[Big Bad Bob]

On 05/09/11 01:34, Patrick Turner so wittily quipped:
if there are 200 man hours in a chinese amp, ( 5 men working for a
week ), the cost of wages is $128, and if materials in chinese prices
are also $128, then total cost of production = $256,and if you double
that for the profit made my whoever owns the chinese company, maybe
the Chinese Communist Party, then the export price might be $512.

you'd need a design where the cost of the components is the majority of
YOUR cost, and it doesn't take 200 man hours to build. In fact, it
shouldn't take more than 1 or 2 (and that includes MACHINE hours)
implying "no point to point".

Of course that means 'circuit board with parts soldered in place' as ONE
of the 'components' that you'd assemble locally. A cost of $10 per
finished board assembly (to you) is _NOT_ an unreasonable estimate
(assuming volume is high enough).

Anyway, at that point the cost of parts will be 90% of the cost of the
unit. The rest will be the 10 minutes or so it would take a tech to
bolt it together, solder a small number of wires, plug in the tubes, do
a final test, and box it. And if you had pre-fab cables that plug
together "already soldered to the board" you could plug them into each
other, save time and $. Anyway, you might prefer soldering a few extra
interconnecting wires yourself, to avoid connector issues (or have the
boards ship with 'pigtails' already tinned to make that part easy). But
that takes more time. 30 seconds per wire, maybe?


Anyway, all of that needs capital, so I hope you know a rich guy who
likes tube amps.