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Post by yanniskusogaki on Feb 2, 2013 16:36:52 GMT
spathia.com/index.php?option=com ... =1&lang=en OK I'll admit it,I didn't think anyone in my friggin' country would be cool enough to even make a wall hanger.I just found out we have a functional sword maker, I am shocked beyond words.Of course there's only that much authenticity in the blades (personally all I want from it is to be functional and not too ugly) and you should skip the plastic fiber shields...they're not there,you didn't see that.But I have to say I am impressed.He doesn't do any test cuts,but he does my favorite thing,he gorilla bashes them on metal square pipes and ruins a couple of brass helmets with them,check the videos.They look sturdy enough and that is always my first requirement from a blade. (A lengthy rant on money and personal work that might offend a few starts here,feel free to stop reading) Aaaaand then there's the price...Why man?Just why? I know blade making is no easy fit and I've gotten into several fights with blade makers and enthusiasts over price issues.But I've seen a handmade tool and knife maker at work several times.Yes,it's not easy,I know,but 615 euro(840$)???Seriously? They say you get what you pay for,and it is true(not always ,but meh),but this is just crazy. I mean,I call myself an illustrator and at rare times a painter.I'm not that great,but if my painting was a sword it wouldn't be too far behind that guy's quality.I spent 12 days with a minimum of 10 hours of work per day,on a piece with copper leaf forming parts and wood carving and pyrography and canvas work...this thing had well over 130 hours by the end of it.And I don't like to ring my own bell (no pun intended...okay maybe a little)but it was a good piece,and I really thought of keeping it in the end.Still I couldn't even imagine myself asking for more than the 480 euro(655$) I charged and 60(80) of that was materials...and that was before the crisis.Am I wrong to call prices like these unrealistic and plain silly?From anyone,not just this guy,I'm not too fond of Albion charging 750$ over a gladius either.
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Post by Elheru Aran on Feb 2, 2013 21:44:08 GMT
Well, once you get past the materials, you do have a cost for time. And I cannot speak for that guy (or for anybody else either) but for Albion and Arms and Armour at least, part of the cost is the time that people spend researching original swords and making prototypes. There are a LOT of little, fine details that are frequently left out of other production swords such as Windlass and Hanwei, which Albion does include in theirs. This ultimately makes a difference in the long run where value is concerned.
As for this dude and his work, I cannot say I am terribly impressed. I agree that I wouldn't pay that much for these swords... it is nice that someone's making steel reproductions (more or less) of historic blades, but honestly, if I want a good historically correct kopis, I probably wouldn't approach him for it.
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Post by chrisperoni on Feb 2, 2013 22:03:22 GMT
So you paid yourself $5.04 an hour for your work? (130 hours @ $5.04/hr = $655.20)
Do you not think your time and effort is worth more? $5.04/hr is less than minimum wage; if an employer only paid an employee this much they would be breaking the law in my country.
You have things completely backwards- artisans, craftsman, etc. are continually undervalued and undervalue themselves.
I think you are wrong to call prices like these "unrealistic and plain silly". Step one is finding what you love to do; step two is respecting it enough to charge what you are worth.
I am not speaking specifically to the prices on the site you linked to as I do not know how much time and material cost is involved. Rather I am speaking to the idea of what is a reasonable price to charge and why.
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Post by yanniskusogaki on Feb 4, 2013 3:11:15 GMT
Research for the product and prototype manufacturing should not burden the client in the least.Why should they?Those are steps needed to reach a satisfactory production piece that you would be able (and proud) to market over your antagonists one,not an excuse to add to a piece's price...at least not THAT dramatically.I don't charge production sketches and scraps to my clients the same way a chef doesn't charge the time he took to try things out and compose a dish or a menu...if he's an honest pro that is.
Fine details are fine,I don't see why they should grossly inflate the price.
