My suggestion is to go read
Richard Sach's blog, he's had a lot of posting about this subject recently.
Originally Posted by
Canaboo
How does the insurance thing work for obsolete brands? There are a lot of bikes out there that have probably long since lost any tie to the original company.
once you dissolve a corporation, there really is no recourse, so no insurance required. You could try that as a lone framebuilder, but I don't think that is fair to your customers, and the corporate veil has been shown to be fairly thin when it comes to corporations that look like a sole proprietorship to a casual observer. I don't expect anything that I build to fail, but it does happen, and I'm not in full control of the quality of the parts that I use to build a frame. And if there is a bad outcome to a crash, it's not hard to come up with a way to blame the framebuilder. My thought is that I owe it to my family to protect against novel legal theories that involve taking large sums of money from us.
The way that framebuilding insurance works, it is what is called "claims made" insurance. In other words, it protects against claims made during the period of the insurance. Medical doctors can buy what is called "tail" insurance, which protects against past misdeeds, but it is really expensive. I don't think you can buy that for general liability, although an umbrella policy might work.