Mistakes - Guns you wish you had not bought ...

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Bekeart

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Mistakes - Guns you wish you had not bought ...

Most, if not all, of us have made some mistakes in our purchases.

A couple of my recent gun show mistakes:
1) H&R 22 revolver - low quality - low price - made a mistake ... expect to LOOSE money ...
2) Ruger No. 1 in 458 WinMag - Little if any demand for this caliber - Well it IS and No. 1 ...

Step into the forum confessional, admit your mistake and ask for absolution

Bekeart
 
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Glock 21: No problems, just meh.
Browning BPS: Bought it to help a friend out, and I just find shotguns to be boring.
 
38 cal.Cobra Derringer. The Barrels are two steel sleeves inside a pot metal outer casing.
 
In chronological order:

  • A Star PD (God Almighty how I hated that gun...)
  • An AMT .380 Back-Up (There, I said it! I'm free, free at last!)
  • A Charter Arms SS Snubby (Just to see how it compared to the Mothership's Model 60. It didn't.)
  • A CS40 (One totally "used & abused" gun... for which I stupidly overpaid.)
  • My second Model 4566TSW (One good auction win deserves one really bad one I guess.)
 

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Glock 31. Trying to find .357Sig during the ammo crunch was difficult plus the cost was high. Cool round but a novelty.
 
A 13 oz (Loaded Kel Tec) P 11 in 9mm

Kel tec makes pretty good low priced guns. It's very small and light but it's kicky and hard to control. Even the manual says that it's pretty effective inside 20' but beyond that.....

It's going to take me a lot of work to get good out to 20' with it. I know most encounters are closer quarter but it undermines my confidence because I can't shoot it. 5 yards, difficult but I can take a person down it that range. At 7 yards it's possible that I would miss all of my shots at least to the main mass. I'm going to have to practice a lot to get more accurate/confident with that gun. I probably should get another Shield and relegate the Kelt Tec to a 'bathroom gun' or something that would be guaranteed to be at close range.:D
 
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Bekeart said:
Mistakes - Guns you wish you had not bought ...

Most, if not all, of us have made some mistakes in our purchases.

A couple of my recent gun show mistakes:
1) H&R 22 revolver - low quality - low price - made a mistake ... expect to LOOSE money ...
2) Ruger No. 1 in 458 WinMag - Little if any demand for this caliber - Well it IS and No. 1 ...

Step into the forum confessional, admit your mistake and ask for absolution

Bekeart
Click to expand...

I bought a nice H&R .22 a few years ago. Every time I fired a round, the barrel would unlatch. Returned it to the seller. Full refund including shipping. My last H&R.
 
The three ported firearms I foolishly acquired in a moment of stupidity. All were aftermarket magnaports: a 4 inch M29, a 338 Remington and a 6' M28.

Sold em all to the proverbial 'greater fool'.

All were miserable noise and blast producers.

I didn't lose a great deal of money. I think of it as tuition.
 
CZ Scorpion. Very cool looking gun, just not much fun to shoot. The ambi safety will leave a bruise on your hand after 50 rounds. Was going to SBR it but the cost of the stock I wanted and tax stamp would have cost another $450. Cut my losses and sold it.
 
Ruger Super Single Six.
Nice little gun and will shoot shorts, longs, long rifles and magnums.

I wanted a western type of gun so I should have bought a center fire.

I had a Remington 1100 that I sold to buy a 870. Love the 870 but the 1100 was a great gun. Sold it to a real putz so I know I will never see it again.
 
A few readily come to mind:

Armalite AR15 HBAR Never could get better the minute of pie plate out of it.

Armalite AR-7 Jam-o-Matic

SKS Meh.....

I currently have an Astra M1921 that I picked up cheap. Turns out there was a reason it was cheap. Has enough of a sear problem I'm afraid to try to fire it........
 
LCP. I knew right away that I didn't want it. Hard to shoot well and not fun.
 
Every Glock i have ever purchased, just can't get the hang of shooting them. Llama minimax 45acp, never could get it to feed right, Kel tec p11
My first S&W revolver as it has started a hunt to find the ones that are right for me and i fear i may trade, sell and buy many more until i find the ones that are just right (at least i will be in good company) .
I do regret selling a few, especially the M&P 357 sig i once had, I'll be looking for another one in good condition at the gun show next week.
 
Colt Officer, Heavy barrel, that had the front strap cut down for Fuzzy grips, then covered it up with a rubber wrap-around to hide the modification. Weasel, but I should have checked. Bought it at a gun show up in Northern CA from a dealer, not a private party, so I'm fairly certain that this was known to him. Good lesson for me.
 
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S&W 4006. I bought it when they first came out. Foolishly fell for the hype: ".45 Power + 9mm capacity". Damned thing never did shoot worth a hoot. I fought this thing for two years. Numerous factory loads and handloaded every bullet and powder I could get my hands on. Never could get it anywhere near as accurate as a 9mm or .45acp. :mad:
Finally gave up and tried to sell it. That's when I discovered you couldn't give these things away. It took a year, but I finally managed to trade it off to a LGS. I lost my butt on the deal, but didn't care. I was glad to be rid of it.

