Gah.  All over the auction sites and every gun show is some fucking "Parade" rifle or bayonet that's so-called because it's chromed.

It's usually some third rate piece of shit, invariably pitted and worn, with chrome on top of the pitting and marks.  Frequently there are pieces missing.  There are often scour lines where the original crisp machining has been blurred by someone's buffing wheel.

The proper way to describe one of these would be something like this:  "Used, crappy, old bolt ation rifle.  Some gap-toothed, slack-jawed, white trash, inbred yokel did a piss poor job of chrome plating it because he'd sucked down too much shine boiled off in the radiator of Pappy's '32 Ford, so his already sub-par brain approached genuine retardation and he thought this was a clever thing to do.  It's probably safe to shoot but we don't guarantee it.  Fifty bucks and it's yours."

Instead, the seller usually tries to tack $50-$100 onto the top Blue Book value.  But ask him for any reference to a "Turkish/Austrian/Spanish/Italian Parade rifle" that was chromed historically, and he can't find one,  because they almost never really existed.

There are so many of these things, and they are all so badly done in the same fashion, I have to wonder if somewhere in Appalachia was some proto-Meth head who did nothing but take old Mausers and dip then in chrome as an excuse to snort the acid fumes out of the tank.  Or did he just have an equally brain-damaged brother who did cut-rate autobody work and thought it would be cool to toss them into the tank along with the bumpers?

Add these to the list of people to assassinate if time travel ever becomes possible.  Those poor old rifles have seen enough battles and rebuilds across Eurasia without being roofied with brake cleaner and raped with chromium sulfate.