BSA VS2000 Side Lever

[Lumberjack]

Just noticed this on another site.

For Sale
BSA .22 VS2000 Side Lever second hand Air Rifle (R/H),
Only 10 Ever Made !! Very Rare BSA. 9 Shot Magazine.
This model never made it to production.
£4,000

Wow!!! Have they put the comma in the wrong place?

I apologize if you guys have already dicussed this one. It just seemed a tad expensive.

Do they really command that kind of money?

[hwvixen]

That can't be right.!

You'll be telling me next that a BSA .25 & Military Pattern are worth 4k too...

Sounds like there's a "bandit" alert....

[Powderfinger]

The one at John Knibbs is priced at £4k, too IIRC. It has been there as long as the shop has been open. Which says everything.

[buffalo]

Saw that myself the other night, thought i had lost a few month and woke up on April 1st

[T 20]

The one at John Knibbs is priced at £4k, too IIRC. It has been there as long as the shop has been open. Which says everything.

It's the same gun, check out the seller's name.

[keith66]

I have heard figures like this being bandied around for these before,
Despite their rarity £4000? be serious, for the same money you can buy a pretty good English shotgun or several Good English Muzzleloaders of way higher quality. For example a friend came round the other day with his new toy, very good quality 150 year old 15 bore percussion double, excellent condition by a lesser known london maker, in perfect shooting order, price paid? £750 , now thats proper value for money!

[Sam99]

I agree with Keith66, but there are "completist’s” who want one of everything, no mater what the cost.

Sam

[Paddy_SP]

I agree with Keith66, but there are "completist’s” who want one of everything, no matter what the cost.

Sam

Sooner or later one of us will win the lottery - I suspect it'd find a new home then!

[Arch.Stanton?]

When I rang Knibbs I was given an asking price of £4.5k for the Military . Must have gone up then ....Thats my chance gone !

I did handle a few of the first prototypes for this BSA VS2000 - there were subtle differences between these and the later batch of ten ( or was that 8 if including the 2 I saw ) - the mags were machined brass for one thing and numbered accordingly . I would have said that these would /could be worth the price but anything over £1k to me is fairy dust so I never try looking for anything too rare anymore ...

[Muskett]

They never went into production and all examples are prototypes, one offs. They weren't even very good. The few prototypes that were made are all owned by a couple of people so we know where they all are. Those people (might be one) don't really want to sell and even if they did they would probably let go the poorest example. A really beautiful air rifle, Holland & Holland quality, might be worth £3k. These aren't. All in all for BSA collectors they just don't count. Other prototype modern guns make 20% or a little more, but not much more than a limited production example. Interesting but not 4.5k interesting.

[hwvixen]

Without stealing the thread.... I have a BSA Gunlaying Teacher thread going at the moment....i'm looking for values of it with the intention of selling it soon & have had some estimates.

What realistic price would a VS2000 sell for...if one were really for sale..?

[REEVES]

I would think its been priced to keep,unless someone with more money than sense wants it.

The value of any gun is the price that someone is willing to pay.

[Hsing-ee]

Is far better value for money than one of these experiments. You can get one for £140, superb quality and will last forever, will piss on the VS2000.

Maybe if you are an extremely rich BSA collector you would buy the VS2000 but if it were any good it would have been a production rifle.

After all, the Goldstar was the rifle that BSA actually put into production, and it does everything that the VS2000 does but better? You can get one of those too!

[Hsing-ee]

What realistic price would a VS2000 sell for...if one were really for sale..?

The Mach One rifles sold by Venom were handmade and in a class of their own and they are worth about three grand. The BSA prototype - given that it would have been a production rifle with a sale price of about £350 nowadays - is probably worth about £1,000 or thereabouts, given that there are only 10 or so around.

This sort of thing makes me think there should be an Airgun Museum, possibly an annexe of the National Car Museum at Stratford-on-Avon (because I like Shakespeare and it is near Birmingham) so that expensive turkeys like the VS2000 can be on display there as a warning to others.

The Pitt Rivers museum in Oxford's Natural History Museum has an excellent firearms collection hidden among the shrunken heads and Inuit anoraks, so there IS a precident. What say you all, the National Airgun Museum in Stratford-On-Avon? Donations? Somewhere to put a gun-laying BSA perchance?

[graham64]

any item is only worth what someone is prepared to pay for it.the fact that this gun is still where it is sould say that it is not worth that type of money.