doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion Classic & Custom Single Barreled Sporting Rifles @ doublegunshop.com Webley .500 Nitro

Pretty darn good I'd say!

Thanks for the follow up pictures Huvius, nicely done Steve.

Very nice, indeed!

Nice work!

Congrats on a great looking gun!

Beautiful rifle, Huvius. My 1902 is in 450/400 3 1/4 MNE - the all around medium bore before the 375 H&H took over. Curiously Webley built it on the large frame which was used for the 500, 577 and 600. Actually back when I got mine I had a choice of it or one in 600. Not often you see 2 at the same time. Since utility won out over possible future value I chose the 450/400. I always considered the construction bullet proof but one day at the range a friend had fired one of my standard loads of 80 grains of 4350 with a 400 grain Barnes (the original ones with .049 copper jackets) and function ceased. Turns out everything about the action is heavy duty except the stirrup. The pins had sheared off the stirrup and brought everything to a screeching halt. The original stirrup turned out to look like a little one from a revolver and as it turned out mine now has a slightly modded S&W stirrup and is functioning normally. Before you use it on something that might take offense I would suggest a very careful examination of the stirrup and perhaps acquiring a spare just in case the second shot wasn't needed.

Apart from a gibbs of bristol, the webley falling block is the rifle i lust after the most. Anything made by webley, the real birmingham webley that is, that i have seen is excellent and very well finished. Any idea how many of the falling block rifles webley produced ?

I'm not too worried about its function as it did duty as a 45/90 match rifle before the rebuild. I imagine any problems would have appeared during that use.
Anyway, I think I will work up to full boat loads slowly.

I don't think that there were many more than 300 or so of these 1902 patent action Webleys made. They came along at the end of popularity for single shot rifles.

Bonny and Huvius, as to the number of these actions made Kirton gives us a clue in the serial numbers he has recorded. While, of course, this is not a complete list it gives us the range for 1902 actions he has recorded. The lowest serial number he has for the large action (i.e. large and medium ones) is 9373 and the highest is 11093. This is a range of 1720 actions but it does include the small frame ones (with the cool circular breech block!) in 32-40 and 300 Sherwood which he describes as very rare. So even if the "very rare" ones made up 40% of production (not so rare) there would still be over 1000 large 1902s. Not all would have been marked Webley as they were sold to the trade and finished by such firms as Holland & Holland and Thomas Bland up until the mid 1920s. Usually their Webley serial remained on the front of the underlever.

HalfaDouble, it is true that the the known examples of 1902 patent Webleys all fall within the serial number range you mention, this range was by no means reserved solely for 1902 falling blocks. There are many double rifles and break action single shot rifles within this range as well. Webley didn't number their rifles by action type but put them all in as they were made.
In Winfer's Vol.6 book, he concedes that he made the same assumption as Kirton must have in thinking that Webley would have sequestered serial number series for individual types of guns.
Another observation he makes, which certainly has been borne out in my own collecting, is that Jeffery's Farquharson production is known to be just over 500 units and of course, Gibbs made exactly 974 Farquharsons so how could it be that Webley could have possibly made such a number of their 1902 patent rifles yet they are so rarely encountered?
My personal observations of the market of 1902s offered for sale or at auction in the last 10 to 15 years (since I've been paying attention) is that the large (like this 500) actions are indeed very rare, even moreso than the small round block rifles having only seen this example and a Rigby 577 in the flesh and maybe two others in auction catalogs.

Who did the color case on that rifle? Thanks