buzz
-
Posts
2061 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
12
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Gallery
Posts posted by buzz
-
-
No offense, but....
1. A price list older than about 12 months is of questionable value. A 10 year old list is prehistoric.
2. Whenever there is a thread on pricing, a lot of people will wax philosophic about supply and demand and say stuff like "it's worth whatever you're willing to pay."
Or they will lament how "greedy sellers have ruined the hobby". (Apparently the sellers are holding a gun to the buyer's heads and making them pay?)
But there is actually a range of typical selling prices for most stuff. Note the words "range" and "typical."
The more common the item is, the more sales data there is. A really rare item can be hard to price.
Colt parts are rare, but surely they are not so rare that no general pricing can be guessed at.
Try going on gunbroker and looking at completed auctions with bids, that actually resulted in a sale.
-
duplicate post
-
Im a newbie when it comes to thompsons, but ive been studying them as much as i can for the past year.
Is there anyway to tell a difference between early savage and commerical savage
Ive been trying to read tracie hills book, but its just to overwhelming with information. So now im reading american thunder with is more higher level view of thompsons and allows to to understand thompsons better.
A appreciate all the help and info on the forum, hopefully one i will become a jedi master of thompson information.
There is an idea floating around that savage commercial guns have a higher fit and finish than other early Thompsons, or lots of nickel steel parts, or colt parts, but I've not seen this.
Based on the smattering of commercial guns I've seen, it looks to me like they just plucked some guns out of the packing crates and sold them to the police.
I don't think the current "collector narrative" on Savage Commercials is very accurate or complete, due to a lack of guns to examine.
Gun collectors will always tend to believe the story that is most interesting. If you come up with a really nifty gun theory, it can become the official story without any proof.
The best thing to do is do an FOIA inquiry on the gun. If it's a commercial it will have a 1940 NFA registration.
-
This forum kicks ass.
-
I have a 17XXX Savage Commercial. So your guns were made within a few days of mine.
Definitely do a FOIA on your guns. I did a FOIA inquiry on mine and was able to determine that it belonged to a suburban NYC police department along with another Thompson, a Colt.
I have seen a couple of 17,000 and 18,000 serial number range Commercials pop up in the last year, one was only about 15 serial numbers away from mine.
We should start collecting photographs of these Commercial guns before they disappear back into gun safes, not to be seen again for 20 years. They sort of pop up now and again but nobody seems to know much about them.
For example, there are descriptions of savage commercials that indicate that they should have a higher level of fit and finish than the rest of the British contract guns, but none of the 17,000 and 18,000 serial number range guns I have seen look any different, they just have normal savage parts and black oxide finish.
Mine has a Colt buttstock and an index line on the receiver but not on the barrel. The barrel is a Savage and all of the internals are Savage.
Mine had a nickle steel bolt that was damaged on the bolt face, the lip was deformed. The barrel and feed ramp are pristine and perfect, so I figure that someone just dropped it on the floor.
-
it's easy enough to picture a barrel getting burned out eventually and the extractor giving up the ghost.
i have noticed certain guns will beat the crap out of the recoil spring and require a swap once in a while.
being heated and violently worked makes metal undergo changes to the crystal structure
if you bend a coat hanger wire back and forth, the energy you are putting into the wire will make it change from dead soft to very hard and brittle. then it snaps.
There are two things about gun collectors that I find flabbergasting:
1. The insistence by some gun guys that springs don't lose power. Every spring manufacturer on earth will tell you that springs lose power over time under certain conditions, usually on the order of 15%. But there is this legion of gun guys who insist that it doesn't happen.
2. The insistence on using non-wood products to refinish gun stocks. Like as if guns have some magic fairy powers that render them immune to normal wood stripping and finishing products, you must use fingernail polish and oven cleaner and sharpie ink to finish the stock. Nobody has a clue what they're doing, they apply products without understanding anything about wood staining and finishing, the stocks often come out bizarre looking. But it's this "thing" that won't go away.
It's like if you went to a car forum and everyone was saying to use moonshine instead of anti-freeze and take half the spark plugs out and pour elmers glue into the cylinders. Totally bizarre.
