I can think of a very good reason to buy a salt-era Diana grade for $1895 and did. High grade Supers from the late sixties, early seventies are not rusted and pitted by reputation and the stigma of a serial number but by the presence of salt.
I also have some trouble accepting that 90% of all of Browning's salt-year production were assembled with stocks stickered in salt given that grade 1s have plainJane straight grain wood rather than the crotch black walnut which is said by Ned Schwing to have been in short supply. I doubt if Browning applied the Morton process to every last stick if plainer grades of wood cured by slower processes were readily and economically available. I admit this is conjecture on my part.
I would expect a current 12K custom shop gun to be quite different in finish and attention lavished thereon from the garden variety grade 1s of the fifties and sixties.
One man's hogging cut is another man's (and another gun's) finish cut. If there's so much as a flat belt shaft overhead and a motive force besides turning a crank present, "machining" in the classical sense is going on and I would not want to underestimate its importance in rationalizing the cost of a production gun by starry-eyed paeans to the "hand-made".
Altho chronologically precedent to the Jap Citori with which it shares it basic design, the Belgian-produced B-25 may not be a superior gun. It is uniquely what it is and not simply a superficially-similar set of lines on paper.
jack
