143 reading right now • ⚠ Launch Promo ends in --:--:--
Get the Book | $37

A rifle bought in 1974 is still shooting.The knowledge that came with it isn't.

Somebody dies, a safe gets opened, and a family that has no idea what they're holding sells forty years of guns to the first shop that offers a number. When my friend Doyle died, his widow sold forty-one years for one flat number. Nobody had ever written any of it down.

Seven years behind a gun counter. Thirty as a state wildlife officer. The complete owner's manual — identify it, buy it right, keep it fifty years, and hand it down.

  • Identify which variant you own — the money is never in the model
  • Do 53 jobs yourself, each with what a shop charges and how to check you got it right
  • Stop the rust you can't see — it isn't humidity, it's dew point
  • Leave your family a page per gun instead of a guessing game
★★★★★ 1,847+ readers·98.9% satisfaction
Get the Book — $37 $52 Or read what's in all 436 pages ↓

7-day money-back guarantee·Instant PDF download·One-time payment

WC Wendell Coffey
Wendell Coffey I wrote down what I'd tell you if you walked in with it.
The Gun You Think You Know, book cover $52$37PDF
0 Pages · 0 Chapters · 0 Procedures · 0 Worksheets
The Field Edition

One book. Everything I know about what's in your safe.

29%OFF The Gun You Think You Know, book cover
436 Pages · 121 Chapters · 53 Procedures

The Gun You Think You Know

Identify it, buy it right, keep it fifty years, and hand it down.

$52 $37 SAVE 29% TODAY
  • Identify the variant, not just the model — that's where the money actually is
  • 53 step-by-step procedures, each with shop price, your cost, and how to verify it worked
  • Stop the rust you can't see — it isn't humidity, it's dew point
  • 14 printable worksheets — the ledger, the sixty-second check, the torque card
  • 46 checked and disproven beliefs, sorted by what each one costs you
Get the Book — $37 →
🔒 Secure checkout · Visa · Mastercard · PayPal · Apple Pay
📱 Read it on your phone, tablet or computer ⚡ Instant PDF download ∞ Yours forever · no subscription

⚠ This Price Expires In

--HOURS
--MINUTES
--SECONDS
The Position

Most gun books stop at the purchase.

This one treats the purchase as the first quarter of the problem. Four of its six parts are about the fifty years after.

It's written for the ordinary owner — three to fifteen guns, most of them bought with overtime money, at least one of them inherited, and nobody honest to ask about any of it.

A family selling forty years of guns for one number happens constantly, and it is almost always avoidable. What prevents it costs nothing but an evening a week for three months.

What's actually in it

Six parts. 121 reference chapters, 53 step-by-step procedures, and 14 appendices built to be printed.

  1. 01

    Know What You're Holding

    25 chapters

    Identifying it as a Model 94 tells you almost nothing about what it's worth.

    The lookup spine. What's stamped on it and the eight places to look — men check two. Serial numbers, date codes and proof marks. Reading a spec sheet without getting fooled. Then a six-step identification method, and variant tables for the guns American households actually own: Model 94, Model 70, 870, Mossberg 500, Marlin 336, 10/22, S&W K and L frames, Ruger revolvers, Glock generations, the 1911, Savage 99 and 110, and more.

    The money is entirely in which one it is.

  2. 02

    Buy It Right

    28 chapters

    The sticker is never the price. I set those tags for seven years.

    The five-question filter. How the number on the tag actually gets built, and the five upsells that add price and nothing else. The genuinely soft buying months, none of which is Black Friday. The sixty-second used check. Five signs a gun was butchered. Police trade-ins, pawn shops, gun shows and online auctions — and what the photographs are hiding.

    What happens at the counter, written from the other side of it.

  3. 03

    Keep It Running

    44 chapters

    It isn't humidity. It's dew point.

