Guncraft

It was in Germany that I first got an inkling of how the Spanish build their guns. I was with Dan Moore, of William Larkin Moore, when we walked up to the Arrieta booth at the 2008 IWA Show, in Nuremburg. In the booth two men were engrossed in an animated discussion. When they spotted Dan, they stood and greeted him like a long-lost friend. I was introduced to Juan Carlos Arrieta, co-manager at Arrieta, and the grandson of firm founder Avelino Arrieta. With him was Alberto Garate—the ebullient manager of Pedro Arrizabalaga.

“Me, Arrizabalaga,” Alberto said, thumping his chest and then pointing to Juan Carlos. “He, Arrieta.” Alberto cocked his hands and squared off in front of his counterpart. Juan Carlos responded in kind. They stood facing each other momentarily, circling their fists like pugilists of old.

And then they smiled and embraced in the sort of brotherly hug one would find utterly unfathomable between rival gunmakers from, say, Great Britain.

After some friendly banter in broken English—Moore is a dealer for the guns of both makers—Dan and I wandered off to see the rest of Europe’s version of the SHOT Show. When we passed the Arrieta booth a couple of hours later, Juan Carlos and Alberto were still there, yapping away and laughing, this time over a baguette, slices of cheese and ham, and a bottle of vino tinto.

With that vignette in mind, I left IWA just a little puzzled, given the Basque reputation for prickly independence and what I had understood to be their inability to work together, much less get along.

A couple of days later Dan and I caught up with Juan Carlos and Alberto again—this time in northern Spain at their respective factories in Elgoibar and Eibar. The translator for our three-day tour of the Basque gun trade was Maria Maguresi, daughter of Ramon Maguresi, partner in and actioner at Pedro Arrizabalaga. Manolo Santos, marketing director for Arrieta, had arranged her services. The first stop on our tour was Armas Garbi.

So much for my misperceptions of insular gunmakers going about their businesses, each to their own ways.

In fact, Spain’s traditional artisanal gunmakers—typified by marques such as AyA, Armas Garbi, Grulla, Pedro Arrizabalaga and Manufacturas Arrieta—are in many ways remarkably similar to one another in the guns they offer, how they make them and how their businesses are structured. Though they are indeed distinct companies with their own products and respective market niches, their lingua franca of gunmaking shares a common vision and in a few respects is as cooperative as it is competitive.

For these reasons—and for others I’ll discuss—Spanish gunmakers remain uniquely positioned to offer something other craft gunmakers the world over cannot: a handcrafted double shotgun of very high quality at a reasonable price relative to their international competition. In a nod to the medieval pilgrims’ route across northern Spain, I will dub this the Spanish Way or, more accurately, the Basque Way. (I ought mind my categorizations: As The Times journalist George Steer once admonished, “There are few things the patient Basque won’t tolerate, and one is the suggestion he is Spanish.”)

At the end of the first decade of the 21st Century, the very notion of a handcrafted double—much less an affordable example—tacks bow on into the headwinds of history. From the priciest Purdeys to the cheapest Turkish imports, the computer-assisted revolution in gun design and manufacturing is in flood tide. Though there is often still considerable handwork involved in building fine guns—and particularly “best” guns—from a strict manufacturing standpoint, a lot of traditional craftsmanship is increasingly optional (and regarded by some as superfluous). Today it is increasingly concentrated in the assembly, fitting & finishing, and embellishment stages.

Artisanal Basque gunmakers remain exceptions to this trend. A huge part of a fine gun’s expense always has come down to bench time or paying for it. The paradox of Spanish gunmaking is that it still relies on labor-intensive, traditional craftsmanship, yet it produces the world’s most accessibly priced, quality sidelocks.

As I discovered over three days at Arrieta, Arrizabalaga and Garbi, the Basque Way is indeed a paradox, but it is no accident. The directors of these firms remain convinced that there is and always will be a market for traditional handcrafted doubles built to order at reasonable prices. Their trade—that is, its production techniques and industrial organization—is specifically structured to deliver just that.

To comprehend how the trade achieves this, one ought first examine the guns being built. Today Basque artisans basically make one: a Holland & Holland-pattern sidelock side-by-side with Southgate-type ejectors. Yes, this is an exaggeration. Indeed there are exceptions: AyA and Ugartechea, for example, both build popular Anson & Deeley boxlocks, with AyA also producing a range of over/unders of both modern and traditional design. Kemen, located in Elgoibar, is noted for its Perazzi-like over/unders with detachable trigger groups that are built by modern manufacturing methods. There are a few new hammergun models floating around. By and large, though, these are blind alleys off the Spanish Way.

