Not just Vic, other magazine reviews are all “this gun is wonderful” pretty much regardless.
I think the problem is bias. It’s inevitable. To someone who shoots a Krieghoff, they’re the best thing since sliced bread. If that gun is subsidised or even free to use, then it’s not ever going to be “the gun is just too heavy” until another gun come along that’s free, subsidised and better, or so much better (to that particular person’s sensibilities) the subsidy becomes irrelevant.
Then of course there is the advertising bias. A good friend is owner/editor of an engineering publication. Now he’s pretty much a ‘call a spade a spade sort of chap’. However, he’s not an *****. He may find fault with a product but writes only about virtues. These people who send him stuff to review also send him a monthly cheque to advertise their wares. Don’t bite the hand that fees you.
Then there are personal bias. I’m biased towards Blaser. I have my reasons and maybe their nonsense, but if you gave me a Browning, I could say what is great about it, but also what I don’t like about it as my bias is towards the Blaser. That’s my benchmark. For what its worth, I do like the 525.
So far I’ve shot CG Summit Accent, Beretta 686 & 694, Browning 525 & 725, ATA, Kofs, Benelli 828, Winchester 101, Fausti FX4, Blaser F16 & F3. They’re all good guns. They all break clays and I’m sure other makes do too.
A £500 Kofs cannot be expected to quite as good as say a Browning. But as someone who has conducted a lot of ‘Value Engineering’ what separates the Kofs from say the Browning? Or say even a Krieghof? What binds them together?
Materials: I don’t know the material specifications used in a Kofs, but I’m reasonably confident that the materials are up to the job of being a safe shotgun. The materials might be of a more commonly available grade than this say used in the Kreighof or even the Browning. As a proportion of the overall cost of the gun, the materials, be those of a common nickel chromium verity or a more specialised nitriding steel, the difference is relatively small compared to the overall gun shop ticket price. The performance difference will be seen in service life.
The work required to convert a billet of steel to a basic component part used in a shotgun is largely going to be the same. Post processing heat treatment, metal finishing and production tolerances will have a fairly small effect on price also. These may also have a small effect on service life and arguably some technical performance gains that to most would be indistinguishable without instrumentation to measure (Claimed Blaser lock times spring to mind) but advertise these and the placebo effect will have many of us convinced we can discern the difference.
Guns that have a significant amount of hand finishing will have their prices dependant largely on hours spent multiplied by cost of labour. So a gun made in turkey with 5hrs of hand finishing is going to have quite a different price point that a gun made in Germany with 50hrs of work put into it.
Volumes built will have a major effect. If your order book is for 100 guns a year, you take a very different approach to manufacture than if your order book is for 1000 guns. The latter may involve greater levels of automation than the former. A set-up cost of £1000 amortised over 100 guns versus £2000 amortised over 1000 guns makes a very different pricing model.
Similarly with the wood. It takes about as much effort (cost) to chop down a tree, chop it up into billets, and select a bad piece as much as a good piece. Scarcity and popularity (fashion is you will) makes up the rest.
Shaping the stock by hand by some chap in Portugal is pretty much the same effort as someone doing the same job in Hertfordshire. The labour costs may be a little different, the value of the timber is what ever you perceive it to be.
In greater volume, a 4 axis CNC router may be used, at least to rough out the blank. The cost of the machine must be weighted against the cost of equivalent labour. It’s a simple business decision based on mathematics with perhaps a marketing fudge factor in there too.
Then we come to margins. At factory, wholesale and retail. A £500 gun still has to make a profit. Even if it comes to the retailer at say £350, the wholesaler (I wild guess) £250, the manufacturer perhaps had a cost of making the gun at say £200.
Given the very best materials, the very best post processing, best finishing, lots of hand working and low order book, the more expensive guns will likely not cost £5,000 to make. Again, it’s a guess, but I’d wager somewhere between £2,000 to £4,000 for an off the rack gun. (Engraving, by hand especially could legitimately double the cost and more)
So most of the price of a higher end gun will be margin. This will largely be governed by brand values. I’d hazard a guess that had no one ever won a championship with a Perazzi, you’d be looking at a gun much less than the price they are.
Im quite sure that my Blaser is costing me more than the intrinsic value of the materials and processes and I’m ok with that.
In my opinion, a good reason to not give a bad review is that when taking pricing and brand values into consideration, there really aren’t any bad guns (just bad shooting)
So by and large, I tend to read/watch reviews just out of interest what other people have to say.
I never did like a film Barry Norman or Mark Kamode said was good. But if Johnathan Ross said its a good film, I’d be booking my cinema tickets right away.
For me, you [ I ] choose a gun because I likes it. Nothing more, nothing less.
