The pretzel do you think one of the nucleus owners would spin off a comp barrel to run a budget $200 barrel to train with? Let’s say they have $800 comp 6mm creed and they want to save barrel life so they spin on a budget barrel to train with.
Most of the people I know who shoot a different caliber for training just have a second gun that's either inexpensive or designed to match their current setup in .223 usually.
There might be a few people who do it, but I wouldn't wager that more than 5-10%, being optimistic, of the people buying the Nucleus would be interested. That said, if enough of them also ordered the BarLoc that could change.
Reason being less than 10% of the PRS guys I know and have talked with have trainer guns, and none of the ones in my area (at least that I know of) swap out barrels on their main gun to practice.
I'm not saying there aren't people who do it or would want to do it, but they're definitely in a small minority. I don't mean to hold you back if this is your business plan that you want to try out, but it's just one that I wouldn't invest in because I think the market would be very small. The people who burn through barrels fast enough to worry about barrel replacement costs are usually the same people who are concerned with accuracy enough to want to avoid a $200 barrel unless it had a proven record of results.
The biggest thing is just the scale, so let's use
@flyer 's best case scenario as an example.
- 1,500 people with Nucleus actions
Let's go ahead and assume, then, that a very generous 50% of the people who buy a Nucleus want to cheap out on their barrel. You've got 750 customers, at least 50% of which will never buy a barrel from you again because they don't wear them out. Assuming you make $50 profit per barrel (unlikely, but we're doing best case scenario) you make $37,500 from this and managed to pay 1/2 of a single good machinist's salary.
- Currently there are about 5,000-6,000 people with a free PRS number (with many of them having never attended a match).
Let's assume a generous 25% of this population is new shooters who want to buy your $200 barrel (not counting the Nucleus buyers who already have one). That's ~1,500 barrels. You're still making $50 per barrel, so you made a total of $75,000 and managed to pay the salary of one good machinist (plus you have $37,500 to go towards the pay of your second employee. Let's say you're a Scrooge, so that's all you pay them all year. You're making 2,250 barrels per year at this point (selling 6-7 per day), and you're clearing $450,000 in gross revenue so you definitely need to hire at least 1 assistant and an accountant.
The problem is that the volume isn't there to make up for the very thin margins you would have. In all reality you'd likely be making less that $50 per barrel because good luck getting a barrel blank that you can confidently slap a 1 MOA guarantee on for only $150. AR barrels can be that cheap because of the economy of scale and the lack of precision required by AR shooters.
AR shooters generally don't require sub-MOA accuracy, meaning they can start with cheaper barrel blanks and they can automate the entire process to crank barrels out faster. There are an estimated 15 million AR15's out there today, and they have to change barrels a lot more regularly than people with bolt guns if they want to maintain accuracy (think about it, if .223 barrel life if around 3,000-5,000 rounds that's only 100-150 30-round magazines and each time they go to the range they're shooting at least 3-4 mags through it without even thinking, plus accelerated wear from them heating the barrel). That number also only counts the lowers out there, and there are many people with 1 lower and multiple uppers in different calibers or with different handguards and other accessories.
