I met Alex many times at gun shows and he is a gentleman as well as being very skilled, his work was superb. Unfortunately here in Australia most people are not prepared to spend money for skilled labor particularly when engineering is involved. With guns it is even worse as they are relatively small so people think that if it is small it should only cost a small amount. Most people would not complain at spending $20000+ on a kitchen which takes a fraction of the time to manufacture yet would faint at spending $2000 on having some gunsmithing work done, but a kitchen is very big and everyone can see it. We do a lot of classic car restoration work and generally we don't have any problems with payment as again the items are big and flashy, although we still occasionally get customers come to us wanting to restore something like an MG TC and they tell us that they have a tight budget. I just laugh at them and tell them that with Racing or Restoration there is no such thing as a budget and if you have to stick to a budget then you really can't afford to be restoring a car. The amount of work that goes into something like that is staggering and that is the same with gunsmithing if you are doing it properly. It would be interesting if Mr. Dorleac was to tell us how many hours he spends on his creations, I bet it would be a huge amount and his actual hourly rate would not be that high.

Waidmannsheil.