    The longest part, because it's the part nobody writes well. What the authorities actually say, and where they disagree. Rod, desiccant, dehumidifier and inhibitor — four mechanisms, three problems, and one of them doesn't touch humidity at all. The eight-dollar fix and the three-thousand-dollar safe. Never oil on wood, and why an oil-soaked stock can't be glued. What actually wears out. Then a full diagnostic tree for when something breaks.

    And the point where it stops, and tells you to carry it to a gunsmith unfired.

  4. 04

    What It's Worth and How to Hand It Down

    24 chapters

    There are two words that cost families more than anything else.

    Grading your own, honestly. Refinished guns. The three value-killers. What documentation is actually worth. Three prices for the same gun, and which one you'll really get. The trade-in trap. Insurance. Then the estate playbook for the first week, and what never to do.

    Doyle's safe went to a shop for one flat number. Forty-one years, one number. This part is so that doesn't happen to yours.

  5. 05

    The Bench

    38 procedures

    Every job you can do yourself — and six the book refuses to teach.

    Each procedure carries what a shop charges, what it costs you, and how to verify it worked. Mounting and torque. Bore sighting for nothing. Zeroing in three shots. A published homemade bore-cleaner formula. Storage builds. The cleaning tools that ruin guns. Inspection cards.

    The six it refuses are named, with the reason. A refusal that explains itself is more useful than a gap.

  6. 06

    The Field

    15 entries

    Waiting, and why it's the whole job.

    Sighting in properly. Knowing your own limit and writing it down. Reading the hit. The temperature clock. Trailing, and what to do when the blood stops. Field dressing, quartering, and processing your own.

    Break-even on processing your own deer is one to two animals.

  7. APX

    The Appendices

    14 printable

    Designed to be photocopied and ruined.

    The handing-down ledger. The sixty-second check on one page. A torque and revolver measurement card. The storage calendar. A recovery card for the truck. The processing yield sheet. Tool lists by tier. And the price reference — every figure dated, gathered in one place so it can be refreshed on a single page instead of hunted through 121 chapters.

    Plus Appendix I: 46 checked and disproven beliefs, sorted by what each one costs you.

Specifics

Fourteen things inside, by name.

Not themes — the actual arguments, so you can judge them before you spend thirty-seven dollars.

1

Why relative humidity is the wrong number — and what dew point actually does to steel in a safe bolted to a concrete slab.

2

The $8–15 fix that protects your guns better than the difference between a $150 cabinet and a $3,000 safe.

3

What an RSC rating actually certifies: five minutes, one person, hand tools, no power tools — and why UL will not put a fire rating on one at all.

4

Why scope makers and ring makers publish incompatible torque figures. Vortex says 15–18 in-lb; Leupold's own instruction sheet says 28. Which number to follow, and why.

5

Why storing a rifle butt-down is slowly destroying the wrist — and the four-dollar fix.

6

A published bore-cleaner formula: the full recipe, the mixing instructions, the container that will fail on you, and my own position on substitutions.

7

The chlorinated brake cleaner in your garage, and what it becomes near a welding torch. This one is at the front of Part Five for a reason.

8

What you should actually get back from a deer processor — from a state study that weighed 115 field-dressed deer before and after.

9

How to read a processor's own paperwork. Several published price lists state plainly that ground product is batched and mixed. It's written on their forms.

10

The front leg trap: on a broadside deer, when the near foreleg is back in its stance, the front of the vitals is covered.

11

Zeroing a rifle in three shots instead of a box of ammunition.

12

How to tell whether your scope is broken or was crushed by the rings — because the replacement will develop the same fault in the same rings.

13

Why cleaning your rifle the night before a hunt is a mistake.

14

The barrel break-in ritual, and what the barrel makers themselves actually say about it.

The Arithmetic

What it saves you, in numbers.

Every figure below is in the book, dated and sourced. None of them are rounded up for the sales page.

