Gun Trading

Trading is a great way to do business, no money exchanges hands and (hopefully) everyone gets what they want. The problem is finding someone who has what you want and is willing to pass it on and that same someone must want something you have and that you are willing to give up.

W. R. Sidley, 20 GA British boxlock  with 30" barrels and chambered for 2 1/2" shells. 

Recently, Stephen Bodio and I have been corresponding about guns, hunting and life in general. Our mutual friend Gerry (who introduced us to one another) knows that I've been looking to replace my 20 GA Citori Superlight with a SxS boxlock (preferably British) and he also happened to believe that Steve might be interested in thinning his battery.   Steve recently acquired a gun that makes his 20 GA British boxlock redundant in his own battery.  Bodio got this very interesting shotgun in a trade a few years ago. He wrote about it on his blog under the heading Gun Deal.

British 10 GA - Steve's ideal in a sitting turkey gun.

 Based on Gerry's suggestion, I suggested to Steve that he might have a gun that I might be interested in. Steve quickly constructed a rather interesting trade.  He was willing to trade his light weight 20 GA boxlock (with elegantly long 30" barrels and beautiful wood ) for a 10 GA Damascus barrelled gun that he sees himself using for turkeys. Of course the glitch is that I don't own a 10 GA, Damascus barrelled or otherwise, so how are we to trade?  Steve had his eye on a 10 GA that he wanted and quoted me the price.  I sent him the funds for the 10 GA (plus the cost of shipping the twenty to me) and before I knew it the Sidley boxlock was at N. L. Heineke's shop in Laramie.

The Sidley arrived in Laramie - on the leather covered counter at N.L. Heineke.

Nathan Heineke in his shop - a former bank building - looking for some 2 1/2" 20 GA shells.

Steve's twenty (now mine) is indeed a very elegant and light gun. When I first picked it up I was astounded by how light it was and good it felt in the hand.  Light guns are not necessarily favourites of experienced gunners - that's because they tend to not have enough inertia through a swing,  The 30" barrels make up for that on this gun.  In one email regarding the gun Steve wrote: 

You will rarely see any 28 as slim and elegant as this 20 -- if you are not used to good English shotguns its lines will amaze you, and the smallness of the action.  I wanted it the moment I saw it, and all romantic analogies apply!  Good Brit 20's compare in looks with US 28's and 410's and pattern better.

It really is a light gun, I believe Nate's scale read 5 lbs 2 oz.  He went over the gun carefully and declared it sound.  The gun shows more wear on the outside than it does inside with the locks in near new condition and it's had some work done on it to try to mitigate that difference.  It was reproofed in London in 2002 and, based on barrel wall thickness measurements, it is still in proof. The right choke is a "bell" or "trumpet" choke (-.005") and the left barrel is what Nate called a tight quarter choke at (.009") - others would call it Improved Cylinder.  We patterned the gun and it shoots to point of aim.  I thought the gun balanced perfectly - Nate says it could loose 2 ounces from the butt end and be better balanced.  To prove it to me he taped 2 ounces to the barrels about 14 inches north of the triggers.  I have to admit that there was a subtle but noticeable difference.  This is one of those ineffable things.  You can't specify the point on the gun (say 4" in front of the trigger guard) where it should balance, it should feel balanced when you naturally hold it in your hands.

A twenty  chambered for 2 1/2" shells is essentially the British equivalent of a modern twenty-eight. The standard load in a 2 1/2" twenty gauge shell is 7/8 oz of shot while modern 28 gauge shells carry 3/4 ounce - an eighth of an ounce less.   So a light weight 2 1/2" twenty is a lot like a twenty-eight carrying 16% more shot.  You can find 7/8 ounce loads for the twenty-eight (Fiocchi makes them) and you can find 2 1/2" 20 GA shells loaded with a hair less than an ounce of shot (Gamebore makes them).   In fact, I was able to buy a few boxes of these at Jax in Fort Collins so I do have some shells - if not grouse loads.  These heavy loads are pushing the limits. The standard loads for my gun are made by RST and they sell them by the flat (250 shells per) reasonably priced and in every possible configuration you might like.

