Quote:
Originally Posted by Frank Cronin
Looking at the pictures, it looks like some deep pitting near the breech to the exterior of the barrels. If you ever decide to restore the Damascus, Brad Balchelder is your man.
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Yep, Brad's reputation precedes him. If I launch with this project in a big way, it's fairly certain Brad will get the barrels and Brian will get the wood. I'm currently toying with who will end up with the action. The engraving on this particular gun is amateurish, at best. Wonder if the kid who scratched this one out went on to be one of the greats or if he drifted off after a year or two and wandered back to the farm? Then again, it's important to remember that engraving during this period was done mostly by the naked eye and in front of a large window. I've read that early engravers were often sent home or re-purposed on cloudy days, generally only working in periods of full sunlight.
In a case like this, what say the collective about the ethics of re-cutting original engraving? The work on this gun features lines of radically varying depths, choppy curves, and disconnected stop/start points. Should it be cleaned up in a period-correct fashion or left as-is? Here's one shot I managed to capture of the forend escutcheon through the microscope, although it looks nowhere nearly as magnified or crisp as when viewed through the eyepieces:
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