Guncraft

Ken Duglan, owner of Atkin Grant & Lang, hung up the phone in his basement office at Broom-hills Shooting Grounds. “That was a gentleman who wants a matched pair of secondhand 12-bores for driven game,” Duglan said. “Thirty-inch barrels, 2-3/4" chambers, 16-inch stocks, and Prince of Wales grips.”
Duglan leaned back in his chair and shook his head. “He’d have to look long and hard to find a pair like that,” he said. “But... ” He paused as the hint of a smile creased his face. “I think I can help him.”
From the gun rack lining his office wall, Duglan pulled a pair of sidelocks and placed them on his desk. “Joseph Langs—plainly engraved but made on perfectly good actions. They should work nicely.”
I looked them over—12-bore bar-action game guns of conventional design with 28-inch barrels, well-used but not abused, with simple border engraving over actions gone silver from most of a century’s shooting.
“I’ll propose to fit in new barrels to his required length and chokes, then restock them with wood he’s picked to his fitted dimensions,” Duglan said. “We’ll put in new springs and lock components, make new pins, re-engrave both to a pattern of his choosing, case-color them, then add a case and accessories.
“In 18 months or so he’ll have two like-new bespoke London guns—for less than half the price of a new pair.”

At noon a sleek green Jaguar XK convertible arrived at Broomhills, and from it Duglan’s caller appeared. An hour or so later both emerged from Duglan’s office beaming and shook hands. As the Jag sped off, Duglan pushed his head into the Broomhills workshop, where three men stood at benches with files in hand. “Carl, let’s get those Langs from my office up here... ”
Since purchasing London gunmaker Atkin Grant & Lang in 1995, Ken Duglan and his associated craftsmen have made something of a specialty of rebuilding fine British guns—particularly those by makers Henry Atkin, Stephen Grant and Joseph Lang—to as-new condition. The firm, today based at Broomhills, in Hertfordshire north of London, still builds a handful of new guns annually under each of those respective names, but the bulk of its customers are interested in vintage English guns that have been, depending on the gun, partially restored to completely rebuilt by AG&L’s craftsmen.
For the consumer, one advantage is price: A vintage sidelock—fully rebuilt lock, stock and barrel—sold by AG&L will average £15,000 to £20,000 sterling; new British “bests” built to similar designs begin at £35,000 and run to well more than £50,000. Buyers get an utterly bespoke gun that promises to work like new yet is imbued with the nostalgia and romance only vintage pieces offer.
Sums of this sort, of course, still represent a considerable investment, so the integrity of craftsmanship involved in restoration is paramount. One needn’t visit too many gun shows in the US to encounter a flood of poorly restored guns. Nothing shouts “tarted-up” so loudly as an old gun wearing fresh case colors over worn engraving and buggered pins; examples of such are legion and seem increasingly common. Disassemble and examine a floozy such as this and its problems often only multiply—the intrinsic collectible value likely will have been obliterated, mechanically it will offer the reliability of a Yugo and, in worse cases, it may even prove perilous to the person shooting it.
Proper restoration, on the other hand, involves skilled craftsmen working sympathetically to the original maker’s intent and to today’s standards of quality. Best British guns are so desirable—and expensive—because they combine incomparable handcrafted aesthetics with high levels of performance and reliability afield. Restoring these qualities to an older English gun by traditional means is never cheap.
The heart of the matter, literally, is a suitable action. Generically speaking, to justify the costs of full restoration, Duglan prefers bar-action sidelocks of “modern” design—typically made on the ubiquitous Holland/Rogers-type action with Southgate-type ejectors.
In AG&L’s case, Duglan can offer more flexibility to his customers, thanks to the varied designs historically offered by the firm’s three makers. “There are certain actions customers are always interested in,” Duglan said. “Atkin was famous for its Beesley-type self-openers. Grants are desirable for their sidelever actions with fluted fences as well as the company’s ‘Lightweights’ [sleek, assisted-opening sidelocks made most famous by Charles Lancaster as the ‘Twelve-Twenty’ but built on William Baker’s patent of 1906].” For those who want a single trigger, Langs offer a good choice, as their design was relatively simple and reliable. Duglan also will pursue best hammergun ejectors and almost any 20- or 28-bore sidelock by any British maker—“because there were so few made and they are in high demand today.”
