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PORTRAIT OF A LADY Rehabilitation of a Hussey – Part II
The great English shotgun writer, Gough Thomas, once pondered the fact that so many of his correspondents thought of their guns as female. He knew not whether this was because shotguns exhibit so many female traits, or simply because they loved their guns and women are the natural focus of men’s affections. G.T. finally decided it was a combination of both, and left it at that. In the case of H.J. Hussey #14315 (Shooting Sportsman, Sept/Oct 2010), it is impossible to think of her as anything but a woman. When she came to me in 2008, she was a street hussy, bedraggled and down on her luck. Two years later, after a sojourn at Dr. Flynn’s Refuge for Wayward Shotguns, she came home to begin a new life as my latest sidelock inamorata.
Being a devotee of Gosford Park, I named her “Lady Trentham,” and so she remains.
When I found the Hussey, there were several puzzles about her origins and the mishaps that had befallen her along the way.
H.J. Hussey was a London gunmaker with a colorful past who was in business only a short time (1895 to 1914, roughly) but who made ‘best’ guns that enjoy a fine reputation. That Hussey himself was a rogue there is no question, but he was an excellent gunmaker with high standards. He was also a good pigeon shot who consorted with gamblers and other raffish types, and was noted for making excellent live-pigeon guns.
This explained some (but not all) of the idiosyncracies and anomalies of the gun as it looked, sitting in the rack at Champlin Firearms. She was undoubtedly a ‘best’ sidelock, but had been restocked (poorly) and converted from an English to a pistol grip; she weighed 7 lbs., 10 oz., her extractors were broken, and her entire safety mechanism was cobbled together and suspect.
Gunmaker James Flynn and I spent the better part of a day carefully dismantling the gun and examining all the parts, trying to piece together her past, and determine what it would take to make her whole again. As best we could tell, the gun dated from about 1904, and began life as a pigeon gun, with 30-inch barrels and 2¾” chambers. The chokes were .018 and 019 – virtually identical “modified” chokes, in theory – but we thought they might have been opened up at some point. I now believe we were wrong about that. The pistol-grip stock, aside from being ugly, was certainly not original, and the trigger bow had been replaced by a pistol-grip bow off a cheap trade gun. The safety button was also not original (possibly taken from the same old trade gun), although the Hussey had obviously been fitted with a safety when it was made. One finds pigeon guns both with safeties and without, and those with safeties are almost invariably non-automatic. All we could do was speculate, and our conclusion was that the gun had a safety when it was made, that the mechanism had been removed and possibly lost at some point, and subsequently replaced with the crude arrangement it now bore. The final list for restoration included a new stock, a new trigger bow (shaped and suitably engraved), new extractors, a new safety button (filed to shape and engraved), an entire safety mechanism, and new pins (screws), timed and engraved. The barrels had been reblacked in the past, but it was professionally done and they still looked good. The forend appeared to be original, and in good shape if a touch oil-weary. We decided to leave it as it was.
The goal was not to make the gun look like new, but rather like a fine century-old gun that has seen considerable use but has been well cared for. Obviously, this included a complete cleaning inside and out, with every mechanical component checked for function and wear. I asked Bill Dowtin to find us a stock blank that would look at home on a best gun from the Edwardian Era, and what he found speaks for itself. From England, we ordered a set of extractor blanks and a trigger bow. These are forgings that are then carefully sculpted to shape a file stroke at a time. The safety mechanism was, in some ways, the most difficult because Flynn had no pattern from which to work. Instead, he called upon his knowledge of such mechanisms generally, and then created one that was suitable. We left the safety non-automatic because that is what would have been found on a pigeon gun. Flynn began work in June, 2008, and continued off and on for the next two years. It took several months to obtain the extractor blanks and trigger bow from England, and work then progressed carefully, a step at a time.
The first requirement was to do all the internal work in order to arrive at a barreled action ready for stocking. This included the safety mechanism and safety button, as well as one new striker screw, and generally checking the frame over, including the top strap and trigger plate, to ensure they had not been altered when the pistol-grip stock was fitted. “You need the barreled action as close to finished as possible before you fit the stock, if only to minimise the chances of damaging the wood later on,” James told me. The exception is the trigger-guard strap. Before he could really go very far filing up the replacement forging, Flynn needed to head-up the stock and have it largely shaped out. “The metal has to flow to fit the stock, because the stock has to fit the person,” James said. “So before you finish the trigger-guard strap, you need to know your drop at heel and toe, length of pull, and cast. That way, you follow where the toe line goes and can shape the strap to fit.” In fact, someone in the past had bent the top strap down to fit a stock with a great deal of drop. Flynn had to re-forge the top strap and bend it back up to its original position to accommodate the new stock with its straight wrist and minimal drop. Consequently, the trigger plate also had to be forged up to be properly aligned with the top strap, and give the correct elegant proportion to the wrist. Like falling dominoes, this led to Flynn having to reposition the trigger blades to meet the sears. Only when all of this was accomplished could Flynn proceed with the other major internal project, fashioning a new safety system.
