The History Channel now

[B. Dudley]

I had the chance to watch the show on demand this evening.

I really wonder where the producers of these shows find these people. My guess is that the actual gunsmiths had better things to be doing. I laughed at the premise of the challenge. “Build a coach gun”. To me that means take a perfectly good shotgun and cut the barrels down. And they were not very specific about the parameters of the “build”.

I am sure the one team builds nice ARs, but working with wood or doing much of anything by hand was completely out of their wheelhouse.

The Parker that was shoehorned together on the show by the ofher team is a perfect answer to the question of frame sizes being interchangeable or not. They took a set of 10g barrels (presumably 3 frame) and put them on a 12g frame and based on the size difference of the breech, i suspect it was a 1 frame that they put those barrels on. You could see when misfired during testing that the primer hit was way over on the inside edge of the primer. And the gun kept on misfiring.

And i wont even comment on fit and finish. But, they had a week, what would anyone expect?

And I wonder who did the homework that turned up the “fact” that Parker Brothers was established in 1832.

Overall the program was a little of an embarrassment to the trade, but i guess it is par for the course on these things.