hard rubber butt plates

[Robert Bork]

I am wondering why in this day and age manufacturers can not make the old style hard rubber butt plates.. far superior in my opinion to the cast plastic that are used now... and the gutta-percha boxes that the pistols of yesteryear came with were something to behold.. what say you?

[Stephen Hodges]

Probably due to cost.

[Dean Romig]

I agree that they were so much better. Gutta Percha was made from the resin of a tropical tree. I'm sure there are all sorts of obstacles today to using that process.





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[Brian Dudley]

I have posed this question to some who make reproduction buttplates. They feel that the modern urethanes are superior.

[John Campbell]

For those interested in more, here's the Wiki page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutta-percha

[Craig Budgeon]

About 18 years ago I was involved in the manufacture of Ithaca Classic Doubles. At that time management wanted a buttplate similar to the Ithaca plates but one that reflected the ICD logo. After getting a price of 10K to make a single compression mold to duplicate a hard rubber buttplate in England, it was decided to have a mold master made of brass in Italy for 3K from which rubber molds could be made for 20-25 dollars each. Based on 1999 prices you would need 50K to make the tooling necessary to duplicate the minimum of hard rubber buttplates for Parker shotguns. Finally Brian is right about the urethane buttplates, I threw an ICD reject buttplate onto the cement floor as hard as I could and it didn't even chip. Now you decide whats best.

[Jack Cronkhite]

A "gentle" fall from the top of a gun safe to a cement floor (quite accidental, not an experiment) for this 110 year old gutta percha plate. Not sure how the plastic plates will fare in 110 years.

http://parkerguns.org/forums/picture.php?albumid=640&pictureid=7464