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Joined: Mar 2002
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KY Jon Offline OP
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I am looking to set up a double gun for duck hunting. I have three candidates. One is a GE Lewis 3" wildfowler box lock I just won at Holt's, the second is an AYA Model 3 3" from the same sale, then I have a AYA Model 4 I have on hand. I thinkg I bid on every 3" wildfowler gun on the last two Holts auctions. Only won two. The Model 4 came in a group sale from an estate. Do not know why I kept it to be honest. Spanish guns never rang my bell. But point is I am looking at what I have and what will fill in a need I have decided I have for a double gun to shoot ducks with a bit of Bismuth shot or even steel. I have other options but would like a British wildfowler option to hunt with and if that does not work out one of the AYA to fall back on.

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Broken strikers do happen. I just had one break yesterday on an Ugartechea sidelock. It's from back in the 50's and a pretty high quality gun, much nicer than most of the Uggies sent to the States more recently. But nothing much wrong, at least according to many Uggie owners, on those guns either. Just that they were mostly made to a much lower price point. Then there's what you read above, and Cole Haugh is certainly a reliable source when it comes to sxs gunsmithing.

Mine doesn't show a lot of use, but if it's still the original striker on a gun that old, that's pretty good. I've had them break on Brit guns as well. Bought a Sauer from Fieldsport several years ago that required a hammer replacement because on that gun, the pin is part of the hammer. German guns have a reputation for being pretty rugged, but I managed to break the first Sauer I ever owned. Not the striker/firing pin, but rather the link between the top lever and the Greener crossbolt. That was after I'd had the chambers lengthened to 2 3/4" and fired quite a few 16ga Express 1 1/8 oz loads through it. That was the only thing that ever broke, over a span of about 20 years.

Sometimes it seems like you win the lottery. Then you get a gun with a really good reputation for reliability, and something goes wrong the first time out.

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Those Lewis 3" guns are usually built like tanks,used a 32" barrelled one a few times,proper wildfowling guns.....

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KY Jon Offline OP
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The Lewis is my first choice but this one is only 30” at 7 pounds, ten ounces, 1/2&3/4 choke. Should be good with a good bismuth load. The AYAs are backup options. Another board member won another 3” gun I was bidding on in the last sealed bid auction. Don’t know who beat me on the other couple 3” doubles. Sealed bid auctions are such a weird thing. Bid too well and win them all which you might regret or bid low and regret it because you lost them all.

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Originally Posted by KY Jon
I recall back in the 70's or early 80's that Spanish made doubles got a bad reputation for having parts made with steel which had not been hardened properly. The gun with POS intials, Pride of Spain, was one of the worst examples. Sears of butter is how they were described. One gunsmith I knew used a POS 20 bore as a donor gun to make a .444 hog killing, double rifle. As I recall he had to go over all the internals and rework them and harden them properly. Was it just the POS line or were other makers like AYA having the same problems?

Good morning Jon,

You nailed the issue when you wrote “had not been hardened properly”, but the problem goes back a lot farther that the 1970s. The problem was first noted internationally during WWI, when Spanish gun makers supplied sidearms to any combatant with the money to pay for them.

The problem is one of process rather than material.

The material in question is just low carbon steel. That’s the same type of steel used in Lugers, Colt 1911s, and all of the old and very fine S&W revolvers. Low carbon steel produced in Spain isn’t any better or worse that low carbon steel produced in Germany or the USA.

Low carbon steel was used in firearms because it is relatively cheap to produce, relatively easy to make in quantity, and easily worked. That “easily worked” is a blessing and a curse. A blessing in that it’s easily shaped and engraved. A curse in that it is easily abraded deformed under impact.

The curse is easily dealt with after shaping and engraving are done by either surface carbonization to create a “skin” of high carbon steel, or by flame hardening and tempering to change the crystalline structure to harden the part through and through.

That’s the material side of the subject.

The process side is where the issue crops up. The Spanish artisanal shotgun makers might more accurately be terms “shotgun assemblers”. They don’t make the parts that they use to assemble their guns. Rather they all depend on a network of small shops each of which specializes in producing a few kinds of parts. The gun makers essentially buy parts blanks from that network of small suppliers and hand shape and fit the parts together to make shotguns.

This process doesn’t scale up well. Each gun maker is set up to make some fairly small (by USA standards) number of shotguns a month. The underlying network of parts suppliers is just big enough to provide the parts to make that small number of guns. That works well so long as there isn’t any sudden surge in demand.

When a US hardware chain tasks a small Spanish shotgun maker to deliver twenty or thirty shotguns a month the feces may hit the fan. If, for the sake of an example, that shotgun maker usually only buys the parts to build ten or twenty guns a month he now has to try to find two or three times the number of parts his suppliers are set up to provide.

So both gun makers and parts suppliers struggle to hire contract workers to make parts and assemble guns. All the really skilled people are already employed, and this is fundamentally a family-based trade, so aunts, uncles, brothers, mostly grown children, and anyone else who can handle a file are dragooned into making parts or building guns.

This is where the problem occurs. Parts either don’t get heat treated at all, or are hardened but not tempered. Parts lacking heat treatment, and parts left brittle due to lack of temper, get into the supply chain. Sometimes the bad parts are caught during assembly, and sometimes not; the gun makers are just as stressed out as the parts makers.

And that is how too soft and/or too hard parts get into Spanish shotguns (and the pistols made by Star, Astra, and Llama). No gun maker is immune. All the makers, Aguirre y Aranzabal (AyA) to Zabala Hermanos have had their share of this issue.

And that’s “the rest of the story”

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Low carbon (1020) steel is rarely used in making firearms. It has very low tensile strength and is used for things like fencing or building material. Converse to your post, it is high carbon steel (1040), or similar, that is used in firearms production and 4140, or similar grade steel, is turned and machined for barrels.

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Originally Posted by halifax
Low carbon (1020) steel is rarely used in making firearms. It has very low tensile strength and is used for things like fencing or building material. Converse to your post, it is high carbon steel (1040), or similar, that is used in firearms production and 4140, or similar grade steel, is turned and machined for barrels.

True today, but historically false for most of the 20th century in most of the world. Still false for most of the parts that go into Spanish artisanal shotguns, except for the barrels.

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Wrong. High carbon steel has been around for the past two hundred years, or more. Maybe it was used in the 16th through 18th century when muzzle loaders were being hand bored and hand cut. Since the invention of water powered lathes and grinders in the earliest stages of The Industrial Revolution, (1750 - 1820, or so) high carbon steel has been used in firearms all over the world. It makes more sense. Low carbon steel is harder to work than high carbon steel, whether is is turned (built up edge on the cutting tool), more difficult to grind (loading of the stone or grinding wheel) and too gummy for efficient drilling. All gun makers have been using high carbon steels for the past 200 years - Spain, Turkey, Pakistan included. If there is a hardness/quality issue for a gun part, it usually is in heat treating, quenching, annealing and so on.

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Originally Posted by halifax
All gun makers have been using high carbon steels for the past 200 years - Spain, Turkey, Pakistan included.

Bunk.

The vast majority of shotgun frames were made from 1018 or 1020.

This is why they were case hardened.

Wrought iron was also used.

Online references abound.


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Kyrie and SGJ are correct, and there are historical references and actually composition testing results here, including some frame analysis at the bottom
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dnRLZgcuHfx7uFOHvHCUGnGFiLiset-DTTEK8OtPYVA/edit

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