I also find it extremely hard to believe that R&D has to be done on 1930s technology.
Now that I'm not using a touch screen device (that has a fetich for deleting the majority of whats been typed)
Originally I mentioned R&D in relation to Fx pedals (another item where people complain that the materials cost next to nothing) and are not cheap items.
Assuming you had built a few guitars yourself, would that knowledge be relevant to fairly large scale production. How much would it cost to make it relevant.
Let me ask this question, how much time has Mr Feline or Wez put into learning to build, improving and refining a 1930s designs.
Me I'd say a hell of a fecking lot of time and time costs money
Now think if Jonathan (pardon me using you as an example) wanted to go into mass production. That would mean new production methods CNC kit, in house paint shop, more cost and time efficient methods of chambering or adding nice maple tops to Lions and the like.
How much would that lovely all access neck joint change when it's not cost effective to have somebody make sure it's perfect and to make those adjustments by hand ? It has to be repeatable by CNC (and the machines minder) with varying wood quality.
Lets add finding enough quality wood (my mates dad is an exotic timbers importer and he has a hard time sourcing quality wood at anything like a decent and consistant price)
By the time you get standard production kit to do what it's supposed to do (the never work as the sales people claim), you are into huge amounts of expense. Thats before staff (& their training), stock and premesis are figured in.
You may not be carrying out R&D on the basic design, but it is R&D for production.
Thats one of the reasons Patrick Eggle left his (original) company.
Of course you could just get everything built on the far East and not give a sh1t what it's made from (in this case no matter what the price is it's expensive).
I'm justsaying it's a bigger picture than buying the production equipment and a few templates, and it all costs a lot of money that you have to earn back before you can feed your family.
Youre overstating the cost of 'refinement R&D'
Developing basic technologies and methods is expensive. Ground up research for new designs of electronics and mechanics with existing technology is expensive, but much less so.
Refining the basic designs for a one-man-led, couple of employees/partners/whatever operation like Feline or Legra or Blackmachine or Wez is hard because the manhours cant be spread and the costs fall on few people to one person.
However, the fact that guys like Bob an Johnathon can do it at all should tell you that gibson, fender, ibanez and so on can do it with great ease. We're talking about multi-million pound companies here doing multi-thousand pound development projects. Its nothing. Its a drop in the ocean. ESP want to make a new line of LTDs, and the R&D is utterly neglegable. The materials are insignificant compared to what they are already buying to produce with, the wages for a small team of luthiers are nothing compared to the cost of running their factories, and the cost of developing the basic tech is zero - at most with something a little ambitious like a Variax it may be a couple of hundred of thousand, tops.
The cost of devlopment of FX and modellers and what have you is higher, by far. The time required to refine a circuit is greater, and the more complex the circuit, the more time. But agian, once the basic tech is laid down refinement is easy. Individuals can build effects and pickups with an outlay that, foir an idividual, is most certainly significant, but not crippling. I can see why BKs cost so much - very simple tech, but it takes a lot of Tims time and effort to develop the pickups (and he always seems to have ideas being developed in the background) plus, time someone like Tim or Johnathon is taking to develop a new idea is time they arent making pickups or guitars, so theres that 'cost' too.
But big manufacturers? Its a drop in the ocean.
Lets put it in perspective - a good guitar costs about 1/20th as much new as a good car, about the same as a very good PC, about 1/5th of a motorbike, about the same as a very good (push) bike, as much as a pretty bloody respectable HiFi, or a plasma screen TV.
Do you really think that the R&D and cost of manufacture of these things is as comparable as the price we pay?
The cost of custom/handmade/one-man/small team stuff seems fair to me.
The cost of 'high end' off the shelf stuff is far, far higher than it should be. I havent exactly audited PRS or anything (but then I very much doubt anyone expressing their strng opinions in this thread has) but I can accept a mass produced guitar costing perhaps £200 easily, mainly because cutting down trees, shipping wood and then making anything out of it is relatively expensive in our era of metal, plastics and semiconductors. But £2000? No chance. Theres a factor drving the price up there thats subjective value - people just assume that more expensive things are better, so the higher your price, the better its percieved to be. We should all know in here that even very high end guitars are far from uniformly superbly made (gibson comes to mind immediately, and I've seen mediocre to dreadfull examples from other brands, like Jackson, fender, Ibanez and the most suprising and dissapointing to me - a caparison that I wouldnt have paid £300 for). Theres a factor holding the price down that not that many people can justify spending £2000 on a guitar. Theres another driving it back up that there are many, many people that would like to, and so at some point may well indulge.
The psychoeconomics of it are very important. There are a lot of rationalisations in this thread for why an expensive guitar is expensive, but the reasons we pay so much for them havent really been mentioned, and thats the key, really - the answer to "Why do they cost so much" cant be answered without asking "Why are we prepared to pay so much".
Its completely erroneous to assume that a market value of something is a direct reflection of the cost to make it. Its not. It never has been. Economics is, at its simplest, supply and demand, and the prices we see on guitars are a reflection of our willingness to pay that much for something we enjoy. (One way or another - beit a superb guitar that you fell in love with or prestige or having something similar to musicians you like or whatever - they're all subjective values that determine the height a price can reach).