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In the end I'd say this was a perfectly constructed trade.  Thank you Steve!  He'll get what he wants and I'm very happy with what I got - even if it may have seemed to Steve at some point that I was dragging my feet.  I took the gun out chasing Blue grouse for a few hours yesterday and although we did not flush even one bird (unlike the day before) I did get to spent a few hours in the field with the new gun and am even happier with it than I was before.  I'm hoping it will turn out to be a magic grouse wand.

Nebraska III

Mike showed up at Super-8 In Ogallala around 9 PM with a bottle of Ardbeg and a copy of the Double Gun Journal.  Like his father and grandfather before him he hunts behind a setter (named Luna) and, on this day,  carried one of a pair of early Woodward under levers with sleeved barrels chambered for 2 1/2" 16 gauge shells.  

 Luna and Mike.

We spent the day hunting walkin areas in Perkins and Lincoln County.  After a days rest, Erdos seemed good, he was not limping and I was relieved that he could hunt.  He started off rather slow, but as soon as he got on some fresh scent he perked up and hunted hard. I apparently misread the walk-in map and we almost immediately wandered off onto private property. As we tried to get back to the approved walk-in, three roosters flushed wild out in the cut corn and we headed across to the shoulder high grass they'd landed in. I asked Mike if we should try to pinch them and he said to just head for where they'd landed as fast as we could, which was not easy in the heavy cover.  We pushed into the absurdly thick cover,  moving together, parallel to one another.  A rooster took off in front of Mike and then another and he missed them both. I did not have a shot.

Hunter and his dog on a country road.

We split apart, Mike heading back into the cover where we'd just jumped the roosters while I headed off into the reeds, ostensibly chasing the ones we'd already jumped.  The cover was so dense and the going was so tough that I abandoned my attempt to hunt and bushwhacked out the back edge of the CRP.  I walked the edge of the corn cut field hoping to hike back to the truck by making a loop. About a hundred yards ahead of me Erdos was clearly making game.  He was onto fresh spoor and headed back into the tangle of reeds; it was not long before I saw three pheasants fly and then land again, perhaps only fifty yards further into the heavy cover.

Following Mike's earlier advice I quickly waded in after them.  The reeds were over my head and I had to hold my shotgun up in front of me to make my way. I could hear Erdos somewhere near me but this was not cover for pointing.  One bird took off not far in front of me, and then another, and then more to my left and right, perhaps eight or more all together.  I finally pushed forward to a spot where the reeds transitioned to a reddish chest high grass that I could see over.  A rooster flew up in front of me, I took the shot and he tumbled as he went down - a solid hit.  I marked the spot as best I could and when a second bird went up in front of me and before I knew it I had two roosters down.  As I started towards the point where they'd fallen I lost the optimistic hope that I would ever find them at all.  Erdos was no help and the cover was so thick that at ground level I could only see a foot or tow in any direction. I started searching in a regular grid from the tall reed I'd hung my hat on where I'd marked the second bird down.  Eventually, I found a few feathers. It seemed like a small miracle. I worked my way out in a spiral until  I found more feathers, and then I found the dead bird a short distance away, along the line defined by the points where I'd I found the feathers.  This started to feel a bit more like tracking a wounded big game animal than bird hunting. I recalled Datus Proper's assertion that a pheasant rooster is a trophy game animal.

I searched for the other downed bird for another half an hour before I finally gave up; I was already late for the appointed meeting with Mike at the truck.  And later, after Mike had a rooster in his game bag we could count the hunt as a success.

Woodward underlever sidelock and Jeffery boxlock and two roosters.

