Kurt_701 wrote on Jan 6
th, 2019 at 4:06pm:
When the seller tells me " it should clean up", that drives me wild. You should not remove patina but for pete's sake clean the bore a little and I may be willing to meet your price.
Kurt
We have a gun store here that probably sells more guns than several other stores combined! The seller told me, "I wont spend one minute of my time, or my employee's time cleaning guns."
He is in it for the money, and doesn't seem to have any interest at all in collecting anything, nor does he even like having collectible firearms really. He's OK buying them at dirt cheap prices, but just wants to turn them over and not spend time on them.
He had a Ballard Pacific .40-85 covered in brown varnish all over the metal. Fortunately the boys who did it removed the wood first! But when we were negotiating he wanted a price high enough that it was in the range of a minty gun. I told him if he cleaned it up I'd think about whether it was worth it. He refused, and eventually came down to a very low price I could live with if the finish under the old brown varnish was no good.
It took me 7 1/2 hours with acetone to get all the varnish off, but when I did it was beautiful. I'd have given him twice the money I gave if he'd had one of his employees spend some time doing the same thing I did.
Looked pretty sad to start.
(You need to Login or Register to view media files and links) (You need to Login or Register to view media files and links) But the first varnish removed showed promise.
(You need to Login or Register to view media files and links) And even better as the cleaning went further.
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