Jobs you stop paying for

JobShop chargesYou payWhere
Mounting a scope$25–75 each time$40–70 once, in tools you keepV-1, V-2
Bore sighting$10–20$0V-3
Ring lapping$20–40Often unnecessary — the book tells you how to check firstV-6
Processing a deer$95–150 per animal$150–300 once. Break-even: 1–2 animalsVI-11

Products you stop overpaying for

ItemBrandedSubstituteSaves
Bore solvent$8–14 per 4 oz (≈$250–450/gal)Published formula, ~$25/galMost of it
Aerosol degreaser$10–18/can$4–6/can, same aisle~$8/can
Cleaning patches$8–12 per 500$2–4 per 500 from a yard of flannel~$7
Hygrometer~$26 with a gun-safe brand on the box$11–15 — the identical instrument$14
Muzzle rests~$40 commercial kit~$4 of foam pipe insulation$36
Dry box$50–70~$25~$35
Bore guide$15–30A few dollars, if none is made for your rifle~$20

The honest first-year math

Mount two scopes yourself, bore sight them, switch solvent and degreaser, skip the branded hygrometer, and process one deer at home: roughly $250–300 back in the first year, against $250–370 of one-time tools you then own for life.

So year one is about a wash. Every year after that is pure saving — and you keep the tools, which is the part the arithmetic usually leaves out.

And then the money that isn't small

The savings above are real, and they are the least of it.

Condition alone can halve or double the value of a collectible gun. The grade is the largest single number in any valuation, and it rests on words that three different systems define three different ways. Under one standard, "Very Good" means a gun that looks nearly unused. Under another, it means a gun that may have no bluing left at all.

Families don't usually get taken by somebody lying about what a gun is. They get taken on which scale it's being weighed on.

Chapter 98 is that mechanism in full. Chapters 99 through 121 are what to do about it.

How It's Written

Every recommendation names its own flaw.

A pick with nothing said against it isn't a recommendation. It's an advertisement.

Every pick carries its named flaw

Every era in every variant table gets a flaw named against it — including whichever one the chapter recommends. Every storage method. Every solvent. Every route to selling a gun.

Where the sources disagree, it says so and gives both

Part One is full of dates that reputable accounts get differently, and picking one silently is how a reference book becomes untrustworthy. Part Six gives the full published range on how long to wait before trailing a wounded animal — because the guidance genuinely disagrees, and understanding why is more useful than a single confident number.

Where the answer isn't in here, the chapter says who to ask

Every chapter ends that way.

Two full pages list what's been left out, and why

Optics and electronics. The AR platform. Long range. Competition. Concealed carry. Anything too recent to have a service record. That list is there to make the rest of the book believable.

The Limits

What this book will not do.

Not a gunsmithing manual

It will not teach you gunsmithing past the bright lines. Headspace. Sear and hammer engagement. Revolver timing. A break gun off the face. Any barrel fired against an obstruction. Six of those get their own entries explaining exactly what's happening and why the answer is no.

Not legal advice

Antique status, estate transfers, interstate movement, private sales, tagging, transport and season rules vary by state and change.

Not medical or investment advice

And it states plainly that a gun is a poor place to keep money.

Not a product review

Nothing in it is recommended because somebody paid for placement. There are no affiliate links in this book.

Fit

Who it's for, and who it isn't.

This is for you if

  • You own between three and fifteen guns and inherited at least one of them
  • You've been quoted a price by a shop and had no way to know whether it was fair
  • Your safe is in a garage or a basement and you've wondered about it
  • You hunt, and you've had an afternoon you still think about
  • Somebody in your family will one day open your safe without you there

This isn't for you if

  • You shoot competition or precision long range — different discipline, different literature
  • You want AR builds, optics reviews, or tactical gear
  • You want to be told which gun to buy. This book gives you a filter, not a shopping list.
Reader Notes

From the field.

— What men have written back —

★★★★★

"Thought I knew what was in my safe. Went through the identification chapters and found out two of them aren't the variant I'd been telling people for thirty years."

