A Unique High Grade Gun

[ArtS]

I was just cleaning up my computer hard drive and ran across pictures of a unique gun I used to own. Thought they might be interesting to see. Unfortunately I didn't keep any full length pictures. I bought this gun at Jaquas about 12 or 15 years ago for around $600. It was really filthy and needed a good cleanup. It looked like a 16 ga that someone had bored the chambers out to 12 ga. I knew nothing about Collaths at the time but it had a lot of unique features. Several years later several articles in one of the gun mags caused an increase in interest in the brand. I noticed that none of the examples in the article approached the gun I had in quality, at least in my opinion. Research on the gun turned up the explanation of the barrel and chamber. The gun had very light Damascus barrels with re-inforcing ribs formed or milled on the first1/3 as part of the Damascus. Every part of the metal was heavily engraved. There were numerous gold filled inlays. The furniture was mostly horn including the underlever release and the ornate trigger guard which had a large Celtic design on the bottom. The stock was a highly figured piece of root stock.

It turned out the gun was chambered for a Proprietary Collath shotgun cartridge called, I believe, a Collath 14. This was basically a 14 gauge bore with a 12 gauge chamber. I sold it as part of a reduction consignment 5 years ago to a dealer who took it to Maryland to an antique arms sale. With the increase in Collath guns at that time, he quickly sold it for several multiples of what I paid. It's one of the guns in retrospect I most regret selling.