The View From North Central Idaho - Tam was so on target

Friday, March 07, 2008

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Yesterday a friend (nameless to protect the guilty) and I were chatting over cups of hot beverages. He told me about ending up spending $1000* to save $100. He had purchased a noise suppressor for one of his toys and was going to save the $100 fee the suppressor manufacture charged to remove the "permanently attached" flash hider. After he and his grinding wheel were done he concluded it was less painful to purchase a new barrel than to submit the old mangled one for the installation. I think I managed to look sympathetic throughout the entire story even though I was thinking of Tam's relevant post with a smirk struggling to burst out. When he finished his story he read my mind and said, "Tam's post was so timely."

Yup.

*The $1000 included some other stuff that was a side effect, not just the barrel replacement.

Gun Rights

Joe Huffman Friday, March 07, 2008 9:58:37 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

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Friday, March 07, 2008 12:06:22 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

So very, very relevant at all times. In the instrument repair world (it may have originated in auto repair) we had a saying:

"Shop Time:
$40 per hour
$55 if you watch
$75 if you tried to fix it yourself first and screwed it up."

..or something like that.

Back in the '80s I had a customer-- one of the top flute players in the region, at age 25 she was already doing an endorsement deal with a high-end manufacturer, so she had this really great instrument. She'd bring her flute in and get a ton of work done on it, to have it really dialed in for maximum sensitivity and performance. A couple weeks later she'd be in with the flute screwed up all to hell. She would try to make adjustments herself, believing that that was what a really good player did-- you had to work on your own instrument. She'd then spend a bunch of money she couldn't afford, to have it tweaked in again.

This repeated itself for several years. When I asked her why she didn't simply get a cheap flute to experiment with, she replied, "Well, that would just be a waste of time."

I don't know right brain from left brain, but clearly they don't have to both work at the same time or in the same person.