Hello. Was given a 20ga Savage era Sterlingworth today. Looks like a Brush model, has a pistol grip, Savage era safety, ejectors (broken rods), and dates to 1939.

I was wondering if it is typical to have to manually move the top lever fully right in order to close the action or not? You have to on this gun, and while I've never handled a Sterlingworth before, that doesn't seem right somehow.

Thanks.

The top-lever should lock to the right when you open the gun and stay there until you snap it shut. Some shade tree mechanic probably removed the trigger plate screw and lost at least the spring and at worst both the spring and the trip that hold the rotary bolt open. To see what I mean, see the disassembly instructions on the A.H. Fox Collectors Association, Inc. web site --

http://www.foxcollectors.com/ah_fox/content/disassembly.html

I see what you mean, and the instructions are great.

If nothing was lost, and it was simply put back together wrong, how do you correct this condition?

If parts are missing, what are the sources you folks go to for parts? I will need parts anyway I expect since the tiny rods that attach to the ejectors and insert into the barrel are gone.

All seems well other than those two issues.

Researcher: Thanks a bunch for that link! I was thinking of putting my auto-safety pin back into my 20 ga. After reviewing that link (which I printed) I have discarded the idea completely.

I have had a few SxS's apart with the attendant amateur problems that resulted and had to make a couple of those "little springs" that jump out at you without warning. Never again.

R.

Love those Sterlingworths.

By far most Sterly's were extractor guns. Are you sure your's is an ejector gun with broken ejectors? Maybe it actually has extractors? One less thing to fix if it is an extractor gun.

From my limited experience, one of the first and only things to fail on a Sterlingworth is the catch mechanism on the top lever. I imagine the parts wear and after about 100 years the engagement is no longer positive enough to hold the lever in the open position. I've got that problem with the one pictured below, and it is at the gunsmith now for repair.

No. Not sure. Not a newbie n general, but still learning my way around all of the wonderful SxS variations and such.

broken ejectors for sure.....you can clearly see the pins have sheared off both sides. New parts are available but they need quite a bit of fitting and the rim cuts need to be put in as well. You can not buy just the pins as they are part of the ejectors. You may consider removing the cocking slide to see if the keeper screw for the ejectors is in place. It looks like they are out more than would be possible if the screw was there. Repairing the top lever is very easy. First remove the trigger plate screw and see if the spring and stop are there. If they are then insert the stop in the proper orientation and you should be good to go.
Steve

A Sterly with ejectors - a nice gift indeed! Congratulations and enjoy.

Thank you. It was a re-gifting. He was given a Parker and this Sterlingworth. He kept that Parker.

Breaking the gun still pushes out the ejectors like they were extractors. I'm assuming the it's fine to shoot. Who knows how long it's been this way. I did notice that you can see remnants of the pins on the back side of the ejectors, and one pin fell out of the hole when I took the barrel off to clean it (beautiful bores.

The barrel was cut to 25 3/4", but at least they did a good job of it and reinstalled the proper bead.

Thanks!

Wrong choice !

Depends upon the Parker.....

Is my source for parts ahfoxparts.com, or are there other options likely to have 20ga ejectors I should check with?

The same friend who gave this to me has a machine shop and many years of gunsmithing experience. I would think what might be simpler than fitting new ejectors might be to drill a hole in each ejector where the pin used to be, make new pins of the right length and diameter, and press fit them into the ejectors.

Regarding the top level, what is the "proper orientation" for the stop? This would be the orientation of the flats the rib extension mates to, and I would orient it from the top or from the underside?

That could very well be a viable solution but a hands on examination would be required in order to make that determination
Jim

Thanks Jim. I thought of it because I was using his gauge pins once to check mechanical dead center on some 1911 sights, and those pins look a lot like the pin that came out of the barrel flat hole.

http://foxcollectors.com/My%20Forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=4887

I saw a "gunsmith" deal with this problem with what I thought was wrong way to fix the problem at the time. He drilled out the ejector pin in the barrels. It spun out before he was half way done. He claimed they almost always released that way. Then he drilled the ejector .010 under the pin size, completely through the ejector. He made a new "pin" with a .010 reduction in the pin size on one end. Placed the pin into the barrel, through the ejector hole and welded it in place on the ejector face. Welded the other side, adjusted the pin length to proper length, and dressed the ejector face down and rear side until it was flat and the repair was invisible. I swear you could not see the repair was not factory.

