Kyrie, again you're talking what happens NOW with driven hunts, not what happened "back in the day", when Brits like Ripon were recording hundreds of thousands of dead birds in their game books.

Wet guns, unless they're hand detachable sidelocks, don't normally get disassembled beyond the 3 main pieces for daily cleaning. Not a bad idea to do it yearly when they get wet a lot, just to make sure something isn't going on inside.

Kyrie, you have a very extensive collection of Spanish guns. How many of them date from before WWII? Any date from before WWI? Personally, I've seen darned few pre-WWII Spanish guns, and I don't believe I've ever seen one made prior to WWI. Meanwhile, there are any number of folks here shooting British guns that were made 40 years or more prior to WWI. And some of them saw extensive use in driven shoots. Can you come up with any Spanish examples from that era that have seen similar use? Guns that go back to the black powder/early nitro/corrosive primer era? Shotshell technology, modern steel vs pre-WWI steel . . . details like that make a significant difference in how long a gun is likely to survive under hard use, especially with minimal "preventive maintenance". You have maybe a 125 year old Spanish gun you can compare to a British gun of similar age? If not, then you don't have one that was used under anything approaching similar conditions.

As for Spanish guns not being copies of British guns: The Spanish don't make A&D boxlocks? Holland-pattern sidelocks? I think that's news to a lot of us. Other European nations went other directions and came up with their own designs. German guns are clearly different--although many incorporate British features, like the Greener crossbolt. The French . . . well, no one copies the French! The Spanish have built a shotgun industry based on English designs and cheaper labor. Nothing wrong with that, but there is something wrong with not being willing to admit it.