When I work for a barrelmaker installing his barrels and using his methodology (mostly)I charge him 125 dollars per barrel. This includes chambering, threading,cutting and crowning, polishing and/or bead blasting and stamping the caliber etc. I can do four or five barrels in an eight hour day. Concentricity and alignment are not equal to a BR job but are very good. At my own shop, I charge twice as much and take at least twice as much time. My charge also includes bluing if required. Now that I am mostly retiring, it's really kind of a moot point, I guess! Regards, Bill.

JBrown, I'll go ahead and throw it out there, he is charging $400. I haven't finally approved the work yet, but I may go ahead just to get this project out of mothballs, it frosts me a little bit, but it especially stings since I got de-employed about 5 months ago, and prospects for new income are slim!

I'm curious what was going to be done for the $400. Just thread & chamber? Crown? Polishing? Ripple free polishing? Engraving caliber? Metric threads? Bluing? Bead Blasting? Inletting in the stock? Glass bedding? Feeding? Facing receiver ring? Squaring bolt face? Lapping lugs? The reason I ask is most every smith has a different pile of services he offers for his set barreling fee. There is a whole lot of time that goes into the "complete" job verses just thread & chamber.

If the job includes most of what James has outlined above, $400 is a good price. As I stated earlier, I charge $230 which includes bluing, add $125 for fitting it into original stock and glass bedding it and you're real close to $400. Installing sights would put it right at $400. But this doesn't include the cost of the barrel or charges for excess number of calls from client asking if its done yet

A rebarrel job as you describe, with no extractor cut and no stock or action alterations, normally takes me ~3 hrs with no polishing or bluing but including crowning, test-firing and caliber marking. An octagon or ribbed single shot rebarrel will normally take me 7 hrs for the same stage of completion, the additional 4 hrs is for the indexing and the extractor cut. Alterations to the action or stock incur additional time, as does any polishing and/or metal finishing.

Any reputable (IMO) workman will gladly give you a time-&-$-rate breakdown of not only his estimate but also his actuals upon completion, in time spent and hourly rate for each operation. If not, then IIWY I'd find another smith.
Regards, Joe

Well, here's the list.

Chamber and fit barrel to Sako 75 action. It is to be a 280 AI, which he already has the reamer for. I believe this is metric threads, but I can tell you this smith has done over 30 of these rifles, so he is set up to handle metric threading, whatever that means! The barrel is to be cut to length and crowned, bead blasted if he mars it during installation, and caliber marked on the barrel. Function test with factory ammo--he already has. That's it, no big process of anscillary work IMO....we will see what happens, but I'm probably just going to get this behind me and find a new smith for future projects.....

If you pay this fellow $400 for what you've described then I certainly hope you get kissed long, hard and ferociously, 'cause you sure will have gotten his green weenie shoved about 8 feet up into where the sun don't shine!

IIWY I'd get my parts back from that yokel and send them to one of the fine smiths on this forum (not me, I'm not a fine smith and I'm booked up). Most any of them will do you a good job for about half that price with the possible exception of the reamer. And if necessary you can rent a reamer for less than $75.

That yokel must work VERY slow and charge about $100/hr!
Good luck, Joe

JD, you may be right, the finale is still upcoming.....

I'm starting to believe this thread will have a life of it own...maybe never end?? I have seen a bill from a reputeable gunmaker (top notch) who charges $20.00 per hour...."Chamber and fit barrel....20 hours"...ahhh...comes out to about...$400.00!

No...I'm not suggesing $20.00 per hour as a baseline. If you charge $80.00 per hour shop time, you'll actually make less than half that!

There is no such thing as a 60 minute shop time..((phone, delivery folks, paper work, drop ins, take a pee, power failure, pick up tooling , go to the post office) ...and the list goes on and on.

$100.00 per hour shop time is "in the ball park"..in the real world of full time professionals

Duane

This is the type of thread I love to see drag on. Very informative.

It gives us amatures a better idea why the pros charge what they charge.