There I was stories....

[beagle]

There I was ....... in a gun shop in NC with #2 son who is also a caster. Old place and here in the back under two shelves are two cardboard boxes. I spied a mould in one and pulled the boxes out.

Must have been 150 moulds in there. About half were H & Gs, some Lymans. MoOstly 2 cav and 4 cav. Most new.

I was on vacation and didn't have any mad money in those days so I bided my time and came back the next Christmas loaded for bear.

The owner had passed away, his son had inherited the place and moved out by the interstate. No one working there had any knowledge of the two cardboard mould boxes.

Kinda makes a feller sick don't it??????

[Dennis Eugene]

man that's why we have credit cards Dennis

[Jim]

Lord, Beag, that makes me sick to know what you missed.

[DLCTEX]

I went to an estate auction about five years ago that had a lot of reloading equipment and supplies. I had already spent a good bit and was wanting to at least watch watch the sale of a roll away tool cabinet that had four 55 Lyman powder measures mounted on it beside a Rockchucker press and a Corbin swage press. In the drawers were another Corbin press still in the box and dies for swaging 38 and 44 pistol bullets, plus about 8 reloading die sets, and lots of other goodies. When the auctioner announced it was all going to be sold together I knew it would go for far more than I could afford to invest at the time. A friend wanted my opinion on some guns that were coming up next, so I was discussing them with him and giving scant attention to the auctioneer until I heard him say (rather quickly) 'I sold it for $385". I just about died. I would have paid in the $1200 range and thought I'd gotten a bargain. Of course the buyer would not part with any of his prize.

[dwtim]

This thread makes a good point. I'll make sure my stuff is given away before I go, so it is enjoyed by someone who will use it, not thrown in a dump somewhere.

Maybe then some poster on a futuristic version of Cast Boolits will end his "There I was..." thread with, "...and then the old fella told me to take the box full of molds!"

[beagle]

Didn't have acredit card in those days. I was poor./beagle


man that's why we have credit cards Dennis

[Dennis Eugene]

ahhh yes poor, I understand. Dennis.

[finishman2000]

I was working part time at a pretty good size gun shop and the nite of the first black rifle ban the manager offered me to buy all 8 of the hk94's for $800 each. I knew the wife would kill me so I passed.

[Beaverhunter2]

When I was in Infantry School, my orders got screwed up so I didn't get my $2300 of TDY pay until the third month of a 4 month course. My buddy and I went to the local gun show looking for rifles to take out to the ranges on Saturdays. A guy was there selling Russian AK-47s (semi-auto converts) for $150 for one rifle still in the cosmoline, $110 each for 4, or $800 for an unopened ten rifle crate (Cyrillic lettering and all). $150 shipping anywhere in CONUS. I had the cash in my pocket and walked around that gun show for three hours thinking about it, but needed the money for college. I thought about taking them to school and selling some, but I figured my parents would really be ticked when a guy kicked a crate of guns off the back of a truck into the driveway. Also, we'd just finished OPFOR weapons training and I knew AKs were basically bullet launchers- reliable, but about as accurate as a thrown rock, so I passed.

I've been kicking myself for 23 years now. A few years ago, I told my Dad about it. He was ready to help me with the kicking! He said- it could have been one for each of us, a couple for the closet, and sell the rest! Mom said I made the right decision. LOL

John

[Whitespider]

There I was.... In my early twenties.... Workin' in a factory making cardboard boxes....
When, after work one night in the parking lot, another young guy (early twenties also) walks over to his car and pulls out four rifles. Seems his grandfather had died a few weeks before and he had inherited the guns (he wasn't a hunter or shooter and didn't care about them).
'73 Winchester - .44 WCF
1886 Winchester - .50-110 (looked brand new)
'71 Winchester (well used)
'94 Winchester
There I was.... With $8 in my pocket.... A week from payday....
When he says that the "set" should be worth $500.oo if anybody wants them?
I could have cried when one of the truck drivers, there to haul the cardboard to 'parts unknown', handed him five $100 bills and tossed those rifles in the sleeper of his truck.

I've been lookin' for a really nice '86 Winchester in .50-110 ever since.

