French gunsmith Christian Ducros, admired as "Le magicien des armes," once described his aim in building guns as challenging machines by hand to achieve superior levels of fit and finish. Clearly there are people willing to pay for work by individual gunsmiths like Ducros, Alain Vaussenat, Philippe Ollendorf, P V Nelson, Trevor Proctor, Johann Vilhjalmsson (who posts here and whom I regard as a friend) and more in addition to firms that built a deservedly good reputation for themselves over the past 100 years. There are new talents coming up by the dday now as gunmaking scchools in Ferlach, Suhl etc come up and the finest bolt action rifles get built in the USA by gunsmiths educated at Trinidad State in Colorado.

Speaking of individual gunsmiths and their guns and lasting value, last I checked, the most valuable collector guns in the world were made for European royalty by Nicolas Boutet in the muzzleloading era. That there is no Armurerie in Boutet's name or that he ahd no successors has not affected the value of his masterpieces one bit.

There will be brand whores who endlessly debate one brand over another - as useful a pastime as discussing how many spirits dance on a pin. All of the reputable brands and individual gunmakers made decent guns, all of them turned out the occasional clunker, and the best designs survived while some good ones didn;t for some reason or the other. Anything that is desired can be made today and there are gunsmiths to make it. All it takes is money.