Silly question about supply, demand and obsolescence

[Desega]

I wish that you could still get half of the stuff you used to be able to, but paintball is a very quick growing industry and what was top of the line two years ago is obsolete now. That means that they stop making upgrades for that product and move on to their new ones.

[MANN]

Here is my problem there are a number of people on this board that seem to think that if there product is not bought in X amount of time they consider it a failure and the fault of the consumer.

I dont think that they consider it a failure, but more of a waste of money. These guys are not wanting to "front" the money, and then end up with shelf full of parts. It is the whole theory of investment. No one would invest 3K, and wait 3 years to get a 100 dollar return.

If I were a betting man I would say that most custom guys also have a "real" job aside from paintball. This is probally something that they just do for fun.

[FARMER00]

Okay, here's the deal. Ready? Take notes:

It Costs Money To Make Things.

Got that? Here's the next part:

People Won't Pay Too Much For Things.

Those two go together like cake and ice cream.

What does that mean? Put it this way: If I went out to the shop, right now, and made myself, from scratch, one- just one- of my barrel adapters, it'd take me probably around five hours, from bar stock to finished, salable product. I usually (try to) charge $40 an hour for miscellaneous machine work- and that's cheap!

But even half that is still $100.

You'd pay $100 for a barrel adapter? No, you won't. I know this for a fact, because I've been asked several times to make an alternate-thread adapter (usually Angel.) Typically I quoted $90 to $95, and no one, ever, took me up on it. "Too expensive". For that price, they could buy a new barrel, or toss a few bucks more in and buy a ULE body.

Now, I can have them made in a CNC shop. Easy, quick, often even fast. BUT, it costs a good deal of money just to tool up that CNC. Somebody has to install the cutting tools (and in the right places, and to exactly the right depths, etc.) and somebody has to set up whatever is used to hold the workpiece (chuck jaws, clamps, etc.) and somebody has to chop raw bar stock into small pieces to feed the machine. Then somebody has to write the program and/or generate the CNC code to make the machine cut the correct part, to the correct dimensions.

So you might have two or three days' work, by two or three people making $45 an hour, to outfit a quarter-million-dollar machine with $500 in tooling... before you've even made one single part.

Let's say, for the sake of the argument, that it cost $1,000 to get that machine set up. (That's high for some small parts, but pretty low for larger complex pieces.) If you then have that machine make one single part, that $1,000 cost goes into that one part. Final cost, $1,005 per part.

BUT, if you make a thousand parts, that same $1,000 is split between all of them- final cost, $6 per part.

This is what's called Economy of Scale.

If I buy one foot of stainless bar to make my single adapter from, it might cost me $35. If I buy five hundred feet of bar, I might be able to get it down to $20 per foot. There's more savings.

Long story short: "Production" runs of 200 to 500 parts are absurdly small. My CNC shop hates projects under 1,000 parts, and often doesn't even want to hear about it unless I'm willing to order 5,000.

Those barrel adapters? Typically I've made about $3 to $5 profit each off those. But if I could order 5,000 of them, my cost could plummet down to $3 to $5 each.

That's great! You say. You'd be happy to buy an adapter at, say, $10 street price? Well, to do that, I'd have to order five thousand of them. Even at "only" $3 each, that's Fifteen Thousand Dollars I'd have to cough up.

And considering that in the past three and a half years since I invented the damed thing, I've sold around three hundred, including a grand total of twenty in the last ten months, I'd have enough adapters to last me over fifty years, and it'd take twenty years for me to just make my money back.


That's why you don't see companies like NPS or even AGD jumping right up and producing every little trinket, gadget or invention that somebody thinks up. You, me and Bob over there might think it's really cool, but the guys actually handling the money are going to want to know of we have 4,997 friends that also think that piece is really cool.

Because if not, it's not worth their time to make it.

Yeah, they could just make ten. But those ten would end up costing twenty times more than the mass production part, and no one will buy it. Would you buy, say, a CP reg that cost $300? Or a tank rail that cost $120? Or a barrel that cost $500? No, of course not.

