The Country Doctor

This is aimed at Mr. Average, the probably small-time gunsmith. It is not for large shops and the competition gun boys with factory-sponsored champions that can afford full page ads in American Handgunner magazine. It is for the "no name" gunsmith that nobody is writing up when they fixed up the gun used to shoot a "world record" jack rabbit. Specialty, big-time shops, and custom makers that regularly do business in deep in to the six-figure range and up aren’t going to understand this anyway.

Their primary interest is in selling you their add-on parts and making more profit. That’s all well and good for if we small-timers buy and sell their parts in our work we provide a service to our customers while also making a profit, something that is (or should be) the goal of everyone in business in anything.

If you have ever been in the old Pachmayr or Paul Jaeger shops or at the Griffin & Howe gunsmithy, you will at once—at least after the envy dies down—realize that there is a wide world of expensive guns and Master Gunsmiths. You will find the Parkers, L. C. Smiths, Purdeys, Fabbris, Merkles, etc. What you won’t find is the Iver Johnsons, Savages, Stevens, H&Rs, Remingtons, or Winchesters, or any such pedestrian, commoner, offthe-rack guns.

I suppose no nobility is found in these inexpensive firearms but they and their owners have a great deal in common with you and the country doctor. Both of you treat these different patients and in each case the disease is different. You and Ol’ Doc have to be able not only to diagnose the trouble but you are expected to fix it. Not much romance in building a custom, hand-fitted part for these guns (especially for a "patient" that can’t afford it) but there isn’t much romance in curing a social disease either.

But you both do it. All in all, taking the number of gunsmiths around the country who keep the old favorites owned by common people working—and after all, both of these are the best kind—what are you and Ol’ Doc doing? You are performing a service. What is this service? The country doctor may have been phased out by the newer, younger specialist as he eventually could not compete but that’s where we are one up on him. We don’t have to specialize as long as there are two different off-the-rack guns to buy.

We will end up fixing both sooner or later. We may not be undertakers but we can wait. The small-time, local gunsmith’s specialty lies in the fact that we are able to repair, refinish, or improve a whole range of different types and makes. Our "specialty" of not having a specialty along with our service is that we can do a job for a local customer that the custom maker or the elite house cannot (or, rather, simply won’t) at a price our customer can actually afford. We are the country (gun) doctors of today.

While we may not make house calls or trade our services for a bag of potatoes, we have that old Yankee know-how to keep things shootin’. You can’t buy this knowledge for it only comes with time and experience. You can’t get it from a correspondence course or a school without also working on customer projects. Just like a country doctor, getting through education basics and preliminaries merely starts the learning and only years spent working at it can give the experience.

Unless you have worked on a great many different guns, you really aren’t out of your internship yet. If you think so, come work for me or any other local independent gunsmith for a month and learn just how far away from your Ph. D. you really are. You need to have a service and knowledge that should be of great reward to you—monetarily as well as personal satisfaction. Nowhere cana person go to get as much service, experience, ability in working with a large array of firearms as a local gunsmith.

Just like a country doctor will see and treat a much larger array of ailments than a specialist ever will. While you may be learning with many of your customer projects, be certain you’re running your shop in a reasonably profitable manner. While not as glitzy as those big shops, you area professional and can offer something locally they can’t. Your ability and knowledge cost money and time to develop and you deserve a reasonable minimum rate and hourly rate for your work.

Gunsmithing boils down to how many hours you work for how much. You are repairing, not making a product that will sell for so much. As you continue to stay in this business you will have to one day realize that your hourly rate is what you are going to be living on. This is your profit. For example, let’s take a job involving replacing a broken pin that takes 15 minutes. What do you charge?

At least $10-15, or a minimum charge for specific work posted on the wall of, say, $25.00, along with the cost of the part added in. If your final bill is $30.00 and you think this is too high, take your car into a dealer and get a fuse changed. Charge a fair but profitable rate. PS, Ol’ Doc didn’t die poor. AG