doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com French Shotgun ID

Two Piper, the first commercially available centerfire that i know of was Pauly of 1812 in France. I am on the road, but at home have pictures of an exquisite centerfire made 100 years before that in the early 1700s.

I recently acquired a 20-gauge Gastinne Renette shotgun made during the first decade of 1900 and I am very impressed by its quality and handling. It is my first french gun and hopefully not the last.
BillK

I was asked by wingshooter to translate the definitive pamphlet on the Manufrance Ideal shotgun. I read it cover to cover... Time would not allow me to do a good job so I sent it back to Mike. But that was just one of several Manufrance models. It will give you an idea of the excellence of St Etienne manufactures. Maybe one day I'll be able to get to this seriously, possibly within the next year.

Lots of French guns on this board...take a look at this line.

http://www.doublegunshop.com/forums/ubbt...4910b29ab4af82b

I have one ad that describes the Ideal as "Le plus beau et le plus parfait fusil du monde." Most beautiful and most perfect . . . there she is, Miss America!

Daryl;
I'll not disagree with you on that. My real meaning was that a pinfire is not a central fire.
The statement I was truly disagreeing with was that the Lefaucheux Pinfire was the original central fire beech loader.

Argo, thanks for posting that thread. I thought I had seen all the MF Ideal threads on here but somehow had missed that one. I was a fairly active member of the DarneUSA forum until it shut down last year. Had been trying to help make it a repository for MF Ideal information, as much as I could. Sad we lost it all. Sorry to hear time constraints on the Wingshooter project. Mike told me about that last week and I was really looking forward to the finished project. I can use my high school French to get through a lot of it when I concentrate but the gun jargon throws me off.

Count me in.
I can translate whatever.
One of my project is a gun dictionary, including English, French and Belgian!
This might sound dumb, but the words are often different.
As an example "poudre vive" is Belgian, "poudre pyroxylee" is French...
WC-

One or the other also uses "poudre blanche" if I recall correctly. That's a very worthwhile project, WC. I've thought of it myself from time to time . . . particularly when I forget some bit of "gun French" that I used to know and have to dig around to resurrect it.

We probably need to compare French gun libraries at some point. I have a few gun books in French, but not many. If I were to read Journee cover to cover, I'd likely have it nailed. But there's also a lot of highly technical stuff in his book.

I've been curious about this mark on Builder's gun:



It looks like "B P 72" or "P P" to me. I assume 72 might be the length of the chambers. I can't find a reference to "B P" in French marks....but at least in Hungary, which seems to have used some French conventions, it refers to Nitro Proof.

My spouse recalls that in St. Etienne...the locals referred to Manufrance as "La Manu"... I'll see what one of her relatives has to say about this.

And another thought; If wing shooter could scan that publication and post it a page at a time, we might be able to "crowd-translate it." i.e we could do a page at a time as time permits. I could do 20 pages...90 would really have been a bridge too far.