Broomhandle and BB's

[alvin]

Originally Posted by luger.parabellum

Alvin

The market here is small but not only for "bromhandles" obviously for "broomhandles" is smaller still. Maybe it's related to the economic crisis, maybe partially due to an endemic lack of deep knowledge, since many seasoned collectors seem to "collect"without the necessary info about what they're collecting.

I am curious on what type of information most people would need 99% of C96s appear on market don't present much myth. 1% has some myth, but most of those are one-of-a-kind guns. They are out of reach of many collectors anyway. If saying most collectors are chasing those, I doubt that.

Historically, people paid high price on some one-of-a-kind C96. Like "M1930 with scope mounting" (RIAC), "Gold Gilt Shansei" (Centurion), "All-in-white enlarged Carbine" (Julia) etc etc. Probably in future, there will be more. Those cost big money. Most people don't want to touch those, definitely not for regular collectors. Not saying they're wrong, but they're too unique.

And, this domain does not have "an extra stamp means 300% higher price" (except certain factory stamps). That kills an important faking direction. No financial driver. To convert a common gun to a rare one?? definitely possible, but not easy. And, probably due to lack of many nice base guns to convert, some people are working hard on converting poor guns, but most of them doing that are for fun, not for cheating,,, anyway, even a few want to cheat, the guns are easy to tell. Relatively speaking, the domain is still clean. Of course, there are refurbished guns listed as original, forced matching, etc. Those are more general issues in almost all C&R domains, not one type of gun specific.

[Sergio Natali]

What I mean is that for instance before I start to seriously collect something first I buy books to instruct myself then I slowly look at what the market offers.
A few months ago I saw an interesting 1911, I was about to buy it when while I was examining it I saw it had a wrong barrel, unfortunately the seller (that here is well known as a serious and experienced collector) insisted that the barrel was right, I had to show him the right book to make him touch by hand that he was wrong.
Then it's also a matter of numbers, if for instance in the States there are 10000 collectors of a specific sort of gun here probably there are 14 - just an example.

[alvin]

I composed a "roadmap" of RIAC 2015 C96 sale. The market is not big, but it's stable.