Old Sauer

[ArtS]

I recieved an old Sauer double the other day I just purchased. It had been listed on GB through several cycles with no bids. It is a hammer Cape Gun. The rifle looked pristine, and in person looks even better. As near as I can tell the finish is all original, the gun is tight and the barrels look like they have never been shot. Blued steel barrels and case colors are nice. The overall quality of the gun seemed better than the average Sauer of this agethat I have seen. The seller thought it was a 16 ga/ .577 Snider. Not my first guess but it was plausible. The gun was made in 1875-1876 which was only 3-4 years after the British dropped it as their military round and several British builders did build for it at the time. The seller had taken some rough measurements and his guess seemed reasonable. When it came, a Snider case fell down into the chanber. I tried a few things on hand and a 20 gauge case fit exactly, but needed to be trimmed to 2". I cast the throat and barrel which showed the fore to be about .615 and the grooves about .645. I posted to some of the German gun specialist people on DoubleGun and finally found that they made a series of chamberings at the time called Ball Rifles (With of course an unpronounceable German term). The chambering is likely the 20 bore x 40mm cartridge. Unlike most Cape guns, the barrels look like normal, equally sized shotgun barrels. In this case, the left barrel is a normal 16 gauge, and the right barrel is a 20 bore barrel that has been rifled to almost a 16 gauge depth. The full length rifled barrel differs from British Paradox style in that the right hand rifled barrel has a much thicker chamber and wall thickness under the grooves is much stronger than a typical Paradox style.

It turned out to be a really interesting piece in tremendous condition which I had never seen or heard of before.

I'll try and post a couple of pictures in the next day or so.