Hey Jow Forums I have an idea but I’m not sure it’s viability. What would it take to become a gun manufacturer of guns whose patents have expired? So manufacturing older designs like the FN1910 or the TT-33? These designs are relatively simple and could even be improved upon like chambering them in 9x19 rather than 380 for example.
Do you guys think there would be a market for these outdated but time tested designs, especially if they were inexpensive like the price of Hi Points?
>A FN1910 in 9mm
You...should speak with an engineer before you do this.
There exist 9mm Toks and 9mm barreks for toks. Look at how well the new pocket pony sales went for your answer.
>Look at how well the new pocket pony sales went for your answer.
That was partially due to COLT though, they priced themselves out of the fucking market by charging OVER what an original would cost.
You'd need to do literally everything any other gun manufacturer would do
Production costs don't increase with time I take it.
Schofield in .22 fucking when
The thing about this is that major companies do not have interests in resurrecting old designs because they make plenty of money on their current inventory. Its hard for a new company to waltz in and gather the money and manufacturing tools to produce those designs that there is only a small market for and the price would be outrageous just so they could even cut even. Yea it would be amazing but its been done before and it hasnt worked out well.
Production cost do increase with time, but there is absoloutely no reason that a Colt 1908 should cost 600 dollars when you could get an older one for 400.
Colt has a reputation for doing this shit, like the re-release SP-1 with a price tag of two fucking thousand dollars when an original could be had for maybe a grand.
>gun manufacturers get bought out by venture capital firms, getting gutted in the process
>continuously cut corners with every update and iteration of their products until fit, finish, and even small parts quality is destroyed
>simultaneously increase msrp of firearms and attribute it to making 'new and improved' models filled to the brim with MIM parts and poor finishes
Do NOT buy from companies that are riding on their formerly good name, and get used versions of their good guns if necessary.
There are plenty of good new gun companies out there, but they're usually smaller than the big names
That’s too bad. It would be sick to own some of these older models. Especially if they were really cheap like in the $200-$300 range.
Maybe if you got a nice 5 axis cnc they could be made to order without needing specific tooling for each one which the cost would be obviously astronomical. Quality billet is cheap enough in bulk and as long as you have the speeds and feeds dialed in tooling should last a while and really not even have to factor into cost. The single biggest obstacle, other than the upfront costs of all this shit, is being able to reliability, repeatably and correctly heat treat frames and barrels properly. It's all well and good to make 1:1 copies of guns, but if you can't harden shit properly then youre a walking lawsuit for exploding chambers and shit. Of course you could outsource that shit, but it adds to costs and forces you to carry inventory that might never sell since they're not going to do onesies and twosies every couple weeks.
9mm Toks already exist. Zastava imports them.
Wouldn’t another big factor be the licenses and permits required to sell firearms?
A patent isn't a technical data package nor is it instructions.
I know but it would be legal to manufacture them without getting sued.
Who cares about the legality when the skilled labor required to manufacture old world firearms designs has increased drastically over what the material cost to actually make them?
But with the advancements in CNC it would be reasonable to be able to manufacture them.
SIG, Kimber and now Springfield have all got on with the pocket pony game, each making basically clones of the Mustang, but with either upgrades in sights, grips, finishes. Colt missed out (again) because they were set on making the same old shit but charging more for it.
That's just some ATF gayness. couple bucks in fees, few forms, inspections and shit, and background checks. I don't imagine it being extremely laborious especially if you're not getting a sot. People do it all the time for tabletop transfer shops.
CNC isn't end all be all. Some parts you'll still want to be forged
What parts do you think? Like the barrel and the slide?
When is Ops and Tactics gonna get a Big Luau supplement with stats for the alphabets and weapons tables of shit like DPMS Sporticals/PSA ARs/Maverick 88s/Hi-Points and sample scenarios about raiding the Hoover Dam with your bros in Hawaiian shirts and plate carriers?
Forged billet
07 FFL is 200 for 3 years, iirc. But you have to pack the state department $2000. Actual fees are pretty small. State sales tac, business registration, another couple hundred bucks. Get a lawyer to help setup an LLC--probably about a grand. And you're basically 100% legal to make rifles, pistols, shotguns.
Now, you'd probably want some insurance--god only knows what that would cost, and to have a lawyer and book keeper to talk to.
Overhead in paying for labor, machinery, tooling, a shop to work in--those, unfortunately will be significant.
>MUH CNC
spot the person who has no idea of manufacturing
You don't press 123 and have the machine shit out a 1903 and have it retail for the price of a Hi-Point.
Almost as dumb as thinking you can suddenly make a blowback FN1910 into a 9x19 pistol, 100 years didn't suddenly change physics.
They were only viable financially due to labor being cheaper than materials and arms producers being massive industrial concerns that afford could set up an entire production lines with banks of specialized tools for each part because they would sell hundreds of thousand of these pistols, and they'd have these lines around for literally over half a century like FN did with the Hi-power.
A hi point costs $150 because it's made out of literal pot metal, go look at what Lugerman (who uses CNC) wants for a new production old pistol if you want to see what these projects cost from a small scale manufacturer dealing in low volume.
