I mentioned the Brownell's catalog in the previous post. If you're a hardcore gun geek like me, you've no doubt spent countless hours with your nose buried in it, poring over exotic sights, walnut rifle stocks, titanium bits, and reproduction vintage handgun grips. Also, if you are like me, you have pounded your head in frustration wondering "Who laid this thing out?" There was hardly any rhyme or reason to what fell on what page; match chamber reamers were one page away from oversized 10/22 safeties which were in turn a column over from Mauser scope mounts. If you weren't good with an index, your only hope of wowing your friends by finding stuff quickly was to memorize the whole thing.
No more.
The latest Brownell's catalog, which is in my sweaty mitts as I type this, is neatly categorized, with color-edged sections dividing it all up by category. There are even two special sections for 1911 and AR bits (I'm a little surprised that the 10/22 didn't get its own, too...)
Click here and spend the five ducats for some of the best throne room literature on the planet. (And warm up your credit card, because titanium firing pin caps and TiNi-coated M14 gas pistons get expensive...)
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20 comments:
You really are trying to bankrupt me, aren't you.
I'm such an enabler... :D
BTW, if you call them and tell them that you heard about the catalog on Tom Gresham's "Guntalk" radio show, they will waive the $5.
Oh, and if you don't, and pay the $5, they will take it off your first order.
I don't have the new one yet, but the old-style catalogs always reminded me of the hometown hardware store with wooden floors and fly-paper strips hanging from the high ceilings where the big old wooden-bladed fans went 'round and 'round. Sic transit gloria.
Visualising you banging two-fisted on your keyboard, sweat flying off the catalog as fast as the words come out onscreen.
Just made a huge order a couple-three weeks ago myself.
Damn. It's just awful how much money one can spend while perusing that book, and, oh...yes, you are an enabler, Tam. :p
Now if they would just fix the damn website, like Larry Weeks (their head of marketing) keeps promising...
Seriously, I always use the website to place my orders, but just to find things on the site I often have to find it in the printed catalogue first, then look up the part number on the website.
I haven't even pulled my new catalog out of the plastic yet (when you send them a copy of your FFL, even a C&R, they send them to you for free).
They had smaller catalogs dedicated to certain gun makes (I have 1911 and AR-15/M16 catalogs from them), and that did help keep things a bit more findable. I'll need to crack open the big brick catalog and see how much nicer it is.
What Chris said. Larry promised us a functioning search engine, but the website really IS like walking through unmarked aisles of dusty cracker-barrels and pickles bobbing in some ancient yellow fluid, just looking for the jars of stick-candy - and teased by the distant hot wind off an old potbellied stove and some old timer yelling "I'm burned!" - or something indistinguishable in the distance - while the others laugh.
FYI, if you have a C&R license Brownell's will give you the dealer discount. It is substantial. I have saved hundreds of dollars over the last year or so. As my wife says, "You've got to spend money to save money!".
5 bux, as dude said, there's so MANY ways to avoid the charge. Plus as I do gunsmithing, I get a coupon for referrals. paid 4 my last browning hi-power kit.
I'm still smarting over the difference between the Hi-power and the dba double action.....
You'd think the clips would be interchangeable...
+1 for the website comments. The Brownell's site is why I buy from MidwayUSA instead.
Thanks for the reminder and the head's up on the format change
Just ordered it and got it for free, since I ordered a spare $5.75 bushing wrench that I can keep one in the range bag.
So I kicked the $5 to the NRA Roundup, since I planned on spending it anyway...
Maybe I should have used the $5 to buy Doritos and Jolt for the web guy
Such a techie...
Dammit! I just threw mine away because you have to be a schizophrenic monkey on crack to find anything. Same goes for the website, I figured the same monkey created it.
I buy mostly from Midway for this reason alone, I can't stand having to work at shopping.
Chris is right - as bad as the catalog was(and it got worse from #50 onwards), the website will make you want to pull the hairs out of your head, especially the search function - it either doesn't return what your looking for, or it gives everything even remotely connected with the search terms.
htrn,
What do you think of the latest catalog?
(...and I dinged the website in comments at the previous post.)
I wouldn't know, I haven't seen anything since 58 or 59, and that was only briefly thumbing through a friends copy. I stopped buying them around 54 IIRC.
HTRN
Honest injun, the layout in #61 is different enough that you'll have a hard time believing it's the same company.
As an example, the section for "Rifle", which is clearly marked by brown-edged pages, is further divided by page-edge tabd into "10/22 performance parts", "receivers", "bolt components", "barrels-centerfire", et cetera.
Heh. When I think of all the counter time I've wasted with customers, flipping through pages and muttering "I know it's in here someplace..."
So they color coded the page edges? Apparently they're stealing tricks from industrial catalogs :)
The one good thing about the insanity of the old layout was that most of the time, it remained the same from year to year(up until 53 I think), so finding stuff wasn't too bad, because you can generally find stuff quickly. With 53, they changed EVERYTHING(Rifles were now first, etc).
And yeah, I know the whole [mutter]I know it's in here SOMEWHERE[/mutter] deal. I probably did it at least once a month. ;)
Course, now that their entire inventory is online, I'll probably never buy another catalog. Which is why suddenly the catalog is logically makes sense: Murphy is taunting me again.
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