doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com One of a kind?

https://www.gunbroker.com/item/1063513077#carousel-modal-view-item

This has to be one of a kind. The butt stock is a graft Claro to English walnut blank. Clear graft line. Certain looks original to the gun. I have never seen a factory shotgun, field grade, with a grafted blank before. It was a full choked gun now opened to cylinder so not original in that regard.

I dunno’ just looks like a guy broke the stock, found a chunk of walnut that would physically fit, and got busy with a saw, and a few files. Fitted a spiffy white line pad while he was at it, so, it isn’t likely to be somebody here. Functional repair. The factory wouldn’t have done this, unless it was a demo, and probably not even then.

Just a pump.

Best,
Ted

I can't enlarge the picture clearly enough to tell for sure, but looking at the left side of the stock, with a slightly better view of the grain lines, it looks to me like sapwood.

Tim

It looks like sapwood to me too. If you look at the photo of the right side the light wood covers about 1/2 way between the nose of the comb to the heel but on the left side it is only about 1/3 of the way.

Also notice that the written description says "semi-automatic sporting shotgun" - I assume that it uses the "arm actuated" semi-automatic operating system as opposed to gas, long or short-recoil or inertia.

Looks like it had on a rubber pull on recoil pad

Could be sapwood, might even have a pith in the heartwood.

That is a graft-line. I have bought several graft blanks. I thought they were cool when I was younger. The heart wood is dark on the English side but the sap wood and heart wood is very blond looking. The fore end looks exactly like the butt stock. Claro on one end, dark graft, heart wood, graft line and then blond English wood. A lot of orchard English is blond looking. Dark color seems to be in the minority. Most likely the trees were cut to soon for them to mature and have lots of heart wood. I expect they were sent hundreds of stock blanks and this one was at the graft line from a orchard tree. Since they paid for it they used it. I have only seen a few graft-line blanks used on custom guns, never a field grade gun. This is what a lot of orchard grown English wood looks like. That is the English part that grow above the graft. They use Claro root stock to graft the English to.

A thirty inch barrel reamed out to CYL. That's just sick, I don't care if it IS a pump. If you want an open choked barrel use a twenty-six incher to bore out.

Love me some cyl bored long barreled guns. My Holland has 29" tubes and is cyl/lt mod and while I could stand some more constriction in the left barrel, I would not change the cyl bore bbl if I could. To be honest, I have killed more birds with cyl choke than all other chokes combined. To be fair, almost all my guns have been cyl in the first barrel and I hunt over close working dogs.

I agree Stan. Some choke is much better than none. In smallbores I shoot none with open chokes except in Skeet. Even then I often shoot a Full in .410 at Skeet. That’s what my Pogeon grade and High grades came with and I refuse to alter them. And a Skeet or Cylinder choke .410 has very limited uses, in real field conditions, when hunting. Past 20-25 yards too many birds will it hit but not killed. My kids call the Pigeon grade gun Wingbreaker because it patterns so tightly that most Dove have one or both wings broken. It is a pleasure to pass shoot Dove with and incomers just ought to turn around.

I have stocked several guns with graft wood and believe that is what is on the S&W pump. Most of it is laid out with the base wood at the butt and not as prominent as the one shown. The blank KY Jon shows is not the way I am used to seeing a graftline blank laid out.
I have grafted stocks together a few times and the only way to make them work that I have found is to cut the old stock just barely behind the pistol grip and blend them together right behind the checkering. Even then you have to start with two sympathetic profiles. The one that worked best was a highly figured Ruger No. 1 buttstock grafted on to a Beretta Companion 410 shotgun (don't ask). When the junction was smoothed and the color blended with stain and then refinished, you had to get really close to see the joint in the profiled junction.

I have never been able to buy and English gun with a wood extension and a new butt plate. They can make a nice gun useable and are often really needed to adapt a midget's prize gun the the modern world, but most of them appear to have been done during an economic depression when every penny counted. Using the second or third piece of walnut seemed to have been way too much trouble and expense.

I also feel that the pump gun Ky Jon showed in the link has grafted walnut in the buttstock. However, that isn't really a very rare one of a kind thing to see, because a lot of Kalifornia orchard trees are English walnut grafted onto a more disease resistant root stock such as black or Claro. There is a market for grafted blanks for those who want something different, but I'd almost rather look at relatively plain wood or even a synthetic stock.

Most often, when sapwood is visible in a gun stock, it tends to run laterally with the grain rather than perpendicular to it, and it will often be stained to attenpt to match the darker heartwood.

A butt graft and a grafted blank are two different things. A butt graft is a good way to make a short, or too low at the comb stock into a usable gun. Crossedchissels gave a good demonstration of how to accomplish that on this board. A true graft blank is the joining of Claro to English that is done in almost every orchard in the US. This is that type of blank. And of the many thousands of guns I have come across, if not tens of thousands, this is the first factory one I have come across. If the gun was priced at $300 instead of $500 I would pick it up just as an oddity. It is odd, rare perhaps but does not increase the gun value that much to me. Just a fun thing not a big thing.