Quoted: Yeah.....if you got some smokin cheap price on it, you better not tell me what it is. I may get pissed off and jealous. |
I have two just like that one, and a cheap smokin' price doesn't even come close to describing what I paid. I also have a fixed stock preban SA85M.
I had a friend/coworker that was a FFL in the eighties. We had known each other for a long time, and had even been shooting together a few times (it wasn't uncommon for us to go out back behind the tracks behind the shop to test new toys that somebody in the shop had just bought), but he didn't know I was interested in EBR type rifles. He had in the past mentioned that he had ran a gun shop part time years ago, and when he closed up when the ATF purged all the small timers he had his inventory transferred into his collection.
I lived about eighty miles from where we worked, so I wasn't all that familiar with the full service guns shops in the area, so I asked him who in town would have trigger parts for an AR. He told me of a couple of places, and then asked me if I was into that kind of gun, I told him I was, he then asked me what I thought about AK47's and SKS rifles, I told him I didn't know much about them, but had been thinking about picking one up.
At this point he tells me he had some brand new AKs and SKSs left over from his shopdays (this is in 2000 by the way)in the eighties, that were brand new, and never fired. He tells me that he would be happy to sell one or more of them to me for a couple hundred bucks, that is if I was interested in them. He went home and brought back two rifles, a Hungarian fixed stock AK and a Chinese SKS. He tells me he would be happy to get what he paid for them, and tells me that the SKS was $100 and the AK was $200. I told him that I would take both of them. I immediately got on the internet to figure out what I had bought, and realized how much I had underpaid.
I went back to him, and asked if he knew what these guns were selling for, and he said yes, but he wasn't selling them to make money, he just wanted somebody to get them who would use them, and prefered it not be a gangbanger. I once again told him directly that these thing were selling for a lot more than he charged me, and less than I was willing to pay. He said he didn't mind, then asked me if I would be interested in a couple more. I told him hell yeah! The next morning he comes in with two more Hungarians, and a case if Chinese steel core ammo, apologizng that he forgot to mention that these rifles had folding stocks (he was not a fan of underfolders), and offered the ammo and a dozen Chinese thirty round mags to make up the difference.
So for $700 I picked up three preban Hungarians, all new unfired, and a nice pig sticker equipped SKS, a case of Chinese Steel core, a dozen mags, and a Chinese drum. I got stupid on the drum and sold it to a guy at the range for $75 before I checked the price they were selling for.
OF course that bargain turned into one hell of an expensive habit (espeically with the price of 7.62X39 being so high now).