I mean OK,if you go to Albion's blank blade sale section I think I saw a gladius blade all heat treated and ready (maybe some polishing required,I don't know) for 150$...You mean to tell me that the rest 600$ is for a wooden hilt,pomel and guard?(No scabbard in that price btw.)Or am I paying like 500 for past research on how to make a historically accurate gladius?Isn't that more than half the price?
I'll be blunt.That particular gladius (no scabbard) should cost no more than 350$.150 for the blade as it is(acceptable),30 for polishing,80 for all those wood fittings (max),20 for assembly,20 for potential sharpening and finally 50 for "research" which is a preposterous thing to charge for on a sword (some pharmaceuticals don't even do it) but I'll let that slide.That 750$ price is bullsemprini...am I wrong?
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Post by Elheru Aran on Feb 4, 2013 4:08:41 GMT
If you don't think spending time looking at old swords, making careful sketches of them, photographs, weighting, handling, etc, and then comparing with more old swords, not to mention taking the time to apply to museums in order to view their collections, apply to private collectors, travel to said collections and pay the fees involved, and then spend time back at your office going through the data you have collated and trying to create a comprehensive picture of how actual historic swords were made, looked, and handled, is worth $50, then I invite you to do the same. It should only take you about 10 hours, yeah?
I will agree that $750 seems like a lot.
Consider:
Albion has something like... 1 secretary, the owner (who also works in the office), and then maybe 4 or 5 guys who do CNC/blade grinding/heat treat. 2 or 3 to do fittings, leatherwork, finish and packing up the sword for shipping. So that's a total of maybe 10 people. Each of them has to make, at the very least, a living wage (and no, minimum wage in the US is *not* 'a living wage'. Take it from one who has been on minimum wage). I'm totally guessing on these numbers by the way, it could well be less; I don't think it can be much more, though.
That's not even including paying Peter Johnsson and whomever else they have on tap for their time doing this kind of work. If you think that these people just take all day hanging out in the back room of museums for fun because they just like doing it, well. Yes, they do like doing that or they wouldn't be doing it otherwise, but they have to eat too. Their knowledge and expertise in history, metalwork, and who knows what else, doesn't come free.
That's why Albion's gladii cost $750. You don't like it? Buy your gladius from someone else.
This is also why guys like Tinker and Gus Trim are going broke. Because they didn't charge $750 for doing everything on their own when maybe they should've.
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Post by Opferous on Feb 4, 2013 6:46:56 GMT
That is a gross oversimplification. Some of the markup may be due to research, but it's not meant to be attributed as just "passing on the cost." What you're paying for is the quality and expertise that comes from the research. Using your chef analogy, just because a 5 star chef uses the same salmon as the guy in some cheap sushi knockoff joint, it doesn't mean he should charge the same proportional price to amount of fish used when he clearly made you better food.
The $350 you are quoting is ignoring plenty of costs. Polishing for $30? It's not a quick spit and strop here. You've got hours sunk into proper polish and sharpening. And these are skilled craftsmen, not people you pay at absolute minimum wage. With the wood fittings, I believe they were walnut for most of the Albion gladii? (It's been a while.) A quick search shows a typical turning block costs about $20 to $30, and you need two. Once again, shaping required and definitely not at minimum wage, so the $20 leftover of the supposed $80 max does not compute. What about shaping the grip? That'll incur additional labor cost.
Then we look at other materials/supplies that are consumed. Albion does CNC milling. To properly do so, bits must be purchased, monitored, and constantly replaced. Some of those bits are crazy expensive. Some of that cost must be counted in the cost of the sword. Shaping the blade and fittings requires some grinding. Add in the price per cost driver of varying grits/grades of belts. Probably some hand finishing is required, so toss in sand paper/whetstones (once again, feel free to divide overall cost of the material by number of swords it can used used for). For the grip, even if we ignore the difficulty of properly shaping the multi-ridges on a gladius, that's a nice block of wood there. And I'm sure there are even more costs involved here in Albion's process.
