The craft and tradition behind a best gun
Building a best British gun takes a team of skilled craftsmen up to three years and a thousand hours. This is why…
If you don’t start with the right lines you can’t correct that later
In a converted garden shed at the back of his yard to the west side of London, Alex Torok actions guns and rifles as an outworker for the best British trade. Torok also makes guns to his own company’s name, Smith & Torok, sometimes working every day of the week, occasionally until the small hours. On a sunny Saturday in May he is showing me how the relationship between the top strap of an action and the height and shape of the rib along the barrels lays the foundation for the elegant lines and graceful proportions of a best-quality British gun.
“The way I set the top strap is based on the type of rib used and the customer’s stock measurements,” says Torok, who trained as an action filer at Purdey in the mid-1970s and spent 30 years at the bench in its factory before going freelance nine years ago. “That establishes the lines of the gun, the right lines for that individual customer. Once I’ve got that in place, everything else I do will come from that.”
The Victorians placed great stock on not only mechanical reliability but also conformation as an inseparable indicator of a gun’s quality, whether it was ‘first class’ or something inferior. “Unless a gun is built on good and pleasing lines,” wrote author Henry Sharp in 1904, “with regard to shape and contour, no one with half an eye to beauty will take to it, and unless the shooter really fancies his weapon he will not be likely to make with it his best display of skill.”
With a needle file Torok pointed to the slots in the action where the lockplates rest. “The depth of the strap determines how high or low I fit the locks into the action,” he explained. “The deeper the strap the lower the locks.”
The strap set and lock positions affect how the stock flows from the action to best complement a customer’s personal gunfit measurements. It also dictates how the ‘horns’ (the wood at the head of the stock surrounding the lockplates) are shaped. Higher-set locks make for rounder-back horns; lower locks slightly flatter. Regardless, it’s critical the horns are proportional and balanced in appearance top and bottom, for the human eye delights in harmony. “Aesthetics are incredibly important,” Torok says. “The mechanics can always be altered along the way but if you don’t start with the right lines you can’t correct that later.”
Actioning a traditional British gun – and we’ve only glimpsed a sliver of the work that that entails – is one of a series of distinct stages in a complex process that may take a team of skilled craftsmen about a thousand hours over two to three years to accomplish. The simplified flow chart (see page 56), reproduced courtesy of Cyril Adams, former owner of London’s Atkin Grant & Lang, shows the basics of the process and should provide an inkling of how important scheduling is to completing a gun.
procedure for ‘the build’
Every company of gunmakers has its own procedure for ‘the build’, influenced by the firm’s history and the sorts of guns it makes. Those built by Purdey (and, often, by Purdey-trained independents such as Torok) are made by specialists in seven distinct sections: barrel making; actioning; lock making; ejector work; stocking; engraving; and finishing. It’s called the Purdey Way and the division of labour, the procession of the work and who builds what and how it’s made and installed will differ from the procedures adopted
by other makers. Nonetheless, the common thread binding traditional British gunmaking is that the finished article results from skilled work performed by manual craftsmen, each of whom is a specialist. “Best guns, regardless of maker, are not built by jacks-of-all-trades,” said Torok. “Each section takes years of practice and experience to master – really a lifetime.”
It’s not that machine tools aren’t used – they’ve been employed since Victorian days – but historically their role was mainly for roughing out components, large and small, that craftsmen would then make into guns through the dexterous use of hand tools.
computer-aided design
The adoption in recent decades of computer-aided design or computer-aided manufacturing (CAD/CAM) has, however, breached the old frontiers between man and machine. Nowadays, the high-tech machinist – aided by computer numerical control (CNC) milling machines, lathes, wire cutters and spark eroders that work to incredible tolerances – has appropriated many tasks once only the purview of craftsmen. The effects of ‘the machine’, as bench-trained gunmakers call CNC, are most dramatic in tube and component making – notably in action and foreend-iron manufacture and in lockmaking – and it has also simplified how a gun is actioned. The long-term ramifications of the technological currents sweeping artisan gunmaking are waters too deep to plumb here, but it’s important to distinguish that fundamentally different manufacturing philosophies govern machine-made and traditional ‘hand-made’ sporting guns.
The former have been designed from the outset by engineers for volume production and manufacture by machine with an eye toward minimising costly handwork: mechanisms are normally simpler and of fewer parts, the shapes of components are generally less complex and are designed for interchangeability, many working tolerances needn’t be so fine and decorative elements are adapted to mechanised construction. Made with modern metallurgy the best of them are enviably reliable and handle well; some are even handsome albeit, like a wellturned spindle, in a simple sort of way.
With roots in the pre-industrial era, traditional British guns, as built today, developed mostly in the 19th century at the hands of craftsmen, not engineers, men to whom gunmaking necessarily meant making by hand. Some designs were admirably uncomplex (the Southgate-type ejector), others the opposite (the Boss single trigger, the Beesley/ Purdey action) but in any event skilled handwork was perforce baked into their making and, importantly, into their mechanical adjustment and regulation, as well as their aesthetic finish. More than a tool, a sporting gun was made by hand to be a thing of beauty – an individual thing of beauty. It was inconceivable to the craftsmen of the day (or their customers) that machines could ever produce guns that were fine-lined and unctuous to operate, guns that were light
and well balanced, guns that looked like and handled like thoroughbreds. Even today, talented CNC machinists, if unaccompanied by the craftsman’s hand, have found this a difficult code to crack.
beginning with the barrelmaker
Now, as then, the building of a hand-made gun begins with the barrelmaker, who will strike up a pair of forged tubes, braze them together at the lumps, file up and tin in the ribs, braze or tin in the fore-end fastener, ream the chambers, hone and lap the bores and chokes, and rough machine the lumps. When completed, a proper set of barrels will be straight and true from chamber to choke and their wall thicknesses will be concentric – a barrel, after all, is only as strong as its thinnest spot. “Now you’ve got a pair of barrels,” said Holland & Holland-trained barrelmaker Peter Higgins during an interview at his workshop. “They will shoot. But,” Higgins continued, “to make those barrels properly, so that the gun comes alive in your hands, that’s a very difficult thing to achieve.”
