PPatch your welcome,
spgordon,
Kind of a touchy subject that goes both ways. The one that is most entertaining and hypocritical in my mind is the "Haga" saga. A man that supposedly produced rifles in the pre & post Revolutionary era. Rifles of his time frame were often bulkier with a straight comb, but everything with a roman nose and the Reading A typical carving is attributed to him. That is the accepted label, but unsigned rifles from other schools with identical carving, inlays, and architecture paralleling with their signed counterparts are beat to death because they aren't signed. A great rifle is a great rifle, I have a signed Samuel Pannabecker that is an identical match to every attributed Haga out there, the common belief is he apprenticed under Haga. Samuel was born in 1794 and Haga died in 1796, if this is true he was an incredibly capable 2 year old. I have often thought that all of the Haga's with the Pannabecker stamp on the bottom of the barrel might actually be Pannabecker rifles, and maybe everyone is obsessing over a ghost that started out as a theory. Maybe the stamp on the bottom of the barrels were the makers mark in that area. I think this is a great gun, but it goes back to the common hypocrisy of collecting; If it is on one mans table its not what it appears to be and isn't valuable, but when it passes to another's table it becomes what it really is and it triples in value. Only an observation.
Buck
