aragon said:
Just another erroneous opinion. I'll stop reading right there...
FWIW, I did see your mention of $65.00. If you would have actually read this thread, you would know that I never said that a Glock cost $65.00 to build.
Obviously you didn't stop reading. No surprise there, you seem pretty weak at following through on your statements.
I also see that you failed question 1: What are Glock's annual payroll cost per unit?
Let's simplify it even further for you, try question 2:
What is Remington's average annual salary at their Ilion facility? Here's a hint:
Jobs at Remington pay well, especially for an area that's seen so many manufacturing jobs disappear. The average worker earns $47,000 a year, in an area where a house typically costs $70,000, according to Frank "Rusty" Brown, who runs a political action committee for United Mine Workers of America, Local 717, which represents Remington workers.
Assuming you can pass question 2, let's move onto question 3:
What's Remington's average BURDENED annual salary at their Ilion facility?
Since I very seriously doubt if you will be able to answer Question #3, let's move on to some of your other silly assumptions.
aragon said:
Have you machined the metal parts for a Glock 17. How long did it take?
The metal types on both guns are comparable.
I would think that it would be obvious that the barrel metal, machining processes/tolerances and finishes on the two gun barrels are not "comparable".
The 9mm Glock runs at 50% more chamber pressure than the Marlin yet has chamber walls half as thick. Is Marlin too stupid to use less steel in their barrels, or do they choose to perhaps use a weaker, cheaper steel with looser (cheaper) machining tolerances, looser (cheaper) heat treat tolerances, less stringent (cheaper) certification processes, easier (cheaper) machinability, faster (cheaper) machinability, less wear (cheaper) on tooling, and inferior (cheaper) (whatever Marlin uses now vs Tennifer) corrosion resistance?
Applying the above thoughts and examining each part on both guns, it would be easy to conclude that the Marlin probably cost well less than half of what the Glock does to produce.
Let's do a quick and dirty look at the chamber and barrel.
The breech of a Model 60 barrel is about .630" in diameter. .22LR chamber diameter is .226". That means that the chamber wall is .202" thick. 22LR SAAMI pressure is 24,000 PSI. Shank is round, we'll use the thick-wall cylinder stress approximation. Hoop stress (what blows barrels apart) is about 31,000 PSI (check here if you don't like my numbers:
http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/stress-thick-walled-tube-d_949.html). Pure crap A36 steel (about the cheapest stuff you can get) has a yield strength of 36,000 PSI (imagine that) with no heat treating. So you can make your Marlin barrel out of pretty much anything you can find lying around.
9mm chamber is .381" in diameter at the small end. Glock chamber is .105" thick on the sides, which would make it .591" in diameter if it was round. It's not round, so it'll have significant stress concentrations to worry about. None the less, we'll use the thick-wall cylinder equation just to keep it simple.
At a standard 9mm pressure of 35,000 PSI, the Glock chamber is seeing a minimum of about 85,000 PSI in hoop stress (
http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/stress-thick-walled-tube-d_949.html)
Since the Glock chamber will be seeing well over 3 times the stress of the Marlin chamber (in reality the stresses will be MUCH higher in the Glock chamber due to the stress concentrations due to the shape) it's easy to see that the only things "comparable" between the Marlin barrel steel and the Glock barrel steel is that it's spelled the same.
aragon said:
If guns didn't have so many restrictions placed on them, if guns weren't such a taboo business and if guns weren't such a historically feast/famine business, other serious manufacturers would have long gotten into the market. They would have created serious competition which would have driven prices down long ago -- or at least as far back as lapsing patents would have allowed.
What restrictions do you believe are placed on guns? Here's the link to the license application to be a firearm manufacturer (Type 07), it's $150 for 3 years. For an additional couple of hundred bucks I can be building full auto (NFA) weapons.
https://www.atf.gov/file/61506/download I hear that turn around time is currently a couple of months, I could easily be cranking them out before Halloween. There would be a couple of states I wouldn't ship them to, and I wouldn't worry about international sales for a while due to ITAR restrictions. Pretty much no different than growing produce. As far as "taboo" and "serious" manufacturers, how many licensed firearm manufacturers do you think that there are in the US?