doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Gun breakups and quick-detachable locks?

You guys crack me up. I said "hand detachable locks are one of the small refinements that separate nicer guns from ordinary guns". Your missing the "one of". All nicer guns don't have hand detachable locks just as all nicer guns don't have disc set strikers or chopper lump barrels just to name a few features.

For the record I did see a picture of one Purdey SxS that had H&H style detachable locks & was represented to be original & certainly looked that way to me. It did look sort of strange to me on a Purdey.

If I remember...there were quite a few guys who looked that gun over before it was discovered to have removable locks. Your face that day was classic. :-)

In my humble opinion the Darne system have the best in removable lock systems.

They don't need much maintenance, or lubrication, for that matter. If a firing spring breaks in a Darne, the correct procedure is to simply shrug and keep shooting. Almost no lubrication is needed.
Illustrated from top, R action block, center view is the very beginning rough action cuts made on an action forging, this is a piece from the late 1950s, and judging from the lack of rust, was likely destined for a magnum gun as it appears the material is XTC, a high chrome tool steel used in that application. Last is a very petite V action with the key pulled out of the center cut.
I've seen a few drop locks and Darnes offered up for sale at a good discount over the years with the problem of locks or sliding breech being missing in action.
Be careful out there.

Best,
Ted

Here is what the Westley Richards Book "In Pursuit Of The Best Gun" 1812-2012
says:









Gunwolf

"No screws to turn or pins to draw".

Hmmmm, and isn't it the very proper English, from which the author Jeremy Musson hails, that are always "correcting" us Colonials about "improperly" calling pins screws? It being a quote from "the Field", from 1909, is even more revealing.

It would seem that the language of the "colony" is had more of an effect on the British language than they want to admit, eh?

SRH

For a good many years I shot a Perazzi Mirage in skeet competitions and on a couple of occasions had one of the hammer springs break. If one has the spring kit, it is a matter of a minute or so to replace the broken spring. I also had a spare firing assembly, which reduces the down time to a few seconds. A Beretta 682 can have the mainspring replaced in a few minutes, but longer than the Perazzi, however, if you break a part on a Kreighoff, you are out of luck unless you have a spare gun!

Gunwolf,

thank you very much for the scan! It is interesting, however, that Westley Richards with drop locks doesn'g seem to have become the weapon of choice for safarists. Whatever the advantage of quick detacheable locks, the people who actually were going out there didn't seem to care. I can't boast of reading absolutely all pre-WWI safari books, but I've read a lot. The only Westley RIchards mentioned that I remember was Alfred Neumann's .577 express, which had a single trigger which broke down. Incidentally, this is one of the very few double rifle failures that I remember reading about.

This returns us to one of the original questions - how common were gun breaking down with British sportsmen on the turn of the XIX and XX centuries?

Westley sold their fair share of rifles many with droplocks. Ernest Hemingway, Maharajas, Nizams several others who don't come to mind right now ordered best guns with the droplock feature.
How often/common did rifles fail in a distant land? That would be like being diagnosed with a rare disease, it's 100% when it happens to you. An once of prevention is worth a couple pounds of cure.

Indian nobility - devoted hunters, great shots and knowledgeable folks as they were - were notorious for ordering the most expensive configuration the maker had to offer. Besides, there's room for four rifles in a howdah.

Hem had a droplock ST WR which he hated. Phillip Percival had a BLNE Lang which he loved