For the paid Smiths out there.

What do you think the demand is for barrel porting i.e. inserting holes in the barrel at or near the muzzel to create a built in muzzle break a la Magna port?? And what would you thing the going rate would be??

I'm considering buying an EDM. I have a line on a very expensive machine that is going for dirt cheep.
This will allow me to burn a hole in the barrel with nearly no burr on the ID and if a played with the setting I can get it burr free and what we (tool makers) call a diamond finish

Keep in mind this is not the only use for this machine it can and will be used for a multitude of parts

I'm not a paid 'smith anymore, so don't technically meet your requirement to be eligible to respond.

One thing I can suggest though, is to figure out what the machine MUST produce by way of income to justify your purchase.

Add up the following:

- Cost of the machine

- Cost of the space it will occupy

- Cost of the burning materials

- Cost of the electrical power consumed

- Cost of such things as annual state and local property tax on the machine, if applicable

- Cost of your total time to maintain the machine, set it up for each job, perform the work, and replace machine parts as required.

When you have that sum, you can divide it by the number of times you will possibly use it.

That will give you how much you will HAVE to charge at that rate of usage to break even.

If you want a profit, you'll have to either charge that same amount but use the machine more, OR use the machine the predicted number of times but charge some percentage more.

If you do not meet the floor number of uses required to break even, you MUST either increase the price per use, or suffer a financial loss directly accountable to owning the machine.

To that extent, what others charge is somewhat irrelevant. They may not be making money on the use of their similar machines either.

Of course, if you have competition close to your market and they charge significantly less than you will need to, you will be at a competitive disadvantage if you charge more. So then you may not want to buy the machine at all unless you can afford to lose money for the sole purpose of having the machine as a wunder-toy.

As you have already suggested, the critical number is first of all "Just how often will it be put to use?" I hope someone can give you somthing other than a SWAG estimate regards that. But, I doubt they can. Their businesses are bound to be different than yours.

All pretty basic stuff I admit, but crucially important to a business. (And partly why a good business is entitled to make a profit. The profit pays them for their risk of failure, as well as the quality of work they perform.)

Good luck. Hope it pencils out for you.

AC

Doing that and receiver blanks might make help pay for the machine

The machine doesn't have enough Z axis to do a receiver and it's not a wire EDM so sinking a receiver is a huge waste of time even if it had the Z stroke to do it. A six inch burn is a long way to go with a machine like this

As per Alberta Granted I put the Paid smiths thing in there but that was only for a current state of the market kind of thing. Anyone with a valid point may post (and some with invalid point will post as well )

Those are all good points and things I need to consider.

But Here's the deal. It's going in my garage, That is solely used for a shop. and it may increase my electric bill a wee bit but I'm not to concerned about that. It just comes down to this. The machine is $1000 it's going to cost another $1000 to tool it up and make it useable. so at $200 per job, I need ten jobs to pay for the machine alone and that covers zero operating expenses. I'm just wondering how many porting jobs come in to an average shop in a year?

Mag Na Port is dirt cheep compared to what I was thinking so I need to rethink this thing.

Kerry, the gunshop I used to work at charged $105 and we did one about every month and a half.

All the more reason not to get the machine for porting alone. I'm looking for other uses but coming up pretty much blank. It's just too specialized of a machine to be productive.
Maybe thats why they are selling it off Cheep????