The straight & narrow remains the Holland-type sidelock. Arrieta, Garbi, Grulla and Arrizabalaga build nothing but, and this gun remains an AyA mainstay. Among sidelocks, the Holland is a forgiving design capable of giving almost infinite service and good reliability, even when built to varying standards (which has been the case in Spain).

Building one standard gun has allowed these makers to be more efficient. Craftsmen can concentrate on producing one primary design across a range of grades and qualities, from entry level to “Spanish best.” Even less-expensive Basque sidelocks boast standard features that in other countries are pricey upgrades: automatic safeties, articulated triggers, disc-set strikers, hand-detachable locks and a variety of rib configurations. Chopper-lump barrels are ubiquitous on Spanish sidelocks of all grades. In Britain and Italy, by contrast, such barrels normally are reserved for only best guns. Bespoke options, such as barrel lengths, weight (within a range), balance, chokes, trigger pulls and stock specifications remain the choice of the customer.

How do Basque makers provide deluxe features for Everyman’s asking? Common aspects of the production process provide one clue. Gunmakers, for example, typically purchase components in volume from outside suppliers. In the storerooms of each of the companies I visited, I saw bin after bin of components that looked remarkably similar to those at other firms. (I did not visit AyA—the largest of the artisan Basque makers—but it is my understanding that the company builds and supplies at least some its competitors’ components.)

Spain’s gunmakers not only share many of the same component suppliers, but they also make extensive use of investment castings—forend irons, trigger guards, triggers, safeties, toplevers, and various inner bits. Important exceptions are the actions and the barrels (both forgings). Investment castings are generally less expensive to begin with than components machined or filed up from raw forgings, and they also require less-extensive (and expensive) bench time to file up, fit and finish from the raw. (That said, Spanish components require more handwork to file and fit than counterparts CNC’d to near-finished dimensions.)

Basque sidelocks also will often share many of the same components, regardless of grade. It is mostly additional hand labor that makes the costs climb. For example, a Garbi Model 101 (retailing for $9,800) takes about 100 hours of hand labor to finish. Garbi’s easy-opening Model 103-B ($19,800) takes 260 hours, and the firm’s top-of-the-line De Luxe ($30,000-plus) takes 440 hours. Notes Jesus Barrenechea, senior partner at Garbi: “The percentage of the gun’s final price reflected in labor costs is 80 percent, and the percentage in material costs is 20 percent.”

Though Spanish sidelocks typically make wide use of generic components, they should not be thought identical. Each company has its own distinctive house style, and as prices increase, so too does the overall quality of fit, finish, engraving and aesthetics. Moreover, artisanal Basque gunmakers take great pride in building intrinsic standards of reliability and durability into their guns, regardless of final cost.

There are a couple of important caveats to my statements above. One is that Basque barrel tubes normally are made of a nickel-steel alloy, with higher-grade guns often being fitted with barrels of chrome-nickel steel, the latter being somewhat stronger (and more expensive).

Basque makers also fit several styles of locks, usually a couple of variants of the Holland type. A prominent variant is the so-called five-pin lock, which uses a tiny coil-spring plunger to actuate its interceptor (intercepting sear). A second is the seven-pin lock, which employs the traditional leaf spring for its interceptor. The latter is often—though not invariably—associated with higher-grade guns. For example, Arrieta employs five-pin locks on its Model 500-series guns and seven-pin locks on its pricier, easy-opening Model 800-series.

The Basque region is Spain’s most industrialized and, like Brescia in northern Italy, it still supports an infrastructure that allows gunmakers to outsource not only components but also jobs to specialists on a more cost-effective basis than it would be to tackle them in-house. There are, for example, companies where action forgings are sent to be rough machined, a lockmaker, a barrelmaker, polishers, barrel blackers, metal hardeners and stock-blank suppliers. There are also individual outworkers—craftsmen on their own working for the trade or on contract to a particular gunmaker. It remains a classic example of the guild system that once characterized gunmaking centers such as Liège and Birmingham.

After spending most of the day at Garbi, we were driven by Jesus Barrenechea to visit a couple of outside specialists to the trade. First up were picadors (checkerers) Jose Antonio Bastida and Mari Jose Sanchez. The walls of their workshop, a darkened cave-like room with a low-slung ceiling in a concrete factory building, were festooned with stocks—for boxlocks, over/unders and sidelocks. A sole, tiny window was covered with a blanket. Here Bastida and Sanchez worked under the glare of open lamps for eight to 10 hours a day, their only task to checker stocks by hand—about 800 to 1,000 per year. It was all rather Dickensian in a Basque sort of way, and as I left their hobbit hole I felt I’d been transported back a century or more.

