doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Damon-St. Étienne

If anyone is curious as to what the insides of a Petrik look like…here you go. I just finished a complete tear down for a long over due strip & clean on this 20 bore magnum Damon-Petrik.
I’ve found that the action and mechanics are simple, well thought out, and very robust. One thing that stood out was the precision of all the parts. On my Mitutoyo micrometer, all of the pins measured exactly the same with literally zero deviation. You don’t find that type of precision very often, even on some of the most expensive guns out there. All of the parts including the triggers are fitted very nicely. The striker block is so precisely fitted it’s unreal. Very nice work. The striker block is a novel idea too! There are some tooling marks on some of the parts, but still not bad…the parts that needed to be finely polished (bearing surfaces, etc) are.
A neat little feature on the trigger plate is an inspection hole that is machined so that a gunsmith can look at the sear-tumbler engagement to assess whether it’s dirty, damaged, or requiring lube, etc. without fully disassembling the trigger plate. Neat stuff.

The guts:


Nicely machined action….








Inspection port for sear/tumbler engagement


Nicely put together:

Thank you to Gene for helping with this thread and for recently helping to gather some very helpful information on taking this gun down to the bits. He was kind enough to put a post up on a board in France that got the required info on taking these guns down. Much appreciated.

Dustin


PS- if anyone owns a Petrik and would like information and methodology on taking it down, send me a pm. More than happy to share.

Thanks for your excellent investigative gunsmithing Dustin. To give credit where it is due, on the disassembly questions the person who responded to a post on passionlachasse.fr was FAB500.
https://www.passionlachasse.com/t40494-damon-petrik-superposes-demonter-larme

This is a historic line and surely will be consulted by others, who might acquire this French relatively unknown over here but classic and beautiful superposed shotgun in our country.

I owned 2 of them. The first one was very basic. The second one was much nicer. Light weight 16ga. I got that one from New England Arms back when they were still in business and Jack Dudley was working (fairly briefly) for Jim Austin. What intrigued me was that all the Petriks I've handled (not a whole bunch!) have been relatively light. Rem 32 may have "borrowed" the design, but they turned it into a heavier target gun.

I found a note in an old file on French guns with just a little information on Petrik and his guns. I'd assumed that Damon was his first name. Per the note, it was Boniface, and Damon appears to have bought the patent from Petrik.

The note also indicates that Petrik worked for Mode-Pirlet at one time.

The information about the pigeon shooting wife is fascinating.