doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Thoughts on this Purdey 12 gauge

j0e, you've be hittin' that jug again.
Say, you didn't buy that old Purdey under it's spell did you????????

No but I've been offered double my money by more than one that saw it in person...

I let one SxS man at the club shoot it...he remarked that it shot its self.

You've been seeing double?

I'm a bit late for the Sleeving twist in this thread.....but I always wonder how folks can REALLY tell that the balance of a Sleeved Gun is not as original,when the original bbls are long gone?
I realize that perhaps the Sleever might skimp on the bbl striking/
balance thing....but how can you know for sure?
It's a personal thing,Balance
I have a nice old 1901 WW Greener Hammer Pigeon Gun, with Jones Underlever ,sleeved & reproofed etc... with the 30" bbls a tad weight forward on this 7 3/4 LB, isn't that how it should be?
Who knows....I like her just fine.
Hope you find yer Gun for the money, mate
cheers
Franc O

The scholar who chastised me for bringing up wall thickness gauges as a trump for eighty year old proof marks also made a comment about "Very seldom is striking the cause of bad wall thickness. Drilling 'em out from the inside is usually the reason." (I just assumed it was the same guy, I didn't check) That is so much BS. I can measure and examine the inside to determine what has been done in there. The hidden cause of bad wall thickness is eighty years of incompetent UK striking. Bad behavior in the bore can be detected with a ninety dollar bore micrometer. I will stick to my opinion that proof marks are worth nothing if you don't measure. "Sleeved" not marked on a water table does not take the place of close examination of the barrels with a high powered glass. Sure, it's nice if the mark is there, but if it isn't there, you had better get out your glass before you get out your checkbook.

Eightbore, yes and no. I do not think that I have EVER seen an English gun that has had externally restruck barrels. However, I've seen a boatload of them with proofmarks of 12 or 12/1 with .740" and larger inside diameter barrels.

Your point about proof marks meaning little (except as a guide) and measuring for yourself are spot on, but I disagree about the bad wall thicknesses being due to bad striking.

I can only say about the balance thing: If you have handled a lot of British guns, you don't need to see the join on the barrels to know whether it's been sleeved if it was sleeved badly. That said, I have handled sleeved guns that handled like originals, where someone paid attention to balance and dynamics.

It's much like what you feel when you handle a Best gun with 26" barrels. With your eyes closed, I DARE you to tell that the gun has "short" barrels, because the dynamics are as if they had 30" barrels.

Of course you havent seen many guns with restruck barrels, thats lots of hard work, and my point exactly. Except in the world of Bill. See Bill has no experience actually working on guns. I'll bet he has never restruck a set of barrels and measured them along the way. If he had, he might know the difficulty in doing so. I've done and I know. Its much easier to hone from the inside and that is also the location of most barrel problems, hence thats where the metal is usually removed from. You dont even need to polish barrels to reblack them, thats why you see pitting under many reblack jobs. As to the marking of sleeved guns, I've stated my opinion. Sleeving a gun like that without marking it so is done for one purpose and one only, to find a sucker and rid him of his hard earned money.
Steve

Right. I've never struck a barrel, but I know a bit about machining, and no one in his right mind would restrike the outside of barrels unless it was ABSOLUTELY necessary.

What you are saying is that all of those guns in the British auctions that carry warnings of "wall thickness below recommended minumums" had badly pitted bores that needed to be drilled out but the outside surface of those barrels was so pristine that they didn't need restriking? Yup,OK. The auction house warning about bores drilled bigger than proof is "Gun is out of proof."

Eightbore, I think you might be a bit confused. Do you know what striking is? It's FILING, by hand. Can you imagine the amount of material that has to be removed by filing the entire length of the barrels around their diameter, vs. simple boring or honing of the I.D.? You can polish external pits relatively simply, but a gun that has major pits inside the bores from lack of proper cleaning/lead fouling, primer or powdwer corrosion is far more common and requires a lot more material removal, generally.

And not "drilled" but bored or honed.