doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Project Guns thrill of victory- agony of defeat

If you have to ask it cannot be explained to you.

ed good, you did not specify to whom your comment was directed.

If to me,

1. I have the ability to do the work in my small shop
2. I have accumulated thousands of rounds of factory 16 gauge ammo and at 74 years old
I want to use them up.
3. The 7 1/2 and smaller is great for clay targets, and the #4s and 6s are great for pigeons
4. I reamed in the chokes that I wanted
5. It is FUN
6 For this particular 3200, I have barrel sets in 12, 16, 20, 28 & 410, so far

Mike

An awesome project on your part.

If you wanted to go super extreme add 24ga barrels to your already prefect set.

Thanks
I have given all my 24 and 32 gauge ammo to a friend
who shoots Fausti O/Us in both those gauges.

Project guns are a hobby for me. While I try not to just dump stupid amounts of money on them, I do not care if I spend more on a project than other would. Due to a bad back, I sleep about four hours a day. That leaves a lot of time to fill. Work only covers about 40 hours. I read four to six books a week. I gave up TV a couple decades ago. So I work in my shop on project guns, do a bit of wood working, upgrade the house and work with my Lab. I like the Lab work best.

As Keith said a man needs to know his limits. I have learned most of mine, with guns. More important, I no longer feel the urge to fix everything or restore them. Old guns earned their scars. I will still replace a buggered screw because I just hate looking at them. A simple screw takes a decent amount of time to replace. More if it has light engraving. I do still like fitting and adding a second set of barrels to a gun. I'd rather have two barrel set than have a set of screw-in chokes put in a double. But my barrel stash has slowly been used up and I might be down to a couple dozen orphans. I'll never use them all up but have stopped buying more. To not buy more, has been harder to do than you might think. But like many here, I am getting up in years and have decided not to leave a total mess of my gun things, for others to dispose of.

So before I go in the next 20 years I am going to taper off projects, finish up a multitude of things I have been piddling on over the years and sell or give away things I no longer have interest in. My Winchester model 70's are all gone. My Browning's are almost all gone. I just gave away five boxes of magazines and gave a couple dozen very plain stock blanks to a friend who is going to turn them on his lathe. I decided I was never going to use them so found them a new home. I gave away about a thousand wooden pen blanks, that I used to make pens on my lathe. I still have more than that left, but need to sort them out and find them a new home. It was fun collecting things but now I hope to thin the heard a bit to enjoy the remaining things more.

I've had successes and failures with project guns. My biggest failure was trying to have a set of new, unfitted 32" Utica Fox barrels fitted to a Philly Fox I have. I sent it all to a well renowned doublegunsmith in the Pacific NW to be fitted. He came highly recommended for doublegun work, though I didn't check out his abilities to fit barrels. I wrongly assumed that he was capable. As I said, the barrel set was new, having never had a file or stone put to the hook. Chambers and chokes had been cut, barrels were struck and polished, rib was matted and roll stamping was all in place on the tubes, no beads and never blued. I had a good many $$$ in those barrels in just the acquisition, in the high three digits.

The gun came home with the worst job of fitting you could imagine. Ray Charles could've done better with a worn out chainsaw file. The hook was no longer round, but egg shaped. There was at least .005" daylight on the left barrel/breechface interface and the right barrel breech was barely making contact with the breech face. I would say 30% contact at best, when smoked and examined, and that's really being generous in my estimate.

I've been enlightened about fitting barrels to doubleguns in the ensuing years. Word up .......a nice set of files and stones does not a barrel fitter make. There are far more otherwise accomplished doublegunsmiths who cannot do the job right than there are who can. It's as our resident English friend Ernie puts it, and I paraphrase him ......... "the lessons that I really learned cost me dearly". That one certainly did for me.

I like project guns, my tool box:
Bondo Glass (you can re-create an entire side lock) Aircraft stripper, Mark Lee, Navel Jelly, Sonic Cleaner. Harbor Freight store close, Linda Ronstadt/Patsy Cline on the Pandora station!

You can fix anything with those two playing.

I had a buddy at work years ago and he came up to me once and said "I just got a Mossberg 500 yesterday for only $50!!" My reply was - "That's not too bad, the guy only had to pay you $50 for you to take a Mossberg." Haha!

my most rememberable project gun started out as a 12 ga gh parker in fair cosmetic condition...wood had some cracks an gouges, with poorly applied varnish, with checkering a faint memory. however, wood was salvageable...twist type steel barrels were heavily pitted and dented. and were not salvageable and certainly unsafe to shoot with any smokeless load...

so, enter gunsmith ed lander...who just happened to have a pair of 12 ga fluid steel barrel blanks, left over from the lc smith liquidation sale...when marlin decided to end their post war production efforts...

old ed refurbished and refinished this deralict old parker, including sleeving the chambers with the aforementioned lc smith tubes. he reused the original ribs...as i recall, i had about $2000 total in this gun, including old ed's basic sleeving job...this was around 2007, as i recall...

after serveral months of futile sale efforts, i finally sold the gun to a skeet shooter in florida...for around $1500, as i recall...lost money...lesson learned not to do that again...

now the good news...for several years thereafter, that skeet shooter would contact me to advise the latest tournement that he won, using that old parker-smith...have not heard from him in many years...he may no longer be with us...if anyone reading this has knowledge of the whereabouts of that gun, please let me know...i would love to have it back, as i am starting a collection of old ed redone guns...