Well, all of them have now sold. Being one of those listers who doesn’t know how to list a gun (apparently) my final sale prices were somewhere between the actual value all the way down to about a third of the value. Before selling them I estimated that they were, collectively, worth about $25,000, give or take. My take was about $13,000, or about half of my estimated value (based on what I paid originally). One of them didn’t sell because I put a reserve on it (a mismatched artillery with a repro stock and holster). My reserve was $2,000, which I was pretty sure wouldn’t be met, again, based on what sales had been up to that point. Still, I needed the money right now and couldn’t wait. I’ll be able to take this money and buy the machine I need for the new business and still have some money left over to rent a warehouse space to start manufacturing. We’ve already gotten a very nice order from Realtree that needs to be made!
In the end, the loss I’ve taken on the sales (as painful as some of them were, the Navy and the Baby to name just two) will be more than made up for in three to five years when we sell the company for many millions. Yes, it’s a thin consultation but it at least helps to bury the pain. And when I say pain, it’s not the pain of the loss of the potential realized profit from the sale of the guns, but the loss of some of the guns themselves. Several of them were the pride of my collection and will be very hard to replace.
Oddly, after all of them were sold, ten in all, I found one that somehow escaped being listed. I’ll put it in the classifieds here since the need for speed is gone. FWIW, it’s a 1917 DWM in fair condition. I’ll ask what I paid for it about twenty years ago.
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