Restoring a Treasured Shotgun

When I was four years old, my mother came into a small inheritance. She bought herself a saddle; me, about four thousand Lego blocks; and for my father, she ordered a custom-fitted Beretta ASEL from Abercrombie and Fitch.

In season, Dad used the gun hard and abused it harder. The other 10 months of the year he lavished it with neglect. As a result, the gun aged fast over a period of 30 years. Last summer, Dad decided to retire to what he calls his "geriatric gun," a lightweight 20-gauge autoloader, and promised to send me his old O/U.

Thieves broke into his station wagon in a motel parking lot one night shortly before he sent the gun to me. In the morning, Dad, fearing the worst, looked in through the broken window to find they had stolen a few towels, a box of Karmel Korn, and a road atlas of the southeastern states. The Beretta, lying in plain sight, had been left behind.

After unpacking the gun and putting it together I decided those thieves might have been smarter than I thought. I'm neither gunsmith nor appraiser, but I could see where the Karmel Korn would have been easier to carry and maybe worth a little more.

When I took the gun by the grip and shook it, the action rattled like a pair of dice. If I dropped the hammer on an empty hull and opened the action, the ejectors pinged weakly 10 seconds later. The barrels were speckled with rust, their blueing worn to a sort of overcast-gray, the color a mackerel might turn after a few days at the fish counter. The rib was badly dented, a reminder of a time, near as I can tell, that Dad must have used the barrels as a pry bar.

The silver initial medallion was missing from the stock, which itself was scratched, gouged, dented, and dinged across every square inch of its surface. Inside the wood, long, deep cracks ran all the way through the stock and fore-end. Most of the finish was worn away, and just a trace of the checkering remained. All in all, I concluded morosely, what this gun needed was a place over the mantelpiece, up high and in very dim light.

STILL, I WANTED A QUALIFIED OPINION, so I sent the gun to the Orvis gunshop, where gunsmith Pete Johnson pretty much agreed with my own estimate and the smash-and-grab appraisal of the B&E guys. He said: "I work on a lot of Berettas. We must have 50 in the shop right now, and I've never seen one as worn out as yours."

"Is it safe to shoot?" I asked, seeking some sort of bottom line.

"Safe is a funny word," said Pete, "You might be able to shoot this gun for years and nothing would happen. But if it was my gun, I wouldn't chance it. I work with my hands."

Hmmm, I thought, so do I, kind of. I could type with my nose, but how would I put paper into the printer?

However, Pete said the gun was salvageable, and he sent me an estimate. I knew very little about the price of restoration work, so Pete's estimate came as something of a shock and a bit of a puzzle. New hinge pins, fully installed, would solve my action problems and cost only $250, which seemed more than reasonable--I had imagined repairing the action would cost about a thousand dollars, minimum. On the other hand, replacing the missing medallion in the buttstock of my gun with a new one made of silver and engraved with my initials would set me back $365.

"How about plain brass and no initials?" I'd asked when I talked to Pete again, hoping to knock a couple hundred bucks off my bill.

The expense, he explained patiently, lay not in the material, or even the engraving, but in actually making the medallion from a small lump of metal and shaping it both to the inletted hole and the contour of the wood. If I were having a new stock made the cost would be much less, said, since the hole in the wood could be shaped to fit the medallion instead. The labor charges alone for custom stocking, however, begin at $1,600. So it goes, I learned quickly, in the world of fine gun repair.

IF YOU HAVE A RESTORATION project in mind, at some point you will have to do some tough figuring, as I did. Get an estimate, then decide: is your old gun worth the work it needs? In my case, which is, admittedly, an extreme one, I had been given a gun worth at best $900 in its dilapidated condition. For $2,000 of gunsmithing I could turn it into an $1,800 gun. Simple arithmetic told me this was not the most sensible course.

I thought about my father, teaching fall classes in his hunting clothes, his Weimaraner guarding the Beretta in the car, waiting for him to dismiss his students a few minutes early so he and the dog could catch the evening wood duck flight.

I remembered the first pheasant I ever shot, and the view over that mangled rib as the bird cartwheeled into the stubble in the long, golden shadows of a November afternoon. And I thought about the gun, too, beaten into disrepair long before it should have been retired, and how, perhaps, it deserved better from its new owner.

I called Pete Johnson back and said go ahead, fix everything. And, over the next nine months, he did.

