Saturday, August 02, 2008

All play and no work...

Of course, there's an ulterior motive for my trip, too. In addition to touching base with the crew at CCA and visiting some of my old haunts, I dragged my trusty laptop along. I've got three or four longer pieces for this blog rattling around, one for the Arms Room, and a small handful of blurbs for the folks at LEM, and maybe this will jar them loose.

The thing I want to talk about at the Arms Room is the nature of collecting military small arms and how time and demographics are changing the hobby. We're at a period of turnover, here; the generation that is now going into retirement is really only the second generation to collect breechloading military arms to any serious degree (before WWII, the idea of collecting 20th Century military arms was somewhat odd; collectors generally collected muzzleloaders) a lot of stuff that is considered rare and valuable on the market is rare and valuable because it disappeared into gun safes 40 and more years ago. Central and South American Mausers, for example, which have been overheated for almost a decade now, were snatched up in the 50s and 60s because they were the Mosin Nagants of their day; cheap, plentiful, and affordable on student's wages. Now we're seeing formerly rare Argentine and Venezuelan carbines coming out of hiding and on to dealer's tables. It will be interesting to see what this does to the market.

5 comments:

JPG said...

You have an Arms Room post pending??!!?

HUZZAH!

I was afraid you'd given up on it entirely. Great news.
JPG

Owen said...

are you going to the Pincus class at CCA?

Mike invited me, but I couldn't make it.

Rabbit said...

I so hope you're right on that...I have such a serious weakness for cavalry and artillery carbines.

Gotta check the schedule for Market Hall again.

Regards,
Rabbit.

NotClauswitz said...

I came across two Krag rifles ($2,00 each or so 1899 and 1903) and a worked over Krag saddle-ring Carbine ($400-something) on Thursday. The stock for the carbine had a plug carefully inletted over where the sadle-ring pieces went, and an "03 Springfield barrel... Stuff is emerging.

Anonymous said...

We've had some neat things come through the last few weeks. Not super rare mind you, but neat anyway. Nice example of a Spanish Mauser comes to mind as well as an Enfield jungle carbine. One has since sold and the other is on layaway.

Have fun in Knoxville. My high school had the class of '88 reunion a couple of weeks ago. And although I didn't make the trek due to lack of much interest and/or time off, I've been a little homesick lately.