Ruger Flat Top Bisley .44 Special. I love the .44 Special cartridge and when these came out I thought "Wow, that's so cool!" WRONG! First trip to the range the rear sight pin backed out and you could feel the right grip panel shift on the frame with every shot. Accuracy absolutely sucked. This thing shot patterns rather than groups. This really disappointed me because I know how good the .44 Special is.
I sent it back to Ruger. Four months later I get it back. They fixed the sight and grips. Accuracy still sucked. So I took it to the next gun show and dropped it like a hot rock.
 
My 1st auto, a Star mil surplus 9mm When I was a teen. It FTE every time. looked at the bore and chamber. You could'a hid VW bugs in the pits. I took some heavy Army surplus gun grease and lubed every bullet. The next buyer did not care he had grease. Why I remember is very shortly after I got rid of my $25 dollar wonder I happened to look in a Shotgun news that Rexall had just started carrying. In it were full page ads from places like Sarge's and others that sold brand new surplus Star bbls, cheap.

I bought and later subscribed to the Shotgun News. Before the internet it was king.

I bought enough bargain shotguns and rifles that I eventually became a fair smith by fixing broke crud. Then I actively sought it out, cheap broke fixed up was a money maker, not rich but enough to let me trade into or by nicer non broke guns.
 
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model70hunter said:
Still have it? My first carry LE was as you describe, I'd like to have another even it it was only to look at...
Click to expand...

No I don't still have it. I spent over $300 and a couple of weeks work getting it into good working condition. After all that I was so disgusted with it, I sold it for two hundred less than I paid for it. The most expensive foul up I ever had with a gun. It should never have left the factory in that condition. The gun had multiple problems including bad magazines, which I ended up replacing. To look at it, it was cosmetically beautiful, but mechanically a wreck. It originally sold by Gander Mountain, and was resold to a dealer who brought it to the gun show and dumped it on me.

That experience caused me to loose all faith in the newer Colt guns. I am almost totally a S&W and a Ruger fan. I only have two handguns that are not either a Smith or a Ruger and I inherited one of them.

It was the final straw in burning me out on gun shows also. LOL Mostly they just were getting worse and worse as far as having anything I was interested in buying.

Funny thing, I have never had a problem with a used gun, only with new ones or supposedly new ones.
 
Walther p-22 aka ***-22. Worst handgun I ever owned. Sent it back to S&W for warranty repair and was sent a new replacement that I traded for a Springfield Micro Compact 1911.

Was treated so well by S&W that I bought a 617 10shot 6" shortly after.

Marlin Model 39AS .22 lever action. Bought new around 2004. Had to buy a Conetrol mount and rings from George Miller to mount a scope to it, the factory one was a ***. Rebounding hammer prevented the hammer from hitting the firing pin to fire the gun. Had to do some modifications to get the rifle to work. Hate the thing, but will not pawn my problem off on someone. Thought about making a floor lamp out of it.
 
The one and only gun I've regretted was a Bauer .25 Auto in Stainless Steel which I purchased as a newbie back in the early 80's, if memory serves. Don't even ask me why because I couldn't answer you! The damned thing never worked for more than two shots in a row and after sending it into Bauer 3 times to get repaired (they never did get it working properly) I traded it into the LGS for a S&W 1905 4th change with the addition of $75 bucks.

I have sold a few guns over the years that I found I wasn't using or just didn't want anymore but have NOT regretted buying them because I always came out ahead.
 
Oh yea! Quite a few. Most of the time it my my stubbornness to admit that not all guns are "just as good as" I thought I'm saving $150 when in fact I was wasting double the price of the gun (once to buy, once to trade in on something better). And there were a few that made no sense.

*Desert Eagle 50 - why? What was the point of that? Lol
*FN 5.7 - a very expensive .22
*AK47 pistol - expensive and not practical
*CZ75 compact - good quality gun and I wanted to like it but the 50# DA trigger pull and the lack of slide real estate was a no go
*Taurus PT111 - all around junk that I felt I was getting a great deal by saving a bucks over another brand
*Taurus PT145 - same junk that my friend couldn't shoot so we swapped the 111 and the 145.
*Star B - 1911ish style in 9mm that was not compatible with any 1911 parts. No ambi safeties and poor performance.
*Norinco 1911, Citadel 1911, Springfield 1911. These 3 belong in the same category because it was my attempt at yet again buying something cheaper to get it to where I want it only to spend more money than it would have been to just buy one right one. On top of that the Citadel was junk.
*Savage 1912 32acp - another one of those brain fart purchases. There was no reason to own that
*Standard FAL ban era- again, trying to save a buck. Cost more to convert back to normal and turned out that standard parts were harder to find then metric.
 
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