Now you take all those costs and pay them off. Employees paid, materials/supplies bought, the research that you don't like paid for. The price doesn't end there. Even if your cost analysis was 100% correct and $350 was labor/materials, you basically left the company with no money. How do they pay for taxes? How does the owner justify owning a company that provides nothing for him/her? How do they pay for the lease on the building/machinery? How do they pay for insurance/worker's compensation? How do they save some cash for a rainy day? There's your markup. And really, after taxes (up to 40% in the US), the company really doesn't make much.
A company always, always, always has to focus on making a profit. That is rule number one in business strategy. You might think "oh, that's not our problem as customers," but you know, it kind of is. A good, sustainable business provides quality products and serves its market for a very long time. A company that doesn't price itself to be sustainable will inevitably run out of cash and die. If we want swords, we not only have to pay for them. We have to pay enough so that makers can keep making.
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Post by yanniskusogaki on Feb 6, 2013 2:22:00 GMT
This quickly turned to a debate over Albion... Too many points were made in my absence and I cannot address them all,but here's some. Nonono my friend,50 is plenty for polishing and sharpening a small blade with no fullers like the gladius.With their machinery it shouldn't take more than 1,5-2 hours and they wouldn't even break a sweat...remember this is not a forged sword full of bumps and dents burned away in some gas forge for hours making the surface rough.It is machine cut out of a billet and they heat it in liquid salt,it probably comes out smoother than a baby's ass even before the polishing,like the bare blade they sell for a REASONABLE 150 (yes,THAT is a cool price).Like I said I've seen handmade tool and knife making up close several times,and that guy only had a lousy belt grinder and he forged his stuff.I am not trying to put the craftsmen down here,but come on,does it get easier than this?With all this equipment and a practically smooth half way done blade...What should the solo "forged blade" smithies with their crappy equipment charge for polishing and sharpening then?And yeah,the machine was expensive and the parts need changing (not too frequently I suppose),but not nearly as expensive as hands and sandpaper going back and forth getting disfigured by calluses...those kinda guys charged me 50 for it btw.The machine should actually make the production faster and easier (and more consistent in this case) thus dropping the price.50 is enough,the worker (polisher?) gets a good 40 for his 1,5 hours and the machine burns 5-10 in power and disposables for that 1 small blade. As for the walnut fittings,you don't need two blocks for the hilt,guard and pommel of a gladius (7,5" altogether),you need one.Remember,this price(750-800)has no scabbard included.A 9,5" block can easily cover those 3 small parts unless you plan on wasting a whole lot.I buy mine for 16$ and I am just a guy,Albion is a company,I suspect they buy theirs in a bundle for much better prices. But I'll leave it at the same 16 bucks,just for argument's sake.Then 5 is burned by the machine (hardly,but what the hell...).That leaves 59 for the laborer.Now,when I took woodturning/carving at tech. school I could turn a goblet in a bit over an hour by my 3rd try,and I sucked at woodturning,I suppose they can do it faster.So 1-1,5 hours for almost 60$,sounds good to me,I know doctors that get less.So 80 is very much in the ballpark for the fittings...And let's face it,This: www.kultofathena.com/images%5CAMS0106_3_l.jpg is no crazy work and should under no circumstances exceed those 80$.Seriously now,would you have the balls to ask for more than 80 if you made these 3 parts as a wood carver?There's even special knives for automatically turn-shaping a ball and a ridged cylinder,you just push those in for a while and ta-daaaah. So I payed the polishing/sharpening guy,the wood carver/fittings guy,the assembly guy,and then the blade (150$) is a price that albion itself sees fit for profit so I don't even have to elaborate on that...but OK,probably like 50 for the billet and machine expenses for 1 piece and 30 for the heat treating guy (remember liquid salt bath,no furnace).That gives the company 70 from the blade.And then there's that extra 50 I let for "research".That makes for 120 from one of their smallest and least difficult to make swords.Not bad considering the fact that sales would double because people can now afford your product and with that kind of quality vs buck they wouldn't think twice about buying it.I'd buy 2 every year. I mean,you ARE a smithy mate,aren't you?Longship armory?(Loved your stuff btw) This might sound like a load of crap coming from a guy that has only just tried his hand at blade making but help me out here...If the price for a blade,the main/hard part (not as hard for them apparently,but meh) is 150,can the rest be 4 times that price?No scabbard either?Or does the blade by itself not include historical accuracy and research fees for some strange reason?I'd have no questions over it if the bare blade was like half those 750$ they charge...It'd be logical then. |
