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What have you fellows got to say about Tobin, American made in Norwich Conn sometime around 1910. Sidelock 12g 2 3/4 chambers.

I have never seen or handled one in person.
How do you rate them for quality, function, handling ?
Are they Purdy under bolt ?
Anything at all about them please, so that I may better understand.

O.M

Try doing a search on here and you'll find plenty about a Tobin.

If smokeless powder had never come along, there would be a few more Tobins around.

The design is neither sidelock, nor boxlock, but, a weird hybrid that has a lot of steel removed from the frame, for the guns mechanics. The only part carried on the sidelocks is the sear springs. The rollers on the hammers and the spring ends, and using the springs as cocking levers was a clever idea, but, due to the design, it is a low pressure ammunition gun, period.

Dave should be along with some documents and photos. But, it is a gun from the past, and the market seemed to work exactly as it should have in this case.

Best,
Ted

And likely a good chance that the opening lever is well left of center. I had a couple of Tobins and have seen a few others. They all had the opening lever left of center which apparently was common on them. One of them I had had the straight English stock and I must say it was a nice handling gun. Even the pistol grip gun was nice and they weren't near as heavy as one would think. But, as mentioned, they aren't really a "high pressure" gun.

Revdocdrew has some high res Tobin pics on his website.
A well maintained Tobin is very smoothly actuating.

Most everything courtesy of Greg, Daryl and Dave

http://www.picturetrail.com/sfx/album/view/24779062
http://www.picturetrail.com/sfx/album/view/22641451

"Rod & Gun in Canada", April, 1911
https://archive.org/stream/rodguncan12cana#page/1462/mode/2up

Tobin Arms Mfg Co. (Ltd) -- I may be the guru of Tobin as I've had four articles published on that company. I discovered Tobin in the 1980's when I was researching things Fox at the Library of Congress and feeding my findings to Mike McIntosh for his book on Ansley H. Fox. Mike encouraged me to continue the Tobin search and write about them. Frank Major Tobin, Canadian by birth, was a gun salesman for various companies around the U.S. from the 1880's to after the turn of the century. Somewhere he acquired the rights to a shotgun patent of Clarance Wollam of San Francisco and set up a company in Norwich, Connecticut, to manufacture the gun. Tobin operated there from 1904 to 1909, then moved to Woodstock, Ontario, Canada, 1910 to about 1916. My Tobin articles were published in Volume Five, Issue 1, and Volume Eight, Issue 1, of The Double Gun Journal; Volume 39, Number 12, May 1994 of The Gun Report; and Volume 34, Number 3 of (the Canadian Journal of) Arms Collecting. Volume 14, Number 1 of Canadian Journal - Arms Collecting reproduced Tobin catalogue #311 from the factory in
Woodstock. The Tobin gun was offered in 12- and 16-gauge and a variety of grades from $30 to $250 with options of ejectors and a single-selective trigger. Tobin also made guns for the trade, that don't say Tobin anywhere on them, but they can be confirmed by the patent stamp -- PAT. MAY 23-93 AND PATENTS PEND'G. Serials to a bit over 11,000 were made in Norwich, and above that in Woodstock. Actually quite a transition spread through the 9000 to 11000 range. G.B. Crandall, a gunsmith in Woodstock that had worked for Tobin, took over the remains and from about 1922 billed himself as successor to Tobin Arms. He probably assembled around 500 guns in the high 18,xxx and low 19,xxx range until he retired in 1951. I believe he was more noted for his varmint rifles.

Jim Stewart Collected Canadian Tobins of every grade except one mid-grade and then donated the collection to the Canadian Museum of History. He did an article about this in the May - June 2016 issue of Canadian Antiques & Vintage. About that time Ted contacted me about a Tobin for sale here in Washington, which turned out to be the one grade Jim hadn't acquired. I put Jim in contact with the seller. Jim did a subsequent article published in Hunting & Fishing Collectibles Magazine.

Tobin was born in Halifax, our provincial capital. There's a Tobin Street in the older, then-fashionable area of the city. Thirty-seven Tobins are in the Halifax phone book.

Anyone seen or heard of a Tobin single-shot, long barrel called Sealer's Special?

[quote][Are they Purdy under bolt ?/quote]


No. They bolt through the rib extension. A method that looks for all the world like Ansley H. Fox's Patent No. 714688 granted Dec. 2, 1902, and assigned to Philadelphia Arms Co., but was never used on Philadelphia Arms Co. guns.





BTW, None of my eight Tobins have the top-lever left of center or a stretched frame. G.B. Crandall made a 12-gauge 3-inch Tobin --