Lone Star Racing’s Dan Fisher 11-18-04

Interview and Photos by Lance Farwick

Lonestar Racing is one of the top parts manufacturers in the ATV industry. Their impressive new racer support semi-truck, combined with just how big they’ve become calls for an all out ATV Scene tour and interview. We went to the Lonestar’s headquarters in Phoenix, Arizona. Getting inside of the belly of Lonestar was amazing. It is a large facility with plenty of tools and machines that make some of the baddest ATV parts in the industry! We met up with Dan Fisher, owner and president, to give us an inside glimpse of Lonestar Racing.

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.

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.

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

 

 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.

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.

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.

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