The Tri-Bore “Pheasant Gun”

It is a famously observed aphorism that we must do something often to do it well. My shooting partner Doc Bisgard has told me many times that if I ever need cancer surgery, Swedish Medical Center in Seattle or the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota are the places to go. His point is that those clinics perform oncology procedures frequently and are therefore more proficient. So it caught me a bit off-guard when Doc asked who should relay the rib on his prized double. No one immediately sprang to mind. But Doc ventilating about his rib did give me the chance to shoot back, “Someone who does it often.”
    It’s exactly the same with fine shotguns. Certainly you could have Boss, Dickson or Westley Richards make you a three-barreled gun, as they all have made them in the past, but wouldn’t you be better off with Ferlach’s Johann Fanzoj Jagdwaffen, which performs the operation all the time?
    The better part of valor compels me to report that I have not shot a British three-barreled gun. But a few years ago at the Safari Club International Convention, in Reno, I did see a Fanzoj Tri-bore. I thought it a frippery until the lovely Daniela Fanzoj—Johann’s daughter—insisted I pick it up. I was besotted. While I pored over the gun, Daniela described a Tri-bore commission with totem engraving of a pheasant. Totem engraving is a style in which fish, reptiles or, in this case, a bird is represented not in conventional game scenes but by feathers, eyes and scales.
    “Would it make a good magazine article?” she asked. I knew I had just been squeezed by an expert salesperson, but what can a chap do? A woman scorned and all that. Besides, I was eager to learn more about the traditional Ferlach gun trade.
    Ferlach is rightly famous for its Drillings: combination guns with one rifled barrel and two smoothbore tubes. But fine guns weren’t always Ferlach’s focus. The country’s arms makers started as weapons manufacturers for the Holy Roman Empire and later the Austro Hungarian Empire. Today Mitteleurope has turned her sword blades into plowshares, and the change can be explained by history.
    Four hundred and fifty years ago, as modern nation states emerged from the Renaissance, European fears of one’s neighbors plus nationalist aspirations caused many to develop nascent firearms industries. Some, like the wealthy and powerful Venetian Republic, had long established weapons manufacturing regions like the Val Trompia, just across the Alps in Northern Italy. Others, like England, with its long reliance on the archer and mounted knight, found it necessary to entice gunmakers from, yes, Northern Italy but also the low countries of Belgium and Holland.
    In Central Europe the Holy Roman Empire did the same. As Voltaire said, the Holy Roman Empire was “neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire” but an “agglomeration.” In Carinthia, one of these agglomerates, the emperor built a great fortress in Klagenfurt as a defense against the Venetian Republic and the Ottoman Empire. He chose the village of Ferlach as his foundry of war because of the natural defense afforded by the surrounding mountains, which also provided water power for metalworking tools. Skilled labor was offered great incentives to leave traditional gunmaking areas in the Low Countries. The Schaschi Brothers were brought from Belgium, and the Fanzoj family arrived from Holland, though at a later date. Nowadays, with few wars to fight, sporting guns have become Ferlach’s focus. If the area is famous for a single firearm, it is probably the three-barreled Drilling, which is fitting because the one rifle barrel and two shotgun barrels provide a bridge of sorts between Ferlach’s militaristic heritage and its sporting present. It has been said of the Drilling issued to Luftwaffe crews in their survival kits that it may be the best-quality martial arm ever issued. By turning the rifle barrel into a third shotgun barrel, Johann Fanzoj has given new life to the three-barreled gun.
    I asked a respected gunmaking patron about the appeal of three-barreled guns. “I read an article in Shooting Sportsman that described the [Fanzoj] Tri-bore as remarkably well handling, belying that it was a three-barreled gun. [See ‘Guns from the Dale of Roses,’ by Michael McIntosh, Jan/Feb ’01.] All my prior impressions of Drillings had been that they were horrendous handlers, hardly what you would consider for bird shooting. Then at SCI two years ago I saw a Fanzoj 20-gauge Tri-bore in the white. I picked it up, swung it and was amazed at how good it felt. A lot of two-barreled guns I have handled haven’t felt that good. Also, the arrangement of the barrels—two side by side on top and one snugged under—resulted in the most elegant three-barreled configuration I had seen. There was nothing ungainly about the gun at all. From the top it looked like a side-by-side, from the side like a typical over/under.
    “I had this delicious vision of being in the field with my closest hunting buddies, flushing a covey . . . bang! bang! . . . so far everything is normal . . . and then, bang! Suddenly, they are looking around trying to figure out where the third shot came from! To be greeted by my Cheshire Cat smile!”
