Morris Melani, a meticulous metal artisan, and I have had a long-standing and ongoing conversation about how gun work is priced and recently a $15,000 catalog price for a synthetic stocked rifle from a well known gunmaker came up.
I have spent a fair bit of today finishing the shaping and sanding of four identical forearms for a Martini project (please don't get out calipers for a .001" comparison) and I have been thinking about the time and effort needed to get to this stage of the project. I am not particularly slow or inefficient, this process simply takes time, a lot of time.
I can't help wondering why someone would fork over $15,000 for a rifle that has a stock that came from a factory, looks like hundreds of others and needs maybe four hours to glass bed, paint and whatever other things are done to them.
Don't get me wrong, I love gunmaking and especially the stock work. Every piece of wood presents it's own challenges and by the time I'm done with a project I intimately know every aberrant turn of each piece of wood's grain and how to achieve the best results with blades and scrapers to get the quality workmanship I want.
Thankfully, I don't do this for a living so fretting long about gun buyers' disconnect among effort, craftsmanship and price of the black guns versus wood and blued custom rifles is not necessary.
Dennis