— D. Reinholt, Wisconsin
★★★★★

"Walked from a Model 70 at a show because of the buffing. Man wanted $900. Book cost me thirty-seven."

— T. Callahan, Pennsylvania
★★★★★

"My father died in March. I had eleven guns and no idea what any of them were. This is the book I needed in April."

— B. Hutchins, Wyoming
★★★★★

"Filled in the ledger over three nights and sat both my kids down with it. My daughter asked why I'd never told her the Savage was her grandfather's."

— R. Halloway, Michigan
★★★★★

"Nothing in here about my AR and he says so up front. Bought it anyway for the other four hundred pages."

— C. Marsh, Idaho
★★★★★

"I wrote tags at a hardware store in Ohio in the seventies. He's got the spiff chapter right."

— L. Prater, Ohio Retired counter man
Common Questions

Before you order.

One searchable PDF, 436 pages, straight after checkout. Print it, read it on a phone, leave it in the safe. No app, no login, no shipping.
A gunsmithing manual teaches you to do the work. This tells you which work is yours, which isn't, what each job actually costs on both sides, and how to know you did it right. The professional-only jobs are named and refused, with reasons.
Parts Two through Six apply to almost anything. Part One's variant tables cover the models American households actually own — the common lever guns, bolt rifles, pump shotguns, rimfires and revolvers.
That's who this was written for. A man with somewhere between three and fifteen guns, most of them bought with overtime money, who's never had anybody honest to ask.
That's what they're for. The ledger, the sixty-second check, the torque card, the storage calendar, the recovery card and the yield sheet are all designed to be photocopied and ruined.
Yes, and the book says so. Every figure is gathered in one dated appendix so it can be refreshed on a single page rather than hunted through 121 chapters. The mechanisms don't age; the numbers do.
It teaches you to grade one honestly — including which of the three competing grading systems a number is being quoted under, which is where families actually get taken — then gives you three prices for the same gun and tells you which one you'll really get. Exact numbers move, and a book that printed them would be wrong by the time you read it.
No, and there are two pages saying so. Optics and electronics, the AR platform, long range, competition, concealed carry, and anything too new to have a service record. I don't have the repetitions in any of that and I'm not going to guess at it for you.
No. Where a subject is genuinely contested, both sides get laid out and you decide. Part Six gives the full published range on how long to wait before trailing a wounded animal rather than inventing one confident number, and that's how the whole book handles disagreement.
Seventy-seven, upper East Tennessee. Seven years behind a hardware store gun counter, then thirty as a state wildlife officer checking guns in the field, in the rain, in the hands of the men using them. I kept every notebook. Nobody has ever sent me a gun and I've never had a sponsor.
Yes. That's most of the point of it. It's yours — print it, hand it over, leave it in the safe with the ledger filled in.
Tell me, and it goes in the second edition. A record that gets corrected is worth more than one that was never challenged. What I want most is from men who were there — at those counters, or at a check station on opening weekend.
Read the whole thing first. If it isn't what you hoped, one email inside 7 days and you get every dollar back — no forms and no argument.
The Close

The one job in this book only you can do.

Everything in Part Four is preparation for one document: a page per gun, in a binder, not in the safe.

  • What it is. The variant, not just the model.
  • What you paid, and when.
  • The condition, written the way the book insists — the system, the number, the exceptions.
  • What came with it, and where those things are now.
  • Who it goes to, and why — which is the difference between an inheritance and a used gun.
  • What you know about it. Where it came from, who had it before, what it was used for, how it shoots, what's odd about it.

That last field is the one nobody else can reconstruct after you.

A safe opened by a family holding that document loses close to nothing. A safe opened without it loses a serious fraction of its value — and every single thing the owner knew about what was in there.

One gun per sitting. One page a week, and you're finished inside three months.

Get the Book — $37 $52

7-day money-back guarantee·Instant PDF download·One-time payment

$37 436 pages Get the Book
S
Roy from Kalispell, MT
just got The Gun You Think You Know
2 minutes ago