So there's the problem. A problem shared by every company from NPS, with an operating budget in the hundreds of millions, on down to me in my little shop with an operating budget of whatever I can sweep out from under the sofa cushions:

You have a part, it's a cool part, and you have the capacity to make it. But to keep the price down, you have to make thousands of them. And you don't know for sure that there's the demand for thousands. But if you make only enough to support the demand, the per-part price goes up to the point where even the people who want the part won't buy it.

The term, of course, is Catch-22.

Doc.

i dont believe this at all. i agree with the part that says stuff costs money and people wont pay for it, but come on it doesnt take 5 hours to make a barrel adapter. im making one at school. it took me 40 mins so far and all i have left is threading it for a cocker barrel.(having troube finding my 15/16-20 tap) but all in all it will have taken me like one hour once im done. why is a master machinst making something that can be easlly completed in an hour by a kid in highschool take 5 hours?

[CoolHand]

i dont believe this at all. i agree with the part that says stuff costs money and people wont pay for it, but come on it doesnt take 5 hours to make a barrel adapter. im making one at school. it took me 40 mins so far and all i have left is threading it for a cocker barrel.(having troube finding my 15/16-20 tap) but all in all it will have taken me like one hour once im done. why is a master machinst making something that can be easlly completed in an hour by a kid in highschool take 5 hours?

I'm calling bull**** on this one.

I know for a fact you haven't cut a functional barrel adapter complete with a nubbin in an hour.

What you've gotten in an hour is a tube turned to the right OD (I'll assume here) with a hole bored through it (again maybe at the right diameter), and maybe you've even gotten it faced off on the end. I'd say you have, at the very least, five maybe six operations left to do, three of which you can't do in a lathe.

If it only takes you an hour cut one start to finish, make a vid to prove it. No stopping the tape start to finish. I'll apologize ASAP when I've seen that one all the way through. It's not a lot of effort, and you'll get mad props from every machinist that sees it (because that'll be one hell of a thing to see), what do you have to lose?

[FiXeL]

i dont believe this at all. i agree with the part that says stuff costs money and people wont pay for it, but come on it doesnt take 5 hours to make a barrel adapter. im making one at school. it took me 40 mins so far and all i have left is threading it for a cocker barrel.(having troube finding my 15/16-20 tap) but all in all it will have taken me like one hour once im done. why is a master machinst making something that can be easlly completed in an hour by a kid in highschool take 5 hours?

Maybe take into consideration he doesnt have a huge workshop with all the ideal machines to make it on. If you had a CNC lathe with rotating tools and milling spindle, you could machine one in less than 15 minutes (this excludes setup, programming and tool adjustment)
Maybe you have at school better tools to do it, so that would explain the difference. I've been working for 6 years with CNC milling machines and i know that to cut costs you will have to produce in large numbers or ask a insane high price for one workpiece. (quite common in the moldmaking industry)

[slade]

students probably have quite an advantage over people like doc, rogue, or logic - although logic was probably right in what he said.

if you attempt to start your own shop, you have to invest the money in the machines, create a product yourself, market the product successfully, and then make and sell enough for you to not only break even but support yourself, family, operating costs, etc.

if you go to a vocational high school or a college, the school pays for the machines and your parents/the state pay for your tuition and living expenses. you can make as many parts as you want for free, you just have to pay for stock. and although you probably want to sell what you make, it doesnt hurt too much to sit on your inventory.

too bad i go to a public high school. the cnc machines we have sit on top of a table . a local company was going to donate a real CNC machine, but we didnt have the space or power for it.

[sunfisher89]

I cant wait. Ive found that once someone experiences it rather than reads about it, reality has a way of changing ones viewpoint.

So true. I tried to develop a product and get it out to the market. Once reality sets in, the whole project gets much much harder.

[Doc Nickel]

i dont believe this at all. i agree with the part that says stuff costs money and people wont pay for it, but come on it doesnt take 5 hours to make a barrel adapter. im making one at school. it took me 40 mins so far and all i have left is threading it for a cocker barrel.(having troube finding my 15/16-20 tap) but all in all it will have taken me like one hour once im done. why is a master machinst making something that can be easlly completed in an hour by a kid in highschool take 5 hours?

-Because I'm not talking about just machine time, and I'd strongly suspect that you're nowhere near done; as Cool noted, I'd bet your 'hour' only includes boring at this point, and no mill work. I also suspect you're using aluminum instead of 304 stainless; if I used aluminum, yes, I could make them start to finish in half the time, too.

