doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com The pinfire game gun

It's hard to imagine that the guns we're talking about here can be 20 years later than the fabulous gun AaronN posted in another thread, the original Casimir Lefaucheux. It is good to remember the pinfire system was current and accepted in France well before any British-made pinfire first appeared.

Mixed in with the first Lang-type forward underlever guns in Britain would have been some Continental guns, such as the Lefaucheux breech-loader, a subject I'll get to in time. Makers were often using Belgian-sourced barrel tubes, and anyone using a pinfire in Britain in the 1850s would have been using imported French cartridges, so cross-Channel trade in sporting goods and gunmaking materials was evident. According to John Walsh, editor of The Field and sponsor of the public trials of 1858 and 1859, pinfire guns entered in the trials were of the Lang type with one exception, a Bastin System gun built by Auguste Francotte of Liège, Belgium, with a fixed breech and sliding barrels.

When Casimir Lefaucheux patented his hinge-action, breech-loading gun in January of 1833 and his pinfire cartridge design in 1836, his was not the only breech-loading system that gunmakers had been tinkering with. Parisian makers were experimenting with fixed barrels and lifting breeches (such as the Pauly and Robert systems), and many a follower of this board has tried, or at least held, a Darne with the rearward sliding breech. French gunmakers can certainly think outside the box.

In 1855 the Bastin Brothers of Hermalle-sous-Argenteau, Liège, went by another route when they patented an action whereby the breech remained stationary and the barrels slid forward (Liège provincial government patent 2149 of 1855, and patent 2395 of 1856). An added feature of the gun was having a recess under the hammer noses which "grabbed" the pin after firing. When opening the action the fired hammer would keep the fired cartridge from moving with the barrels, thereby extracting it -- a flick of the wrist then ejects the spent case. If one or both barrels were unfired, the cartridges would stay in the chambers. The cleverness of this selective extraction is that no additional mechanism or modification was required.

The Bastin underlever action has a forward-pivoted, pull-down underlever with a hinged catch on the distal end. While it looks ungainly, it is remarkably smooth and easy to use, and while not as time-efficient and ergonomic as the later snap-actions, it has a certain elegance. The Bastin Brothers were inventors and they made actions for other gunmakers -- I am unaware of any complete guns made and sold by them, perhaps they simply made a good living off of royalties and partial builds. While the Lang-type underlever fell from favour pretty quickly in the face of better alternatives, the Bastin system remained popular in Britain well into the 1860s, including on guns built by James Purdey and others.

This gun is a 14-bore, serial number 2309, by the Masu Brothers of London, made sometime between 1865 and 1869. It has 30 5/16" damascus barrels signed "Masu Brothers 3a Wigmore Street London & Liege" and, uncommon for a London-retailed gun sold to the British market, it has Liège proof marks. The action is stamped "Bastin Frères Brevetée 598," so it is the 598th gun built on the Bastin system -- probably towards the end of its popularity. The gun has very thin fences, which can be considered a decided weakness. The back-action locks are unsigned, metal parts have simple border and open scroll engraving, and the trigger guard has a chequered spur grip extension. The figured maple stock might be a contemporary re-stocking job, and the gun weighs 6 lb 13 oz. The stock has heel and toe plates, marking the departure from the iron butt plates commonly found on most pinfires. (A discussion on heel and toe plates and variations in butt plate materials will be for another day; so many features on late-Victorian, Edwardian, and later guns started on pinfires.)










The Belgian gunmaker Gustave Masu was established in London in 1864 at 3a Wigmore Street, and the firm became Masu Brothers in 1865. Wigmore Street is in London's fashionable West-End Marylebone district, and a stone's throw from Cavendish Square, so his customers would have been well-to-do. In 1869 the firm was renamed Gustavus Masu and moved to 10 Wigmore Street. In 1882 it returned to the name Masu Brothers, and ceased trading around 1892. It would appear that Masu guns were built in Liege (by the other brother, whose name I have not been able to find) and retailed in London by Gustave. I should add that every Masu Brothers gun I've handled has been of very high quality. I've another, different Masu pinfire to post here, but that's for another day.