[docone31]

Back in the I knew nothing days.....
I had gone to my favourite gun store. The owner had been a salesman and knew nothing about anything. He even listened to me!
Sitting there, was a Colt #2 in 45/90. He wanted 200$! Both he and I though no one would possibly want something that archaic. I walked on by. There was another, a Farqueson in a strange caliber. I knew nothing about reloading then. I walked on by. He had an 1886 Winchester with a full octagonal barrel, nice and long, in 45/90. 200$ and a Winchester in 38/55 100$ 1920s vintage wth full octagonal barrel, nice and long, with a funny sight on the tang. 100$.
We both laughed at how some people just do not appreciate the great plastic stock whiz-bang heavy barrel specials. I finally got a Mossberg 500 with pistol grip stock. Spent a long time makeing that actually work. I also got a Universal Carbine 30 Carbine repro. Spent a lot on bananna clips that jammed. Lots of Enfields, #1s and #4s stacked like cordwood, 03-A3s stacked like cordwood, 25$ apiece. He was throwing in a Turk, or 98 Mauser with each new firearm sale. Complete with ammo.
If I only knew then, what I know now.
There were some cherries ready for picking indeed.

[par0thead151]

so there i was, a senior in college spring 2006...
sportsmans guide had a special on wolf 7.62X39, 80$ per 1K + shipping.
free shipping on entire order if you renew your sportsmans guide membership...
i bought 3K and was way over extended that month. rammen noodles and ham sandwiches was all i ate because of that order. that and making a 10$ handle of vodka last all month...
if i only had a few grand to throw at ammo then, i could have a lifetime supply of 7.62 X 39 wolf...
now its going for 300$ thousand... always a day late and a dollar short.
that was until i blew every penny i got for graduation money from relatives on reloading components... best decision i ever made! that or selling stocks and buying a house literally right before the market(stocks) tanked.

[imashooter2]

In mid 94, one of our local shops had a 4 X 4 X 4 box filled to the brim with Colt 20 round AR mags in pristine condition. $3 each. I didn't even own an AR then, but bought 3 for a buddy that did. Wonder what that box would have been worth in 95?

[leadeye]

There I was .....stumbling over the best gun deal of my life in 82. A whole pile of nice guns and ammo from an estate but the hitch was cash today, $5000. Went to the bank and took out a 90 day note and bought everything. Went home to face a young wife with a less than year old baby scraping by as most young couples do early in life. You can all appreciate the beating I took while explaining that I would be able sell enough to cover the debt in time and still keep some of the more choice items. I accomplished everything I had set out to do and retired the note before the time limit. This year will be our thirty year mark and to this day she has never complained about a gun deal since that one. I still have the german Weatherby 300, Belgian Hi Power, and the Sako Forester 243. They bring back good memories every time I look at them.:-D:drinks:

[hoosierlogger]

There I was at a flea market about 3 years ago and a guy had two boxes of bullet molds. a lot of them were round ball's but there were others as well. He wanted $5 a peice for them. I didnt buy any of them. As I had no need for them, because I didnt cast at the time. What a dummy I am huh? I look for that type of thing now, but never find it.

[Trey45]

In 1986 there was a gunshop out in south norfolk, it's no longer there now. I had just been paid and decided to go look around, they had a LOT of Milsurps and other oddities to choose from. I rounded a corner of the glass gun case and saw German Lugers, I had never even seen one before and asked the guy, hey can I see the one with the long barrel? He opens the case and tells me it's an Artillary Luger, and i can let you have it for $500 today. I check it out, knowing absolutely nothing about Lugers, just that they're "cool" and the Nazi's used them. I hand it back, tell him , nah, I don't want to pay that much for a gun this old.

Oh, and then there's the time I sold a Mosin Nagant stamped with SA, SKY for 75 bucks because I had no idea it was a Finn Mosin.

Something about retelling these stories is giving me a headache.

[sniper]

There was this gun storen when I was in college, and they had bright blue Browning Hi-Powers for $108!!

You can just tell how long ago that was! Anyhow, my monthly budged, after food, rent,and laundry was $2.50 for entertainment, and that was in the days when movies were to be had for $1.00. Sooooo, I had to pass. [smilie=b:

[405]

and there I was.... staring at crates and wooden barrels of Mausers ranging in price from 19.00 to 29.00! Early Mausers, pre-war Mausers, WW2 Mausers, various Latin American Mausers- many unissued, in cosmoline. All this of pre-Gun Control Act era, so take-one take-all.... no forms, no restrictions and so on. All I could look at and dream of and lust over were the "new" shiny Win 70s and 94s on the gun rack behind the counter. And, hardly a notice paid to the barrels of various bayonets with prices like 1.50-2.50. All I usually carried in my pocket was max about 3.00 for a box of 16 ga shells and a box of 22s.

and then there I was.... not too long ago handling an un-molested, fine condition Bowie that was laying amongst a pile of junkers in a 2nd hand junk store.... errah.... an "antique boutique". The price tag on par with the rest of the junkers. It was an original Sheffield Bowie from about 1850-60. It had an equally nice original scabbard. The handle was classic "coffin" form with horn slabs. I passed... Doh!!! Today that is a +2000.00 knife! Slow learner, with self-inflicted buttocks bruising to prove it :???:

and then there I was.... on two different occasions staring square at two different original Hawken rifles for sale. Both better than very good condition with very good shootable bores. "Seemed" expensive at the time... but well under a thousand each. Yep, we be slow learners. Either one would easily be well into 5 figures now! Doh!

and then there I was.... uhhhh, just too painful to continue.....

