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Light varmint stocks?

Terry was selling around 200 or250 a year at 1200.00. To 1300.00 each you do the math that is a living
Im not saying your wrong but I had a running order with McMillan for my LRB stock and could never get that many out of them. Not even close. Then with market saturation, meaning evenually everyone that wants one has one, demand only went so far. Not saying I know it all but I do have experiance with this. I have sold a lot of stocks but not even close to those kind of numbers.
 
When I first started shooting Benchrest some 30 years ago, we built LV Rifles with 28+ ounce stocks.

What Happenned?

One is scopes. The most popular scope was the 36x Leupold , which weighed around 15.5 ounces. Todays scopes top 21+ ounces.
Second is the use of tuners. Most will go 5 ounces. That’s 5 ounces you have to get off somewhere.

A glued in Panda Action was pretty darned light as well.

I currently have my favorite LV Rifle in 6PPC built on a Scoville Stock that weighed 21 ounces. It even has a 4.5 ounce tuner, and a Night Force 15x55Competition Scope. The action is a early Farley that I converted to a drop port.

How do I do it. Weight off the barrel. You can easily build a LV barrel at 21 inches by only leaving about 1” of the straight on the chamber end.

One of these days shooters will realize that a heavy barrel does not shoot any better in a Short Range Benchrest Rifle than a barrel that weights less than 70 ounces.
Jackie, I was able to get a LV, which consisted of a BAT SV, Scoville stock, Jewell trigger, Leupold 45x and a 16 1/4" barrel that weighed just under 9lb (1oz), and that shot as well as it did as a LV, just a lot livelier than a 10 1/2lb rifle.
Perhaps you can build a LV with a heavier stock and lighter barrel that is competitive.
 
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I have bought 6 of them over a 5 year period I ask jim to start making them again with no response
Jim is a very good business man. As one has to be in todays world. Believe me, if this was a profitable venture Kelbly's would be back in the stock making business in a heart beat. Sad but true. Just my take on it.
Paul
 
Kelbly's now has a stock on the Kelbly KLP design made of Basswood three layer by X-Ring stocks for LV. Retails for 825.00 in flat top and 1750.00 completed with trigger guard and butt plate with high gloss finish. The stock weighs 32 ounces with butt plate, trigger guard and mounting hardware. The old carbon fiber, fiberglass KLP we made weighed 30.86 ounces with trigger guard, butt plate, hardware with pillars installed. You can easily make LV weight with Panda action.KLP X-Ring 7.jpg
 
Kelbly's quit making rifle stocks due to the fact that a 800.00 dollar (BR Stock) to 1500.00 (F-Class Stock) carbon fiber/fiberglass stock is not a money maker. We would need to charge 2000.00 to 3500.00 per stock before bedding actions to make money with the way we made stocks here on the old 1970's technology Lee Six process. We had over 8 - 10 hours of hand time in making the stocks to get them as good as we made them. The price for materials has gone through the roof and we had to buy about five years worth of material at one time to get a deal that still was about five times what materials cost us in 2018.

Sorry to say just making stocks for BR, today there just is not a market there. Walking the line at this years Super Shoot and I would venture to say that 90% of the rifles on the line were over ten years old. In 1990 our business was 90% BR shooting, today less than 5%. That market is dead with so many used BR rifles for sale for less than half the price of new rifles and they shoot just as well when properly tuned.
 
Just to check, I weighed some of the old stocks I have. A Brown Precision SPG from 1979 weighs 24 ounces, bare. A Lee Six SPG from 1978 weighs 30 ounces with a thin walnut buttplate. A Brown Precision hunter stock from 1981 weighs 30.5 but it has a Pachmayr pad on it and the mag cutout has been filled in. The Brown SPG could have used a little more resin in some places IMO. Lee's stocks were always a little heavier than the Browns. WH
 
The Kelbly stocks were a very good stock at what I thought was a very reasonable price. I've had most all of the BR models, including their Varminter hunting stock.

The KLP made LV weight easily with a Panda. This one I built was pillar bedded and still had room for 6 oz. of weight in the butt with a 22 oz. scope.
X1wKeqPl.jpg


I restocked another Kelbly's KLP with a pillar bedded BAT SV and it makes LV weight with the Sightron SIII 36X45 ED scope.

It's not hard to savvy how it no longer made sense for Kelbly's to do these. It would be a real benefit to the BR community if someone could purchase the molds, etc from Kelbly's and continue to offer them. Prices would need to be adjusted accordingly.

Good shootin' :) -Al
 
The Robertson LV stocks were a hollow butt. Mine was 28 oz with a thin butt plate, no trigger guard. I filled the back end and added a weight system for a HV rifle.
m5KUE26l.jpg

GUlv2Xfl.jpg
Thanks Al, what did you fill the butt with and how much did it add to the weight of the stock?
 