    The Johann Fanzoj publicity material makes much of the same idea. “Sensationally light and well balanced, with the handling qualities of the finest game gun. A third shot is immediately available, thus offering the ultimate advantage to the bird hunter.” The late Marco E. Nobili agreed, comparing the firm’s Tri-bore favorably with a semi-automatic, adding that it “offers the advantage of a different choke for each round.” The barrels on Fanzoj’s original Tri-bore were choked Quarter, Three-Quarters and Full, but any combination is possible in a bespoke Tri-bore. Nobili’s feature for the Italian magazine Armi & Tiro featured a Tri-bore with a single trigger that detonated each barrel in turn, whereas the standard model was then available with two triggers—the front firing the right and then left barrels, and the back trigger firing the under barrel. All this ingenuity was made possible by a Blitz action, and extractors (instead of ejectors) helped keep the weight at just over six pounds. Since the Nobili article appeared, Fanzoj has “changed and improved” the Tri-bore, according to Daniela, who is also General Manager of the firm. The new gun features Holland & Holland-type sidelocks that detonate the side-by-side barrels, and a triggerplate action accounts for the under barrel. The front trigger is a mechanical single trigger and trips the left and right barrels via the sidelocks, whereas the rear trigger fires the bottom barrel via the triggerplate action. A single trigger firing all three barrels is still offered as an option.
    The Tri-bore is available in 20 bore with 76mm chambers or 28 bore with 70mm chambers, with 12- and 16-bores as well as .410s available for the same cost. The 20, which is the only model I handled at SCI, looked like a side-by-side from above and an over/under from the side. With the bottom barrel bedded deeply into the action and an English straight-hand stock, it has the trimmest possible profile of its type. Handling qualities, which are extraordinary for a three-barreled gun, are improved by relatively short 26-1/2" barrels made of Böhler Super-Blitz lightweight steel.
    Beyond the unique three-barreled aspect of the gun featured here, the client, who Daniela describes as a “real
gentleman with exquisite taste and very particular,” also wanted unique engraving. He already owned a David McKay Brown over/under with totem engraving by British craftsman Malcolm Appleby, but he decided against asking Appleby to engrave the Tri-bore in favor of a more appropriate Mitteleuropean craftsman—though he did retain totem elements in his style directive.
    His engraver of choice was Richard Maier, born in 1965 in Villach, Carinthia. Maier had begun drawing and painting as a child before attending The Advanced Technical Institute, in Ferlach, in the field of artistic metalwork. There he trained as an engraver. Maier is perhaps best known in German-speaking countries for his scrimshaw work on fossilized mammoth ivory and the custom knives of Egon Trompeter. His fine, multiple-cut scrimshaw technique is reflected in both the feather totem design, in which every vane is visible, and the heightened realism of the pheasant head. By combining totem and photorealism, Maier has developed a distinctive style, and he now signs his work “Ritchi.”
    Maier attracted a lot of attention at a recent IWA Show, in Nuremberg, Germany, with a Fanzoj .500 Nitro Express double rifle he’d engraved. Dubbed “Lionfire,” the rifle was built on the ubiquitous Holland & Holland sidelock action. It featured an articulated front trigger and an elephantskin case with handmade accoutrements from Mike Marsh in England. Maier created narrative engraving around the life cycle of a lioness. Beginning with a cub on the trigger guard, the left lockplate features the mature lioness and her maned mate, and the right lockplate shows the lioness taking down a zebra. On the underside, lion and prey are integrated, with the yin and yang of life and death represented in black and white, hunter and hunted. I asked the client who commissioned the Tri-bore “Pheasant Gun” whether he had been influenced by “Lionfire.”
    He wrote: “What impressed me with the ‘Lionfire’ rifle was the creative imagery that drew you right into the heart of primal Africa, into the soul of the predator, and transmitted the palpable tension of the instant before the taking of prey. Through the genius of the artist, an inanimate object had been infused with the capacity to transmit the emotions of primal life. I was compelled to seek the same infusion of life into a bird gun, to honor that quarry: a wild and wily pheasant, a tapestry of regal plumage, yet embodied with the imminent potential to transform itself into a clattering rocket in evasional flight.”
    In keeping with the client’s vision, Maier has engraved the sides of the Tri-bore as if they were the sides of a  pheasant, with breast and wing plumage decorating the lockplates. The underside features the bird’s head, and the trigger guard and safety represent the scales of its legs. A tailfeather is visible on the tang. Maier has a complementary second gun planned, only it will feature a chukar on a 28-gauge Tri-bore.
    At press time the client had just received images of the “Pheasant Gun,” and I asked for his impressions. “I am extraordinarily impressed with the execution. Richard has captured the exact spirit and detail of the design on the action. This gun is unique, very creative, and truly evocative of the live bird. It is non-traditional, which may somewhat limit the audience that appreciates it, but the third report will be fun!”
    The Fanzoj firm currently is making  a .410 sidelock single-trigger Tri-bore. An exercise in miniaturization, the challenge will be to fit the single trigger for all three barrels while also accommodating the lock for the third barrel on a triggerplate less than a half-inch wide. Fanzoj is hoping to have the gun in the white at the 2010 SCI Convention in Reno. In the future the company hopes to build a sidelock Tri-bore with individual ejectors for each barrel, “If we find the time and the right customer for such a time-lengthy project.” Consider ejectors essential? Anything is possible with Fanzoj bespoke gunmaking, but expect an extended delivery time and a bigger hit to the wallet.

Author’s Note: For more information on Tri-bore guns, contact Fanzoj Jagdwaffen & Ribohunt Sportartikel GmbH, 01143-4227-2283; www.fanzoj.com.

Douglas Tate is an Editor at Large for Shooting Sportsman.