(rant over)
-
If the barrel of an M1 has been replaced there's a 99% chance the gun was a registered DEWAT, especially any gun that has been through an arsenal rebuild. A LOT of M1s were processed by the importer/retailers of DEWATs in the fifties and later until import of live MGs became resgricted to dealer samples after the '68 Amnesty. Even after that M1s were DEWATed by people who didn't want a live MG, even though the guns were registered.
DEWATing of M1 Thompsons by the importer/retailers, generally speaking was quite consistent. Treasury had long ago given up on supervising the welding and issuing of a signed certificate by the time retail DEWAT MG sales got rolling, but the shops that did the work kept to the treasury protocols. Shops varied on the techniques used when they did them. The breech weld and barrel weld to the receiver was the standard practice. One or more shop's technique was a drill rod or mild steel rod inserted into a hole in the bottom of the front end of the receiver that was drilled through the grip iron attachment, then through the chamber and the rod end welded to the receiver. sometimes the boldface was ground off or welded over. One-off deactivations are fairly common as well. Then, of course, a few never had the barrel welded to the receiver but the breech was welded shut.
Registered DEWAT M1s, '28s, etc continue to show up as the values rise. Reactivated DEWAT prices are going up because buyer's don't make the hair splitting distinction between an M1 that has been arsenal repaired/refinished, which is no longer original, and a reactivation that well done. Neither is in factory original condition.
There is a always a lot of curmudgeonly grumbling and muttering on this site about high prices and what is worth this much or that much for whatever reason, with often a lot of crazy bias, but the bias against reactivations does give those buyers who are really hardly able to afford an M1and desperate to do so, a bit of a break in price. This will not last, most likely, a whole lot longer.
As with any collectible, the finer the hairs are split about what incremental value is added for what almost imperceptible difference, that preoccupation creates higher and higher prices for those items that meet all the requirements on the check list of must-have attributes. This is at the core of the elitism of collecting so, in my own view, with the Thompsons, anything that keeps the prices a bit lower to widen the participation in the hobby is a blessing. As all values rise with the tide of increasing prices, there won't be any deals left or non-exclusive collectible Thompsons and accessories. Nothing new here, though, really…….
You are clearly very clued in on rewats.
I can't dispute anything you wrote but i do offer the following thoughts:
1. There is no reason to spend the same money for a gun that was rewatted vs one that wasn't. If two guns are offered for sale, one rewatted and one not, the demand for the non-rewatted gun will be higher.
I think you're always going to see the price of rewats trailing by a few thousand.
2. The bad guns tend to devalue the good guns.
Some rewats are really screwed up and some have no damage except for simple barrel replacement.
The rewats with the damaged threads and weld holes in the receiver will tend to devalue all rewats in the minds of gun collectors.
Because most people do not have a complete understanding of the rewat process, so they have no metric to measure what they are getting.
Same with rewelds, the quality ranges from superb to horrible. The horrible ones shed a bad light on the good ones, because of the uncertainty about what the buyer is getting.
-
those auctions are all over the place...when WH's are selling for $18 and then $30k at the same auction its hard to see any ''real'' prices to use for comparison....
if i were to sell my thompson i would use one of those auction houses....prices are just nutty most of the time
The auction prices are silly and I would not use them as a guide.
A WH selling at RIA for $28k is not a measure of their current prices when they sell for $17k on gunbroker.
But me, I can buy a WH for $5,000 ALL DAY LONG. (just kidding)
-
Getting back to Thompsons,
A lot of guys feel that 28 style Thompsons are better than M1s and M1A1s. But that's not engineering or military type evaluation, that's a gun collector evaluation.
Gun collectors always adore guns with lots of little bells and whistles and extra cost features.
Gun collectors always love the custom shop guns more than the field grade guns.
More than any other gun I can think of, the 21 and 28 were LOADED with extra cost features, to the point that the gun was so expensive that it sold poorly.
The 21 even had a beautiful custom shop type blued finish and the fit and finish was exquisite.
When they stripped off all those extra cost features and made the M1A1 version, they technically improved the gun as a war weapon. It was literally a product improvement.