As with English stockmakers of old, Flynn works strictly with hand tools, clamping the stock blank in a vise and making one cut at a time. Watching the stock blank become a stock under his patient hands was much like watching a duckling turn into a swan, and it took place over a period of some months. Meanwhile, James had finished the new extractors, filing exact copies of the old ones from the English forgings. How the originals were broken remains a mystery, and since one was in two pieces, matching them was not easy. As well, one extractor was ever so slightly larger than the other – they were not exact mirror images – which added to the difficulty. Making extractors is an intricate and painstaking task. In the English trade, “ejectors” was a distinct skill in which some craftsmen specialized exclusively. It is not just a matter of shaping the two pieces to fit the channel. The notches that engage the stop pin in the lug must fit perfectly to allow the extractors to protrude the right distance, and they also need to be hardened so they do not peen when they strike that pin, which occurs every time the ejectors operate. And, to the eye, the extractors have to fit so well they look like they are part of the barrel. No wonder having a new set of extractors fitted to a gun can cost $1,000. Yet, like so many aspects of fine gunmaking, it looks like it should be easy. The most obviously difficult and time consuming part of restocking a sidelock gun, at least to the eye of a layman, is inletting the locks.
The lock mechanism is three-dimensional with several moving parts. Obviously, these parts must be able to move unimpeded, but that should be the only empty space behind the lock plate; every other cubic millimeter should be occupied by either steel or wood. In effect, the metal should be married to the wood so that it becomes almost a solid mass when the lock is pressed into place. This leaves the head of the stock as strong as possible and ensures that the lock remains stable and immovable under the stresses of firing and recoil. It also braces the moving parts, dampens vibration, and prevents parts migrating and pins loosening. A fine lock mechanism has a comma- or teardrop-shaped cavity in the bridle, and this must be carefully inletted so that a walnut post fits exactly into that opening. This helps hold the lock in place and discourage the natural tendency of the lock to rotate when the tumbler is released. Generally speaking, the wooden ridges and plateaux that press on the steel provide support where needed and prevent the lock shaking itself to pieces. This painstaking inletting is one of the reasons why a fine English sidelock from a century ago still performs flawlessly, while a cheap gun has long since disintegrated. An unskilled or lazy stockmaker can chisel away more wood than necessary, leaving room for the moving parts but leaving much vacant space as well. The ill effects may not show up immediately, but eventually they will make themselves known in undesirable ways such as loose pins and excessive wear. It takes only a glance at James Flynn’s exquisite inletting of the new stock, compared with the mediocre work on the stock we replaced, to see the difference.
When a new London gun is completed, it is usually fired 250 to 500 times in the course of finishing to ensure that every part works perfectly, and final adjustments are made before it is delivered to the client. In the case of a major restoration such as we performed on the Hussey, a similar process of test-firing is required to give the new parts a chance to settle in and learn to work together. After shooting the Hussey several thousand times, I found that the stop-pin in the lug was peening the notch in the new extractors, raising a slight burr that made them sticky. A trip back to Mr. Flynn, some judicious use of the file, and then rehardening, solved the problem. This is not unusual, but it should be kept in mind by anyone who undertakes such a project. Even when it’s over, it’s not necessarily over. Ever since I acquired the Hussey, I wondered about the chokes. Preliminary measurement showed right and left barrels to have constrictions of .018 and .019 inches respectively. Once I started shooting her, however, her performance was not typical of any gun bored “Mod./Mod.” I shot skeet, trap, handicap trap, and sporting clays with the gun, and performed as well at each as I ever have with specialized guns made just for that purpose. Obviously, there was more to this than the constriction showed. In the English trade around 1900, a client could specify exactly how he wanted his gun to perform, and this was particularly true of pigeon shooters where there was serious money on the line. A client might demand a 60/40 pattern, with a certain number of pellets in a 30-inch circle at 40 yards, 60 per cent above center and 40 per cent below, evenly distributed among the four quadrants.
The gunmaker would meet this demand through a process of repeated shooting, counting, measuring, reaming, polishing, and then repeating the whole process until each barrel delivered exactly the pattern it was supposed to, at the exact range. This approach is still used by Holland & Holland, among others. When you look at the barrel flats, they might be marked Choke and Choke, but there is much more to it than that. Barrel makers had their own methods of achieving the desired performance. One approach was the “tulip” choke, in which the bore was enlarged slightly just behind the choke, and then constricted. In recent years, this approach has been used with some success in competition guns. The Hussey’s barrels were made by Frank Squires, a well-known London barrel maker who supplied barrels to Boss & Co., among others. He enlarged the bores from .735 and .737 nine inches from the muzzle, to .736 and .739 just behind the chokes, and then constricted them to .718 and .720. The constrictions may be almost identical, but the actual bore configuration is not. The right barrel throws a lovely, even 60/40 pattern that would be termed “light modified,” while the left is “improved modified.” Even that does not tell the whole story, however, because the shapes of the patterns are even and consistent from 30 yards out to about 50 yards. Gil Ash’s testing with chokes at varying distances suggests that modified may be a better long-range choice – or at least, be effective over a longer span – than full choke. When I picked up Lady Trentham from Dr. Flynn, I found that she was trimmer than before. She now weighed 7 lbs., 3 oz., seven ounces less than she had when I bought her. This was a result of restocking, and it makes a world of difference in handling.
She came home to find a cozy new case awaiting her from Connecticut Shotgun Manufacturing, oak-and-leather even if it’s not from London, complete with a reproduction Hussey Ltd. case label and set of accoutrements. She settled in with a contented purr and prepared for her second debut in polite society. As ladies will do, she seems to have completely forgotten her questionable past…
But this is a story, not about H.J. Hussey himself, but about one of Hussey’s guns. It is a mystery with a touch of tragedy – a tale of gamblers, rakes and barbarians. The character of H.J. Hussey himself plays no small role, and the story begins in, of all places, Enid, Oklahoma. James Flynn, Gunmaker |
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| NOTE: A big Thank You to Terry Weiland for letting us reprint these articles on our website. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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