doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Westley Richards Butt Plate

Another item I purchased in the Guyette and Deeter auction was a Westley RIchards SBT. The gun seems to be in excellent condition except that it has no butt plate. It was sold with a slip on leather pad that extends the butt about 1/2". I have looked through a bunch of references as to what it would have been fitted with originally. There seems to be a lot of variation over the years on different features. My gun for instance has the odd reduced forend tip that seems to have appeared at some point and then disappeared again. I want to put something on the gun, but I don't know if something like a horn plate would be appropriate or a period style pad. I am leaning toward a period pad to extend the LOP. Any thoughts from anyone?

This is a previous thread regarding the WR SBTs, which I cannot unfortunately edit
https://www.doublegunshop.com/forum...lat&Number=560470&gonew=1#UNREAD

The Model of 1908. Typical pigeon and inanimate target loads then were 1 1/4 oz. 3 1/4 Dr. Eq. - OUCH!



Trapshooters, being trapshooters, frequently added or replaced pads, and WR very likely provided any period pad requested; which pre-1910 would have likely been a Silver's. Other pre-WWI pads used in the U.S. included the Y.C. (Young & Cadwallader), Funkes, Huntley Shock Absorber (Omaha) and “Perkins” Recoil Pads (both advertised starting in 1915), Tryon #6, and the American Silver pad (sometimes called Grieb c. 1908; possibly by the Ajax-Grieb Rubber Co.)
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qxQsLDgpKtKITSGCJZ9H348YOsQL5CeZjjqNnHshpKQ/edit?tab=t.0

Not sure what pad this might be. Is that your FE?



I believe Bro. DeMund used a WR but none of these image provide a good look at the butt
https://www.trapshooters.com/threads/h-p-de-mund.618689/

1916 ad listing a rubber anti-recoil pad



WR cheek piece and different FE

No slippery horn. Do a nice period pad.
JR

In my picture files, this is the only buttplate I find. It is on a turn of the century droplock. All others are either checkered butts, heel and two clips, solid steel, or skeleton buttplates. When a recoil pad was shown, it was a solid Silver pad.

Keep in mind that anything you put on it won't be original. That's not a criticism, but rather an encouragement to do what you want to do, within reason.

Add a period correct pad and get the LOP to where it needs to be for you.

There are ways to make a new pad look aged.

Silver pad.

Drew listed a picture of the odd FE on the gun. Most of the ones I have examined in peson over the years had the ebony tip as shown in the other picture.

The gun appears to be original except for the butt plate. In this case it is an ommision since there is no plate or pad, so anything is going to be an addition. My plan is to go with some kind of 1" quality reproduction from the 1910 -1920 era and mount it with a 1/2" black extension spacer I already have from Connecticut. That will put the pull at 14-1/2" and not be obtrusively obvious. A lot of people will put very thick spacers but I will not shoot this gun in competition so I only want to get it long enough to be useable. The butt looks to be uncut but has two sets of very old screw holes, so I presume it originally had a hard pad at 13-1/2" lOP and this was swapped out later. I found an auction listing from about 12-15 years ago that I am pretty certain was the same gun and in that the gun had a modern aluminum and black rubber adjustable pad. I''m glad they removed that; I have too manyn of them in a drawer already.