | Every part made at LSR is inspected closely. Here a drag racing swingarm gets the final look over before it goes to powder coating. |
ATV Scene: How many A-arms do
you make in a week?
Fisher: We can turn out about
100 sets of A-arms. That number is growing a lot lately. We are getting ready
to knock down the back wall to expand the manufacturing capacity for A-arms.
We also just redesigned our A-arms. We’re in the middle of getting them
out to our dealers right now.
ATV Scene: Why the change in
design of the arms?
Fisher: We wanted to come out
with a different look and be different than everybody else. The new ones are
a lot stronger and allow more ground clearance.
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| LSR hubs hot off the press and ready to ship! |
ATV Scene: What else is in LSR's
future?
Fisher: For one we're going to
step up our customer service. There are a lot of the smaller manufactures out
there that can’t deliver what they say they can from the start. We're
proud that we can do what a lot of companies cannot. We get lead times too,
mainly during the busy season, but we're pretty serious about doing our best
to keep enough inventory to satisfy the demand. I wish we could have had our
latest laser cutter earlier in the year. It would have helped us out a lot,
but next year our customer service should be through the roof. Staying on top
of the race scene helps us find out if our product will stand the test.
ATV Scene: Do you do all your
powder coating and chroming in house?
Fisher: We do all our own powder
coating, but not chroming. I like to do as much in house as we can. The main
reason for doing stuff in house is, we can control it and not worry about getting
put behind someone else causing delays. Chroming is very difficult to get into
however. There are so many more rules and regulations you need to follow. So
at this point, I have no interest in dealing with it.
ATV Scene:
What are you trying to accomplish with the enormous pimped out LSR truck
and trailer? It seems like a lot for just one rider (Keith Little).
Fisher: The Lonestar rig can
help out racers more at the races. We can now stock a lot of products in case
a racer breaks something. We also wanted to give something worthy to Keith Little
to give him the best chance possible at winning a GNC championship. He did exactly
that. Congratulations Keith for the 2004 GNC TT title!
ATV Scene: Looks like you're
raising the bar with the rig too.
Fisher: That's also what we wanted
to accomplish. With Suzuki stepping up, we wanted to get noticed this year as
well. I think the whole racing industry is getting ready to blow up into something
like supercross. If everybody plays their cards right and doesn't do anything
foolish, we have a good opportunity to showcase ATV racing beyond what many
people can even imagine.
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| Raw hunks of metal become quality LSR swingarms. This one is completely finished, packed and ready to be boxed and shipped. |
ATV Scene:
Can you talk briefly about switching Keith Little from the LSR CRF to
the new YFZ production quad he now races with?
Fisher: I really wish we didn't’t
have to change bikes this past year to the Yamaha. It was a heck of a learning
curve going from last year's bike (CRF450) that we had dialed in, too the new
YFZ. I think definitely next year we are sitting on a pretty good chance at
running for the MX and the TT title. We're dialed in now and ready!
ATV Scene: What have been the
main problems with setting up Keith's YFZ?
Fisher: Just the learning curve
with a completely new quad. It’s holding together nicely now. We're really
expecting some good things out of Keith.
ATV Scene: Is he considering
changing bikes?
Fisher: Yes. It’s still
a wide open subject. He had a rough season this year in the GNC MX series. In
the past he’s been moving up nicely but this year he went backwards at
the motocrosses. He’s not used to that. Nothing against his talent, it’s
just been rough this year with the problems we've come across.
ATV Scene: Thanks for having
us and thanks for stepping up ATV racing's image.
Fisher: No problem. Thanks for
coming and thanks for all you guys do for the sport as well.
