Not Always A Disaster

As you know, I am not one of Gunsmith Bubba's fans.

Bubba has destroyed a lot of history over the years.

I have to concede that Bubba didn't ruin much of value when he did it.  The guns that Bubba attacked are nearly always the guns that Armies have dumped, all at once onto the commercial market.

A famous example is the .50-70 M1866 Trapdoor.  They were $12 new and dumped on the market for $2 each.  This during a time where a Colt SAA was $10 and a new Winchester '73 was $20.  Hella bargain.

Try finding one in original condition today.  What did it cost?  Just to give some perspective, $2 in 1873 is just a bit more than $38 now.

Perhaps more common in the US is a sporterized version of a Krag.  They were dumped by the Army for pennies on the dollar once sufficient supplies of the M1903 were available.  .30-40 is very close to the .30-30 in performance, so the Krag was considered a good gun for hunting once you lightened it up a bit and improved the sights.

And the improvements are real!  The quality of the work is superb in many cases.  Literally professional quality work.  Real money was spent upgrading these guns and that means that they are worth about 25% of what they'd be worth if they'd been left alone.  At the time they were converted, though, their value was enhanced greatly because they were more useful to the ends of the owner.

There's another category of the milsurp market that deserves at least a grudging respect.  A good sized hunk of the guns that are surplus are also wrecks.  You can use terms like patina, but in your honest heart you know the gun is effectively worthless even if it shoots and will never have any value because there's an abundance of pristine or very nice examples.

These are the "fuck it, I'm going to see if I can fix it" guns.

Sometimes it comes out very well indeed.