Since I do everything, my estimates include everything; from picking up the bar of raw stock, all the way through to final polishing, wrapping and packing. I don't just count the time I'm standing in front of the lathe cranking handles.

Maybe take into consideration he doesnt have a huge workshop with all the ideal machines to make it on.

-It's huge enough. The machines aren't the problem (although I could stand to have a bigger lathe with a bit more power, when it comes to drilling a 5/8" hole through 2-1/4" of stainless bar.) It's purely the fact the machines are manual. I have no CNC anything, and likely won't anytime soon. (It's that investment thing again; $12,000 plus tooling into a small and low-features CNC would take me ten years to earn back.)

A full production CNC can drop one of my adapters out every ninety seconds. Cranking handles by hand takes hours no matter how huge and accurate the machines.

The irony is that my orginial comments were directed at AGD. Everyone understands the diffuculy of the one man shop.

-Except that the big shops have to consider the exact same things. It's only the scale that's changed. Yeah, they can invest in bigger runs, and so the per-part price can be even lower, but they also stand to risk more in absolute dollars if the product fails to take off.

AGD wont carry stock in products that dont sell.

-Bingo. Keep in mind that what you read here, is NOT accurately representative of the market at large. Here, you'll have five or six people all saying they'll buy Part X, but as I pointed out above, six parts isn't even worth plugging in the CNC, unless those six guys are willing to pay $300 each for a small and simple part.

And that means you need to cut more parts, to get the price down. But after those six people have bought theirs at $35, what do you do with the other 4,994 parts?

Anyone see all the barrels, wood grips, and obsolete Freak Backs that Smart Parts has been trickling out on eBay for the past year or two? SP made a couple of hundred Freak backs for Raptors. When's the last time you saw a Raptor being used on the field? Or even for sale?

So SP's stuck with all these backs that they have time and labor invested in (think of what it cost just to have them all polished and anodized) and they are now spending more time and effort (somebody has to list 'em manually) in order to get rid of them at scrap-metal prices.

Anyone remember my X-Ray Posters? I still have over a thousand of these things left, after two and a half years. I haven't even broken even on them yet- even after a full-page writeup in PGI Magazine, and having one of them on the cover of a German PB magazine.

I have something like thirty other X-rays I'd love to print, but if I can't sell 500 Autococker posters, there's no way I could sell 500 Vector or Blazer posters.

And again; yes, I could print singles, or just a few dozen, just to satisfy what demand is there. But in that case, each print would be $35 each my cost. You guys won't pay $40 for a poster, because no one right now is paying five dollars for a poster.

Doc.

[Beemer]

I'm calling bull**** on this one.

I know for a fact you haven't cut a functional barrel adapter complete with a nubbin in an hour.

What you've gotten in an hour is a tube turned to the right OD (I'll assume here) with a hole bored through it (again maybe at the right diameter), and maybe you've even gotten it faced off on the end. I'd say you have, at the very least, five maybe six operations left to do, three of which you can't do in a lathe.

If it only takes you an hour cut one start to finish, make a vid to prove it. No stopping the tape start to finish. I'll apologize ASAP when I've seen that one all the way through. It's not a lot of effort, and you'll get mad props from every machinist that sees it (because that'll be one hell of a thing to see), what do you have to lose?

I'll take some of that action. I bet large it aint the same or as good as Docs if it even works at all.

[slade]

Anyone remember my X-Ray Posters? I still have over a thousand of these things left, after two and a half years. I haven't even broken even on them yet- even after a full-page writeup in PGI Magazine, and having one of them on the cover of a German PB magazine.

I have something like thirty other X-rays I'd love to print, but if I can't sell 500 Autococker posters, there's no way I could sell 500 Vector or Blazer posters.

And again; yes, I could print singles, or just a few dozen, just to satisfy what demand is there. But in that case, each print would be $35 each my cost. You guys won't pay $40 for a poster, because no one right now is paying five dollars for a poster.

Doc.

hey, i remember those! you should post here more often. depending on my financial situation later in the year, i may be e-mailing you about a couple.

