Deciding
when (or why) to restore a firearm is not as complicated
a matter as would be indicated by the millions of words
written on the subject. "RESTORING AN ANTIQUE WILL
DESTROY ITS VALUE" is the phrase most often heard;
but, what if its value has already been destroyed by a
previous refinishing done badly by one of the great many
hacks out there (especially true in the 50's and 60's),
or what if it's a pitted, rusty, brown or grey gun with
numerous other problems?
Basically,
if a gun is not a "collector-grade" specimen,
meaning that it has less original finish than what the
collector is looking for (say less than 80% as a general
guide), then its collector value cannot be considered in
the decision to restore or not. The exceptions are: (a) a
gun with some documented historical provenance or (b) a
gun of great rarity, both of which are factors that
outweigh amount of finish or condition as collector-criteria.
So, if
a gun is in the less-than-80%/no-provenance category, it
has a value to the "accumulator" (most of us),
but no real "collector" value.
Probably
95% of the guns coming into my shop are non-collector
guns with little or no original finish, are often abused,
pitted, gouged, dinged, prevously-overbuffed, hot-blued,
cold-blued semi-wrecks in the less-than-10% category.
Restoring these "bad-guns" and making them into
"good guns" is what it's all about. It's either
that, or let the effects of abuse and negligence eat them
away until they're gone forever.
I
frequently advise my customers not to "mess"
with a particular gun if it happens to fall within the
collector-grade range. On the other hand, if a collector-grade
gun has something wrong with it, which is correctable,
but which hurts the value if left uncorrected, I'll often
do a partial restoration to fix that one problem.
As an
example, I recently had a would-be collector-grade Colt
single-action where the front sight had been filed down
to nothing, and the barrel had been hit a few times in
the filing process. I made a new front sight of proper
shape and height, polished out the file marks and re-blued
the barrel using the original nitre-blue, then "aged"
it back just a little to match the rest of the gun. Could
you tell? No. Did it hurt the value of the gun? No. Did
it increase the value? Yes.
Flayderman
has written: "Refinishing is akin to taking an 80-year-old
man and dressing him in the clothes of a teenager".
I couldn't disagree more if we're talking about non-collector-grade
guns. It's more like taking a naked 80-year-old man and
dressing him in a nice suit (even though it may not be a
new-looking suit). Which would you
rather look at?
What
needs to be remembered is that there is a world of
difference between "refinishing" and "restoration".
the term "refinishing" could mean hot-bluing a
single-action (where hot-blue wasn't invented till about
1937). But "restoration" means doing things
right. It means doing it precisely like it was done 80 or
150 years ago by the factory. It means polishing in the
exact way the factory did it, and finishing the exact way
the factory did it.
There
are only a handful of restoration-gunsmiths in the world
who can do that... or who will do that. To that
handful you can entrust your antique arms.