Another poster was concerned with the weight of his 20 bore Smith that he is going to restock..I have never seen a 20 bore Smith on a Regular Frame..Did they make such an animal.. I have had several 20s with an "R" on the frame, but they were Featherweight Frames.. MDC
I am looking at an R frame Specialty Grade tomorrow. 30" barrels full and full. Isn't that a coincidence that you should bring this up. I don't know how common the regular frame 20 is? Maybe Walt can enlighten us.
Like MDC, I've never seen an R frame 20g in the flesh either. I'd heard it mentioned here that they exist. I have owned at least one early 20g that didn't have the "FW" on the frame although it was clearly of the same dimensions/design as the FW.
Russ told me that there were no regular frame 20 gauge guns. At least none he had ever seen or heard of. Bobby
I went to the L C Smith site listed above.. Sorta hard to seperate the wheat from the chaff. I remember what Russ said about it and if hey made any 20 bores on a reg frame, they're pretty rare.. MDC
As one who is heavily involved with the LC Collectors Association, I can tell you for a fact that we have yet to find an example; or any evidence that Hunter ever manufactured a 20-bore on the standard "R", or Regular sized frame. Having made that statement, we would never state unequivocally that such a gun does not exist; only that we've yet to find it. If one does surface, we certainly want to see the gun!
Smith did made a light weight 16-bore on the "R" frame, and continued to do so for 10-12 years after the introduction of the "FW" featherweight frame in 1907. Also, we have yet to discover the significance of the R suffix stamped/seen on many of the featherweight frames prior to 1919; but as noted, it is not an indicator of frame size.
On another note, an FW framed 16-bore A2 grade Smith gun with two sets of barrels was recently sold at auction and should be in the possession of the new owner in a few days. It was advertised as having two sets of 16-bore barrels; but the shipping records have the notation "16/20" in the barrel column. Once the gun is received we'll examine the gun to verify bore size; but if this gun is a two-gauge/two barrel set, it will be the first such Smith gun I've ever seen.