Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Savage Collectors Bizarre trivia question of the day...

What was the cost to Savage to have the first Savage 1895 lever made?

They sold them for $2 in 1895, for $1.75 in 1900.

Get within 10% and show your work and I'll give you credit for a correct answer.

$10,000. The number stuck in my head for some reason, must be it right?

No.. they never paid more than $5,000 for a rifle.

And $5,000 isn't the right answer, either.

So colt built the 1892 prototype? 10k?

Nope.. not asking about the cost of the entire rifle.

Just the lever.

How much did it cost to have somebody make the lever?

Misleading question!

43 cents.

Lee

For just the lever? $ 55.57 3% per year

Yep, for the very first lever.. The very first one of these.



And, no.. not $55.57. Interesting number choice.

it's either ridiculously low or ridiculously high. I would lean to the latter considering that the first lever also cost all of the tooling, labor and design that went into producing it.

How much for #87 Rory? That's got some nice color

No idea, just stole the pic from eBay.

Okay.. Rather than $$, anybody care to guess how many man-hours went into creating it?

To forge, mill, final contour/polish by hand, then heat treat (color case harden)- I'll guess two or three man hours. (Remember, they weren't doing them one at a time, rather in big batches. Also the forges ran as fast as a guy could pick up a hot casting and stick it in a huge press one after another. The guy operating the shaping mills used fixtures that guaranteed monotonous repeatability. I'll bet the finishers were paid by piece rate to whip around on them with files and abrasives, and the carburizing was done in large furnaces in big batches. No other way to approach it in an analog mass production setting.

I don't know the average hourly rate at the Savage plant at the turn of the century, but Ford set the country on its ear a decade or two later when he offered $5/day for a ten hour day to assembly line workers when he opened the River Rouge plant to build Model T's. The waiting lines to apply stretched for about a mile outside the factory gates. Twenty years earlier I doubt seriously that Arthur was paying his men a similar rate, so say 20-30 cents an hour, at most?

There's 90 cents in labor, round it off to a buck to be really generous, to shape a lever. Add to that the cost of the raw casting- I'll guess $.30-.40, making it $1.30 or so in manufacturing costs. Tack on 50-60 cents for profit when selling one to the trade separately. Brings me to around $2.00 or less, no more, for a lever if you sent off to the company to buy a replacement and I'll bet a beer that I'm a little heavy on that number.

But this is the very first one... Not done at Savage because Savage had no plant. Not mass produced. Once they were mass producing them they were selling for $1.75 to $2.00, which is probably a couple hours work.

But how much effort to create the first one from scratch, and include creating the jigs/fittings/etc?

I’ll say 50x retail, so $100.

Knowing enough about industrial processes of the period (heck, my first job out of college in 1974 was as a greenhorn supervisor in a factory originally built during WWI in which the processes hadn't changed materially and in which our machinery mostly dated to pre-WWII- American Chain and Cable in York, Pa), I'll take an educated guess in that the first step was to make a wooden pattern (sized 10% or so large to allow for shrinkage) and send it off to a foundry to have a sand cast or lost wax casting made of it in steel. Wooden mockups were SOP in pattern shops- it's how Sam Colt and John Browning worked up their models. (Patternmakers were among the top paid guys in American industry, along with the tool and die makers in the R&D shops.) Then when the rough casting hit the work bench, some skilled guy worked it by hand with files and simple universal jigs and fixturing in a milling machine to the specs on the designer's drawing and/or the wooden model. The same guy (or more likely an apprentice) would have then smoothed it and polished it, and some old blacksmith kind of guy would've heat treated it.

No specialized dies/fixtures would've been created at that point- not until the design/dimensional bugs would've been worked out- so it would've been a laborious process dependent upon the eyes, hands, brains of a guy who lived and breathed that stuff. That means you can discount tooling costs for the prototype, but pile on labor costs- time = money. Remember too that wages were insanely low compared to today- that squinty-eyed guy at his bench in the R&D shop likely wasn't making no $5 day in the mid-1890's. If it took him a couple days to get that lever just right, there's $10, and probably less. Add to that the wages of the patternmaker and the cost of a one-off steel casting, be generous and tack on another $10. Are we factoring in the salary of the engineer/designer (presumably Arthur, so probably not) and the overhead of the shop (heat/lighting/gas/electric/steam or water power, lease, machine tool costs/amortization, etc)?

I'll guess around $20 for the prototype 1895 lever. Maybe $25 if overhead is figured in. (And that guess is the product of a rational mind who witnessed/took part in developmental work in a shop not all that far removed from that era. What I'm not sure of is the labor rates in New England back then.) But, like all guesses of mine, it may be way off and not worth a bucket of warm spit!!

Creating the jigs and fixturing and buying the machinery to utilize them would come later, and wouldn't have been a factor in the cost of the first tool room prototype. Rounding up all that stuff and the factory to house them, and the money for training of the guys to run them would've been between Arthur and the bankers after he had a successful working model to show them. Those costs would be allayed after production started and rifles were being sold.

He did this where he did because of the wealth of cheap power and a worker base that wouldn't have been found hardly anywhere else at the time. You couldn't have pulled this off in the middle of Wyoming, for example.

Is that a fact? Do you have a parts list from the turn of the century? If so, I guessed pretty good!

Yep, the 1895, 1897 and 1900 catalogs all have parts list pricing in them. You did do good on the mass produced.

Couple hours remaining for guesses.. I'll post answer up later this morning.