Gunsmithing: Shotguns. Patrick Sweeney

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      The Ruger, with its lower locking lugs.

      One suggestion about scrubbing these receivers; there may be delicate parts or small springs in there. When you first pull the stock off, look carefully at the location of the springs and parts. It is a good idea to make a drawing of the proper orientation of the parts. One early trick I learned was that if a shotgun had been disassembled, or parts had fallen off, the easiest way to determine where the parts went was to compare the one I was working on with an operating example. (This also the reason gunsmiths end up with a couple of hundred guns as a “personal” battery.) You don't have the luxury of owning two of each of your shotguns just to have a working sample with which to compare. Make drawings that are clear to you.

      Once you have scrubbed the insides clean and dried them, you have to lubricate them. It may be years until you open that particular shotgun again, and all of the surfaces have to be protected. Oil or other lubricants only protect where they coat. Give the internals a complete coating of all parts, and let the receiver drip out onto a paper towel for a few hours or overnight. The gunsmith who taught me, Dan McDonald, said “Oil is cheap and rust is expensive. Coat the surfaces and let it drip,” Once the excess has dripped off, then reinstall the stock.

      As with the single-shot, use a high-pressure grease to coat the hingepin. Ail side-by-side doubles, and some over-unders use a pin that passes through the receiver from side to side. Some over-unders (the Browning Superposed is an early example) use a pair of trunnions on the sides of the interior of the front of the receiver. Circular hollows on the sides of the barrel assembly ride over these trunnions. Grease both sides.

      Pumps

      The first pump shotgun to be seen in any quantities was the Spencer. It established the pattern for pump shotguns to come, being a hammerless model with a tubular magazine under the barrel and a front slide to work the action. The design was complicated and required intricate machining, making it more expensive than contemporary doubles. Economic difficulties put Spencer out of business and the remaining parts were marketed by Bannerman. An odd design, but one that enabled the shooter to clean the bore from the chamber, was the Burgess. Built just about when the Winchester design by Browning was coming onto the market, the Burgess differed from other pumps (and the 1897) in two ways: The pump to operate the mechanism was not up front, and it didn't come apart into two pieces. Taking a pump apart for storage and transport was considered an important part of its marketing. Shooters and hunters a century ago traveled to the range or the hunting grounds by horse, buggy, streetcar or bicycle. Even in the 1930s my father, who lived in the city, could take a streetcar to the edge of town to practice or hunt. The contemporary doubles came apart into a compact package. A pump that did not was at a disadvantage in the sales arena.