The M1A1 is a superb weapon and built like a tank. The fit and finish is as good as any USGI WWII rifles.
If AO had introduced the M1A1 and 1921 at the same time, compete with 30 round mags, the M1A1 would have been 99% of their sales.
The above fact confuses people because gun was converted from an super-expensive feature-laden gun to an fairly expensive plain-jane war weapon. So they think it's not as good.
As far as gun collecting goes, the value that gun collectors place on guns is a function of the collectors imagination.
Singer made 1911s, they sell for $20,000+. It has a little tiny "S" on the side for "Singer". A $1000 gun with a $19,000 "S". That's gun collecting for ya.
M1/M1A1 Thompsons were the main USGI subgun of WWII. WWII is the biggest event in world history and gun collectors basically worship US and German WWII firearms.
The M1A1 fought on Normandy and Iwo Jima. It's up in the tippy tip-top of the pyramid of historic collector firearms.
Someone who is a WWII collector is going to value an M1A1 differently than a pure Thompson fanatic.
I have both a 1928 and an M1A1, i like them about the same. I do like shooting the M1A1 a little better, the rear sight WAY easier to use.
-
Huggy,
When I bought my NIB Vector for $7900, i was told by a number of people that I overpaid, complete with indulgent chuckles.
Ever notice that those oh-so-helpful smug people can never ever point to a cheaper one for you to actually buy?
They say stuff like "I can buy a NIB UZI for $7000 ALL DAY LONG."
Okay then, show me one for sale for $7000. Cue the sound of crickets chirping.
If I had a NIB vector, I'd put it on gunbroker for $15k and get it with ease, I've seen them sell for that already.
I had the exact same experience as you, I bought a NIB Vector with alignment issues, and had the trunnion welds break,
I gave Andrewski $600 to fix it and then had to send it to Hoffmann to actually get it fixed. I think I paid Hoffmann $900. I'll have to check that.
The bad thing about Vector UZIs is that some have certain dimensional problems and bad welds that need fixing.
The good thing is that CAN be fixed by a gunsmith who actually knows what he's doing AND they are indestructable. AND they are full SMG spec guns. AND they have case hardened receivers.
Look at it this way, when Group punched out those UZI flats and registered them, and then Vector sold them in 2000, they doubled the number of UZIs in the registry. That kept prices down.
If they had never made those UZIs, you would have paid a whole lot more for a crappy semi-auto conversion job or a full auto bolt, or even worse, a crappy semi-auto conversion with a married slotted bolt.
I say all hail Group Industries and Vector! Hurrah! Hurrah!
As far as buying a NIB MG and then devaluing it, that was your (and mine) OCD disorder at work. That was a matter of policy, not necessity. A mint used UZI for $12,500 is a better deal than a NIB UZI for $15k. As it is, neither one of us paid the premium for NIB so it's all to the good.
As far as 22 kits go, I put those in same category as flying coach with a pounding hangover while a huge fat guy fills the air with body odor and a baby screams in the seat next to me. And the PA system is malfunctioning and making a intermittent buzzing sound. -
As far as waiting to buy an MG goes, there are three things that generally happen when people go to buy an MG:
1. They stumble across an awesome once-in-a-lifetime deal out of pure dumb luck.
2. They pay full retail, feeling like a chump at the time, and then a year or two later they're glad they did because the prices went up 25%.
3. They refuse to pay full retail this year because they insist on pretending that they're buying a normal consumer product. Then they end up paying 25% more next year.
I remember back in seeing FNC sears sitting unsold for $2700 and NIB M11/9s not selling at $3400. Because they were "rip off" dealer prices.
Today's full retail price is tomorrow's once-in-a-lifetime bargain.
Just a few years ago USGI M1s and M1A1s were selling for $17k to $18k and USGI 1928A1s were selling for $23k or so.
In the space of about 3 months, M1s and M1A1s jumped up to the same price as 1928A1s.
There are so few guns for sale that all it takes to move the prices 25% is for one guy to post up a cool video on youtube.
-
UZIs and MACs both doubled in price between 2012 and 2015. They've sort of been steady since then.
