Jack the dog has a nice 1924 transitional up for sale

[gbethu]

Very well reasoned and well said. We all value things differently. If it was my Dad's gun carried in the first wave in Normandy then all the convential metrics for value go out the window. If you just "gotta" have the original barrel that " Betty" , in the Colt factory selected from the pile of barrels....then that's a lot more scarce. Some collector's would value the barrel "Betty" picked up for far more money that the one adjacent.....who really cares ??? Well, obviously some do. I don't

Art, Real Estate, Antique car values are all market driven well. You can bet the value of high end M1911s will shrink when oil remains below $30 a barrel....so will many other pricey antiques that enjoyed a strong, well funded market.

I buy the guns I truly like....they aren't necessarily "investments". I'll let my estate worry about values. I have the change...I don't call it chump change as I had to beat the industrial market to acquire it, but I won't refuse to purchase a beautiful original 1 or two digit serial number M1911 just because the seller wants top dollar and someone else replaced "Betty's"worn out barrel with a better original example.

[prewar]

Maybe buying from a high profile seller makes the buyer feel better about the pistols problems.

Yes that's it Jonny as you know he gets more for his stuff than other sellers and this is not the first time something like this has happened .I won one of his auctions years ago and I knew when I won it there was something wrong with the gun (it should have went for more ) and I was prepared to bid higher ,to make a long story short the gun had issues you could not see in his pictures and I sent it back and he claimed he did not see these issues when he photographed it and there was no way he missed them .