doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Parkers are they truely...............?

I suggest that the prices of Parker guns is irrelevant to the levels of overall quality.

Parkers are no where near the quality of a British best gun. Even A&D boxlocks are of better design and general overall quality. Parkers are good guns (as are Fox guns) and have been loved (and collected) by Americans for generations. But they do not compare favorably to many British, German, or French guns of the day.

C'mon ed. Smith guns are not the topic, and this is the design defect that we have discussed many times

Amazing how fast this went off topic! Thank to everyone who responded!

Riddell, once you�ve driven to the end of the road a feller has to turn in a different direction.

I know very little about really fine guns, and I certainly would never consider any of my hatcheting as "fine", but I do understand that concept, Dustin. When I was inletting the lock on the last m/l long rifle I built I went to great pains to leave every bit of wood possible. I left a very small area that is between the two leaves of the sear spring. It ended up looking a bit like the forward part of an arrow. When my mentor inspected the inlet he said he had never seen anybody leave that piece of wood in a lock inlet, and asked why I did. I replied "Because I could". He smiled and nodded in agreement.

Thanks for expressing it so well.

SRH

stan, as a failed long rifle builder, i would appreciate seeing pitchers of your work...my sense is that it is top grade work...

an doc drew,thanks for providing pic of lc smith design flaw...that also makes sense...

Take a good, hard, look at the amount of wood left under the lock plates on the Purdey, pictured above. The bolt has some material to work with to hold the gun together.
The Lefever has more wood than an LC Smith, but less than either a Purdey or a Holland. It isn�t real hard to find any of the American guns named here, with wood problems. To be fair, they are all getting pretty old.

The Parker has a splitting maul bolted to the front of the wood. They will all fail, eventually.


Best,
Ted

I'm surprised that the Preacher is just jumping to conclusions based upon a picture of the small surface area at the head of an L.C. Smith stock. This is exactly the type of knee-jerk observation that he criticized me about in the current barrel burst thread.

Just think, if he wasn't wasting time attempting to discredit me for simply using my eyes and stating the obvious, he could be engaging in "Wood Stress Analysis"to find the true cause of shotgun stock failures.

Why, he could spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to hire some wood research facility to analyze gun stock breaks. He could start Threads with photos of broken stocks, and photomicrographs of the fracture areas. He could impress us with descriptions of "waves in the sand" and other phenomena. He could lament the valuable knowledge we might glean from missing chunks and splinters. He could even Copy-and-paste a bunch of links to things that have little or nothing to do with the subject, to create the illusion that he is a big-time gunstock expert and guru. He might even use some big scientific words he doesn't understand, just to dazzle people who are easily fooled.

But simply stating the obvious as he did here is a missed golden opportunity to be something he isn't. What an incredible faux pas!

Incidentally, of the three Parkers I own, one has been restocked due to the aforementioned design flaw, and another has a screw through the cheeks to repair a split. I see a lot of these "American Purdey's" with screws, pins, stove bolts, and dowels through the cheeks. My Syracuse Lefevers don't have that problem. But thin, fragile wood above and below the sideplates is a major weak point in that brand. It remains to be seen how the plastic stocked guns of today will fare in 100 years.

Keith- one of many good reasons why I shoot 1100 fps low pressure loads in my 12 bore Smiths- 3 are graded ejector guns pre-1913, one is a Ideal LONGRANGE made in 1929- that gun will never see a 3 inch shell or a steel shot load- so I use it for turkeys, and "arch-angel" barn pigeons- they all love RST loads-- Also, I had Brad epoxy coat the thin wood areas in the stock head, and I do NOT remove the lock plates, to avoid over-tightening the head through bolt-- Facts of life if you want to shoot Smiths today.