>forged billet is the same as a forged part
do you have brain damage or are you just pretending to be retarded?
I was just curious if it would be possible. No need to get edgy.
Put up your thing on /tg/ again, so I can tell you that you made .38 Super as powerful as .357 rather then a slightly hotter 9mm, like it really is.
Nigger commie guns don't have patents anyone can claim. No one is going to sue for making a VSS or SVD clone. Russia tried in the early 2000s but fell on their asses. You think Zastava, Century arms or Norinco is paying royalties to the Kalashnikov estate or the now defunct Solviet Union?
>What would it take to become a gun manufacturer of guns whose patents have expired? So manufacturing older designs like the FN1910 or the TT-33? These designs are relatively simple
Several hundred thousand, if not millions, of dollars in tooling for products with little to no demand.
We could make a upper slide for a M1911 that is more TT-33, like those AR-18 uppers for the AR-15.
Ok, let me know how much they'll cost. But if it's not $50, why would I buy that over an actual Tokarev for $225?
wow congratulations, you redesigned a TT-33 to make it not a TT-33 in order to make a 1911 worse
obviously that will somehow be simpler than manufacturing the whole gun to begin with
What if the insides are a 7.62x25mm M1911, but the outsides are TT-33?
So a more expensive Tokarev that needs mag work done to fit in the gun to operate?
>Implying milling a piece of proper forged billet isn't just as good as a to shape forging for frames and other non pressure rated parts for way less cost and hassle
I bet you NEED a forged ar lower or Glock frame too
The Brownells AR-18 upper didn't require any work on the lower at all.
Cool you going to cram Tok ammo into a .45 magazine without it fucking up?
Parts do not come out of a cnc perfect. Somebody has to do final finishing touches and assembly by hand. This is why people hate on kimber for reliability but all rock island armory 1911 work. Theres cheap labor handfitting the things.
>using a strawman to try and disprove something I never even said
I am calling you stupid for telling someone that said
>CNC isn't end all be all. Some parts you'll still want to be forged
to use a material that needs to be machined using a CNC machine. A forged billet still is a machined part, which doesn't change the grain structure as forging something to rough dimensions would.
>Several hundred thousand, if not millions, of dollars in tooling for products with little to no demand.
These are Pinoy's making 1911's in their back yard with a metal forge, clamps, and a metal file.
I was just thinking that RIA would make a splash if they ditched producing the Baby Rock (itself a Llama Micromax clone) for a 1903/1908. The various firms that produce for them have adequate experience making accessibly priced, acceptable quality 1911s, and I’m sure there’s a lot of redily transferable skills between the two designs for worker retraining to be negligible. It’s a design with more panache and a cheaper price point than the bevy of mustang clones on the market now. Plus, as the flip-made Cimarron pre-a1 1911’s have shown, they can make a classic Americana design with subdued markings and a nice finish. Import info can be out of the way on the dust cover. They could be made in .380 and .32 NAA and also sold with both barrels as a conversion package. Heck, they could even make a modern carry model with Novak sights and an extended safety.
YES
Cnc machinist, manufacturing engineer, and 07 ffl here.
You cannot make new manufacture old guns for a cost which people are willing to pay. I could make literally any gun you'd ever desire but you wouldn't want to pay my shop rate x the hours it would take.
>muh 5 axis cnc
A 5 axis milling center costs 60-200 thousand ameribucks. Now double that for tooling and fixturing. Now add a building with thick enough concrete floors and 3 phase power ($7-10/sqft NNN), and then pay someone who can design, model, program, set up, and then run parts on said 5 axis. Modern machining is FUCKING EXPENSIVE but once it's proves out you have amazing productivity and you can amortize the cost over a run of thousands and thousands of parts. $1 million for a 5 axis cnc shop is not an exaggeration.
If you desperately want a left handed garand in 9mm tokarev or some shit you can find a guy like me to do the project for you ($$$$) but you'll never have a successful business that makes big runs of odd guns.
This guy knows. The design of a firearm reflects the manufacturing methods intended to be used to build it. Those neat old school guns are designed around methods that don't exist anymore except through small boutique very expensive production. CNC doesn't do things the same way FN did things with an army of employees and lines of dedicated-to-a-single task machines.
You'd be better off designing a gun that brings back the old FN pistol aesthetically and conceptually but designed with modern methods in mind. All steel, single action, nice rounded snag free exterior.
CNC does not scale and does not get cheaper with volume. There's a reason why most cheap guns are made of stampings, forgings, and casting, because you can shit out a vast quantity of them.
The only exception to this I can think of is Apple, who bought something like 10,000 CNC machines to make their macbook at scale. You cannot afford to do this.
>cnc does not scale and does not get cheaper with volume
the literal point of CNC is it scales and gets cheaper with volume. quanity 1 makes no sense to make on a CNC, quantity 100000 you'd be a fucking retard not to make on CNC
>cheap guns made of stampings, forgings, casting
forged or cast parts need machining to bring to finish dimensions, nobody makes guns from raw casting/forgings
>mfw this whole post