Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Gunsmithing Whats a fair price for unscrewing a barrel from a Remington action?

Unknowen customer first time 25.00. regular customer's get a break depending on how regular. I will reward a regular faster then an unknowen. Maybe just me but if I was a regular and heard of a first timer getting a better deal than I do. would PMO.

I like the shop charge thing, but make it a fixed amount up front.

Don't give somebody a $40.00+/- and say "depends".

Taking a barrel of sometimes can be more than a 5 min job depending on the action and how the barrel is installed. Every barrel i have removed has been 15 min or longer. Some Rem 700 barrel where put on to stay and are very hard to remove and this is why i said if Auger was here i would let him use my equipment to remove the barrel himself. The most any Smith should charge would be 20 bucks or less for the job no matter how hard or easy the barrel screws off.

Just like our shop...even if it takes 5 minutes we always charge a full hour shop rate unless I feel like giving it away for free, which as others have mentioned depends on who you are and what kind of mood I am in.

It might only take 5 minutes but you do have to stop what you were already doing and get it in the vice, then get back to what you were doing.

The (now passed away) local gunsmith removed a barrel from a Mauser some years ago. It took him five or 10 minutes but a lot of that was talking. After he was done I asked him what I owed, he said, "Oh, five dollars." We did more business on account of that and I steered a good bit of business his way. Helluva nice guy and he is missed in the community.

Yeah, he stopped another job to do the barrel but the good will brought him all the business he wanted.

BTW, he had made himself an interesting barrel vise. It was an overbuilt hydraulic ram type, about five times stronger than most I've seen, and run with an electric hydraulic pump.

we're building one with an old bottle jack.

Seems to work wice as fastas the dual bolt midway style with half the effort.

Quite some time back while while going over shop rates and doing a little adjustment here and there I addressed this very subject of a customer walking in and requesting a small job you can probably do while he waits. In my area there are no strangers and pretty near everyone who uses my services consider them selves a friend as well. And I want them to. Consequently I get a lot of nickel and dime stuff and I must show a profit or lock the doors. After reading Bob Brownells input on keeping a gun business in the black and much deliberation on my part I decided if I could something really quick, for example a customer had a rem 700 that would not feed and I removed his upside down magazine box and put it back in, I would not charge them anything. If it required me to set up on my work bench or get a special tool out I would charge a half hour minimum ($25). I always advise the cust what something will cost before doing the work. One exception is when they want their scope bore sighted it's $10.00. Fast, easy and it promotes good cust relations.

As for the barrel removal. If the rifle still has the stock and scope base on it I dont think I could disassemble, get out the action wrench, find the correct blocks for the barrel vise, rosin everything, remove the barrel and put everything away in less than 30 minutes. If the barrel is really tight or it slips in the blocks it would be longer. I would probably charge $25.00. If they brought just the barreled action in and no scope bases ready to go and it came off without any heroic efforts I would probably want $10.00.

I do agree that the surly attitude is uncalled for. If this guy is the owner he wont last long. If he is an employee he should shown the door.

I have one piece of advice for gun nuts who need the services of a skilled gunsmith occasionally. Find out what he likes. It might be Guiness beer. Or Cohiba cigars. Or home made chocolate chip cookies. When you need a small job done or even advice take some goodies along. I bet he will remember you the next you need something.

Good post, and very close to how I do business... That's why these same customers keep coming back.. Quick service, fair prices and good work..

Be an azz and charge a bunch, and many times you won't be seein' 'em again.. Not worth it - ever...

I took an action to Karl Kenyon, he lived 2 mi. from here, told him I wanted the barrel taken off and a used tube installed. He jumped right on it, had to cut the shoulder a bit to get the headspace right, took him about 30 min. When I pulled my wallet, he just waved me off, headed into his house and left me standing in the shop. This wasn't the first time he'd done that. So I left him $50 on the bench, got to looking around, the lighting over his worn-out lathe wasn't good, so I bought a 4' flourescent light and hung it over the lathe. Still think I took advantage of him, after all it was Karl Kenyon.

He sure is a great guy, watched him work for over an hour on a kids' .22 for free. He built triggers for the top 10% of BR shooters at one time. He's moved now, living in a care center in SLC, IIRC.

I popped one out of a 700 last week for nothing...ya gotta help out gun nuts once in a while...not like it's a big job, but in a shop environment it's not really feasible to work for nothing...word gets around....

When a job like that comes in I ask if they want to do it.Some have no idea what it is like to work on them.
I have a base price that i charge,if it doesn't take that long no biggie.Oh they all get cleaned for that charge.Sometimes a problem is fixed just by cleaning .Wonder what it would be like to get 70.00 for poping a barrel off?

What he said, and NOT directed at auger- at all-
however I have a couple of customers who about every 10 months call and request a complicated quote....every...ten....months....
never did a lick of work for them. Now when they call,or email I ball park a price without researching those babinga tips, case colored sling studs and metric bi-pod..
Profits not a crime. 70 bucks might apply to some war torn mauser that was fired 500 times in a row and rolled in snow a few times.
Some new CZ's are a biotch to pull the barrel too



LOL, aint that the truth!

I know there are all kinds of people in this world, and no reason to expect that gunsmiths are any exception, but I've often wondered if some have read tales of certain old masters who were known to be crusty old bastids, and they figure that is the "gunsmith persona" they have to adopt.

Just my half-assed theory.

Paul

In the 1960's there was a gunsmith here who was extremely talented. He had part of his left arm missing and still could build the most beautiful hunting rifles including elaborate checkering. He was the grouchiest crusty old guy you ever saw. He had an attitude about like the "soup natzi" on Seinfield. He would chew you out and throw you out of his shop for the slightest infraction. Yet he was so good at his craft that people would patronize him anyway. In fact old guys still come in to my shop and brag about the time they got thrown out of "old man Morton's" shop. They talk about it almost as if it were a right of passage in those days.

You would never get me out of your shop....

I've never been charged to remove a barrel. I also won't take a barreled action to a local smith to have them unscrew it if I'm sending it off to have someone else work on it.

Just seems... wrong.

I guess I could, and force them to take some money. That would be better than giving USPS more money.

Sometimes when they are finished they leave with a new outlook for what it takes to get the job done.I do the same with reloading,just watch them a lot closer.Maybe it's just me it's had to be a grump.

My current build is on an old A series action and the smith really had trouble getting the barrel off. He didn't charge any extra as he is doing the whole build for me, just said he really had to work at getting it off. Is that a common issue with older REmingtons?

CWH2
A customer had me pull his barrel so he could ship it for installation of a muzzle brake. After quizzing the guy, it turns out the person doing the muzzle brake work did not even have a FFL. The cust shipped the barrel only and after getting it back had me re-install the barrel. It was pretty crude work to say the least. I have a reputation for doing the best muzzle brake work around. But this character paid me $45.00 to remove and re-install a barrel so he could ship it to a quack and pay him about the same money I charge in the first place. Now this young man was in college too. Some folks just cant see the forest for the trees.

Moose
My experience removing Rem barrels, about 80% are medium tight, about 10% are not very tight at all, and 10% are real buggers.