In my youth, a gentleman named Robert Carey spent time feeding my obsession with firearms. At that time he was one of the top 5 or 6 U.S. Military firearms collectors in the country. He also did appraisals of various firearms from time to time. One of the observations he made was that the toughest thing about doing an appraisal is convincing people that just because something is old does not mean it's worth a fortune.