I have damascus guns by Keith Kearcher and Buck Hamlin. Both do great work and are a pleasure to work with. That said I recommend Keith. If you are willing to spend some energy prepping the gun using the correct emery cloth (sand paper for metal) to remove the old finish and get most of the time consuming nug work done prior to sending the gun you can get a good price from Kearcher and he will get it back to you even faster than if he had to do the prep work. I did the prep work on a nice damacus gun the first time and tried to do the finish job myself (not good results). I stripped it a second time and sent it to Kearcher. After doing it twice my conclusion is stripping it down with emery cloth is not that hard.
