How long is a reasonable timeframe?

[Coolduckboy]

Hopefully STI will get their machines to run in over-drive and make me my dang gun...............patience never has been my strong point.

[HSMITH]

What kills most smiths are the small jobs, put a sight in, re-barrel, trigger job, scope mount, etc. These small jobs are ALWAYS available in quantity if the smith is good, and it is really hard to tell someone that it is going to take MONTHS to get to a trigger job or drive a sight out so you can install a new one. Customers generally get pissy when told it will take MONTHS to do something simple too, making it harder to say no. First in-first out lets the smith stay more or less on time, but it is really hard for a lot of people to do. They want to help people, are afraid of the customer not coming back after being disappointed with lead times, afraid the customer will say negative things about trying to get work done and things like that.

A smith can either choose to take the small work and suffer the consequences in delivery times, accurately predict how much small work will come in and what effect it will have on delivery times (impossible), or run a first in-first out program and accept possible consequences for doing so. Full time gunsmiths need to eat, generally at least one time per day, so turning work away or telling someone that their 30 minute job is going to take a couple months to get to isn't going to happen.

That is what it looks like on the other side of the fence. There is NO excuse for communication being so poor, even if the answer is 180* out from what you want to hear you have to at least respect a man that will give you the most accurate answer he can with the information he has at the time. Not getting an answer at all is unacceptable.