[FARMER00]

-Because I'm not talking about just machine time, and I'd strongly suspect that you're nowhere near done; as Cool noted, I'd bet your 'hour' only includes boring at this point, and no mill work. I also suspect you're using aluminum instead of 304 stainless; if I used aluminum, yes, I could make them start to finish in half the time, too.

Since I do everything, my estimates include everything; from picking up the bar of raw stock, all the way through to final polishing, wrapping and packing. I don't just count the time I'm standing in front of the lathe cranking handles.



Doc.

agreed, i am using aluminum and I assure all I have to do is tap it thats it no extra drillin. I have already recessed the shoulders for the tap so as soon as its tapped im done.

its bored exactly to .694 the outside is the exact same size as the breech so it wont even need the orings and is completly polished. its drilled for the loader right body and also for a spyder style rubber nubbin. all this was done in one 76 min period in class including 20 mins of prep and clean up. maybe once i get the right tap (I was %100 sure I had one on the farm but i cant find it) i will make another and film it.

[MANN]

its bored exactly to .694 the outside is the exact same size as the breech so it wont even need the orings and is completly polished.

hmmm let us know how that turns out.

After it is all said and done would it not be easier to just pick up a used ULE.

[CoolHand]

agreed, i am using aluminum and I assure all I have to do is tap it thats it no extra drillin. I have already recessed the shoulders for the tap so as soon as its tapped im done.

its bored exactly to .694 the outside is the exact same size as the breech so it wont even need the orings and is completly polished. its drilled for the loader right body and also for a spyder style rubber nubbin. all this was done in one 76 min period in class including 20 mins of prep and clean up. maybe once i get the right tap (I was %100 sure I had one on the farm but i cant find it) i will make another and film it.

So what you're saying is that you turned and bored a slug, then drilled two holes in it, right?

That being the case, you're not even close to comparing the two pieces. At this point it's apples and bald tires we're talking about, not the same thing at all.

You're skipping two oring grooves, a counterbore, and the milling for the twistlock slot, IE the most time consuming operations.

Also, I'd nearly guarantee that Doc is drilling then reaming or finish boring his bores to size before tapping the barrel threads, which is an operation you didn't say anything about either.

Top it all off that you're working in aluminum instead of stainless and you get two completely different parts, with equally different fab times.

Also, on that diameter, turning the OD of the part to exactly match the ID of the bore it slides into will lead to press fit, not a slip fit. If you get it in there once, you'll not get it out again without quite a bit of effort (if at all).

[FARMER00]

So what you're saying is that you turned and bored a slug, then drilled two holes in it, right?

That being the case, you're not even close to comparing the two pieces. At this point it's apples and bald tires we're talking about, not the same thing at all.

You're skipping two oring grooves, a counterbore, and the milling for the twistlock slot, IE the most time consuming operations.

Also, I'd nearly guarantee that Doc is drilling then reaming or finish boring his bores to size before tapping the barrel threads, which is an operation you didn't say anything about either.

Top it all off that you're working in aluminum instead of stainless and you get two completely different parts, with equally different fab times.

Also, on that diameter, turning the OD of the part to exactly match the ID of the bore it slides into will lead to press fit, not a slip fit. If you get it in there once, you'll not get it out again without quite a bit of effort (if at all).

well most people dont know what any of that is so i didnt go into explain anything like that. but i have already installed it in the gun and because i made it such a smooth finish and exact bore it has no leaks and works perfect. also a slot is not needed for instalation since it will come out every time you unscrew a barrel so i drilled one hole to fit into the twistlock assembley and will not move and can only be removed if the gun is dissasembeled. oh and it has been reamed and couterbored slightly i have dont virtually the exact same thing as him. just mine is made from aluminum

when i finally get ahold of the right tap i will take pics for y'all and see what you say

ps is this under pat pend? if so i will quit right now doc

[cyrus-the-virus]

I've read this whole thread and I've got one thing to say.

Some of you people are mentaly insane.

I've also learned a lot.

Also I do have an opinion on how AGD would increase sales. Advertizment, however being only 16 and my job is 2 paperroute (yealding a measly $86 and 2 free movie passes a month. My yearly income would barly cover the cost of an add in a magazine like APG.

If I could I would but sadly I do like to play paintball and I cannot buy paintballs with a foodstamps card