doublegunshop.com - home Forums Thread Like Summary - Lindner Daly Restoration

Well, I am bored and I suspect many of the rest of you are as well. With asthma and a bit of COPD, I'm taking the "social distancing" pretty seriously, until they work out a treatment plan that is consistently effective. Luckily I'm a natural at social distancing, as my friends would say, but still have a little extra time. And starting a thread is more fun than cleaning the house again.

So this thread is going to detail, with photos, the work that has gone into the restoration. It's not quite completed but we can see light at the end of the tunnel so now seems like as good a time as any to start.

3 1/2 years ago I was lucky enough to score a very sharp deal on a Lindner Daly Diamond Quality model 275 in 12 gauge. My original thread can be viewed here:

https://www.doublegunshop.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=459551&page=2

When I bought the gun, I knew it had a significant dent across both the barrels. A door slam or something that got them both. After consulting with CJO, a member here with outstanding gunsmithing skills as anyone who knows his work will attest, we decided the risk/cost equation was worth it.

However when I received the gun, despite being told it was in "good working order" but for the barrel dent, I found it had a broken ejector rod. A few brief emails back and forth with the vendor, a gun shop, resulted in the hoped-for response. A significant amount of the purchase price was refunded to cover the cost of a high quality repair of the ejectors by a smith who knew what he was doing. A very fair outcome in my opinion. An offer to return for full refund was also made and left as my choice.

Early in 2017 I delivered the gun to Claudio. With gun in hand he gave it a good once over, noting some of the obvious areas that needed attention. When it came time to give him instructions, I simply said "Claudio, repair it as you would one of your own. With as much attention to detail as you see fit for a gun of this quality." I realized this was a rather open ended description for the scope of work I wanted done but Claudio has worked on a number of my guns and over the last 10 years consider myself lucky to have found both a double gun mentor as well as a good friend in Claudio. I trust him.

Well, it's finally time to wrap up the saga of the restoration of my 12 gauge Lindner-made Charles Daly Diamond Quality model 275. What started as a un-shootable basket-case (although it looked pretty good) has finally come full circle and made it back to the duck marshes it was originally destined for when it left the bench in Herr Lindner's shop more than a century ago. Covid and it's resulting lockdowns and restrictions made getting this gun back into action a much more drawn out affair than I originally imagined but all is well now that it's gone BOOM and ducks have fallen.

There was a meeting of fine double guns over the last couple days as we hunted out of the famed Mud Creek Club on Lake St Clair. Pretty sure even former member Henry Ford would have been pleased to be using some of the guns on hand. Thanks to the kind invitation of AR15meister, Claudio and I joined Adam and his father to hunt the famed marshes of Lake St Clair, sandwiched between Detroit and Port Huron. With that kind invitation, it was a given the Daly would get the call but Adam is pretty keen on big vintage duck guns so he made sure Claudio brought a gun a few of you may remember from threads on this site now nearly a decade old....his big B grade Fox with the 32' barrels and that spectacular beavertail forend, if you can call it that. We just call it The Big B and, ten years after first seeing it, I still think it's the most beautiful double I have ever seen. Adam also brought his own, very fine 12 gauge SuperFox, recently restocked along with receiving new metal finishes by member Chris Dawe. It is a gun that deserves it's own thread. Adam's father Wally doesn't have quite the same enthusiasm for vintage doubles but he humoured us by bringing a very nice late 1950's (I think) Browning Superposed.

While the volume of ducks coming into the spread was a little thinner than we might have hoped (the weather was just too lovely) there were enough to keep us alert and watchful. The lack of waterfowl within range may have had something to do with the amount of laughter being generated in each of the two duckboats. But, as many of you know, it's not always about the limit and we all left yesterday having enjoyed a great time. Claudio made one shockingly good shot that had two big greenheads falling dead as stones from a single shot. By chance we all got a clear view of that event. Fittingly the first duck I dropped with the Daly was a nice Canvasback drake. Here are a few photos. There are more but I'm having some computer issues and will try to post when I get them problems worked out.

Thank you all for following along this adventure with me. I had hoped that, this group being who you are, you would enjoy seeing a start to finish restoration by someone as talented as Claudio. And I think I was right. You did like it. As I alluded to earlier in the year, there is a new project getting teed up. Hopefully sometime in 2022 we will start anew with this 12 gauge Daly's new companion, a Lindner made Charles Daly Diamond Quality model 275 20 gauge. I hope you will join Claudio and I for that one as well.

My view for a couple days:

Claudio on the right:

From left, me, Adam, Wally & Claudio:

View of the club from the canal.

I think this is pretty obvious:

I'm back....with more tales of Daly restorations.

I know that I teased you all with the 20 Gauge Lindner-made Daly Diamond last May but that one continues to languish while Claudio and I get our ducks in a row. In the mean time, we have another, somewhat simpler but hopefully similarly interesting Charles Daly Diamond restoration to talk about.

This one will be a little shorter and quicker as there were fewer problems. But I hope it will tide us over until the 20 gauge takes centre stage.