I never thought about doing it that way but he used the barrels as a jig to hold the pin in perfect position and welded everything into place. Sad to say that "gunsmith" has since died but I no longer think that there is only one way to fix your problem. Thinking outside the box is a under appreciated skill too rarely seen today.

I would think that fitting new pins would be a whole lot easier than buying and fitting new ejectors and cutting rim recesses.

Ejectors are priced high and they take a good bit of fitting and then cutting shell rims.Bobby

regarding your question of the orientation for the "trip" as it is called (stop in a previous reference), the flat side goes to the rear.

Thanks All!

Got the trip oriented correctly, and found a spring that works for the time being. I've saved springs from different projects and had one that fit. I think it was a firing pin spring or extractor spring from something.

As far as the ejectors go, I'm going to go the route of making pins and mating them to the existing ejectors.

Thank you for all of the feedback and council.

New question: what is the safest way to separate the forend iron from the wood? The seems to be only one screw holding the iron in, but there is an ornate metal piece set into the wood on the opposite side.

One might question why you feel the need to take the wood off the forearm iron? At any rate there are two screws the one you mention down through the forearm iron into the escutcheon and one in from the back to the yoke inlet in the wood around the forearm iron.

Needs some new finish. Buttstock is worse, and has a poorly fit and decayed pad.

That round piece you refer to that is inlet into the forend is the escutcheon. It is what the screw threads into. After removing the forend iron it will usually tap out easily from the inside. Be careful that you don't splinter off any small chips of wood as you remove it. I haven't had that problem but, never say never.

SRH

In the disassembly instruction cited earlier, the author states that they always remove the auto safety rods. Maybe a poll would be better than a question, but if folks are willing to reply I would appreciate knowing reasons why people do and do not remove this feature.

Thank you

I do not own a Sterlingworth or any grade of Fox for that matter. I do not however de-activate the auto safety feature on any of my doubles which have them. I was never involved in serious competitive target shooting, primarily hunting & a bit of casual clays for practise. As my desire was to always take the gun "OFF Safe" as it came to shoulder, it therefore required to be "On Safe" prior to the mount. For this purpose there is simply no handicap to an auto-safe & its just a bit of insurance. I have never however conditioned myself to just automatically rely on that auto feature but check each time I load or reload the gun.
For a gun which might see use both on a target range & as a hunting gun Lefever Arms Co had the best design I am aware of.
They used a 3 position safety. center position was safe, forward was fire which was automatically returned to safe upon opening & closing closing the gun. The rear fire position however was not a manual setting as on most other 3-position safeties but rather by turning a screw in located in the top tang the safety could be locked into the rear fire position, thus making it a non-safety gun. Unless locked out by the screw it would not stay in the rear position.

There is absolutely no good reason to remove the safety rod except for risking it's loss or gumming it up during the refinishing process and then re-installing it prior to reassembly.

When doing a custom restock, the auto safety rods are often removed on a Fox because this is the area that is most likely to crack. It is very thin up in the left part of the cheek. Dan Rossiter of Custom Stocks and Steel told me he recommends this when he is redoing a gun. On an existing stock, the wood has already been removed so I'm not sure what the point would be other than personal preference or the convenience factor.

I do not own a vintage gun with automatic safety. I always remove the rod on Foxes, and disable the auto feature on my hunting and competition guns. When one bird is worth thousands of dollars, few serious competitors are willing to take the chance. I have taught my grandsons that the safety is between their ears, not on their gun. I would hate to hunt with a man who could not train himself to put his loaded gun back on safe.

Anytime this comes up I wonder how many shooters who preach the virtues of an automatic safety have autos and pumps in their stable. If they are so all fired important, no pun intended, why don't THEY have them?

SRH

What Stan said.
Jeff

I've had three Foxes restocked to fit me. In each case I have the automatic safety feature removed as having it requires and extra hole be drilled in the head of the stock which decreases the strength of the wood per my stockermaker. Anyway, I don't miss it and don't think about it. Putting the safety on and off at the right time is so ingrained in my mental makeup, its as easy as using both triggers on a sxs.

There is also a screw in the frame side of the forend iron. In the face of it.

Like Stan I've had every auto-safety removed. I have rifles, pistols and shotguns with various safeties and all are manual. I believe that is safer to have all of my safeties manual because, no matter which weapon I am using, I know that it's up to me to engage the safety EVERY time.

