doublegunshop.com - home Forums Thread Like Summary - Shotgun sales listing etiquette: bare minimums

Offered for discussion.

I've been on a bit of an acquisitive tear in the past couple of months, and as a result, have three new doubles to my name- a disparate pair of over-unders built for serious skeet, and a weird, delicate Italian side-by-side farm implement built for, umm, looking pretty and possibly scaring ruffed grouse and spruce grouse out of their feathery little wits. During this period of "take my money", I naturally examined several dozen sales ads on numerous sales and trading fora, and bricks-and-mortar shop websites. The number of times I read an advert and had to contact the seller to ask basic questions such as "How long are the barrels?" "How's it choked?" "Is that a selective or non-selective single trigger?" "Do you think it'd stop a Yukon Gold potato in a charge?" still amuses me. So I've been wondering what this hive mind would consider the bare minimum of data required in a double-barrelled shotgun sales ad. For the general and possibly-interested market, I mean.

I'll start. Were I to list my old Browning B-SS (which is for the moment damned unlikely) on a site that doesn't permit photo upload and I had no photo hosting service available, this is how I'd do it:

FOR SALE: BROWNING B-SS 12-Gauge Shotgun, 28" barrels

Browning B-SS shotgun, side-by-side, 12-gauge, 2-3/4" chambers, 28" barrels

• Condition: Wrecked. Off-face. Clatters like an old Zippo.
• Serial number places it beyond the salt-wood era.
• Rollmarks state "MADE IN JAPAN ASSEMBLED IN CROATIA"
• Single non-selective trigger
• Choked Modified and Full. Modified (right-hand) barrel usually fires first.

Of course, if it had screw-in chokes...

• Comes with the following Triley-Breague Unscrewable® flush chokes: Cylinder, Cylinder, Skeet, Skeet, Disapproved Cylinder, Modified Cylinder, Modified, Modified Penguin, Penguin, Penguin, Full Penguin, Light Musk-Ox, Full Musk-Ox, Full, Extra-Full, Too Full, Reverse Venturi, Buick

(Sorry. Back to regular programming.)

• 17.5" length of pull
• Original hard black plastic Browning buttplate with a picture of John M. Browning straightening his tie; stock appears unaltered
• Forend and buttstock free of cracks, chips, and other defects that may invite derision or incite disgust
• Comes with original maker's case. Original case-maker not included.
• Exact round-count is unknown to me, but figure 500000 to 700000 shells
• Pictures available to your rotary phone.

So. Did I miss anything important?

What do you mean by "a site that doesn't permit photo upload"?

Here's my old B-SS, in a photo that I just uploaded.

Photo hosting is FREE here

https://www.jpgbox.com/

Osage Missourian Canoe
17 feet, square stern, 9.5 Johnson Outboard
Drafts 1 inch and is my duck canoe

Fudd, as Stan and others have stated, posting photos here is fast, easy, and free. The additional time required to upload a pic to a free photo hosting site, and then copy-and-paste it into a post or advertisement here is minimal. Stan says it takes less than 60 seconds, and he's absolutely right. If I already have the photo stored in my PC, it takes about 20 seconds or less. Posting photos directly from my Android phone might take a full minute. The tens of thousands of photos posted here over the years should be proof that it isn't at all difficult.

Most of the guns I've bought online were at least as described, and sometimes better. I pay attention to details and ask questions. If I don't get good answers, I don't buy or bid. One Lefever stock was broken during shipping, the fault of FedEX, and the seller gave me the option of returning it or giving me a partial refund. I kept it and took the refund, so never had to make a return. I considered returning another Lefever once because it was said to have fluid steel tubes, but they were Damascus. Robert Elliot advised me to keep it because almost all were fluid steel. He said it was a rare variation of an already scarce gun. Your biggest impediment in selling a gun here is being Canadian. Most buyers would incur a large fee and long wait to import it. Another impediment would come if you had guys like the Nutty Professor dislike you. Then they would Troll and intrude on every For Sale thread you posted here, and repeatedly do all they could to disrupt your sale. They also would claim to be civil members who never break the rules they complain about others breaking. This mentality is also why Dave would be nuts to have photo hosting here. If the system ever crashed or got hacked, the crybabies who lost images would blame him for all eternity.

I liked your list of various chokes. But you forgot one that is even tighter than Too Full, Reverse Venturi, or Buick. Gladys Kravitz choke is so tight, you couldn't get a greased sewing needle through it with ten times proof pressure.

I think this is so true. I use a portable hard drive that is almost permanently attached to my desk top IMac. Many of them are also on my Mac/iPhone/iPad and in the cloud as Stan suggests. But if it’s a photo I want to keep……it’s on the hard drive.