VHE brought back to life.

[B. Dudley]

This 2 frame 12g. VHE belongs to a gentleman that is not a member of this forum. The gun started out as shootable, but in overall poor condition due to a screwed and bolted buttstock, cracked buttplate and very worn barrel blue. But it had some good things going for it. That being it had a reasonable amount of original case color on the frame, decent bores and good screws. And ejector gun also.

The buttstock was replaced to the same dimensions as the original with grade appropriate wood. It was fitted with a new buttplate and the original grip cap. The forend was refinished and re-checkered. I would have liked to replace the forend as well. But it was plenty serviceable as is with just some dents and scratches in it.

The barrels had significant wear to the bluing and has a lot of very fine freckling and pitting on them. They were re-struck and rust blued. The Trigger guard, triggers and safety button were polished and Nitre blued.

An interesting feature of this gun was that all the engraving was very light and also the makers mark on the barrel was very lightly stamped as well. The trigger guard engraving did not hold up to normal polishing well and had to be all re-cut by Gournet.

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[Todd Schrock]

Very nice Brian!

[Mike Franzen]

I really like how you do the darkening for the checkering. It's interesting to see a gun like this brought up to that level of restoration. Your work is just excellent Brian.

[Scott Smith]

Very well done! Nice to see another American classic brought back to life.

[charlie cleveland]

i really like this gun..good work as usal by brian...charlie

[Preston Chaney]

How do you darken the checkering? Also in another post you mentioned milling out the forearm metal and water table to lighten a heavy gun. How much can the weight be reduce. I have a Dh #3 that is pretty heavy.

[Dean Romig]

Preston, if you had that done to your gun you would never notice the difference. That was just one of several methods used to lighten a particular gun.

[B. Dudley]

And you wouldn't want to do that on a finished gun since it would require annealing the frame, killing and the. Re case hardening it.

Parker only did that killing on the very small frames for 20g and smaller gauges.

The checkering is darkened with a dye.

[Dean Romig]

What is "killing"?

[Dean Romig]

Maybe 'milling'?

On the contrary, Parker would mill the lightening cuts on 0-frame 16 gauge guns and on 00-frame 28 gauge guns. I can't recall seeing lightening cuts on a 20 gauge gun unless it was a 28/20 two-gauge combination. I can't think of any 1-frame guns with lightening cuts but a fair number of very light 12 gauge guns on the 1-frame were made.