Hi Steve, sadly, the quality of the rest of the stuff at the auction was not very good, and most of the dealers / collectors stayed away, hence the low prices.
Looking through some old boxes in my garage, I found 2 pinfire actions, one almost certainly a Blanch, the other I was lead to believe, came from a Thomas Boss. I will try to photograph them, and post them on here.
Back in the early 90,s the number of pinfires coming onto the market dropped quite dramatically, so to compensate for that, I started looking for hammer guns converted from pinfires.....quite successfully! With my gunsmith friend,s expertise, we managed to "re-convert" them back to pinfire. They were all out of proof hammer guns, heading for the breakers, so I had no second thoughts about doing this. Removing the centre-fire bits was easy, as was tig welding the action face and dressing it off. Again, opening the "slots" on the breech end of the barrels was easy, the hard bit was in finding the right hammers, which involved quite a bit of searching through lots of catalogue photographs of similar guns. I quite enjoyed this, as it gave me lots of good information on the original makers. A visit to the Proof House for an Exemption Certificate, and a quick check by the local firearms officer, and I had another one for my collection. Many of them were by provincial makers, and many more were "trade" guns from Birmingham, with a local gunsmiths (or ironmongers!) name on the rib, but I did find quite a few gems.