To get these actions, Duglan seeks out what he calls “wrecked guns”—those with out-of-proof, badly sleeved, pitted or thin barrels and stocks that are cracked, broken or otherwise marred by hard use, alterations to LOP or excessive refinishing. “So long as the actions remain structurally sound,” Duglan said, “they are far too good to waste.
“When we find a gun like this, we put it on the shelf and wait for the right customer. Our objective will be to make a good useable gun from it.”
AG&L restorations are performed by a team of crack Holland & Holland-trained outworkers and in-house craftsmen. The former include barrelmaker Bill Blacker, actioner Gary Hibbert, stockmaker Stephane Dupille and finisher Alan Wey. All still work for the trade at large, but Dupille is based at Broomhills alongside AG&L’s in-house finishers Alan Bower and Carl Russell, both originally trained at Ladbrook & Langton, a gunsmithing shop based in Hertfordshire. Under their tutelage, Ian Sweetman recently was taken on as an apprentice.
Once a client is interested in a particular gun, restoration begins in earnest. “First Alan and Carl go through the action to make sure it is as sound as it looks,” Duglan said. “They strip & clean it to examine if it’s ever had cracks welded up and to make sure it hasn’t taken a ‘set.’” (A “set” indicates that the action has actually bent at its root—the juncture between the standing breech and the action flats—catastrophic damage usually resulting from the use of high-pressure loads that have exceeded the elastic limits of the action’s metallurgy). If either of the two flaws is encountered, the gun is rejected; if they’re not, it’s on to barrels.
Duglan occasionally will retain original barrels if he considers them sound, but if existing wall thickness is much below .024" at the thinnest spot—.020" being absolute minimum—he will opt to have Bill Blacker build a new set. “In good conscience you really can’t be selling guns thinner than that,” Duglan said. “However, we are in a fairly unique position where we can rebarrel the guns of three high-quality London makers and legally put those names on the new tubes.” (If original barrels are deemed good enough to keep, they are normally in a condition where re-proofing is not required.)
Rebarreling is the single most expensive element of full restoration—AG&L charges £6,500, which is considerably less than most other London houses, even though Blacker also builds new barrels to the same quality for those makers.
If the standing breech has pitting around the striker holes—a not-uncommon cosmetic flaw with guns dating from the corrosive-cartridge era—it will be stoned down to present a smooth face for Blacker’s new barrels. Once chopper-lump tubes are joined, rough-struck and chambered, they are sent to Gary Hibbert to be machined and jointed in to the action. At this stage the new barrels and action are sent for proof.
“Proof must occur as early as possible in the restoration process,” Duglan said. “It doesn’t happen often, but we’ve had guns fail before, so we try to spend the minimum amount of money on the gun until it passes.” Under current UK/CIP rules, standard proof pressures for 2-1/2" and 2-3/4" chambers are identical for 12-bore guns—850 Bars—so the longer chamber length is used.
The new-barrel option allows the customer to pick his length and chokes, and it also offers the readily apparent advantages of modern metallurgy and perfect wall thickness. Moreover Hibbert makes new extractors as well as a new underbolt and hinge pin for each rebarreled action.
Normally when an old gun wears loose and the barrels come off the face of the action, the answer is to replace the existing hinge pin with one of a larger radius, to compensate for the wear that usually occurs on the barrel lump. With a rebarreled action, however, Hibbert can start fresh by fitting in a hinge with a small radius, thereby assuring the ability in the future for rejointing with successively larger-radius pins if wear occurs.
On guns originally built with third bites (or top extensions), AG&L offers the option of filling in the recesses on the action faces and fitting in new barrels sans extensions. More than a few London guns of the late 19th Century were built with top extensions (see “An Aktin for Morgan,” p. 78). In ensuing decades top extensions came to be regarded as mechanically superfluous to bolting the barrels on bar-action sidelocks.
Part of the bias against third bites on London sidelocks is also stylistic convention—the idea that they render, in the words of Sir Ralph Payne-Gallwey, “a clumsy appearance”—and that the extensions sometimes inhibit cartridge extraction. “When you don’t have a third bite, you can have nice large extractors,” Duglan said. “One of the irritating things you can have happen on guns with top extensions is for the cartridge rim to slip over their smaller extractors and then jam in the chamber. Not terribly convenient in the midst of a driven shoot.” If a customer chooses to remove the top extension, the recess will be filled and tig-welded and the new barrels made with a straight breech.
