I wasn't sure where to ask this question but I thought if the gunsmith guys couldn't help me understand it, who could?

Simple question, why are over and under shotguns or SxSs for that matter so astronomically priced?

I shoot clays, trap/skeet casually at the local club and just take my field gun (old 870). I've been looking at over/unders that are all over the shotgun range but for the life of me I just can't see what there is about a break breach gun with two barrels that makes them so darn expensive. And I don't mean the fancy collector grade guns, just a regular shotgun, no engraving etc. They all do seem to have fairly nice furniture but can anyone give me the straight dope on why the big price tag on these guns? I'm obviously missing something but there are a minimal number of moving parts and I just don't get it, even the used ones are out of sight...

Thanks,
XWind

My guess is for the same reason double rifles are expensive though to a slightly lesser degree and that is that some form of regulation needs to occur in shotguns for the patterns to strike from there respective barrels in the approriate spot.

For a shitty under & over you could near buy a top of the range auto loader (well you once could in our country before our dictator Sadamm..I mean John Howard decided he did not like them so no one else could own them )

PC is about right. Anybody can weld two tubes together, but to get those tubes soldered together so that they shoot to the SAME POINT takes a bit more time & effort.

While nothing in the gun business is hand-fit to the extent that it was years ago, the big companies can mass produce pumps, etc a whole lot quicker & easier than O/U's and SxS's.

XWind,

Cold Bore and PC nailed it, there is a lot of work building these. Not only do the barrels have to converge and impact in the same spot at a set distance, (around 30 yards), but they have to do so while hot from firing. The barrels are either soft soldered or silver soldered. The amount of work involved in the soldering process from the sterile conditions at the start to the clean up when it's done can be tremendous. The added complication of holding everything in perfect alignment during the soldering process adds to the costs. The degree to which these are prepared for finish also boosts cost.

Soft soldered barrels cannot be blued in the traditional hot caustic manner. To do so would undo the joints. So these have to be blued by the old and slow rust blue method, which can be a benefit, but, runs up the cost even more, and that's just the barrels.

The action designs run from the dependable yet simple Savage/Fox styles, to the super complex styles of the LC Smiths and everything in between. You have simple double triggers, 1 trigger, 1 barrel, or, complex single select triggers using the guns recoil and an inertia block to automatically switch barrels for you.

In short, there is a lot involved in building O/U's and S/S's, and time is money...

Malm