There are many self proclaimed experts out there, and that's why I hate selling on Gunbroker. I had a gun for sale a while back, and a guy bid on it and won. This gun is in pristine condition and looks like it has only been test fired, but I know that the term "unfired" could spark a debate so I took a lot of detail pictures and described the signs of use instead. The day after the auction closed, I got a phone call from the buyer. He said that he had looked closer at the pictures and found that the gun could be a reblue, and the box must be a reproduction. It guess he thought that the gun was too nice to be all original and got cold feet. I didn't want to argue with him, so I simply cancelled the transaction.
This forum and the P.38 forum are really the only places where you don't find those quasi-experts. If you go to, for example, the Colt forum, you really have to filter everything you read, some members seem to absorb every piece of information they can possibly pick up and then pass it on as the truth. It's kinda funny sometimes when you read a thread about gunsmithing where some people say that a particular repair or adjustment is "impossible", and you know that you did that actual repair yesterday.
One of the stranger ones was when one guy stated that the sight beads on Colt revolvers are tapered and need to be fitted to the tapered slot in the barrel. I guess he had come across a sloppily cut sight slot (which is not too uncommon), and thought that it was tapered on purpose. I wouldn't be surprised to see this being repeated in future threads, until it eventually is accepted as "the truth".
Anyway, if you want some good entertainment you can search the Colt forum for "unfired". Among other interesting tidbits you'll find that Colt revolvers were always test fired in the white, then disassembled, finished and reassembled to make sure there were no signs of the gun ever being fired. I wouldn't doubt that some of the custom guns were done that way, but doing it in production... ?