After proof, barrels go back to Blacker to have the ribs installed and tubes polished, then Stephane Dupille begins stocking using walnut the customer has selected. In the meantime work begins to replace any damaged components as well as those most subject to repetitive stress. Finishers Russell and Bower invariably will fit in new mainsprings and sear springs in the locks and a toplever spring as well.
For replacement springs AG&L uses those wired out of a block of spring steel by electro-discharge machines (EDMs). Duglan has had these tested for compression strength and durability. “We attached one to a revolving wheel with a cam on it and checked it after 800,000 compressions,” Duglan said. “It hadn’t weakened in the slightest. In this sense I am a modernist. Today’s components made with today’s steels are far better than those of the past.”
Strikers also are replaced and, if necessary, new discs fitted should the gun have them. Often new tumblers are required, as the originals may have cracked or broken at the highly stressed hinges where they engage the swivels attached to the mainsprings. Swivels are also routinely replaced and a full set of new pins made. “If a pin is buggered or doesn’t line up right, it just jumps out at you no matter how good the rest of the restoration is,” Duglan said.
Perfectly functioning ejectors are critical, and new springs are always fitted for them. “Normally we prefer to restore guns with Southgate-type ejectors,” Duglan said. “The Southgate’s advantages are simplicity, strength and reliability.”
Duglan does make exceptions for certain sought-after house actions: Many best-grade Grants, for example, date from the era when the company employed a proprietary ejector design. “Grant ejectors work perfectly well if they are still mechanically correct,” Duglan said, “but over the course of 100 years many have springs that have never been replaced and are not performing as they should. So we’ve had components machined for them and make a practice of restoring them to full order.”
Though some clients prefer to leave the action as is, many choose to have it re-case-colored. With the latter option, the action first is annealed to relieve the stresses in the metal. Re-hardening without annealing runs the risk of distortion emerging in the re-hardening process. “It doesn’t take much distortion to produce an unseemly gap in metal-to-metal fit,” Duglan said. Moreover, annealing must take place if the gun is to be re-engraved.
If the engraving on the trigger guard and toplever is worn, it is customary to have it touched up. In general, however, Duglan prefers to not re-engrave actions—and in the case of a gun bearing full scroll there is rarely a need to. “If the action was properly worked in the first place,” Duglan said, “it will be very, very hard and the engraving won’t have worn with normal use.”
However, upgraded guns (such as the pair of Langs mentioned earlier) allow the customer to choose engraving to his own tastes. Because an action is annealed in either case, Duglan’s engravers usually “pick out” the maker’s name with discreet gold lettering—quite handsome against the vibrant colors of a re-cased action. Triggers and pins are also case colored. After the action is hardened, a few customers prefer to have the exterior colors removed for a silver or gray finish but, per tradition, the colors are retained on the action flats and face. For the time-honored pack-hardening process used, Birmingham’s Richard St. Ledger is the obvious choice. “Richard is the most expensive hardener in England,” Duglan said, “but you’d expect him to be; he simply does the best job.”
Dupille’s new stock—which is completely inlet by hand and shaped by traditional stocking tools to the customer’s measurements—is then sent to outworker Alan Wey, who checkers it. Wey sometimes applies the oil finish, although during my visit I watched Alan Bower rubbing in a finish to a pair of stocks in the workshop. “One of the hardest things to get is a really good oil finish,” Bower said. “A good finish has about three months’ work into it.”
The barrels, which by now have come back from Blacker’s final polishing gleaming like chrome, are sent to John Gibbs, in Bath, for traditional rust-blacking. Bower and Russell then will finish the gun, freeing up any sticky parts and regulating ejectors and locks.
After final assembly, Duglan wraps the stock in a protective covering and steps out back at Broomhills to fire it for functioning. “When I test a gun,” Duglan said, “I shoot it horizontally, vertically, upside down and on each side—at least 10 times in each position. We don’t just take it out and go ‘bang-bang’—that proves nothing.”
The gun is then sent to casemaker Ian Tomlin, in Kent, for a full set of accessories and a custom-made case. Upon the gun’s return, Duglan shoots it one last time and makes a final inspection. “I need to know everything is right before we release it,” he said. A fully restored gun will carry a five-year warranty.
Duglan describes vintage English guns as “practical art.” The guncraft of restoring them is no less artful.

Author’s Note: For more information on gun restoration, contact Atkin Grant & Lang, 01144-1582-842280; www.atkingrantandlang.co.uk.