Next up was a visit to one of the more notable examples of the cooperative approach Basque makers use in certain aspects of gun production. Barrena  Bostak is a barrel-boring cooperative set up by AyA, Arrieta, Garbi, Arrizabalaga and Grulla. Here is where all five gunmakers send barrels to have chambers and chokes reamed and bores honed.

It is not only Eibar’s volume-production techniques and industrial organization that keep Spanish guns relatively affordable. Basque gunmakers do not subsidize fancy showrooms full of shuffling salesmen in expensive capitol cities. Nor have they corporate owners in far-off lands. Basque artisans themselves are the owners—or at least they have substantial ownership stakes—and their unadorned factories are their showrooms.

Numerous observers have commented on the incredible work ethic of Eibar’s craftsmen, and after seeing them with files and chisels in hand, I can only second that they work very hard and very fast. They are also very experienced: Of Arrizabalaga’s six-man workforce, three have more than 40 years each on the bench, one has 26 and the remaining two have eight. This is not much different from what I saw at Arrieta and Garbi.

Dan Moore, whose father’s company has imported guns from seven Spanish makers and 10 Italian firms over the years, contrasted Basque makers to those in Italy. “Italian gunmakers are like artists,” Moore said. “Flamboyant, sometimes temperamental, working to their own schedule. The Basques are like farmers: They say, ‘We have a job to do, we are happy to do it, we are proud of it, and we do it on time, all day, every day.’”

The following is anecdotal only but supports the thought that Basque gunmakers accept lower standards of material prosperity than their counterparts in England or Italy. In the UK I’ve seen English craftsmen climbing in and out of Jaguars, Aston Martins, Range Rovers and even Lamborghinis; in Gardone I’ve seen Italian craftsmen driving Mercedes and BMWs. In Spain, when the company managers took us to lunch, we crammed into smallish Renault or Citroen sedans. Yet Basque country is by no means poor—it enjoys the highest per capita disposable household income in Spain.

Which in a manner of sorts brings me to the future of Spanish gunmaking. Economic times are today turbulent worldwide, but the Basque Way has survived this before. Owners admit a weak US dollar is a perennial worry, but more so is the shortage of young craftsmen signing on as elders retire. There are easier ways to make a living, and many of them more lucrative.

Yet each of the factories I visited had young men (and some women) on the bench, though they were clearly outnumbered by their older peers. According to Arrieta importer Jack Jansma, of Wingshooting Adventures, the Asociacion Armera, which represents the interests of the Basque makers, has set up an apprentice program to aid all the gunmakers—yet another example of their cooperative philosophy.

I made a point to ask gunmakers at each company if they planned to follow global trends and transition to computer-aided design and manufacture. The response, to a man, was an emphatic, “No!”

Artisanal gunmakers dislike change in general, the Basques particularly so. Yet a trade based on hand labor coupled with an aging workforce one day will face dolorous consequences to its bottom line. This already has affected—and will continue to affect—the viability of some of the lower-priced models that carry the slimmest profit margins, especially for the smaller-volume makers who do not enjoy forgiving economies of scale. In 2005, for example, Garbi dropped its Model 100; Grulla also recently dropped its entry-level Model 209.

At the moment, continuing to move upmarket seems the sole path forward. Wealthy Europeans have embraced Basque sidelocks in higher-priced versions. But as Terry Wieland notes in his book Spanish Best, most Americans still associate Spanish guns with utility- or field-grade guns and generally not as those of collectible quality. This clearly presents a dilemma, given the importance of the US market.

The precise course of history can never be predicted—financial realities, for example, may one day impose a grudging adoption of more modern gunmaking technology. This certainly is available in Eibar and its environs. Or the Basque Way as a whole may eventually trundle up the path of boutique Italian and British makers—that is, producing a limited number of guns priced accordingly, cost be damned. Basque bench skills at their best are as good as any, but to compete in the rarified best-gun market, I believe the artisans of Eibar may need to embrace (and encourage) the sort of transformational “high art” engraving techniques that make today’s best guns as much objets d’art as tools for getting game. There are signs this is beginning to happen; stay tuned . . . .

Most important, though, the future depends on the market’s continued appreciation for—and willingness to pay for—traditional handcraftsmanship. Old-fashioned gunmaking still defines the Basque Way, and for now it remains a bargain.