"IF" the gun is on safe until on its way to the shoulder it absolutely matters not how it was put there.
This thus applies only when a person is firing a string of shots Without the gun ever being placed in the safe configuration. I have absolutely no problem with this under proper conditions, but this is not the type of shooting I do. The only "Worth" to a bird I might shoot is whatever food value it has. I have seen dedicated trap guns which had no safety at all, no problem here either. I do shoot other types of guns which do not have auto safeties with no problems. My first "Shotgunning" occurred about 65 years ago with a single barrel hammer gun. About 61 years ago I acquired my first double, a hammerless which did have an auto safety. Every Hammerless double I have owned from that day to this except one has had an auto safety. I have never seen a viable reason for de-activating a single one of them. That one exception I still have but do not use, NOT because of the safety but because I do not trust its barrels.

Some of my guns have 'em, some of them don't. I've never understood the hatred some guys have for one system or the other.
Doesn't seem like it would be a big deal to learn to use the gun however it was equipped. I, also, have never been in a position where, a clay pigeon, or some other target, was worth thousands of dollars to me.


Best,
Ted

Totally agree, Miller. I was not referring to you as one of those who are so adamant about having automatic safeties.

And, refreshingly, I agree with Ted that I, also, do not understand "hatred" for one way or the other. If a man cannot teach himself to manage a manual safety, I'm the first to say he needs to use an automatic one. I have to admit to some level of frustration though, with clays shooters who cannot remember to push their safety off before calling for a bird. Then, oftentimes, they expect to get that bird/pair over with no "Os" resulting from it. That is not a gun malfunction, that is a brain malfunction.

SRH

About removing the escutcheon from the stock--it is good to put the screw back into the escutcheon after the iron is removed, and gently wiggle the plate out using the screw, rather than tapping it out, to prevent chipping the stock.

My target guns have no safeties as I load only when on station. Field guns do have safeties. The Ithaca Single Barrel Trap guns, with one or two exceptions, never had safeties.

That worked like a charm. Thank you.

Thank you all for your commentary about auto-safeties. I don't have a preference either way, I was just wondering what the schools of thought were since I read about doing so on the Fox Collector site.

I'm posting over there as well to try and learn about what model my gun is. I thought it was a Brush Model, but there's a screw/tang interface that is significantly different than the pictures of a Brush.

I think now that it's a Skeet and Upland Game. There is also an opinion that it was re-barrled, but the Skeet and Upland Game had a 26" barrel, and ejectors as an upgrade option.

When Fox called their Sterlingworth a "Brush, Standard, Field or Trap" They were classifying them by barrel length only. Brush models have 26 inch barrels Trap models have 32 inch barrels. Other than that a Sterlingworth is a Sterlingworth essentially unchanged from their introduction to the end of production with minor changes to the forend wood design and top lever which occurred later in the Savage era. Skeet and Upland guns are a whole different sub-set with specific stock configuration which is different from the standard Fox semi-pistol grip design. Ejectors, recoil pads, custom stock dimensions and center beads were offered as extra cost options on all Fox guns.

Skeet and Upland Game I believe are english stock only.

Man you'd think you just found TR's Fox with all the posts here and on fox site. Dude its not a Skeet and Upland. You got a Sterlingworth with ejectors. period. Now that's out of the way, you better find out why both of the rods broke. One maybe, two means you got a problem. May be the site pundits will tell you why that is. No its not fine to shoot the way it is.

I'd expect many of those scrawny little guide rods break due to how slight they are, and from what I've read since starting this post, it is not uncommon. I'll be drilling the extractors, and threading in new rods of the appropriate size; probably using a pair of in gauges.

Why not shoot it? It ejects hulls fine, and if the ejectors were disabled by removing the sears and such, the hulls would extra just fine too.

I wish that whoever wouldn't have cut the barrel down. I like shorter barrels, but I'd prefer something other than cyl/cyl.

Do not allow someone to drill completely through the face of the ejector during the process of getting the old piece of guide pin out. Foxes were not built that way, and shouldn't be repaired that way. Any competent 'smith can do it properly. See this thread for a proper repair procedure, and further down in the same thread the reason why drilling completely through can cause other problems. Understand that I am not proposing that you, or anyone else, use the procedure posted to do the job. It is posted just as info as to one way of doing it.

http://www.foxcollectors.com/My%20Forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=6511

Why not shoot it as is? Because flexing of the longer ejector stem will occur in much greater measure when the guide pin is missing. repeated stresses from ejection like this, or one sticky hull in a chamber, can break the ejector stem. Then you've got a much worse problem to deal with. Fox ejectors are getting hard to come by, and expensive, and require proper fitting and rim cut to be made, all of which is much worse than a proper repair on the broken guide pin.

