On my Sauer, when Abe Chaber repaired the cracking, he found that the inletting was not correctly done for the gun, regardless of whether minor cracks tend to occur in the wood behind scalloped boxlocks. The wood behind the scallops on my gun was unusually stressed by the recoil and metal slammed into the wood at a point where it should not have happened. Abe says would not have occurred if the inletting had been properly done. Abe is a very longtime stockmaker, so I take his comment seriously. After the War, good wood may have been in short supply. Good stockers may have also been in short supply. Getting a stock on the gun and getting the gun out of the factory door and sold may have been more important at that time after the War than maintaining pre-War stockmaking quality. The scalloped action is beautiful and the lock-up is silky smooth. Maybe the wonderful action was pre-War work-in-process. In any case, it is a very nice gun. Now that the stock has been repaired, the Sauer should have a long and useful life of shooting.
Whoever did the repair, it was expertly done, and it's been glued so well that only a faint line remains were the cracks came in the middle and top pointed lines of the scallops. The heads of the stocks on these are thick, sturdy, and stout, anyway.
As overbuilt as these guns were, they ought to weight just over nine pounds, instead of just under seven.
I took a candle and smoked all the bolts and side clips, and all six make lockup. The head of the stock now contacts all the metal on the action, if it didn't before it was repaired.
In modern America, we have so many guns it takes a while for each of us to count them all.
These old shotguns were made to be the customer's only shotgun, for their entire lives, and it shows.