The new hinge pins solved my lockup problems, and helped re-time the ejectors. After the rib was straightened, the top was refiled. The repair shows, but only because Pete is more skilled with a file than whoever did the rib originally; the repaired section is just a little bit neater and sharper than the rest. A screw in the tang, marred by an ill-fitting screwdriver, was ground down and re-engraved. The metal was re-blued to deep, shiny perfection.

Pete then turned his attention to the wood, working epoxy down into the cracks to bind them together, using surgical tubing to hold the pieces tight. He made a paste of epoxy and sawdust to fill in the chips at the ends of the forearm. Other gouges Pete raised with steam or sanded out. After experimenting with re-cutting the checkering, he decided to just wipe it out and start over, which he did beautifully.

Fifteen to 20 coats of oil, wax, and stain rubbed deeply into the wood sealed the pores and brought out the figure of the wood from within, giving the effect of a warm inner glow rather the wood-under-glass look of high-gloss varnishes.

LIKE MANY PATIENTS who've undergone major surgery, my gun is on a restricted diet for life: no steel, no magnums, said Dr. Johnson, lest the barrels bulge and the wood re-split. He advised me, however, to shoot all the target and field loads I wanted.

In fact, the Beretta arrived back home on my trapshooting night while I was getting my gear ready for the range. I couldn't keep my hands off the gun; I kept turning it over in my hands, admiring the deep figure in both sides of the stock, the smell of the new oil finish, and the blue-black sheen of the metal parts.

I decided to leave a more suitable autoloader at home and take the lightweight, open-choked bird gun to the trap field instead. Stepping smartly to the 16-yard line, all eyes (so I imagined) upon me and my elegant gun, I proceeded to break 14x25. You wouldn't believe, though, how good I looked trying. Honestly, I could have cared less about my score; it was enough to be shooting Dad's old gun again, looking forward to many, many years of carrying it in the uplands.

Aside from the necessities of wood and metalwork, I had two alterations made to my Beretta: first, I had Pete add a Pachmayr Decelerator pad. My gun had a lovely checkered buttplate, so I had to weigh aesthetics against practicality. The decision was not easy, but I needed extra length in the stock, and, knowing myself pretty well, I was sure I'd chip pieces off the wooden butt over the years if it weren't protected.

According to Orvis Gunshop Manager Jack Dudley, adding a pad should not hurt the value of your gun, so long as you stay away from the white line/ventilated type pad and don't cover up a skeleton buttplate.

I also had the modified and full chokes on my gun opened to improved cylinder and modified. With a few exceptions, Jack Dudley assured me, altering chokes will not lower the value of a gun either, contrary to what some people believe. Barrel length, to digress for a moment, is quite another matter. At this writing there is a Westley Richards in the Orvis shop selling for a good $1,500 below its normal value because its barrels have been shortened. Maybe the owner thought long and hard and decided it was worth a grand and a half to turn his Richards into a great woodcock gun. I hope so. His heirs, no doubt, are wailing and gnashing their teeth right now.

There were, thankfully, several procedures my gun didn't need at all, but since your project gun might, I'll mention them here. Many old American doubles, Dudley told me, have extremely heavy pulls, often around nine pounds or so. It is a small matter to have them lightened to more practical weights. The traditional formula is half the weight of the gun for the front trigger, and 25 percent more than that for the rear trigger.

CHAMBER LENGTHENING is a must for many older guns. Parkers, again according to Dudley, are notorious for having short chambers; sometimes even guns marked as 2-3/4 inches are actually short-chambered, and many English guns are built for 2-1/2 inch shells. An alternative to chamber work is to buy 2-1/2 inch shells, available in this country from Orvis and New England Arms.

Some American doubles have far too much drop in the stock for modern shooting styles. Using steam, a skilled gunsmith can bend stocks up to an inch in any direction. Bending, in itself, is fairly inexpensive, but usually the gun will require a refinish afterwards.

Damascus barrels are totally unsuitable for any modern ammunition, but new barrels can be sleeved onto the old monobloc, or a set of sub-bore tubes like those found in multi-gauge skeet guns can be fitted to the old barrels. Dents in barrels are relatively easy to raise, but bulges represent a major undertaking.

Restoration work isn't cheap, and shop time is usually measured in months, not weeks. If you own a suitable candidate for an overhaul, have a good gunsmith look the gun over and tell you what needs to be done.

If you can't afford to have everything fixed at once, do it one job at a time: blue the barrels one year, refinish the stock the next. In the end you'll find, as I did, that the time and money spent will be more than repaid by the pleasure you'll take in putting a great old shooter back in the field where it belongs.

Copyright (c) 1996 Philip Bourjaily. All rights reserved.

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