Long time away and I have a Question

[RDP]

Hi everybody, it has been a few years since I participated here in the forum, as we know life some times gets in the way, and in my case of our hobbies, have done some engravings for my self and some friends, strictly as a hobby, after a long process here in Australia, finally acquired my firearm licence, and for my first pistol could not pass the opportunity to buy a Limited Edition Kimber Southern Cross out of 100 made specifically for the Australian market 1911 9mm, unfortunately the plastic grips that came with it left a lot to be desired, as one of my many hobbies is metal work and machining, I decided to make my own grips out of stainless steel and of course I had to engrave them with an appropriate theme to suit the gun, as you can see in the photos is very much Australian, I know that the design has it's flaws, scrolls are not perfect, the cutting is very amateur to say the least, because people keep asking me how much would they cost and how long to make them, they took me months and months to finish them as I could only do a little on weekends, no idea in hours, my question is just for curiosity, if one of you experienced engravers would have done this grips from scratch, ball park figure, what would you have charged for such work. If you can help satisfy my curiosity I will very much appreciate it.
Richard.

 

[mdengraver]

Beautiful work! Quality work takes time and much thought, and patience! You succeeded, Congrats!

 

[papart1]

very nice

 

[DaveAtWeirs]

First off, fantastic work. I really like the balance you got, it reminds me of some of the old gold pocket watches I see in work every so often from when customers were happy to pay for people to go the extra mile. Don't beat yourself up over any design flaw you see, you've been staring at this thing for hours so they're obvious to you but to the regular person they're works of art. I've seen absolutely terrible engraving on very expensive things. You're up at luxury level.

Unfortunately, without knowing how long you spent on them you wont be able to work out how much to charge. Even a rough idea would help.
You need to add how much your raw materials cost first, then how long you spent on making the new grips, how long you spent drawing the design, how long you spent cutting them, how long finish them and also how long you spent sharpening gravers.
I know it's probably more than this but for ease of calculations lets say 100 hours. From there you'll need to figure out how much you should be paid per hour, again for calculation lets say it's $50 (remember, if you underprice yourself, not only are you ripping yourself off but you'll be undercutting your fellow engravers). For 100 hours at $50 an hour you're looking at $5,000 just for your time, then you have to add on your materials costs.

Now don't forget, you're doing highly skilled work and design on a luxury piece so if $50 per-hour is actually low in your part of the world you'll have to bump your per-hour numbers up. And if you spent more that 100 hours you'll have to bump that up too.
Most important thing to remember is, while it's tempting to take on work just so that you get to do interesting work, you CANNOT underprice yourself. It literally has to be worth your time. Having said that, I've taken on jobs that I haven't done before but that I'd like to do more of so I give my first customer a better price so that I could use them as an experiment/gauge of how much I should be charging people in future and told them this before starting, and then when I finished told them what the price should have been. This will set expectations for future and, if they saved a few hundred, they'll be happy out. If I charged them too much initially I'll give em back the difference which makes them even happier.

All that to say, it's extremely important to time how much time it takes. From there you can work out how much it's worth.

EDIT: sorry if that sounded patronizing, wasn't meant that way at all (I was trying to cater to yourself and any noobies that might find the thread later).
Also, minimum wage in Australia is $25?????

 

[allan621]

Ditto what Dave said. One more thing about charging too low a price. Its not only about make sure you're paid correctly and avoiding undercutting other engravers. Its also how the customer judges the worth of the engraving based on the price.

Part of the customer's pride in owning this engraving is understanding the difficulty of the work, the rarity of finding an engraver that has the skill to do work this exceptionally well and how well it stands in comparison to any of his friends who also has a firearm highly engraved; and this will easily surpass any comparison.

Plus, this is one of those professional trades that require a great deal of practice, experimentation, purchase of expensive tools and time coming up with the sketches. There is a lot that goes into the price. Including the manufacture of the pistol grips on a unique Australian gun.

With this piece of work, you're no longer a hobbyist, you're an artisan and professional grade engraver. Whatever price you decided to charge, double it.

