Outright fakery

[Ballistics in Scotland]

I have a 24ga hammer shotgun by the Anciens Etablissements Pieper in Belgium, with the cursive year letter for 1926. It is in very good condition, and about as good quality as Belgium was producing. The name means the former Pieper Establishments, when the firm was reconstructed after a bankruptcy.

They had a persistent belief that brazing barrels together was likely to harm the steel. One way they did this was the European monobloc system, but mine is quite different. It not only has chopper lumps, forged integrally with the barrel and norally brazed together, but a dovetail joint down the middle which only required soft solder. BSA used it in the UK, but few others and never the most celebrated gunmakers, as it makes the gun a shade wider and heavier than is desirable in a 12ga, but that hardly matters in a 24. It came from Australia, and my theory is that it is almost unfired because someone got it home before finding that 20ga cartridges wouldn't fit. The engraving, of pheasants which look a bit more realistic than real pheasants, is identical in style to one shown in their catalogue of 1911. Either their engravers were amazing copyists or someone outlasted the German takeover and forced production of military arms.



I intend to make an oak fitted case, but although reproductions of many British case labels, and some others, are available, I could find nothing for Pieper. So I bought this share certificate on eBay. Indeed it may entitle me to a hundred thousandth of the 11,500,000 Belgian francs capital of the firm, liquidated in 1954, but several devaluations mean that that would be rather less than the $11.50 I paid for it on eBay. The coupons to be used for claiming dividends haven't been used from 1929 to 1949, and perhaps there were no dividends

I scanned it, and some of the illustrations in their catalogue, and composed my own label, below. Adobe Photoshop or various other programmes would be fine, but I like my now obsolete Micrografx Picture Publisher, which has to be adjusted for compatibility on Windows 7. Apart from all the usual ways of drawing, smearing, text, cutting and pasting etc., you can mask all of an area of one degree of brightness, and flood it with a colour selected from a palette, or copied from any part of the drawing. There was a dreadful amount of that to be done on this one, since the original artwork was apparently produced with watercolours and stamps. I got the 3/4 circle corner wreaths from a site offering free clip art and made a flipped copy to get clockwise and anticlockwise versions.

Attachment 153411



In the past I have made monochrome labels by printing them out on heavy drawing paper and spraying with aerosol lacquer. But for this one I had them printed on glossy photographic paper. I would sooner have the biggest lettering n blue and white, but that yellowish tone in an original would be the base colour of the paper, and there was no such thing as printing in white.

It is o course, a label that Pieper never used. Is it forgery? Well, up to a point. But it is certainly no more so than direct copies of original labels, which can be and are passed off. A lot more Adams and Tranter cap and ball revolvers seem to come as boxed sets nowadays, than did forty years ago. It will be on what is obviously a modern gun-case, and is unlikely every to be used to fool anybody.

[Blackwater]

Very neat old gun, B. I'd really love to see it. I have an old 32 ga. that I believe was a guild gun, but it's nowhere near as nice as yours. Your description of the engraving has me drooling! Thanks.

[Ballistics in Scotland]

Here are some pictures. A Belgian gun of this period will have some useful information in the proofmarks. The bore and choke dimensions aren't very useful to someone with amateur equipment, since it will specify the diameter six inches or so in front of the chamber, which is hard to measure, and it is routine to adjust chokes with no loss of strength. But the weight of the barrels, down to the tenths of a gramme, will tell not only whether they have been rebored, but whether they have been weakened from the outside in refinishing.

Here is a website dating Belgian proofmarks, including the year letter from 1922 onwards, and another very good one on Belgian firearms.

http://damascus-barrels.com/Belgian_All_Proofmarks.html

http://www.littlegun.be/

[Blackwater]

Wow! VERY nice gun! Thanks for the pics. Again, my old 32 ga. is NOTHING like yours. I'm an old double gun man, having started hunting with quail, and originally started with an old Stevens 311 in 16 ga., a much neglected guage, IMO. Tough old guns, and served me pretty well, except for the stock dimensions. Couldn't have it all back then, I guess, but I sure used that old gun for a lot of fun and adventure. If I'd had one like yours, I'd probably have had to hold my little finger out when I sipped my tea! Nice old double guns will always hold a very special place in my heart. Nothing handles like a good side by side - NOTHING! Not even over/unders.

I have an old LC Smith that's very, very close to what my eldest uncle shot, having ordered it back in 1932 to his specified stock dimensions. I think it was one notch up from the base gun, which was still extremely nice for a Depression era gun. He was "de shootinest gennamin" in my family, and at age 81, the last time we hunted together, he never missed a shot the whole day long on doves. He was a true force of nature with a shotgun, and I wouldn't be surprised if he'd given Bogardus and the other notables a really good run for their money. The more critical the shot, the better he got. That's the mark of a real, sho' 'nuff shotgunner! I'm afraid I'm just a duffer with the scattergun. I'm usually having so much pure ol' fun that I forget to pay attention, and miss too much. But I surely do enjoy it, even the missing ... up to a point.

Thanks again for those pics of a very neat old gun. Not many even appreciate such things any more, or the care and craftsmanship and technology of the day that went into them. Thanks for giving it a really good home. One day, maybe, those guns MIGHT become appreciated again. We lovers of them have a bit of a duty to keep them up until then, or even if that day never comes. There'll always be a few, at least, who really know and understand what all they symbolize, and can do. You're a good man for doing your part in that.

[BAGTIC]

Gee! I couldn't even afford a stock blank of that quality.

[Ballistics in Scotland]

Gee! I couldn't even afford a stock blank of that quality.

Not many of us could, for that kind of wood doesn't grow on trees nowadays. But the gun came at a good time for that kind of thing. Although plenty of Georgian furniture uses highly figured veneers, relatively little interest was shown in highly figured gunstocks in the muzzle-loading days, and there wasn't the same market for the awkwardly-shaped parts of the trees, near the roots and branches. I'd guess that many a farmer or private person with an old tree or two for the walnuts was content for it to linger a long time on death row as long as it produced a good crop regularly. So there was plenty of the good stuff still around in 1926, I'd guess that the finish is only shellac, and needs careful handling.

[Blackwater]

If what you did is "outright fakery," then so are the repros that are commercially available for those other makers' stuff. Looks great to me.

[Lightning22]

That's a beautiful little side by side, I'd love to add a nice one like that to the cabinet.

Would you consider doing a build thread for the case when you make it?