In the early 2000s I sent a Pair of Parkers to Keith for some minor restoration work. I say "minor" because nothing was broken or cracked, the guns worked fine, but the finishes were very, very tired. One was a a VH with Infallible Trigger, and the other was a GH Damascus with fishtail top lever. When the VH came back, the gun looked good at 20 feet, but there were a lot of flaws. Lots of very minor pits in the bluing that should have been filed or sanded out, but that could be all be fixed with a proper reblue. The biggest problem on that gun was that the side of the buttstock had been sanded so much that it was noticeably dished, and that can't be fixed. I had some knowledgeable gun guys look at it and they agreed that it had been botched. The boys at Ivory Beads looked at it and agreed. My comment to Jim at IB was that the stock work looked like it had been done by a twelve-year-old. Jim said that Keith had a kid working with him and may have had the kid prep the stock. Kody? I dunno. I shot the gun once, put it away and have not looked at it since. I called Keith and had him send the GH back to me with no work done.
On the subject of Damascus refinishing, Keith used to offer browning and what he called "black and white." I saw some barrels at IB that he had refinished, and they looked OK, but the B&W was really pretty brown and not appropriate for most American classics. Jim at IB told me that he thought Keith was shortcutting some of the process to save time, and that was why the B&W came out brown. Finish was fine, but the color was wrong, so I never sent anything else for work.
This I think is impossible to repair properly.
Pretty much where I came down on the VH. Not to justify sloppy quality, but I had another nationally known double gun guy do some work on a couple of mid-grade guns. One is so botched that I have never even bothered to shoot it, and the other came back with chunks of walnut missing after a stock bending exercise. That one is still in pieces, gathering dust. If this clown had saved the chunk of walnut that blew out during the bend, it would be a fairly straightforward repair, but no such luck. Same guy did some work on another of my Parkers, and the result was so bad that it had to go to a different smith for a do-over. The second guy got it right, but it added hundreds of dollars to the cost of the job. Bottom line is that the truly good smiths seem to be few and far between.
