After re-reading the article in an older Double Gun Journal about The Meriden Firearms Company's Aubrey shotgun several weeks ago, what should appear to my wondering eyes yesterday but an Aubrey shotgun. Until reading this piece I had never even heard of such a gun.
A friend of mine has some sort of miraculous ability: neat old guns seem to launch themselves out of forgotten closets into his hands. He just picked up this Aubrey (and a Winchester .30WCH lever gun, and a POS American Arms double) for less than $500 last week.
The point of this post is the Aubrey gun: it is covered in some sort of sticky black gunk and so is difficult to properly describe. It is a 12 gauge, appears to have nice damascus barrels of good pattern and thickness, has some barrel pitting, some decent engraving (flying bowling ball type) and seems to have a pretty nice piece of lumber on it. The stock is cracked through at the wrist, although nothing that couldn't be easily repaired. It has one of those pull off fore ends. A fair amount of nicks and dings on the wood, but nothing really on the barrels or action.
I have no idea at all of any value of this gun, but it does appear that it could be a nice shooter if the owner so chooses. So my proposed actions are aimed at re-making the gun into a shooter, with the appropriate ammo.
Any thoughts, suggestions or comments? Actions to be taken?
At this point my next action is to suggest that we set up an appointment with Kirk Merrington to get his thoughts and potentially get him to do a strip & clean, check & repair the action, re-brown the damascus, hone down the worst of the pits, clean the wood and do a through the wrist screw and acgraglass repair ???
No?? Yes??? What??
Thanks very much for any input.
