I have a heavily modified Gemini duplicator now. I had a KStar which was a early model. Vibration was a killer on it and I never got it to produce anything better than what I would call a 90% semi inlet stock. My first machine was well worn but worked reasonably well. It was all in the operator past a point. With a light touch and taking all the time in the world you will get a better and better product. Translation a long learning curve.
Another thing is the quality of the pattern which is very under rated. Making a good pattern takes a lot of time. For a good job I fill in every little defect and ripple in the in-letting. Otherwise you either duplicate the blemishes or under cut the in-letting so much that it take too much time to fit the gun. Why duplicate a stock and leave yourself an extra ten hours of work.
It is to the point that I do not use my duplicator very much anymore and I need the shop space more than in house duplication. If you run multiple copies of one or two stocks it comes in handy and I have been thinking about just running five or ten blanks of two or three basic stocks for later use and then selling the machine. Figure on doing four or five blanks before you figure out what you are doing and use culls to learn with. Culls are reject blanks. Better to ruin a 5-10.00 cull than a 50.00 decent blank.
Cost to use is something that you need to think about. You can get a stock duplicated for a few hundred dollars. You can pay someone else to duplicate your blanks or invest in your own machine. Unless you figure on doing several dozen stocks, it, the investment, may not be worth it. So if you just do two or three stocks a year you are wasting your money. If you want to do ten or more perhaps it makes sense. On the other hand ten stocks would take me about three to four hours each. Perhaps more with pattern making. And time is in short supply these days. I rather spend that time in-letting a stock than duplicating one.
If you run the same pattern multiple times you get much better at it and you get faster. Say you wanted to only cut AH Fox patterns you can learn the task well. But switch to a LC Smith and you have another steep learning curve. Then do a Ithaca and you are back to square one. Point is figure out what you are going to be duplicating and see if it makes sense. If I only collected one or two models I would just make a good pattern for each and pay someone else to duplicate them when needed. In the end that is what I am going to be doing.
