TIMMINS -- A trip to a local thrift shop can sometimes give you more than what you bargained for, and that's exactly what happened to a Timmins man.

Rick Picard recently bought himself a stereo cassette player, but when it wasn't working, he decided to do some tinkering.

“I purchased a 1970s Sansui cassette deck and I’ve had it home for a couple of days," Picard said. "So Sunday I had nothing to do so I took it apart so I could find out what was wrong with it."

He was hoping to play some of his favourite tunes, but the song coming out of the deck was off-key, to say the least.

He unscrewed the top, saw some foam and then he saw a board. He lifted both up and much to his surprise, he discovered a Ruger .22 calibre semi-automatic pistol inside.

Gun to be sent for analysis

"A bunch of things were going through our minds like why? What? Why is it there?" Picard said. "So we (he and his wife) talked for a little bit and ended up calling Timmins police to see what we should do. They advised us not to touch it because we didn’t know if it was loaded or not, so we left it as is and they sent an officer over and he safely removed it from our house."

Timmins police said Picard did the right thing by calling them. The gun will be sent to the Centre of Forensic Sciences for testing.

“They will determine whether or not the firearm has been used in a recent crime," said Marc Depatie, communications coordinator for the Timmins Police Service. "There’s a database of those things that have to be matched up against the firearm so that may not be able to be determined depending on the origin of the firearm."

If the gun is Canadian, all restricted firearms must be registered by make and model numbers and police will try to track the original owner down.

Failing that, police say they'll assume the gun came from outside the country. 

Correction:

The gun type was initially reported incorrectly as automatic and has been updated to semi-automatic.