Geissele Automatics is a company known for excellence. They demand the best from their products, and for the most part, they get it. But in any factory, there are always going to be the occasional products that come off the line with an irregularity—often a minor blemish, which has no impact on performance. In the case of Geissele, some of these items get lasered with the Count Blemula® logo and released in drops once or twice a year.
If you’ve never bought a Blemula® part, though, you might have some questions about what exactly that means, what you can expect from Geissele blemish products, and what might be available during this year’s sale. Luckily, we have answers.
What is the Geissele Count Blemula sale?
Count Blemula is Geissele’s iconic moniker for their blemished products. This includes any product that for some cosmetic reason does not meet their exacting standards for sale.
It’s important to point out that these are cosmetic blemishes—every Count Blemula part is fully functional and performs exactly as their non-blem counterparts would in your firearm. Components that are out of spec in essential dimensions or fail quality control testing will never be a part of the Blemula sale.
Instead, these products are made up of parts that have minor visual imperfections. This can be imperfect or irregular anodizing, excessive machining marks, off-center laser engraving, or logos—nearly anything that causes the part to appear imperfect without in any way affecting function.
Some of these imperfections are quite subtle, often undetectable to the untrained eye, so Count Blemula parts are marked with a laser-engraved vampire head to ensure they can always be distinguished from unblemished stock.
If you’re unfamiliar with Geissele as a company, we offer a Geissele brand review to help you get to know their history and product offerings.
Are Blem Parts Worth It?
Ultimately, that’s going to be up to each user to decide. However, blemished parts perform identically to their unblemished counterparts, so if you plan to run the rifle hard and can stomach an imperfect finish, Blemula parts offer you the chance to take advantage of Geissele performance at a significant discount.
The importance of a ‘perfect’ finish is largely personal, but most marksmen spend more time using their firearms than modeling them. In the case of internal components such as triggers, you might not even be able to see the blemish without disassembling your firearm.
What Parts Can You Get During A Blemula Sale?
Every Blemula sale is going to be a little different. The inventory of available blemished parts is basically random; blem parts aren’t produced on purpose, as they’re the product of random chance on the production line. There’s no way of predicting which parts will get an uneven result from anodizing, so there’s no way to predict what will be available during any given sale.
Any of Geissele’s products have a chance of being featured in the Count Blemula sale, though, and their most frequently produced parts have the largest chance of having a few blems available. Here’s a sneak peek at what you can expect from most Blemula sales:
Triggers
Geissele’s bread and butter has always been their world-class triggers. While they offer a full array of parts for AR-15s, AR-10s, and many other rifles, their triggers have always been what they are best known for.
In any Count Blemula sale, you can expect at least a few of Geissele’s triggers to be available. Common models like their classic Super Semi-Automatic and Super Semi-Automatic Enhanced 2-stage triggers are a part of nearly every drop, while rarer models like their Super ACR trigger may show up only once in a blue moon.
If you’re looking at upgrading your AR-15 trigger, the Blemula sale is a good place to start. Triggers are a phenomenal part to purchase blemished because they make a huge difference to your firing experience but are largely internal and rarely, if ever, looked at. Because most of the components are inside the firearm, the odds are high that whatever blemish the trigger has won’t be visible when your gun is assembled.
Even if the blemish is on the trigger shoe, which is the visible part of the trigger that you pull to fire a shot, it’s a small part that rarely gets studied closely. A visible blemish on the trigger shoe isn’t likely to have much effect on the appearance of your firearm, but an upgrade from a mil-spec to a Geissele trigger will definitely improve your enjoyment of your rifle.
Upper Receivers
Stripped, complete, and everywhere in between, receivers of all types are a big part of the Count Blemula sale. For uppers with multiple components, such as barreled or assembled receivers, the blemish could be on any of the parts, or all of them. In that respect, it’s sort of a mystery-bag experience; you never know what precise blemish you’re going to get.
What you do know is that you are getting a top-of-the-line upper at a steep discount. You can expect the same accuracy and reliability out of a blemished upper as you can out of an unblemished one, so they’re a great way to put together a rifle with premium performance, without the price tag.
