I recall back in the 70's or early 80's that Spanish made doubles got a bad reputation for having parts made with steel which had not been hardened properly. The gun with POS intials, Pride of Spain, was one of the worst examples. Sears of butter is how they were described. One gunsmith I knew used a POS 20 bore as a donor gun to make a .444 hog killing, double rifle. As I recall he had to go over all the internals and rework them and harden them properly. Was it just the POS line or were other makers like AYA having the same problems?
Good morning Jon,
You nailed the issue when you wrote “had not been hardened properly”, but the problem goes back a lot farther that the 1970s. The problem was first noted internationally during WWI, when Spanish gun makers supplied sidearms to any combatant with the money to pay for them.
The problem is one of process rather than material.
The material in question is just low carbon steel. That’s the same type of steel used in Lugers, Colt 1911s, and all of the old and very fine S&W revolvers. Low carbon steel produced in Spain isn’t any better or worse that low carbon steel produced in Germany or the USA.
Low carbon steel was used in firearms because it is relatively cheap to produce, relatively easy to make in quantity, and easily worked. That “easily worked” is a blessing and a curse. A blessing in that it’s easily shaped and engraved. A curse in that it is easily abraded deformed under impact.
The curse is easily dealt with after shaping and engraving are done by either surface carbonization to create a “skin” of high carbon steel, or by flame hardening and tempering to change the crystalline structure to harden the part through and through.
That’s the material side of the subject.
The process side is where the issue crops up. The Spanish artisanal shotgun makers might more accurately be terms “shotgun assemblers”. They don’t make the parts that they use to assemble their guns. Rather they all depend on a network of small shops each of which specializes in producing a few kinds of parts. The gun makers essentially buy parts blanks from that network of small suppliers and hand shape and fit the parts together to make shotguns.
This process doesn’t scale up well. Each gun maker is set up to make some fairly small (by USA standards) number of shotguns a month. The underlying network of parts suppliers is just big enough to provide the parts to make that small number of guns. That works well so long as there isn’t any sudden surge in demand.
When a US hardware chain tasks a small Spanish shotgun maker to deliver twenty or thirty shotguns a month the feces may hit the fan. If, for the sake of an example, that shotgun maker usually only buys the parts to build ten or twenty guns a month he now has to try to find two or three times the number of parts his suppliers are set up to provide.
So both gun makers and parts suppliers struggle to hire contract workers to make parts and assemble guns. All the really skilled people are already employed, and this is fundamentally a family-based trade, so aunts, uncles, brothers, mostly grown children, and anyone else who can handle a file are dragooned into making parts or building guns.
This is where the problem occurs. Parts either don’t get heat treated at all, or are hardened but not tempered. Parts lacking heat treatment, and parts left brittle due to lack of temper, get into the supply chain. Sometimes the bad parts are caught during assembly, and sometimes not; the gun makers are just as stressed out as the parts makers.
And that is how too soft and/or too hard parts get into Spanish shotguns (and the pistols made by Star, Astra, and Llama). No gun maker is immune. All the makers, Aguirre y Aranzabal (AyA) to Zabala Hermanos have had their share of this issue.
And that’s “the rest of the story”