That's how it goes, zooms up and then goes steady for a while.
If you got a NIB Vector for $13,000, you stole it. I have seen NIB vectors sell for almost $16k on gunbroker. $13k is the normal price of a used UZI.
Realistically, the $500 you gave to Andrewski should not be counted as part of the cost of owning the UZI. You paid money and got nothing of value in return, so how is that the fault of the gun?
Why is it going to cost another $2000 to fix? Last time I checked, Richard Hoffmann charges about $600 to install a milled feed ramp, reweld the rear plate and reweld the trunnion and bend the receiver a little.
-
uzis have been flat, m16 are pretty flat, macs have gone up and are now going back down.....some guns are increasing, some arent....there just are no thompsons out there any good right now....no original's
and none sold recent to compare....(not counting $40k auction prices)
id be in on this m1a1 for $22,500...i think at that price you would not lose...if it was original finish i think $25,000 would be a nice price
Buzz---do M1a1's have serial #'s on the lower? a barrel line too?
The prices always go up in leaps and plateaus, no idea why, they just do.
Probably because the market is so tiny. There's not enough sales to smooth out the jagged edges.
Some M1A1s have the serial number on the lower, but they stopped at some point.
There is no index line on the barrel. None are needed anyway.
I don't think I would hold out for an original finish M1 or M1A1. They are a rare bird.
If you really had your heart set on one, the thing to do would be find a real solid minty rebuild and buy it, and then maybe eventually replace it with an original finish gun in the future when it cropped up.
Waiting and waiting is not a good idea in the MG market. This year a nice rebuild might be $25k and next year it might be $30k.
People snickered when I bought my NIB Vector UZI for $7900 from a dealer. The price was at least $300 too high! What a fool!
-
It's very hard to find an original finish M1A1, seems like 95% of them were arsenal rebuilt.
Once they are refinished and rebuilt, the level of originality is kind of irrelevant. Just like any other rebuilt WWII guns.
I would expect a nice minty fresh rebuilt M1A1 to go for $25k.
If the gun truly just had the barrel spun off and replaced, that would be ideal, because you could get it for a rewat price tag but without the welding and repairs that rewats usually have.
A rewat is a rewat, don't pay a non-rewat price for it.
-
Got Uzi's rewat sold for $25k or at least thats what it was listed for...in the past i thought rewats were selling at WH prices...but after got uzi's gun i guess not anymore
M1a1's used to sell for $22-23k in original condition 1.5 years ago...as i bought nicer original gun for $26k 1.5 years ago its hard to believe rewat m1a1's are now $25,000....but i dont know....for me its a low $20's gun.....whereas 1.5 years ago it was a high teens gun......
i have not seen an original finish/matching numbers thompson for sale in many,many months.....so i dont know where the market is...ruben has his refinished thompsons for $26,999....and they all sold....tells me the market may be $25,000...not sure if his were rewats or original
i still think you should wait for a 1928AC police gun, original finish, numbers matching....havent seen one for a while now...not sure why? 1.5 years ago they were $25,000 and a WW2 A1 all original was on subguns for $23,500.....they just dont seem to come up anymore...now they are all refinished
MG prices from 1.5 years ago don't mean much right now. A 10% increase in prices over 1.5 years would be about normal for the MG market.
-
I bought a bunch of spare parts for my Thompsons, it looks like it was a waste of money.
what exactly is going to break or wear out?
can anyone testify as to a thompson part that they installed new and it broke or wore out?
probably some springs and extractors need replacement because of being installed in the gun for 70 years
but has anyone actually ever worn out a NOS part?
-
I skimmed the thread too fast.
For some reason I thought you were talking about the Geraldo TV show about Capone.
I agree that movies and TV shows absolutely made the Thompson into an iconic firearm in the mind of the general public.
Every year there is another movie made with a Thompson being used in a huge flashy gun battle.
I was too young for that show "Combat" but I know that it was a big hit with the older baby boomers.
-
I don't understand this thread.
The popularity of the Thompson as a collector firearm has nothing to do with some cheesy TV show.
-
I'd like to see the auction listing on the $40k M1A1 if anyone has a link
-
-
Bob, I understand exactly what you're saying.
