Hi again - I shut down the shop for the night so I figured I'd try to improve my typing skills now. Many good insights, there, Marc - especially in regard to pricing and how that would all work, and who would be willing to pay for things. By way of comparison to the Wesson project, let me put in a couple of cents (and maybe sense) here.

I never entered into the Wesson with the idea of doing complete rifles. I CAN hang a barrel; I CAN put on wood; etc - but not economically enough, or anywhere near it, to have a complete gun as a product offering. It's just not my area of expertise, so I choose to stay out of it. Some of the idea here is for guys to be able to take in little bites, what might otherwise be a prohibitive expense. (Could always take out a loan, I suppose. That's little bites.) So a question arises - can a double be produced in multiple disparate steps, the way a lot of nice single-shot rifles have been built over the years?

I've seen some not-very-nice (to my eye) Wessons built up. But I'm not resposible for that, and I can't let thinking about it inhibit my enthusiasm for the next guy on the phone. I could market only beautiful complete rifles, at an exhorbitant price, to someone who did not know how to shoot, and I'd still get the blame for a bad rifle. Where does it end?

At some point people need to be responsible for their own actions and direction, so if you take a nice kit and make an ugly mess out of it - oh well, it's not my fault! But marketing psychology doesn't work that way, unfortunately. Everyone in the supply chain is put to blame when something goes wrong - witnesss the Ford/Firestone fiasco. What REALLY went on there was just stupid people, at many levels in many places.

To make a project foolproof, you have to ensure that no fools buy into it! Any good ideas on how to solve that one?

Steve <><