When I uses to do product development we'd try to figure out how much value the market would place on certain attributes and features so we could come up with the most perceived value for the money.
I was thinking about this in relation to these rifles and the ironic part is that many of the things that would make a rifle much more appealing wouldn't cost the manufacturer any more to produce than the compromises they're trying to push on us. It shouldn't cost manufacturers any extra to get barrel twists right and barrel lengths right for example.
Although length is more subjective sometimes they're off enough you know they missed most of the market. Like I was looking at a cz alpha 223 because they gave them a 7 twist. But they only come in 24" barrel lengths in the alpha. The lux has a 20" barrel but it's a 9 twist. Would make more sense the other way around because I'd more likely hunt bigger game with the lighter 20" wanting 7 twist there and varmints with a heavier 24" so 9 would be ok as a compromise but they should just do it 7 too.
I asked the guy at legacy if it would have been cheaper to just use stainless instead of material and labor cost for cerekote. He said cerekote was better for corrosion resistance and I said except you don't coat the bore and bore corrosion resistance is the main reason we want stainless in the first place. I told him nitriding was more appealing to me than cerekote.
To get some things right frome the start wouldn't cost any more. Like the twists, the mag box length, the stocks not being shaped like a hogue, a stiff forend, a soft recoil pad, a decent trigger, barrel lengths and contours that balance. Howa did ok on some of the twists on the minis. The 8 twist 223 is better than a 9 at least but they should have just went 7. All the companies still doing 9.5 twist 7 mags and 10 twist 243s just drive me nuts.
And why can everyone figure out how to make their short actions fit a 6.5 prc at 2.96 and not do that for all their other short actions. Many of them leave all their other short actions at 2.83 or so. And those that do 223 on their standard shorts block the mag box to limit length to about the same 2.26" you get from an AR mag. Not usually tough to fix but why not just block them a little looser giving you at least 2.5" or so.
One company told me their boxes are long enough for factory ammo and they see no reason to accommodate hand loaders. I said there's one reason, so hardliners will buy your rifles and be happy with them. I said your customers are not your enemies it wouldn't hurt to do them a solid once in a while especially when it costs you nothing extra.
It's like all the years I fought optic companies trying to get mil turrets with mil reticles instead of moa with mil. At some point you just realize that many in the industry don't know what they're doing enough to even know how to ask the right questions.
Does anyone here know steel material costs well enough to estimate about the difference between a block of blued steel vs a block of stainless large enough to machine an action out of? Or the difference in material cost between say 4150 bar stock and 416r stainless bar stock for making barrels?
I wonder what data legacy would get if they called barrel manufacturers like brux, bartlien, pacnor, hart, krieger, rock etc and asked them if their customers preferred stainless or blued steel barrels. I'm pretty convinced that most shooters that are into it more than just a weekend deer hunt every few years would all prefer stainless.
And the guys that just hunt once in a while but don't know much about guns wouldn't stop from buying a stainless rifle if the price wasn't much different and that's what was available. Some genuinely prefer the old blued walnut look but that's not the cheaper end of the market anyways. I wouldn't see a guy turning down say a stainless 700 sps because he really wanted the matte black unless he was a mall ninja going tacticool.
Bb
