doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Spanish "Not so Best".

I had one of those in 16 gauge. Talk about a tank. The steel was a vanadium alloy and just tough beyond description. The 16 gauge I bought had insufficient headspace for SAAMI shells and getting a tiny increase to SAAMI minimum had my gun smith swearing and sweating.

An AYA 400E from the early 60s. I picked it up with lots of provenance from a retired man of the cloth who served on the estates of Lord Amherst in northeast England. It may not be a best gun but the stories the old man related were among the best - faith old labs, tough shots, invitations to formal shoots. Shoots at which literally hundreds of hare were taken off the estate so bird populations could flourish.

I doubt the hare could tell it wasn't a best gun. I had my English sidelock experience, and it soured me on the guns. There is much to be said for the generic A & D patent boxlock, it goes a long way toward frustrating Murphy's law.
There is also much to be said for a gun that doesn't go to the 'smith until it breaks, as opposed to one that goes in every year for service.

Best,
Ted

Ted, the Brits look at guns the same way we look at vehicles: preventive maintenance. You can also run a car until it breaks, but you're likely to get more miles out of it through regular service. The wealthy class were also putting a lot of rounds through their guns on those driven shoots. Shells that we wouldn't consider all that heavy, but considering the relatively light weight of English game guns, there's likely to be some wear and tear. (Those loads are "hotter" in terms of shot charge and velocity relative to gun weight than are the ones target shooters run through guns weighing a couple pounds more.) The standard Brit game gun, prior to the change in the proof laws in 1954, was a 2 1/2" 12 bore weighing around 6 1/2#, give or take a little, with a designated service load of 1 1/8 oz. Not unlike the loads used by trap shooters . . . but their guns weigh around 25% more than that.

The sidelock has much more in the way of moving parts, Larry, and needs more maintenance. I'd bet those "keeper's guns" we see from time to time didn't get that maintenance, either. A lot of still functioning boxlocks in that catagory.
I got a sidelock that was just worn out. And, I still see lots of them, in that same condition, on websites and in dealers rack's, today.
I guess if I had been a newly minted English officer, in the India Corps, circa 1906 or so, I know which design I would have picked for that duty.

Best,
Ted

The sidelocks, and for that matter boxlock pairs (obviously made for driven shooting) often got much heavier use, in terms of rounds fired, than a keeper's gun. Not at all unusual to go through 100+ shells in a day on a 250-300 bird driven day. And back when Ripon was shooting, a lot of the driven days were bigger than that. So one heck of a lot of shooting over the course of the season, for those who were serious about it. That's why the preventive maintenance was a particularly good idea. You might not need to change your oil if you only drive your car 5,000 miles in a year. Probably a good idea if you drive it 50,000 miles a year.

But if the preventive maintenance wasn't done . . . easy to see how one can run across a worn-out gun, if it was used for volume shooting.

I�ve been following this thread concerning the necessity of yearly preventative maintenance for (presumably English) side lock guns with interest and some incredulity.

Spaniards rarely even clean the bores of their guns once a year, much less take them back to the maker for a yearly PM. The guns get used and put up, used and put up, until the original owner is too old for the field at which point they are handed down to the next generation. Eventually someone breaks a firing pin and has it replaced, or a hinge pin becomes sufficiently worn that it needs to be turned, but PM just isn�t in the picture. Guns can go forty or fifty years and never have the side plates removed.

I�ve seen any number of discussions of English shotguns in the forums of Spanish hunters/shooters, and the beauty of the top end English is highly praised, but their lack of durability is spoken of with a kind of sorrow. I�d always taken the former at face value and doubted the latter. The English hunters/shooters I�ve corresponded with over the years have not mentioned any great need for maintenance of their guns (English or otherwise) or of a short service life without such maintenance. But this thread has made me wonder if lack of durability of English shotguns spoken of in the forums of Spain should be given some credence.

So Kyrie, should we all trade in our delicate and such needy English guns for the more durable Spanish guns then? I'm not quite sure what you are trying to say?

Buzz,

I'm more asking a question than I am making a statement.

I'd never thought English guns to be any less durable than Spanish guns. But the impression I'm getting from Larry and Ted's exchange is that English guns need at least yearly maintenance to stay functional. That seems just passing strange to me and I'm asking, as politely as I can, if that's really the impression Larry and Ted wanted to give.

They don't need any more maintenance than any other gun. England is very rainy and their guns were exposed to gobs of moisture. They had them go in for yearly maintenance for that reason and primers were very corrosive. I'm pretty sure something along those lines is what Mr. Brown was referring to. I'm pretty sure that Spanish guns (which for the most part are copies of what the English produced) wouldn't fare any better in the same environmental conditions.