Assuming you can sell enuf units to say you did more than give it the old college try and get your name in the papers, the BIG factor on day 1 and day 1023 is labour cost. None of us thought Glen Fewless was going to carve them out of solid blocks of steel with a drillpress, a hacksaw and a float! Given the abolute necessity to use every advantage you've got to save manhours, CNC is going to come into play and the designer and programmer are going to choose the topographical features that produce a rationalized, non-duplicating tool path to offset the pay and bennies (assuming the fellers who produce these fringe products have any of the latter) of the human assembler and detailer. Lord knows how you make or source barrels and barrel assemblies but presumably that ain't a one-off by a little old elf with the tune in his head either. Apparently even the cosmetic flash of wood and metal has too be done with lasers and chemical etching to produce a 2500 to 5000$ gun. At some point, a human hand IS going to have to add some slight refinement of shape, finish, balance, fit, regulation or you end up with either JASKB, or worse, a low end Fausti with some vestigial references to the design and styling of the Lefever. Assuming there won't be Toyota-scale yearly sales and the employees want their kids to wear shoes, why would anyone think the pricing of big ticket/special interest items is solely about what the market will bear?
jack
