doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Spanish "Not so Best".

Larry,

Thank you for the reply.

Driven hunts in Spain were (and are, on private estates) very common in Spain, and frequently on a scale that dwarfed those in England. Remember that during the Reconquista grants of reclaimed land ran to the hundreds of thousands of hectares, that many of these estates still exist, and frequently have different parts of the estate hunted every year for different animals.

Spain is quite the destination for paid driven hunts, and the various companies who run these hunts have videos on YouTube.

Kyrie, see my previous post on economics, then vs now. On paid driven hunts, the volume one can shoot is limited by money (and by time). I'm well aware that Spain offers paid driven hunts NOW. But we're talking about guns that were made and shot over a century ago, for the most part. And a world that has long since ceased to exist. As in the remark made by a statesman prior to WWI, about the lights going out all over the world, and how they'd never be relit again. In terms of the world before vs after "the Great War", that remark was quite accurate. One thing you get from "Downton Abbey" is a sense of how that world was changing in the postwar years.

I understand, but don�t see the connection between wet weather (which requires immediate cleaning and proper storage) and yearly maintenance.


Spanish shotguns aren�t any more copies of British design than the Beretta M92 is a copy of the Walther P.38. There is this persistent myth that Spanish guns are copies of English game guns, when the truth is Spanish game guns are just European game guns.

And in terms of (dis)interest, some guys prefer blonds and some prefer red heads. The only British firearm in which I have a present interest is the L2A3. I just haven�t been able to persuade myself I want to put $6,000 to $8,000 into a sub-machine gun. Yet. I�m working on it.



Depends on the individual�s social class, level of wealth, and interest. One of the fellows I hear from only infrequently because if he isn�t hunting in GB he�s in Bulgaria, or Russia, or some other place. There�s one fellow who goes from invitation to invitation, and hosts a couple hunts of his own each year. But those are outliers; most of my correspondents are working (if well compensated) people, and pay to hunt.

Are you serious? What are you smoking? Of course the Spanish copied the English! Are you really suggesting otherwise?

I�m sure everything you say about England is true. The Great War pretty much put paid to England as a world power, and by the end of the second world war England couldn�t even control its own economy. The English monarchy and titled and landed gentry have become something of a hollow joke. I�m frankly waiting for the Argentines to reach out and take the Falkland Islands; the British don�t have the means to anything about it.
But that�s England and not Spain. The Spanish royal family and landed aristocracy still control enormous wealth and equally enormous land holdings. Those estate hunts that used to happen in England in the nineteenth century are still a reality in parts of Spain, on million plus acre estates.

That's OK, Adam. If you want to believe Spanish shotgun are knock offs of English guns you can do so with my blessing.

Ah, almost all continental guns are based on English game guns, the exception being guns coming from Germany or Austria. The British Game Gun IS THE GUN that other makers in europe tried to emulate.

As to driven shoots, during the Golden Age of shotgunning in England, 30 years prior to the Great War, they made the current shoots in Spain look like an outing with your kid hunting rabbits. During this period the wealthy, Royals or Landed didn't pay the taxes that they do now. Thus they had the money to spend on raising birds and shooting them.

It appears that you have painted yourself into a corner.

Kyrie, again you're talking what happens NOW with driven hunts, not what happened "back in the day", when Brits like Ripon were recording hundreds of thousands of dead birds in their game books.

Wet guns, unless they're hand detachable sidelocks, don't normally get disassembled beyond the 3 main pieces for daily cleaning. Not a bad idea to do it yearly when they get wet a lot, just to make sure something isn't going on inside.

Kyrie, you have a very extensive collection of Spanish guns. How many of them date from before WWII? Any date from before WWI? Personally, I've seen darned few pre-WWII Spanish guns, and I don't believe I've ever seen one made prior to WWI. Meanwhile, there are any number of folks here shooting British guns that were made 40 years or more prior to WWI. And some of them saw extensive use in driven shoots. Can you come up with any Spanish examples from that era that have seen similar use? Guns that go back to the black powder/early nitro/corrosive primer era? Shotshell technology, modern steel vs pre-WWI steel . . . details like that make a significant difference in how long a gun is likely to survive under hard use, especially with minimal "preventive maintenance". You have maybe a 125 year old Spanish gun you can compare to a British gun of similar age? If not, then you don't have one that was used under anything approaching similar conditions.

As for Spanish guns not being copies of British guns: The Spanish don't make A&D boxlocks? Holland-pattern sidelocks? I think that's news to a lot of us. Other European nations went other directions and came up with their own designs. German guns are clearly different--although many incorporate British features, like the Greener crossbolt. The French . . . well, no one copies the French! The Spanish have built a shotgun industry based on English designs and cheaper labor. Nothing wrong with that, but there is something wrong with not being willing to admit it.

The point about maintenance in the discussion I was trying to make was that a sidelock would, with more moving parts, need more of it, than a boxlock. Nothing more. I had a worn out sidelock when I was a younger man. If it was from lack of maintenance, or much use, or, much abuse, I don't know. Since I bought the gun, here, in the US, use with ammunition outside of the gun's design parameters is suspect, but, I have no proof. It was purchased as a project gun, and sold the same way, and likely is a project gun, somewhere, to this day. This was back in the 1980s. We have a better grasp of what a gun of that design and level of proof should be fed for ammunition today.
I would like, someday, to try owning another sidelock. A real sidelock, inspite of the fact I got burned, once. The trouble I have is a boxlock does all I need at a much lower price of admittance.
Well, that, and I'm cheap.

Best,
Ted

Ted, good point about choice of ammo. I think, thanks to this BB and some others, people are a lot smarter about what to stuff in their vintage doubles than they were 20 years ago. My first classic double was a very plain but very solid pre-WWII Sauer 16. Immediately lengthened the chambers, then proceeded to shoot high brass 1 1/8 oz loads at a lot of pheasants. The only thing that ever broke on that gun was the piece linking the top lever to the Greener crossbolt. But then Sauers (and German guns in general) have a reputation for solid build. I learned the error of my ways, and when I buy a used European gun, I try to pick the ones that don't show signs of abuse. And I won't touch a Brit gun that's had its chambers punched, unless it's passed reproof. You live and learn.

Meanwhile . . . I'm wondering whether Kyrie is digging around in his gun safe for that 125 year old Spanish driven bird gun.