The SR-25 and Its Collectability – Part 4: The Collectability of Knights Armament
All right, let’s talk a little bit about the collectibility of Knights Armament stuff, which has really come on strong now in terms of collectors and guys that want to get some of that early GWOT hardware, of which Knight’s Armament was very seriously involved with.
I’m going to talk about this SR-15 a gun where they made a limited number, right around 100. What it’s got are a few things that are seriously desired on the collectors’ market. For instance, this muzzle device, I’ve been told that in new condition it could go for a $1,000, used condition goes for $600. They hardly ever made them as they were very difficult to make,and you can hardly ever find them making it a serious collector’s item that people are willing to pay serious money for.
Same thing on the rail system. They didn’t make a lot of them and the ones they did make typically were paired with a new rifle so by and large hey only made a few extras. Rails go for serious money.
Knight’s Armament is always a company that had kind of pushed the edge in experimentation. In some cases, the stuff worked out; in other cases, it didn’t. They might have made a scope mount or some kind of a flip-up sight or whatever where they only made two dozen of them or 100 then decided to go in a different direction. Now, those items are big money on the collector’s market.
Interestingly enough, at Delta, we would see a lot of this stuff. We’d see something come in from Knight’s Armament; it might be a scope mount or some kind of new doodad, and we wouldn’t pay much attention to it. Unbeknownst to us, they only made a dozen of them and sent 10 of them to Delta, two of them they kept, and now when you find those things on the open market, they’re grand. There’s a lot of that kind of stuff.
Knight’s Armament is a serious R&D shop and they’ve always pushed the edge. Remember, they’re the guys that came up with the Picatinny rail free-float handguard, which Reed Knight told Eugene Stoner he was going to breathe 20 years more life into your gun with this handguard, and absolutely did, if not more than 20 years. The free-float handguard was a game-changer. You could argue in many ways the free-float Picatinny rail handguard really was the catalyst to so many other modifications and parts and different accessories that came onto the market for this style weapon system – M16, M4, AR-15. It just opened up Pandora’s box, and it really, in many ways, started with the rail system.
Heckler & Koch is in many ways is the same as Knight’s Armament when it comes to R&D shop. H&K really has limited production on the firearm side. When I visited HK back in the day, I was shocked at how small the manufacturing facility really was. They basically set up to build guns, and when they’re done building the batch of guns for that contract or for that fiscal year, they tear it down and they build something else. So that’s what you see with companies like Knights Armament and H&K as well – serious on the R&D side, that’s why you see them now always innovating, pushing the envelope, and coming out with stuff kind of unlimited in some ways, especially Knight’s Armament, somewhat limited on the production side, and it’s also why you see some serious collector interest and you see a lot of their rare accessories go for such big money on the collector’s market.
Hey, I hope you enjoyed this series covering the SR-25, where it started, its Delta lineage and where it ended up with the M110. I hope you were able to take away something from touching on the desirability and collectability of the various accessories they brought to the firearms market. Make sure to like and follow me on social media. Until next time, LAV out.