Varminterror said:
Odd to see someone in college, i.e. early 20's, that misunderstands what MIM means in terms of end product quality. I can forgive old codgers that dislike change, or misunderstand that cast steel or injected metal is somehow related to "pot metal" that earned a poor reputation 50yrs ago, but you're obviously not old enough to have those direct experiences or biases. Must be drinking some of the old fella's koolaid though.
Absolutely NO reason to favor cast and machined parts for hammers and triggers over MIM and fitted parts. You're just being foolish to disregard MIM hammers and triggers. There ARE parts that I'd not prefer to have MIM, but hammers and triggers are not one of them. As an engineer that has worked in tool design/production, and product development, I can say with confidence that I favor MIM hammers AS A SHOOTER, even if I don't love how the material-saving recesses look.
I also don't agree with your naïve understanding of production cost relative to consumer cost. MIM and other production improvements help manufacturers keep SALE costs down, because their MANUAL LABOR COST is increasing faster than national inflation rates in recent years. MIM costs will ALWAYS decline, whereas the hand-moving casting, machining, and fitting manual labor costs will ALWAYS increase. Production innovation has to stay a step ahead, because materials prices and labor costs will always increase over time.
Frankly, it's a moot point for the New Vaquero anyway. I have a 2005 Ruger catalog that lists stainless Vaqueros as $589 MSRP. Factor for inflation, that's $721, compared to the 2014 MSRP of $739. None too far off. That's also a price for the Vaquero, not New Vaquero, which came out at a slightly higher price than the old Vaquero since it was an "enhanced model" (Old vaq's were priced ~$10 cheaper than blackhawks at the time, which were cheaper by about the same than the SBH's. The New Vaq's came out at about the same price as the SBH's - new and improved, as it were). In other words, even though the price has risen over $150 in 9yrs, a minimum wage worker has to flip the same number of burgers to earn enough to buy one.
This will be my last post on this thread since clearly you feel the need to be antagonistic towards me.
Odd or not, I never related to mim or cast to pot metal, Infact i clearly repeated over and over that i like rugers investment casting. I have many experiences with mim, most gun manufactures use it now. Personally i do not like it
By all means, if you believe that there is no reason to favor cast or forged parts, well lucky you, they implement in most any gun, you could go as far as to replace all your hammers and triggers with MIM and im sure you would be fine. There are plenty of older guns out there for me to purchase that have better quality than most of the new stuff.
I don't believe that my understanding economy is naive though you may think so. If you think cost cutting measures that benefit the producer more so than the end user are good, than by all means go buy a new remington 870 express, hows that painted on finish? Cost cutting measures are just that cost cutting but on the producers side in terms of labor and quality, I have found new in box smith and wessons for less than current production models. Mim may help costs decline but that is because of the removal of quality control, sure that may be good for the manufacturer to line their pockets and keep yours full, but its cheaper for a company to send out a sub par product and have it break on the user and have them return it, than it is to implement quality control and hand fitting of parts.
They are pushing the bottom limit, to make the cheapest end product, for the lowest price, to the lowest bidder, that sir is free market economy.
MIM may last the average shooters useage of that gun, but lets say for example a normal part is found to last 20,000 rounds. Now the company finds over time the average person who buys there product only shoots the firearm 5,000 rounds in the lifetime of that product. Well now the old part is overbuilt, here comes MIM, it has 98% of the strength of forge no? Well for the average user who wishes to buy the cheapest gun they can buy that works, that is fine, for the person who looks to buy one firearm of a type that they can rely on and hope to get that 20,000 rounds out of it because that is all they have, then now he must repair his gun an average of 4x.
That is my issue with mim, it is built to the lowest end product that works for the average person. I dont like it, i like when quality standards were higher, look at some of the .22s even the really cheap single shots for that time period, and the quality is usually much higher than the plastic molded junk you see now a days for the same price bracket, quality standards have fallen, people are used to it, and thats the problem.
again,
have a good day, i look forward to browsing more of this forum in the future.
-Adam