And look over the fega.com website, you should join.

Allan

 

[RDP]

First off, fantastic work. I really like the balance you got, it reminds me of some of the old gold pocket watches I see in work every so often from when customers were happy to pay for people to go the extra mile. Don't beat yourself up over any design flaw you see, you've been staring at this thing for hours so they're obvious to you but to the regular person they're works of art. I've seen absolutely terrible engraving on very expensive things. You're up at luxury level.

Unfortunately, without knowing how long you spent on them you wont be able to work out how much to charge. Even a rough idea would help.
You need to add how much your raw materials cost first, then how long you spent on making the new grips, how long you spent drawing the design, how long you spent cutting them, how long finish them and also how long you spent sharpening gravers.
I know it's probably more than this but for ease of calculations lets say 100 hours. From there you'll need to figure out how much you should be paid per hour, again for calculation lets say it's $50 (remember, if you underprice yourself, not only are you ripping yourself off but you'll be undercutting your fellow engravers). For 100 hours at $50 an hour you're looking at $5,000 just for your time, then you have to add on your materials costs.

Now don't forget, you're doing highly skilled work and design on a luxury piece so if $50 per-hour is actually low in your part of the world you'll have to bump your per-hour numbers up. And if you spent more that 100 hours you'll have to bump that up too.
Most important thing to remember is, while it's tempting to take on work just so that you get to do interesting work, you CANNOT underprice yourself. It literally has to be worth your time. Having said that, I've taken on jobs that I haven't done before but that I'd like to do more of so I give my first customer a better price so that I could use them as an experiment/gauge of how much I should be charging people in future and told them this before starting, and then when I finished told them what the price should have been. This will set expectations for future and, if they saved a few hundred, they'll be happy out. If I charged them too much initially I'll give em back the difference which makes them even happier.

All that to say, it's extremely important to time how much time it takes. From there you can work out how much it's worth.

EDIT: sorry if that sounded patronizing, wasn't meant that way at all (I was trying to cater to yourself and any noobies that might find the thread later).
Also, minimum wage in Australia is $25?????

Hi Dave, thank you for your kind words, I understand exactly what you mean, unfortunately here in Aus I doubt someone is going to pay $1250 for the grips considering the gun only cost $3000 new, but like you said there are not many that would take this highly skilled work on, so I guess I can name my price, if I like lol , I would say you're close with the hours, there was a lot of experimenting and trying things out, but because it was for me and could only work on the weekends it did not matter how long it took, I am about to retire from work and my wage is $23.23 an hour, not patronizing at all, really appreciate you taking the time to explain everything, I did see Brian Powley's video explaining how he works it out, so had some idea, thanks again.

Richard.

 

[RDP]

Ditto what Dave said. One more thing about charging too low a price. Its not only about make sure you're paid correctly and avoiding undercutting other engravers. Its also how the customer judges the worth of the engraving based on the price.

Part of the customer's pride in owning this engraving is understanding the difficulty of the work, the rarity of finding an engraver that has the skill to do work this exceptionally well and how well it stands in comparison to any of his friends who also has a firearm highly engraved; and this will easily surpass any comparison.

Plus, this is one of those professional trades that require a great deal of practice, experimentation, purchase of expensive tools and time coming up with the sketches. There is a lot that goes into the price. Including the manufacture of the pistol grips on a unique Australian gun.

With this piece of work, you're no longer a hobbyist, you're an artisan and professional grade engraver. Whatever price you decided to charge, double it.

And look over the fega.com website, you should join.

Allan

Thank you for your kind words Allan, appreciate your time commenting, yes here everybody loves the work I did on the grips, but nobody is willing to pay any money to have their own engraved I will be talking to somebody tomorrow that wants a set of grips engraved will let you know what happens.
Cheers,
Richard.

 

[airscovell]

Beautiful work! Extremely pleasing to look at.

 

[RDP]

Beautiful work! Extremely pleasing to look at.

Thank you

 

[RDP]

Beautiful work! Extremely pleasing to look at.

Thank you

Beautiful work! Extremely pleasing to look at.