A little personal Pachmayer upgrade story; when Brother Frank Pachmayer was doing his upgrade business, he created a fair number of upgrades that were donated to Ducks Unlimited chapters around the country as raffle items to help them raise money. The winners of these auctions subsequently received 1099's so that they had to report the value of their winnings to the IRS on their tax returns. One of those winners lived in a neighboring county; his story, and a picture of him holding his Parker "A-1 Special", subsequently appeared in the local payment. This guy subsequently received his 1099 declaring the value of this gun at $30K; and somewhere along the line, got an appraisal pegging the value of the gun at $100K. Everything rocked along just fine until he and his bride fell out with each other and the value of the gun came up in the subsequent property settlement portion of their divorce. Seems the husband wanted his wife to accept the gun as a portion of her part of the property settlement; and had his attorney insisting that the $100K appraisal was in fact a realistic value. Well, the wife was a bit suspicious and had her attorney call me (have no idea why he called, or how he think know to call me). Oddly, at that time I had just examined 3 Pachmayer upgrades that were for sale; and asking prices ranged from $6,500-12K. Also, Herschel Chaddick had an original 12-bore A-1 Special for sale at the time for $65K. I had never seen the disputed gun; and even if I had, would have refused to place a value on the. I simply related to the attorney the information noted above and advised him to draw his own conclusions. I also heard later that Pachmayer had some problems pertaining to the $30K 1099 values they assigned these guns, but don't recall the details at the moment.