It is a deep disappointment to hunt and kill any animal and to not be able to retrieve it. I killed two pheasants on this trip that I was unable to retrieve.  First and foremost, such a failure is a waste of life that is hard to justify. It seems that uncertainty is the foundation of the compact between hunter and prey - the hunter will try his best for a clean kill and recovery and the birds will enlist all their instincts to thwart that objective.  Uncertainty is the essence and the very nature of the endeavour, to bring down a bird on the wing at a distance with a few pellets of lead. That birds are wounded or killed and never recovered is inevitable and serves as evidence of that uncertain footing.

 A lost bird is an abrupt interruption of the intimate relationship between hunter and prey that begins when the bird falls to the ground out of thin air.  Once to hand, the hunter must often kill an already dying bird with his own hands.  This usually accomplished by wringing its neck.  The attentive hunter inspects the miracle of the warm feathered form closely before depositing it in his game bag and may walk miles with that body pressing against his back in the game bag.  I hang pheasants undrawn for a week and then pluck them and gut them saving the liver and heart.  As individuals of the species, each pheasant is special and they present a challenge in the kitchen. Pheasant should never be overcooked, but nevertheless must be cooked. The intimacy of the relationship ends with the enjoyment and sharing of an honest meal of wild meat. A lost bird is a lost opportunity for a kind of perfection.

British game guns and long tailed rooster.

By the time I was home I'd driven over 750 miles in the course of three days -  and that number does not include the driving Carlos did Saturday and Sunday morning which was at least 160 miles more to be summed with my own total. I drove home leg tired, with a tired and satisfied dog and with three pheasants and two quail.

Sunset on the drive home.

On good bread and good guns.

     It does not cost much. It is pleasant: one of the most hypnotic businesses, like a dance from some ancient ceremony. It leaves you filled with peace, and the house filled with one of the world's sweetest smells. But it takes a lot of time. If you can find that, the rest is easy. And if you can not rightly find it, make it, for probably there is no chiropractic treatment, no Yoga exercise, no hour of meditation in a music-throbbing chapel, that will leave you emptier of bad thoughts than this homely exercise of making bread.
                                        M.F.K. Fisher, How to Cook a Wolf. 1942

Making bread is a great thing. The only drawback M.F.K. Fisher could find was that it takes a lot of time. The no-knead bread recipes essentially eliminate the time element so there really is no reason not to make bread anymore.  Here's a photo of the loaf from yesterday.  I sometimes make it, but P is getting really good at this.

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Datus Proper first brought my attention to M.F.K. Fisher's writing in his own book Pheasant's of the Mind: A Hunter's Search for a Mythical Bird.. In that book, he frequently and reverently refers to her translation of Brillat-Savarin's The Physiology of Taste.

 In Proper's pheasant hunting book he puts forth the proposition that a man should own one good shotgun and that a month's salary is not an unreasonable figure to account for it.  A suggestion I found shocking when I read it and somehow still do; a month's salary has never been available to me for such a purchase.  For himself, Proper followed his own advice.  He hunted a side-by-side sidelock shotgun made by  James Woodward.  A London best gun made some time just before the turn of the last century.  A quick search reveals that only Woodward side-by-side I can find listed on the internet right now (it is sold) was priced at $28,500. I'm fairly certain that Mr. Proper, who was a Foreign Service officer in the State Department never made that amount in one month, so I guess his strategy turned out to be a pretty good investment too.

A 12 GA sidelock made by James Woodward & Sons.

In his book Good Guns Again, Stephen Bodio makes a good argument for boxlock actioned shotguns, preferably British made.   Bodio himself also seem to like the rather odd French made Darne slide-action guns.  Boxlock actions have fewer parts and are less delicate than sidelock actions.  Fewer parts means they are generally more reliable, but also fewer parts means they require less precise hand fitting and so are less expensive to make.

Barrel markings on my 12 ga. Jeffery boxlock.