Handguards
If you don’t need an entire receiver, just a handguard, then you’re in luck. A variety of different Geissele handguards are usually released each Blemula sale.
While these are higher-visibility parts than something like a trigger, they still offer excellent value, particularly if you intend to mount accessories to them. Most MLOK and Picatinny attachment systems will leave marks on a rail anyway—often more prominent ones than any blemish from the factory.
For rifles that will see professional or competitive use, cosmetic blemishes are even less relevant. These rifles tend to get plenty of marks from being tossed into dump barrels during a stage or banging around the trunk of a cruiser. The wear from use will quickly outstrip most blemishes.
Scope Mounts
Geissele’s scope mounts are well respected, even in a crowded field. Their Super Precision scope mounts have even seen military use with Special Operations forces, making them a popular choice with civilian and professional users alike.
Like triggers, scope mounts are components that have a significant practical effect, but rarely get much visual attention. You’re not likely to notice whether or not your scope mount has a scratch or a smudge very often, but you will definitely notice if your zero starts wandering or your scope twists one way or the other.
A high-quality mount is a form of insurance for your optic. It protects it and holds it true, ensuring that your shots go where you expect them to time after time. With Geissele’s blem mounts, users have the option for a high-quality, fully functional mount at a fraction of the normal cost.
Charging Handles
Aside from their triggers, Geissele may be best known for their charging handles. While ambidextrous charging handles may now be all the rage, and the market rather saturated with options, there was a time when Geissele was one of the few manufacturers to bring these improved controls to market.
Their flagship charging handle is the SCH: the Super Charging Handle. This broad ambidextrous charging handle features wide, aggressively curved levers to grip the hand during operation, allowing for secure charging with either a traditional grip or a one-sided pinching maneuver. This allows users to easily charge the rifle from either side while maintaining a proper firing grip and stance.
Geissele also offers their ACH, or Airborne Charging Handle, which utilizes the same forward-curved design to the levers, but with a reduced overall profile to limit snag potential. For those who need an even slicker, snag-free handle, their Government Charging Handle was created at the behest of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for that express purpose.
As with triggers, the bulk of your charging handle is going to be inside your rifle most of the time, so you may well not even see the blemish once it’s installed. Moreover, any charging handle that has been worked a few hundred times—which goes pretty quickly if you like dry-fire practice—is going to show a fair bit of wear. At that point, you’d be hard-pressed to tell whether it started it’s like as a Blemula or not.
Other Parts
You never really know what is going to turn up in a Count Blemula sale. Geissele’s catalog of products is broad, and any of them could make an appearance.
Geissele’s Premium Buffer Tubes are a frequent flyer, often showing up in a variety of different colors. Other components, such as their braided-wire Super 42 buffer springs and accompanying buffer weights rarely if ever appear in the Blemula sale.
Nearly any of Geissele’s components are eligible for inclusion, so it’s worthwhile to check for whatever you need each time the Blemula sale comes around.
Why Blemula Is Great For Builders
As we’ve already touched on, Count Blemula parts offer significant cost savings for users who aren’t overly concerned with their rifle’s appearance. If you can suffer a few odd marks, Blemula components are an excellent way to shave a few dollars off your next build.
For builders, in particular, blemished parts offer an excellent value. Most home gunsmiths assemble their firearms with care, but even so, you’re likely to leave a few marks of your own when putting your AR-15 together. Starting with a scratch or two on your parts before you assemble them won’t make much difference if there are going to be a half-dozen anyway by the time you are done.
For that reason, Geissele Blemula components offer the best “bang for your buck” for the at-home AR-15 armorer. If you’re following along with our home defense AR-15 build guide or starting a new project from scratch, Blemula parts are well worth consideration.
Conclusion
Geissele’s Count Blemula sale might only come once or twice a year, but each time it does, it offers buyers the chance at a value-for-money proposition that’s rarely seen in the firearm industry. These parts have full function and peak performance but offer steep discounts for a minor trade in aesthetic.
If you spend more time looking at your target than your rifle, Count Blemula parts from Geissele Automatics are a perfect way to stretch your dollars a little further.