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Post by Opferous on Feb 6, 2013 4:42:20 GMT
We can give them a break on the wood cost then, if we assume perfect utilization of resources. But with the CNC, don't forget you need a CNC technician. In the US, the average salary of a CNC technician is around $42,000 USD. That's a bit more cost to add. Yes, the blade comes out fairly clean if they use a ball-ended bit. But keep in mind that the blade is CNCed pre-heat treat, which means you have extra millimeters of the steel on the edge as well as on the rest of the blade, although maybe to a lesser extent. I don't have any access to their .dxf files, so I'm not sure of their exact parameters. Since Albion is expected to hold up to both historical standards, consistency, and quality, shaping those last couple of millimeters SHOULD take more time than an hour or two to quickly knock out. If I buy an Albion, I expect that edge geometry to be done properly down to a couple micrometers. And, of course, after all that shaping, now you've got to do the polish.
Given all that, I would say that their bare blade price definitely does not include anything else besides machine time (and consumable supply costs), materials, heat treat, and a slight markup. Getting those small adjustments and profiling is what makes or breaks the final product, and that does raise the cost. If we at Longship farmed out our blanks to CNC and also got 3rd party heat treating, the total price I was quoted (average of multiple sources) came out to something like $110. Sure, Albion might save some by owning their own machine and taking advantage of economies of scale (and hell, anything is cheaper than New Jersey), but I get the feeling (this is pure speculation) that they are pricing the bare blades to just move quickly with a very small markup to both satisfy the custom fittings/customization/DIY market and supplement any loss of sales that may have occurred with the economic situation and their recent price increase.
And of course, there's the whole "company in the US" thing again. Corporate tax, income tax, and high cost of living all take a toll on prices. We're fairly comparatively priced to Albion here at Longship and do much less volume, and the only reason we haven't tanked yet is because it's basically a 3 man gig with the forge in a shed. If we had more people to pay and a building with a showroom to pay for, we would be done for without question. You take the $120 you mentioned and pay a 40% corporate tax on it and bam, you're down to $72. Not an accurate way of calculating earnings after tax, but it still shows a point. US manufacturing will very rarely price lower than foreign competition ignoring shipping, unless we're talking high automation tasks.
I'm not a die-hard Albion fan, probably for reasons that are not completely unbiased. :lol: But even as a competitor that hopes to overtake them someday, I have to admit that they are priced fairly and, most importantly, sustainably (if they go up any more, I may have to change my opinion). Some people won't want to pay the premium for the attention to detail/historicity. They don't need the perfect distal taper in their Type XIIa. They don't need the subtle "livelier" feel to the sword. They're happy with their fully loaded Camry and don't want a base Benz C300 with no options, and that's fair. That's not their target demographic. For everyone else, there will always be a retailer that utilizes cheap labor to provides a decent product.
Here's the crux of it all, which applies to all higher end/higher priced swords, not just with Albion. Disclaimer: this is my personal opinion and doesn't reflect the overall opinion of Longship, and everyone is free to disagree. The historical collector crowd, martial practitioner crowd, and bladed art crowd will always be a niche market. Could you probably sell a lot of pieces if you kept your profit margin low and increased your production capacity to meet that demand? Absolutely. It would also put you out of business in a couple years. Unless you somehow released a compelling new design that everyone had to have every year, eventually, people will have all the pieces they want from you and stop buying. Then you downsize/divest, cut costs, lower production capacity, maybe raise prices when you can't cut anymore, and then you're right back to where you started. This part of the sword market cannot survive a price war. Differentiation through innovation is the only way we survive.
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