doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Damascus barrels refinish

He will! Got behind. Sincerely sorry about that. Always looking for economies of scale to improve.

Admittedly, when making this my sole occupation, I failed to grasp how much I could realistically do by myself. With damascus in particular, they are all different in how they respond to the process, leaky ribs to deal with, etc. Difficult to predict required time to get desired outcome.

Trying to catch up, and when I do, I’ll be taking much less work so that throughput is increased significantly.

It takes time to learn to manage workflow, especially as the services that you offer change to meet changing demand. Same goes for learning when to say no, even when I am taking work I turn down 95% of the jobs offered to me because they do not fit into my work schedule. I have a few in the shop I should not have ever accepted, working hard to get those out and even harder to not let myself get talked into taking that kind of work in the future.

I'm reminded of the wise words of my accountant, he said to me once "There are a lot of disadvantages to being self-employed, you need to leverage the advantages to make it worthwhile" Setting my own schedule is one of the biggest advantages of working for myself, by keeping intake down I'm able to focus on the more profitable aspects of my business and spend more time doing what I love all the while keeping the client base happy. Finding the balance can be tricky but I feel I have been doing much better at it.

Bill, with the dwindling number of good smith I expect you will always have all the work you can stand. Making money on some of it might be another issue. It comes down to economy of scale, being efficient and learning to use more consumables to save more time. It does help if you can just do one procedure over and over again to not waste time on setups. Time is the only thing that is in short supply and you can not buy anymore.

When doing a job that involves sandpaper I discard a lot of paper which still has life left in it because a new sheet is three times as efficient. I’ll pay that extra dollar to save five minutes. For too long I squeezed every bit of life out of things like sandpaper which were cheap, at the cost of wasting time.

False efficiencies. You see them everywhere when you start to look.

Thanks for your input Karen. If you find your big girl panties, contact me directly. As an added bonus, papa smurf frAnk might buy you that tiara you have been begging him for princess.

Call collect, I don't mind.

All my best precious.
Steve

Thanks, Mills. Mr. Gorman does excellent black and white from what I’ve seen posted on the Parker forum. I personally like to do brown more, but am always working to improve at both.

A smith I know pretty well would devote an entire week doing nothing but barrel prep. He said by the end of that week his arms were about to fall off from striking barrels. I think he did them in batches of 8. Did excellent work and fantastic polishing all by hand. I think most of what he did was fluid steel barrels. Could be wrong. He found that was the best way to do it, but indeed it was a long wait between batches. He now works for G&H.

No way I could strike barrels and polish for a week straight, my hands, shoulders and back just would not take it. I tend to prep two to four sets of barrels at a time and blue in small batches as well. I constantly have stuff heading out for engraving pick up, that dictates my bluing schedule more than anything else, thankfully my engraver is darn quick which helps keep work flowing.

This was a younger fella. Mid 30's. He told me he hated that week.

I've done a four day stretch before. Right now, I need to do a two week stretch to make a dent in the accumulated tubes. I'm in my late 50's, and do not relish the thought. Protecting certain days for certain tasks is where I lack discipline. Each morning starts with a plan, prayer, and a solid commitment and firm commitment to do my best for every customer I have. Thankfully, I've been blessed with wonderful folks who are kind people, and many have become friends. However, I drives me crazy thinking all of the tasks I am NOT doing, when I pick the one to do at the time. Clearly, the problem is partially me.

My other issue is related to my facilities. I have half of a two car garage, and the front yard to do my work. Sometimes I will go to another shop and hour away if I need a big mill or lathe. I can have 6 barrels going at a time because of limited space, and a limited me. In two years we can move, and I spend most days imagining how fantastic it will be to have everything I need set up as workstations, instead of having to set up and tear down for so much of each day. I'm proud of what I've been able to accomplish here, but it is also extremely frustrating and pisses me off quite often. Two more years .... I can make it until then as long as the body holds up.

Starting a week long stretch tomorrow, with a day off on Sunday.