Now I know what those few of a previous generation are talking about when they relate similar stories about wandering thru the piles, stacks at Bannerman's, but only having 5 cents candy money in their pockets. :)

[Leftoverdj]

Been times I've had to race my check to the bank, but I cannot recall ever passing up a super deal. Best was the auction of a defunct gun store on the weekend of a big gunshow, and me the closest thing to a dealer at the auction. Auctioneer was clueless and selling in huge lots. One deal I remember was something over 400 pounds of buckshot for $10. Bought so much stuff I had to call a buddy to bring his truck after I filled mine.

Made back a few hundred in the parking lot while loading up, selling small quantities to those who could not swing the big lots. Stopped at a gun store on the way home and more than covered all that I spent, and still got home with a full truck load.

Once in a lifetime deal. Sheer dumb luck and a willingness to plunge. Had I not found quick sales, that check would have wiped out my bank account and maxed out the credit card attached to it.

[Bloodman14]

Trey45, that gunshop in Norfolk, it wouldn't be Bob's Gun & Tackle, would it? I spent a few bucks there when my ex-wife was in the Navy at Naval Base- Norfolk, YEARS ago.

[RemSoles]

There I was 5 or 6 years ago (I was 16), met a nice guy at the end of the driveway who was looking for a job. After talking some he told me he had rifle he wanted to sell, would I like to see it? It turns out to be a Savage 99 take down with a specal 20" heavy barrel in 303 sav. all in VERY NICE condition for 400 bucks! With 60 rounds of ammo! Sorry to say thats all I know about that one:groner:

[WILCO]

There I was, staring at the biggest chunk of lead I had ever laid eyes on.
It was sooooooo huge that it covered a full size tractor (farm) tire and damn near crushed it to the ground! 5 minutes earlier, I had introduced myself to the owner of a small industrial shop as an independent scrapper and did he have any scrap needing to be carted away? He answered indeed and brought me to this mammoth beast saying that I could have it, if I could get it out of there. The year was 1998 and scrap steel was $50.00 a ton. With a future x-wife and two children to support, I was scrapping on the side for extra money and I just hit the mother load for non-ferrous metal. Using my back, a steel cable and a 1985 Dodge Ram truck, I was able to drag that thing up an outside truck ramp pausing only to tie the cable back together after snapping it at least 3 times! Little more than an hour later, I was at the point where it was time to roll it off the dock and into the truck. Let me just say that when gravity took over and brought that thing down, the front end come up off the ground like a cartoon!! With a boom and much dust, I reckoned I'd just snapped the axle while watching the rusted box sides wiggle back and forth as if they were liquefied! The whole 10 miles to the scrap dealer was punctuated with many drag strip style front end jumps and loss of steering. At one point, I feared the Dodge was going to give up the ghost and die on the road from such a strain to it's oil burning rod knockin engine. I can't remember what that wreck weighed when I hit the scales, but she paid out a cool $300.00 tax free bucks. Years later, knowing now just what I had then, I wish I would've kept the whole enchilada as it was truly a lifetime supply of lead.

[jdgabbard]

There I was, a local FFL and friend had recently purchased a VERY large lot of NEW south american made 1911 .45 acp pistols. And offered me a dealer price break of $150 a piece for all I could afford. Well, this was just a few years back, but I'm sure they would have gone for much more at the last Tulsa Gun Show... The rest... Too embarrassed to speak of...

[Linstrum]

Wholly cripes! I'm pounding the wall reading these incidents of "a day late and a dollar short"! :violin: Well, but that's what I'm supposed to do, right? That, plus teach me to be ready when a situation comes up that I can take advantage of IF, and a big IF, I can recognize opportunity knocking when my pocket is full of enough loot to do something about it!