 Unable to follow Proper's advice, I followed Bodio's.  I spent far less than a month's salary on a good, if not best, shotgun.  My own shotgun is a British boxlock made by W. J. Jeffery & Co.  It is labeled with the 13 King Street, St. James's St. London address on the barrels; records indicate it was made in Birmingham in 1906 by a Mr. Clarke.  This was not an uncommon arrangement, to have boxlocks made in Birmingham and sold by London makers. In 2006 I had a little 100 year birthday party for my shotgun.  It has a splinter forend, a straighthand stock, double triggers, 28" barrels and is chambered for the non-standard (in the US anyway) 2 1/2" 12 gauge shells.  The 2 1/2" shell was British standard in the beginning of the last century.

Standard 12 gauge shells are 2 3/4". The fact that it is chambered for non-standard shells meant the price was a bit lower than it might have been.  A standard upland field load for a 2 3/4" shell is 1 1/8 oz. of shot.  The standard load for a 2 1/2" shell is 1 oz. of shot which also happens to be the standard load for a 2 3/4" 16 gauge shells.  A shotgun chambered for the British 2 1/2" 12 gauge shell is quite comparable to a 16 gauge shotgun.  The difference is that a 1oz. load from a 12 gauge barrel packs a bit more of a punch.  The ballistic advantage comes from the fact that the shot itself leaves the larger diameter barrel in a shorter shot column, it is not quite a strung out as it is leaving the smaller diameter 16 gauge barrel.

The action and top lever shows some case coloring, and probably has been refinished.

The British were never really fans of the 16 gauge and not many were made there. It was a favorite on the continent, there were plenty of French and Belgian 16 gauge shotguns made.  In fact, my first side-by-side was a French made 16 gauge; a Breuil with horribly pitted barrels and chambered for another oddball sized shell -- 65mm 16 gauge.  The stock cracked while stored in my gun safe in a damp attic in Ithaca NY. That gun was never the same. Sixtten gauge shotguns were  was popular here in the US too.  Many of the classic American shotguns made by  Parker, Fox, L. C. Smith and Ithaca were chambered for 16 gauge shells.

Scroll engraving with Rosettes on the screws.

Engraving was standard practice for fine firearms (even boxlocks) at the turn of the last century.  The Jeffery is engraved with a very elegant fine scroll and and leaf pattern with rosettes on the screws. Modern pressed "engraving" can not compare and as far as I'm concerned, you might as well not have it at all.


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 A few years ago, running up a steep hillside to get into position for a shot at a grouse Erdős was pointing, I slipped on a snow covered log. My arms went out, the Jeffery was in my right hand, and I hit it damn hard on the log.  It put a pretty good gash in the otherwise delicate forend and I was surprised it did not break it.  I would not be surprised if that fall was responsible for the scratch in the engraving (it is just visible if you enlarge the image above.) Since then I have been a bit more careful about the kind of hunting I do with it.  That was about the time I  personalized my 20 gauge Citori so that I had a more pedestrian gun for rough conditions like Chukar hunting.  To me, it is unacceptable to put the Jeffery away in the safe and not use it, it is a fine tool perfectly designed and expertly built for its intended use.  But there is a balance between using it an caring for it, I don't so much own my 105 year old shotgun, it's more that I'm the current caretaker.

A really good loaf - open crumb, large hole structure, crispy crust, great flavor.

So how does one get from bread to guns and back again?  These are the well trod paths of my autodidact mind.

Shotgun Notes

From James Howe's (of Griffin and Howe) book "The Modern Gunsmith"

The first gun I ever bought was a Browning Citori Superlight. It's a light weight 20 gauge over/under shotgun with a straight grip and 26" barrels. I just installed a recoil pad on it. Previously it carried a plastic butt plate with the Browning name on it. I've installed butt pads before but always on stocks I was already planning to refinish. There is something nerve wracking about putting the stock of a perfectly good shotgun on the chop saw. The butt of the stock was slightly curved for the black plastic plate that was on it before so I needed to straighten it for the flat back of this pad.

The pad I put on it is an imitation of the classic British Silvers pad sold by the Connecticut Shotgun Manufacturing Company called the "correct period pad". High end British shotguns and rifles sported orange rubber pads made my a company called Silvers, having one gives a shotgun a rather classic look. They were also used as the base for leather wrapped pads which were often done in goatskin.

