Today at 6:30 a.m. I drove North
out of the snow storm that began dumping snow on us in the wee dark hours of the morning, to pick up a gun I had committed to buying almost a week before.
It is an Ithaca 20 gauge Flues made in 1910 and it is in remarkably nice condition with about 25% case color, 95% barrel blue on Krupp Steel barrels, original hard rubber butt plate with all the right Ithaca identifying logos.
I had originally thought it was an ejector gun but as it turns out, it is an extractor gun, obviously ordered as an upland gun.
When I got it home and began really closely examining the gun my heart went in my throat when I measured the barrels at 24 1/8"
I immediately checked for choke constriction and found the right barrel to have .014" and the left barrel to have .015" of choke... but the barrels looked cut. The muzzles were a bit dirty and when I cleaned it the keels showed.
I thought maybe it had been jug-choked so I measured the bore diameter of each barrel at various depths and found one barrel to have a bore diameter of .614" and the other had .616" and the choke taper goes back about 2 1/2". This all seems righteous enough so I reached out to a friend in the know and he confirmed that the gun, according to its serial number, was made with 24" barrels!! How lucky am I to have found
two small bore guns with 24" barrels so far in my collecting career that are confirmed to have been made that way AND both made for ladies... Yep, as I was examining this Ithaca I saw something almost out of plain sight on the trigger guard bow but I couldn't tell what it was so I got my magnifying glass to be certain that it was just some old gouges or scratches.... but there was the confirmation that it was made for a lady... "Mrs. E.W.B." engraved in fine old script.
Incidentally, this li'l gun weighs 5 lb., 6 oz. and Kathy says it fits her very nicely
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01-24-2015, 10:43 PM
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