I have a friend who is a VP of a manufacturing firm in China that does extensive work with machine tools and had a chance to discuss this idea with him. He was home for the holidays. He is pretty knowledgable about costs for finely machined parts. We disassembled a Luger and removed a breech block from the toggle train on a '38 Mauser, and stripped everything off the breech block so he could see the part clearly. Theory was the breechblock is one of the more challenging parts.
He was pretty impressed by the machining. Due to all the angles and cuts etc. his assessment was that while CNC, 3D printing etc. might speed the process up and make it cheaper today than say a few years ago, manufacturing a Luger replica would be a challenging and expensive undertaking. The parts are complex enough that you'd still need to cast the parts. Many would require several CNC setups. Due to the complexity of the setups, and the number of operations required to machine the various parts, he felt the setup cost would be prohibitive at low volumes. Essentially he validated the opinions of several in this thread that we are not there yet in terms of short run manufacturing for such complex/hard parts.
I would love for someone to prove him wrong. But am not expecting that for at least a few years.
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