“How to crawl Gun Shows.”

To many guys go out to a Big Gun Show, and think they are going to fall on an old under valued classic and flip it for a mint.   Guys, just because the gun is old and rusty, doesn’t mean it’s valuable.   No, Dillinger did not own that gun.

Guns are a very fickle market.  Old guns, even more so.  However there are some older guns that if you can find at the right price, you can reliably turn them for a profit.  But to do this, you have to know the guns you are looking at… and you have to know the guys looking for them.  Old S&W’s are a solid.  Old Winchesters are too.  The only problem is that everyone knows that.  So finding a decent condition gun at a good price is usually the difficult trick.  Sometimes you can luck on one, but you can’t bank on stumbling into them with regularity.   So you have to look for other classics that have followings… SIG’s, Colt, Savage, Remingtons, (Believe it or not, they didn’t always make model 700’s)  Mausers.   (Not ever Mauser was WWII, German)

Now, you can’t go around the gun show with a great big copy of a Blue Book.  That’s uncool and the dealers will not treat you well.  So what you need to do is find a couple groups of guns that interest you, and you need to educate yourself on them in detail.  Learn histories, dates, places, and the conditional values.  You can’t find everything on the internets… so you are going to have to read books.

When you hit the next gunshow – look only for those guns you know something about.  Check conditions carefully.  Take some Binos with you.  You can use them as a microscope if you look through them backwards holding the ocular lens within an inch.  Look for wear marks, pitting, examine markings, and look for things that the gun should have.  For example, that S&W 745 IPSC we took in on trade… everything on it was golden save for one thing.  It had adjustable sights.  It should have had fixed sights.  That actually hurts its value off the bat.  Unless you find out that yes, it did indeed come from the factory with an adjustable.  Then it can help the value.  If a gunsmith or a Bubba put the adjustable sight on it – hurt value.  That means you have to know the types of adjustable sights S&W had at the time of manufacture to tell if its period correct.  Cause a gun in the 80’s, in spite of what the guy at the table in the gun show says – did not ship with night sights from Trijicon.  (That’s just an example, nothing to do with the aforementioned Smith)

One you get a handful of guns down pat… your ready to do a major gun show crawl.