Okay, I had my chance not too long ago and I DIDN'T BLOW IT! Here's what happened to me. I was down at Max Metals, the big scrap metal recycling business in Chatsworth, California (about 30 miles west of Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley). It serves all of the aerospace and electronics industries in the Greater Los Angeles Area, so it has a real varied supply of just about anything metallic you would ever dream of running across. I was looking for AISI 4140 chrome-moly steel bars, stainless steel bars, and brass bars for gunsmithing; and lead pigs for casting. I was looking through a big box of short left-over odds and ends of stainless steel bars that Fermin, who deals with the public there, had set aside for me. I picked out what I wanted and the last one I picked up slipped through my fingers because it was enormously heavier than I expected it to be. It was 7/8" in diameter by 9" long. I made sure nobody saw me drop it, [smilie=1: and I added it to the ones I'd picked out and put it on the scale, hoping that the weighmaster wouldn't check them out individually :twisted: . He didn't, so I paid the cashier and and in a dead sweat with heart pounding I got my stuff out to my car and drove home, shaking every inch of the way! :veryconfu

There are only four common metals that look like stainless steel but are about twice as dense, and they are:

Platinum, if my heavy bar were platinum I would have just scored $90,000! That's right, ninety-thousand bucks! In chemical applications, platinum is used for its extreme corrosion resistance and catalytic properties, and also used in very high-end jewelry. A platinum bar 7/8" in diameter and 9" long could certainly have accidentally come from a jewelry manufacturing company's scrap, either that or from some recently passed-away old geezer jeweler who had bought it in the early 1950s when it was $40 an ounce, a trifle more than gold was going for at the same time period, and whose widow had mistakenly sold it as scrap stainless steel for a buck a pound.

Tantalum, sometimes used in aerospace equipment as flywheels and inertia blocks because it is very dense. Also not cheap!

Tungsten, (not tungsten carbide, but that is darned heavy stuff, too!) also used in aerospace equipment and electronics because it is also enormously heavy and resists abrasion and spark erosion in electrical contacts because it is also darned hard and has the highest melting point of all the metalic elements. TIG welding electrodes are tungsten, but usually not this big.

Depleted uranium, used mainly for military ballistic applications, but also was used briefly for weights and such before its high toxicity became apparent. Could have come from a company that makes armor penetrating cores for the ammo used by the Abrams Fighting Vehicle cannon, but not very darned likely.

Okay, the bar I found was very slightly dented, ruling out super-hard tungsten. It was actually not quite heavy enough for tantalum, and not likely depleted uranium, so that left only one thing - - -

PLATINUM! :bigsmyl2: WOOO HOOO! YEAH!!!

I set up a specific gravity test by weighing it suspended by a thread under water and it came out to be 5.854 pounds. Then compared that weight to what it weighs in air, 6.2 pounds, and came up with a specific gravity of 17.9, not quite heavy enough by a grunt hair for platinum! DARN DARN DARN!!! :groner:

It turned out to be a special 95% tungsten and 5% copper alloy used for electrical contacts, but it was still worth about $200!:drinks: I still have it and don't want to sell it, I want to do something special with it since I only paid $6 for it.


rl553

[windrider919]

1985 with a 3 year old and a wife that was 8 1/2 months preg. I was replacing a blown head gasket in the driveway so I could take her to the hospital when she doubled. And I was between construction jobs so I was so broke I could not pay attention. An acquaintance came buy and asked if I would be interested in buying a box of guns. He had a crate (A pistol shipping wood crate stencilled Llama, 25 to a side with the butts up, each in its own slot.) of 50 LLama .380s, the old style like miniature 1911s with real locking lug barrels that you could load to ++P. Not the blowback models they had started producing which were crap. The pistols were new, in excellent condition and were marked in Spanish "Mexico City Police Dept" on the slide and the grips had the Mexican gov medalion on them. They had been in their armory and they had replaced them with some other pistol and surplussed the .380s off. He even had a bill of sale from a gunstore in Brownsville! And he only wanted $500.00 for the box, $10.00 ea. I literally drooled, I mean I really suddenly found my mouth full of saliva! But I had to pass even though I KNEW what I was giving up. I did offer him $35.00 for one but he wanted to sell the crate or nothing. Off he went into the evening and I never saw him again. Earlier this year at a gun show I saw one of them, marked like I wrote above, for $750.00. For a Llama .380!!!!

Whats really funny was back in those pre drug days a lot of real collector item guns came OUT of Mexico because of their restrictive gun laws. They had rather sell them to us Gringos than have the gov. confiscate and destroy them. Now the guns are being smuggled INTO Mexico for the drug wars. At really outrageous prices. Who wuda thunk it?

[tanstafl10]

I sit here in the early Am, reading.... drinking my coffee......

It is not always possible to take advantage even if you recognize the opportunity.

THANKS for the stories