Randy_
Member
The following comment was posted in another IAP thread; but was a little OT from the original thread. Thought I would start a new thread and see what everyone thinks??
I suspect that everyone in the "food chain" has the same opinion. Manufacturers think the raw materials are too expensive, importers think the manufacturers are too high, turners think the importers are too high and pen buyers think the turners are too high. If you look at a hundred dollar pen, it starts off as a few pennies worth of brass, gold, plastic and wood and each step in the process adds cost to the final product. 75 to 80% of the final cost of a pen is added by the turner. Seems to me that a couple of dollars more or less for the initial cost of a pen kit isn't really going to have much affect on any pen-turners bottom line??
I recently read that it costs $100,000 for an import license. You have to sell an awful lot of $3 pen kits to make back that kind of money. Most of us turn pens on a $250 lathe. I'll bet that the manufacturing tools for the pen kits cost a thousand times that much??
Originally posted by jenamison
... I wish they would work a little more with the pen-turner instead of against us in the rising cost...
I suspect that everyone in the "food chain" has the same opinion. Manufacturers think the raw materials are too expensive, importers think the manufacturers are too high, turners think the importers are too high and pen buyers think the turners are too high. If you look at a hundred dollar pen, it starts off as a few pennies worth of brass, gold, plastic and wood and each step in the process adds cost to the final product. 75 to 80% of the final cost of a pen is added by the turner. Seems to me that a couple of dollars more or less for the initial cost of a pen kit isn't really going to have much affect on any pen-turners bottom line??
I recently read that it costs $100,000 for an import license. You have to sell an awful lot of $3 pen kits to make back that kind of money. Most of us turn pens on a $250 lathe. I'll bet that the manufacturing tools for the pen kits cost a thousand times that much??