The subject of the current discussion is a Prussian Charles Daly Diamond Quality Model 275 12 gauge circa 1925. Astute followers of Charles Daly guns will immediately recognize this as a non H A Lindner gun. At the moment, we are speculating the gun was made by Robert Schuler but that's not definitive. While I must admit to an automatic bias in favour of Lindner-made guns, this one eventually won me over.

It starts with the size and weight of the gun. As it sits now, almost completed, it is a 6 pound 7 ounce 28" barreled gun choked mod and full. My favorite upland hunting guns, regardless of gauge, have always been between 6 1/4 and 6 3/4 pounds. So this one is in the dead centre of that sweet spot. And while the bulk of the restoration was taking place, Claudio was fitting the gun to his personal measurements. It just happens that my fit is almost identical to Claudio's fit, so when I finally picked up the assembled gun, rather than just one component or another, it fit like a glove. Whatever resistance I had to a non-Lindner gun just melted away.

With a friend like Claudio, I would be stupid not to listen carefully to his assessments of guns that come into our orbit. Last fall, when this one first surfaced, I must admit I was a bit of a skeptic regarding quality of a non Lindner gun. Surely the quality had to have slipped. But every time I was over to Claudio's shop, or was on the phone with him, I'd hear a growing admiration for the build quality of this gun. I think the final assessment came down to that it was every bit the equal to the Lindner guns we have looked at. The areas of exception are the engraving and the barrels. The game scene portions of the engraving are fantastic, as well done as my Lindners. However the other engraving is of a simpler, less time consuming style. But still extremely well done. And it's Claudio's opinion that a key benefit to a post WWI gun is noticeably better steel in the barrels.

The gun is still with Claudio, getting a final adjustment to the ejectors (damn all ejectors!) and I still have to pry the progress photos out of him but they will come. In the mean time, here's a pic to whet your appetite.

As work got started on the wood, it was time to look at the metal. It started with a thorough strip and clean and like the previous gun we profiled, the results of the ultrasonic cleaning are stunning:

Before:



After:

Excellent question. I agree that the ultrasonic cleaning "uncovers" the original colors. I recall a photograph that Oscar Gaddy included in his wonderful two part treatise on cch that showed what the surface of cch steel looks like under an electron microscope. It is an amazing picture showing crystalline shaped forms that comprise the surface. These refract light in such a way as to cause the eye to see the colors. Even though the surface feels very smooth to the touch, those shapes are present, until worn away, at which time the colorful effects are lost. It just stands to reason that years of accumulated dirt and grime can work it's way between those minute, shaped, structures on the surface, causing the light to no longer be refracted, by being blocked.

Actually, the cleaning away of all that grime does constitute a "re-activation" I guess.

I think we are pretty much at the end of this latest project. As I mentioned near the start, this gun was in pretty good shape to begin with. Only a few areas that needed to be addressed to let it shine again.

We fixed up the the nicks in the wood. Bent the stock. Removed the cheek piece. Replaced the tired old pad with a new leather covered beauty. gave it a beautiful new hand rubbed oil finish. Thoroughly cleaned the metal in the ultrasonic cleaner. Fixed the stripped pins on the two "cats eyes" ejector locators. And made some very minute adjustments to the ejector timing.

Here's the finished product.

Well, it's been a long journey.

The snowbirds I bought the new Daly from departed for warmer climes just as we were completing our deal last November. And I didn't want a rush packing job done by people who had never shipped a gun in their almost 80 years. So we agreed to wait until their return at the start of April and in the meantime I sent them a heavy duty aluminum full length travel case (bought for taking rifles to Africa).

The case held the Daly and two Francotte 28 gauge guns just fine and they arrived today. Our respective governments don't make things easy. Diamond Quality Model 275 circa 1906. 20 gauge. 26" barrels. 5 pounds 9 oz. Looking forward to bringing it to life like the 12 gauge. Here's a couple quick snaps of the Daly.

Just soap and water. If you look at page two of this thread a number of posters offer up specific soaps and solutions.

The next bit of work was on the ejector box. You all are probably familiar with the iconic "cats eye" locator pins on Prussian Daly ejectors. Both pins had been somewhat mangled and not just the slots. They both had their threads stripped, just spinning in place.

The original pins had to be removed and the whole assembly dismantled. Then new pins were made and hardened.






The stripped holes were plugged and then re-tapped.





Finally the whole assembly put back together. Happily the rest of the ejector system is working quite well. In fact it was working well prior to discovering these pins had been stripped.

Glad you are enjoying it Mike and John. Have no plans to quit. It's simply limited by Claudio's time (he's got a bit of a backlog these days) and my gun money supply. LOL As I mentioned earlier, we have a Lindner Daly Diamond 20 gauge waiting in the wings. So we aren't short of suitable candidates.

Probably a very silly question, but does ultrasonic cleaning simply expose case colouring that is there under the accumulated crud, or does the process in some way re-activate the colours on the surface layer.

Either way the results are most impressive.

He doesn't just seem to be John, he really is. Always a pleasure to visit his shop.

This is one of the better threads I can remember ever reading here. Thanks to you James, and Claudio, for the excellent pics and for sharing them with us.