SRH

Thank you, Stan. I will consider this all carefully.

I read the thread about the repair technique used, and it's along the lines of what I was going to do, except I was going to drill and tap for a threaded rod, rather than solder. Locktite would hold them in place, and I could make a few pairs in the event that they needed to be replaced again. One significant difference in my plan was drilling through ejector, and then cleaning up the outer surface, and that seems to be the bad part of my plan from what I'm gathering. I suppose because it would weaken the ejector?

In my humble opinion a Sterlingworth with ejectors, even with cut barrels, would be worth restoring properly. Not to make any money on it but just to preserve the Fox heritage. If it were me, I would not be trying to cut any corners, doing my own smithing or attempting to jerryrig anything. If I were so inclined I'd find another real beater to play with. It's not my gun and, of course, you are free to do anything you want with your gun. I'd send it to a trusty Fox smith.

Drilling through would require tig welding to hide the hole, then dressing off to try and hide what you've done. Just a bad idea, IMO. Much better to silver solder the pin into the hole you drilled, just not all the way through the ejector blade. Silver solder is a good deal stronger than soft solder, which is used on the ribs. It will hold the pin forever, if done properly. Really much easier than threading the end of the pin, then tapping the hole in the ejector. Also, if you don't carefully turn a shoulder on the pin, when you snug it down it may "cock" itself to one side and not be true to the pin hole. Better to use the hole as a jig to keep it all aligned perfectly, I think.

My repair that I described in the link I posted for you is all but indistinguishable from an original ejector. Your way might end up that way, too, but with much more effort, it seems to me.

SRH

Thank you. I have access to mills, lathes, and other machinist equipment, and a fellow who knows how to use it all. I think that the approach you took is great and more than likely what we'll go with it. Sharing the plan I had, before knowing of a different approach, has helped me get a deeper understanding of the issue. I appreciate all of the feedback.

What I envisioned with the threaded rod approach was somelike what I've done with filling holes in drill and tapped rifle receivers. Using a right size screw, Locktite, and then machining down the screw hear to be flush the the surface being filled is a process that's worked well for me before. But, I get your point, and your process being more of a traditional and simpler repair method makes it the way to go.

Regarding it being sound to shoot, and the opinion that it is not because of risk to the ejectors: can I disable the ejection until I can the rods replaced? If so, what would be disabled, and would it be OK to shoot then?

Thanks.

You may have some slightly bulged heads on the shells from shooting it before fitting those guide rods. Maybe not at all. It sure would not be a safety issue due to the rods missing.

BTW, I believe those secondary small outboard guide rods are silver brazed into the ejectors. I can see the ends clearly on the breach face end of the ejectors in my Fox. I would use a propane torch and heat it slowly until you can push out the broken stub.

They may have been silver brazed at one point in production. On the NOS ejectors the secondary guide rods are integral to the ejectors. A fair amount of work involved in fitting a new set. When repairing ones that have separated I usually TIG a new rod in place.

I've already started the process described earlier in the thread; the step where you file down the remnants of the proken pin flush, then mark, and drill. I've filed thus far, so it will be hard to find a hold to twist the stub once it's hot to see if it will come out.

I'll likely heat it up anyway. Maybe it will fall out on it's own if it wasn't a snug fit to begin with. I wouldn't have to drill if that was the case, and that would be GREAT.

Disabling the ejection: it's been stated that shooting it this way will apply excessive strain on the ejectors, which could result in breaking something expensive and hard to find and fit. So I figured disabling the ejector function would prevent this, and I can shoot the gun while working through the pin repair.

What's the process people advise for disabling ejection, and is it simple to reverse once my pin repair is complete?

To convert a Fox to extractor you need to replace the ejector springs with weaker springs. Simply removing the springs will not give the ejectors enough travel to lift the spent cartridges. Converting back to ejector just requires the re-installation of the original springs.

Thank you. Not intending to be dense: this sounds like a weaker version of what I already have, and what I already have should not be shot because of risk to the ejectors. What's unclear to me is where the tipping point is for risk vs. no risk. Is it the force of the process of ejection? By using weaker springs the reduction in force eliminates the risk of damage?

Heating didn't release the remnants of the old pins, unfortunately.

I'm going to find someone to send it to. I don't want to mess it up myself. I looked it a bit, and now I'll stop.