Best barrelmakers such as Higgins achieve it through hours and hours of ‘striking’ the tubes with rectangular files (strikers), essentially shaping the final profile of each tube before joining them. Higgins likens it to planing wood, striking from breech to muzzle with long, practised strokes.
Gunmakers sometimes speak of the ‘Eiffel Tower’ profile of best-quality barrels – flared at the breeches with a subtle sweep in to the muzzles. “Tube shape determines balance,” said Higgins. “It’s not just about looking pretty, it’s about weight distribution.” And the latter will determine how lively, or how mulishly, a gun handles.
The actioner will then joint the barrels in to the action, and how perfectly jointing is performed – that is, achieving accurate fits between barrel and action surfaces at the hinge pin, at the action face and at the bolt (with a very light bearing at the draw) – will determine its longevity over a lifetime of shooting. Then the actioner sets the strap and fits in the locks, the latter usually made (or assembled) up by a specialist lockmaker who has been trained to make nothing else. With the locks in place, the actioner fits in disc-set firing pins, hinge pin, bolt and leverwork, and the furniture – trigger, trigger guard and safety – and the fore-end. Some actioners build ejectors; others employ ejector specialists and, if it’s a side-by-side of Purdey-type, the ejectorman will also install the cocking and self-opening mechanism.
Mechanical integrity established, now comes the ‘file up’. With hammer, chisel, a bevy of files and a few simple gauges an actioner will hand-sculpt the action to finished shape, transforming a machined slug of metal into an individual work of supreme craft. “Every actioner has their own special shapes and lines,” said Torok, “which made every gun their own creation. You could look at an action and know who made it.”
At this point, the barrelled action is then sent to either London or Birmingham for proof ‘in the white’. Assuming it passes, it makes its way to a stocker. As a gun trade saying goes, as recounted by the late American gunwriter Michael Mcintosh: “The metal men make a gun fire, but the stocker makes it shoot.”
A well-fitted stock fixes the eye so it looks straight down the rib, breech to muzzle, and the gun will shoot where it’s pointed. But with a sidelock gun, the stock does more: it literally makes it function by cradling the locks and trigger-work in as rigid a frame as seasoned walnut allows.
The first step is ‘heading up’ – the exacting process of mating precisely the bearing surfaces of the top strap and back of the action to the head of the stock so that it will absorb recoil without cracking. The triggerplate and locks are inlet by hand, so accurately that internally the lock’s bridle and its pins will
To make barrels so the gun comes alive in your hands is a difficult thing
just barely bear on the wood for support, but with enough clearance so that the tumbler, sears and springs are not bound.
Since the days of Joe Manton, no country has built gun stocks as elegantly as Britain and with a drawknife and files a stocker will shape the headed-up blank to nearfinal dimensions, steered partly by expert eye, partly by gauges that establish proportions at different points along the stock, and partly by geometric principles that influence proportions at the butt. The trigger-guard is inlet last, and the stocker then turns his attention to a creating a fore-end, which requires an inordinate amount of inletting relative to its size.
final process
Finishing is the last process in making a best gun and is the process least touched by the machine. A finisher must be a master of metallurgy and walnut, of mechanics and aesthetics, and his job – which will take 100 to 200 hours to complete, depending on the gun or gunmaker – encompasses several stages.
The first step is preparing the metal components for the engraver: installing and slotting the pins, and polishing the action and components to a mirror-like finish. When the gun returns, the finisher will repolish or reset anything the engraver may have bent or marred. He will then regulate the mechanics of the gun – that is, integrate the locks, triggers, cocking system and ejectors so that they work together and work with the slickness expected of a best gun.
He will then send the action and appropriate parts to a hardener, who will in the case of traditional ‘pack hardening’ bake them in bone charcoal to impart a glass-hard skin that is wear-resistant. The heat may distort the action and some of the components and, if so, the finisher will reregulate the mechanics, which includes freeing up all of the metal components, as well as ‘bedding in’ the barrels to the action so they bear properly again, and adjusting ‘the grip’ (the bolt and leverwork) that holds the gun closed. Internal components that require it will be hardened and tempered, and then the finisher will test the gun’s mechanical function by firing it.
The second major phase of finishing is mainly stockwork: chequering, sanding down with finer and finer grades of paper, burnishing with chamois, staining with red oil for colour and then applying and rubbing off coat after coat of an oil-based mixture. This can take 60 or so hours and six weeks or more, depending on the wood and how much oil it soaks up, and the humidity and temperature. Once this is finished the gun will be assembled again test-fired a couple of hundred times to ensure it works and patterns properly.
And there you have it: a best-quality gun, unique to itself, a gun that has passed through the hands of many master craftsmen, each of whom has imparted to it something of his soul during its making.
May there remain a world where customers appreciate such things.
The writer would like to thank the following craftsmen for advice and assistance with this article: Alan Bower, Alex Torok, Peter Higgins, Michael Louca, Mark Mitchell, Stephen Murray, David Trevallion and
David Sinnerton.