I need a chalkboard and a half hour of talking to make myself understood, typing a dozen sentences into the internet is futile.
In a half hour in person I can say about 3500 words and draw 10 pictures.
-
There are lunar landers standing on the moon and it's the result of a very happy marriage between the slide rule guys, the testing lab guys, and the craftsmen that machined it.
Those things are all part of one big process, not exclusive of each other.
-
So anyway,
The original grip and mount is a determinate beam called a "cantilever beam".
If you put your M1 in a vice and hung a 100 lb weight from the center of the grip (about 4" away from the mount), you would get a bending force in the mount of
Mx = F x d = 100 lbs force x 4" arm = 400 lb inches.
If you put strain gauges on the actual gun, the real load on the mount would be like 391 lb inches, match the calculations almost exactly because it's a very simple mechanism.
Now, if you add the barrel band on, the forces in the grip become very complicated and full of imponderables.
In order to get a feel for how much the band is helping, you can pretend that the band is an idealized simple support and pretend that the grip is an idealized determinate beam called a "propped cantilever". And according to the perfect idealized elastic behavior, the bending in the mount drops from 400 lb inches to 100 lb inches.
HOWEVER, the 100 lb inches number depends on the band acting like a very simple support, a point load.
In reality, the band is not an idealized point load, it presses the mount tightly against the barrel and makes the whole assembly very rigid.
So in real life, as Bob pointed out, you would expect the actual bending load to be far lower than the idealized calculated value, maybe 25 lb in instead of 100 lb in.
As an engineer, I'm aware of the discrepancy, but I can still use the calc as a tool, because I'm actually interested in the upper bound, the highest possible load.
Like if I was designing a $500,000 version of this gizmo out of rolled steel beams to support some pipeline on an oil rig, I would use the idealized version to design it, and it would work fine because it would be a conservative design but still reasonably economical.
I would have a finished product that was guaranteed to be stronger than the applied load and would be reasonably efficient.
If you were doing something similar to design a part for the space shuttle, where weight is critical, the crude idealized design method would be too heavy and you'd have to get out the computers and strain gauges and start refining the crap out of the calculation.
So anyway, the barrel band does one heck of job reducing the load on the mount, as a MINIMUM it reduces the load by 75%.
-
Reconbob,
I'm too lazy to type out a wall of text to explain my engineering stuff. And nobody would want to read it anyway.
If I could stand in front of a chalkboard and talk about this topic for a half hour, you would a.) stop thinking that I'm a calculator jockey and b.) understand my meaning exactly.
Engineering calculations don't replace reality, they reflect a simplified version of reality.
The closer that the actual object is to the idealized version, the closer the calculated values are to the real world values.
If I have a static 1000 lb load hanging from a single beam made from elastic material, the calculated internal forces in the beam are going to be within 1% of the actual forces.
But if I tried to calculate the loads in the 100s of 2x4s in your balloon framed house, I would be lucky if I had a 25% error.
There's a name for engineers that don't understand the relationship between calculations and reality, they're called "dumb asses".
COLT Parts Values Dec 2017
in Thompson Submachine Gun Message Board
Posted · Edited by buzz
This thread doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense to me.
The commentary doesn't jibe up with my experiences of buying and selling gun stuff. Or buying and selling anything at all.
Some guns and gun parts are so rare that the only way to figure out what it's worth is to actually offer it up for sale in an auction and see what happens.
If you insist on getting tip top price for the item, you have to put some work into it and it could take a few auction cycles to figure out what people will pay for it.
But Colt parts come up for sale fairly often. There is a regular "market" for Colt parts, it's a thin, specialized market but it exists. So there is some recent cost data that you can use.
I sold a handful of rusty Colt XX mags on gunbroker, and it did not take me long to come up with a fair price.
The mags all sold after about a month of dickering with a questions and buyer's offers, so I figure I got the top retail price for them at the time.
The people who bought the mags off of me were not "clowns". There was no clown aspect to the event.
It was just a normal friendly hobby transaction, the buyers went away happy and the seller went away happy. It's called "capitalism."