Remington 1/2 Frame Parkers

[Bill Murphy]

Austin, you can add 241,672, a DHE with Parker single trigger, splinter forend, skeleton butt, straight grip, and replacement PSS 28" 16 gauge barrels. By the way, what happened to the early guns that seem to have been prototypes for 1/2 frame guns? I guess we have not found any of those guns. Have any guns in the latest stock books been identified as 1/2 frame guns by the entry in the frame size column?

[Austin W Hogan]

I have learned that this question arose on the Doublegun? Doublegunshop? forum; I am not a member and I hope one of you will transfer this material there.
Robin was able to extract and post this table from Vol 9 Issue 2 (2002) Parker Pages. It came from an article by Ron Kirby that appeared in DGJ. The table follows several pages of discussion on the original Parkergun Forum. A note follows this table indicating that there is no 1/2 frame size data entered in the Remington/Parker records or the Remington IBM cards. The table was prepared by noting the s/n and details of guns seen or reported and is not a record of manufacture from the order or stock books.
We found an internal Remington memo that suggested forging of additional 1/2 frames if Parker production were to continue, and noted it in the series of Parker Pages articles about the "cessation of the Parker operation". Craig Reynolds also noted a statistical forecast of the number of 1/2 frames in a related article.
I think that the way to determine the number of 1/2 frames made would be to take the approach Dave and Larry have used to examine the tooling used to bore damascus barrels. If someone could extract some info about Parker's forge ( or the forge used by Parker's frame forging supplier) the number of frames made per batch could be estimated. It appears that Parker may have made a batch of 1/2 frames, finished one or two as prototypes and abandoned the idea. The left over frames were shipped to Ilion were they were used as the supply of frames available dwindled. Some of the letters /memos in the shutdown articles indicate that some sizes of frames/fore end irons were not available.
Best, Austin