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Kelbly's quit making rifle stocks due to the fact that a 800.00 dollar (BR Stock) to 1500.00 (F-Class Stock) carbon fiber/fiberglass stock is not a money maker. We would need to charge 2000.00 to 3500.00 per stock before bedding actions to make money with the way we made stocks here on the old 1970's technology Lee Six process. We had over 8 - 10 hours of hand time in making the stocks to get them as good as we made them. The price for materials has gone through the roof and we had to buy about five years worth of material at one time to get a deal that still was about five times what materials cost us in 2018.

Sorry to say just making stocks for BR, today there just is not a market there. Walking the line at this years Super Shoot and I would venture to say that 90% of the rifles on the line were over ten years old. In 1990 our business was 90% BR shooting, today less than 5%. That market is dead with so many used BR rifles for sale for less than half the price of new rifles and they shoot just as well when properly tuned.
Not to point any fingers, but its my belief that mandatory minimum wage hikes and the Dem-panic is what truly pushed the price of goods through the roof, add in the lack of people willing to work to provide services to make products is what's giving us our inflated economy.
Businesses started analyzing thier margins and determined which service are more profitable and which wasn't, with the latter being dropped to a very minimum if not entirely.
Gunsmithing is no exception, I know a few gunsmiths that quit taking on new customers, focusing solely on existing client base but specializing in where they make thier highest margins "barrels" and chambering, action timing, and fire controls.
Now those consumable barrels can run as much as $850-$900 depending on who's doing the work, with customers having 2 or more done at a time,
"I get it" its good wages for precise work.
Which brings me to inlets and bedding, if a gunsmith is making $125-$150 an hour chambering barrels, they sure don't want to be inleting stocks for half that wage when they have a rack full of barrels they want to concentrate on for maximum profit versus hours worked.
Again, "I get it."
The part I don't get is sometimes we have to do operations for less as a cost of doing business and try to make up the differences in volume. This is something I do on the day-to-day from my autobody background.
Example, dealerships run as high as $150 hour to work on a specific make and model whereas a body shop works on all makes and models for a third of the door rate, leaving profit margins thin yet still providing a service to the customer, and staying in business.
Coming back to the very small part I play in building a rife "finishing stocks" if I charged $50 hour it would cost $750-$1000 per unit for the hours worked project dependent of course, but I probably wouldn't have a lot to do. Lol
Anyhow this is a long winded explanation of my view just to say, if a stock is going to cost $2000-$3500 to the end user so be it.
The stock will last a lifetime of service, where the consumable barrels only last a season.
 
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Not to point any fingers, but its my belief that mandatory minimum wage hikes and the Dem-panic is what truly pushed the price of goods through the roof, add in the lack of people willing to work to provide services to make products is what's giving us our inflated economy.
Businesses started analyzing thier margins and determined which service are more profitable and which wasn't, with the latter being dropped to a very minimum if not entirely.
Gunsmithing is no exception, I know a few gunsmiths that quit taking on new customers, focusing solely on existing client base but specializing in where they make thier highest margins "barrels" and chambering, action timing, and fire controls.
Now those consumable barrels can run as much as $850-$900 depending on who's doing the work, with customers having 2 or more done at a time,
"I get it" its good wages for precise work.
Which brings me to inlets and bedding, if a gunsmith is making $125-$150 an hour clambering barrels, they sure don't want to be inleting stocks for half that wage when they have a rack full of barrels they want to concentrate on for maximum profit versus hours worked.
Again, "I get it."
The part I don't get is sometimes we have to do operations for less as a cost of doing business and try to make up the differences in volume. This is something I do on the day-to-day from my autobody background.
Example, dealerships run as high as $150 hour to work on a specific make and model whereas a body shop works on all makes and models for a third of the door rate, leaving profit margins thin yet still providing a service to the customer, and staying in business.
Coming back to the very small part I play in building a rife "finishing stocks" if I charged $50 hour it would cost $750-$1000 per unit for the hours worked project dependent of course, but I probably wouldn't have a lot to do. Lol
Anyhow this is a long winded explanation of my view jut to say, if a stock is going to cost $2000-$3500 to the end user so be it.
The stock will last a lifetime of service, where the consumable barrels only last a season.
Bcz is spot on. In my industry we did the exact same thing right after the virus. It changed buisness...some for the better...some not so much. Labor, well thats another dynamic all together. I am in my 60s. Todays younger people look at work much differently than my generation.
I have seen them punch in at 7am and not even make it till the first break.
 

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