When I look back on my first time around in this game, it seems like I usually didn’t buy that many guns in a year. The thing is though, I did it for over thirty years. I’m sure there are muzzleloaders that I owned and sold that I have forgotten. When the safe walked out the door I lost 19 firearms, ranging from original muzzleloaders to an AR-15. Still, there were enough guns in other locations that I still had several muzzleloaders and modern guns left.
In the aftermath of the theft I resolved to move on to other things and sold almost everything I had involving the shooting game. I was left with some heirloom (kinda) modern guns and a percussion half-stock rifle that had some sentimental value. (The percussion rifle had been built by a friend, one of my first mentors in the black powder game, who ended his own life.)
Five years later one of my stolen guns came home, and it briefly sparked an interest in returning to the game. The returned gun was a flint smooth bore. I decided to buy a flint rifle and bought a .50 caliber Virginia rifle from TVM at their booth at Friendship. It was shot less than fifty times. The following year I sold the smooth bore and used the proceeds to buy another TVM rifle, a southern gun in .36, along with most of the fixings. It was fired for the first time after the first of this year.
This year, the “bug” has definitely returned.
First off, I decided that if I was going to start shooting primitive again I was going to need a smoothie. This was taken care of after a conversation with Matt at North Star West. A few months later I had an Early English trade gun in 20 gauge that is probably the best shooting smooth bore I’ve ever owned.
The next time I got in trouble was after reading a thread on this board about swamped barrels. Of the guns that were stolen, one that I miss the most was an Edward Marshall rifle with a swamped barrel. The .50 TVM shoots great, but for someone with a destroyed rotator cuff in his left shoulder it was a little heavy for offhand shooting. Hey, it’s only money right? I soon acquired a nice, slender, pre-rev war style rifle with a swamped barrel.
That really SHOULD have been the end of it. ”˜Course, it warn’t.
A great nephew has showed a few signs that he might susceptible to a black powder addiction, and I feel it my duty to feed any such addiction.
When a Traditions Crockett showed up at TOW at a price too good to pass up, I bought it. It will probably wind up in Bubby’s hands eventually, but he is still a little too physically small for it.
Then there was the estate auction of another friend’s collection. I bought back the Tingle I’d sold him and an H&A under hammer for good measure.
I’m pretty sure I’m through buying now. Unless”¦”¦
For what it’s worth, the auction referenced above had a listing of around 200 firearms. At the auction there was another sheet listing about a dozen handguns that had not been found until after the original list was printed.
Last weekend there was another auction where even more recently discovered guns from the same estate were offered along with items from one or two other estates.
It’s too bad Paul isn’t around to post on this thread. THAT would have been some interesting reading.