doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Dickinson Arms Dont Buy Buyer beware

Please try to show some restraint with your tangential retorts, Run. Not judging, just asking...
JR

CZ,

Just speculation on my part but if you compare the action of the Zigenhahn built Essencia (boxlock as Krieghoff calls it) to the Dickinson guns there is very similar basic shape & dimensions to the actions & trigger plates, the placing of the triggers & the cocking lever pivot pins are the same & both guns use shoe lump/platform lump bbls in which the which the lumps appear to be identical.

Merkel has been part of of a Turkish firearms/bbl manufacturing organization for some time & I read somewhere that Ziegehahn sourced his bbls from Merkel so draw your own conclusions from this. My Essencia carries 11/2010 Suhl proof marks so this is not a recent development.

Correction: Merkel is currently owned by CARACAL which is headquartered in the United Arab Emirates but I think there was/is a Turkish connection in the not too distant past but I can't locate the source of that info at the moment.

The Zigenhahn built Essencia action has much more detail/machine work in it (ie. replaceable hinge, pin, disc set strikers scalloped action back & the stock is secured with a conventional breech pin & hand pin arrangement as opposed to the Dickinson's draw bolt stock attachment) + the Essencia uses an Anson style forend attachment rather than the Deely style that the Dickinson uses.

I'm not knocking the Essencia or the Dickinson & I'm not suggesting Ziegenhahn sources completed actions from Turkey but I do suspect that there is some commonality in the rough action parts & possibly the lump portion of the bbl assembly between the two guns. Not much different that the same basic frames being used to produce Chevy Suburban & Cadillac Escalade SUVs or what was done w/ firearms manufacture in the British trade.

I like my Essencia (fixed choke 16 ga w/29" bbls English grip gun @ 5lb 15oz) nice handling / good looking gun w/excellent trigger pulls.

After action report....am sitting here with 20 quail to clean, plus one bonus bird (chukar). Saw some wonderful dog work and decent cover yesterday. Walked the equivalent of 5 plus miles and burned almost 85 28-gauge shells. Had a few shells not go on command (Federal 6s) but the Fiocchi 7 1/2s worked flawlessly (not sure why). The light gun and lighter shells really helped me keep up with both the dogs and the birds. Most of my fellow hunters were sucking a bit of wind by the end (as was I) but unlike the rest, I wasn't complaining about gun weight.