Since you do not aim a shotgun but instead point it, the stock measurements determine where the gun points when it's mounted. The image above is from volume I of James V. Howe's encyclopedic The Modern Gunsmith first published in 1934. The 1930's may well be the pinnacle of gunsmithing art. Very little has really happened since then in the gun world; off the top of my head I can't think of a thing. Drop at comb, drop at heel, length of pull, pitch and cast (on or off) are the measurements that determine where it will point when mounted. These measurements are shown in the accompanying illustration.

I increased the length of pull on the shotgun by 1/2" to 14 1/2" to have it match another that I own. I kept the original pitch; pitch is the angle of the finished butt to the top of the barrels. At 1" thickness for the pad and another 1/8" for the black spacer the Galazan pad seemed a bit too thick for the lightweight shotgun I was putting it on. I screwed it to a board and ran it across the table saw to slice the orange part down to a bit less than 1/2". I glued it back up with contact cement and shaped it. I rough shaped it with the disc/belt sander that Gerry gave me for my birthday and then did most of the final shaping with sandpaper wrapped around a file. Slow work, but far safer for the stock. The photo below makes the pad appear to be a slightly brighter orange than it seems in person, but just a bit. Out of the box the Galazan pad is a bit of chalky reddish color and although they claim the pad its color is an exact replica, it does not seem as orange as ones I've seen. I dabbed some thinned down cadmium orange oil paint on it to orange it up a bit and then, as per instructions from Galazan, shellacked it. First time I put it on my shellac was too thick and sort of gummed up and I had to clean it off and then try again with it significantly thinned down with alcohol.



The new pad personalizes the shotgun in a way that I'm very pleased with. I hope to get out after some birds with it soon, some pheasants in eastern Wyoming after Thanksgiving. Grouse locally here at home and I hope to hunt chukar in eastern Oregon on our drive west in mid-December. Bird season around here end December 31st.

Shotgun loads

Looking at various shotgun pages I see that the Fiocchi Golden Pheasant load with one ounce of sixes or fives are top rated for chukar and pheasant. Everyone raves about them. The 20 gauge 2 3/4" shells carry 1 oz. of nickle coated lead shot and so are not legal for ducks or on Wyoming state game farm lands. Oregon still allows lead shot for upland game birds as does Wyoming on non-game farm lands. Non-tox shot prices are astronomical. My Citori is an old one with fixed chokes and steel shot is not recommended for older guns. Steel is the inexpensive approved shot for waterfowl hunting. I was surprised to learn that the Bismuth Cartridge Company went out of business a couple of years ago and there was a gap in availability of bismuth shot. For a time, bismuth was the only lead free shot option for classic shotguns. It is a bit denser than steel shot (but softer) and so is more effective than steel. It is more expensive. If you want to shoot ducks with an older shotgun for a time it was the only option. Now a new company called Bis-Maxx is selling bismuth shotgun shells. The kicker is that they cost just a bit less than three dollars a shell. Kent Tungsten Matrix shot is also approved as non-toxic shot for waterfowl and is safe for older barrels. It is even heavier than lead and so has even better ballistics than old fashioned lead shot. A single 2 3/4" shell loaded with 1oz of #6 shot costs three dollars and a quarter. Based on these numbers, I thought, OK, I should start reloading my own shotgun shells. It turns out that Tungsten Matrix shot can not be purchased and bismuth shot runs about $24/pound. With 16 oz per pound that makes the shot cost alone around $1.50 per 20 ga. shell; and you still need primers, hulls, powder, wads and a MEC reloading press. I just ordered eight boxes of the Fiochii shells in sixes and fives which come out to cost about sixty cents a piece. The sad thing is that I have frequently jumped ducks when hunting pheasant or grouse and you can not legally shoot one if you are carrying any lead shot shells on your person.