Ed-your knowledge of gun mechanics is stupendous. What make of American doubles had these "floating firing pins" and how do you see that "float". My older Parkers have the integral firing pin hammer design, as shown in my Baer book. Does my A.H. Fox magnum also have this same fine design? Mr. MacIntosh wrote about the "one design flaw" in the Fox guns in his epic 1981 "Best Guns"- a lack of rebounding hammers. I thought that term only applied to outside hammer guns? Could you explain in more detail please? RWTF
By "floating firing pins" I mean the firing pins not attached to the hammer. They "float" between the hammer and the precussion primer and tend to be spring loaded to back them away from the shell. On the old Parker hammer guns the springs would break... but this has nothing to do with rebounding locks, which affect the position of the hammer.
In the old guns before the rebounding feature was devised the hammer (or "cock") would rest against the firing pin unless pulled back to half-cock position. Pulling the trigger at half cock would not fire the gun. Failure to half-cock prior to opening after firing could cause the firing pin to be damaged when the gun was opened, because it otherwise would be in the fired position stuck forward past the standing breech into the fired primer. Failure to half cock the loaded gun would leave the firing pin pressed by the hammer against the unfired primer in the loaded shell, which was very dangerous.
The first Parker rebounding locks were ca.1870, when the gun works licensed the John Stokes/Wesson Arms patent after Wesson gave up on shotgun making. Stokes was hired by Parker Bro's as a lock maker, and the Wesson records show Charles Parker's company paying royalties of $1.00 to $1.50, depending on grade. I am presently corresponding with the keeper of the Wesson records trying to nail down, once and for all, the cross-polination of Wesson and Parker in the early 1870s.
Quite simply, rebounding locks are engineered in such a way that opening the gun withdraws the firing pins from extending beyond the standing breech, and is applicable to both floating (independent) firing pins, like the L. C. Smith hammerless side lock and David Mc Kay Brown round action (
DGJ Spring 2004 p.8), and which ever other gun makers chose the floating firing pin mode. The patent drawings I have seen in McIntosh's book for the Philadelphia Fox show nosed hammers.
I don't know about "design flaws" and am not a gun mechanic. I observe, however, that the Parker concealed-hammer gun ("hammerless") has simple one-piece nosed hammers that strike the primer directly, and, as reported by Babe Del Grego, are trouble free; other guns have a hammer that strikes a spring-loaded floating firing pin that, in turn, strikes the primer. Different strokes... I don't see where a two-step process can be any more trouble free than Parker's direct hit, but I have no information that floating firing pins present any chronic problems. David Mc Kay Brown sells an $80,000 bespoke shotgun with floating pins and I believe most if not all side locks do it this way.
Perhaps the issue of nosed hammers versus spring-loaded floating firing pins is just another red herring, like side-locks versus box-locks, that wasn't a topic of contention when the guns were in current production, but now rears it's ugly head when gun cranks spin their opinions on the Internet. Hammer guns had floating firing pins of necessity and the springs of the 19th century were not made of alloy steel, so they sometimes failed. Parker adopted an encapsulated-coil main spring for use with its hammerless in 1888 (that would still function if fractured); Parker omitted the spring-loaded firing pin altogether, by using the one-piece nosed hammer.
All Parkers post-1872 were made with the essential rebounding-hammer safety feature, which had been a $10 extra. There is an entry in the 1873 order book that "reb ham throwed in gratis." Rebounding hammers are a design feature of the lock mechanism; firing pins are an extension of the hammer, some connected (nosed), some disconnected (floating). EDM
