Are opinion changing on restoring a shotgun?

[StubTwist]

My 2 cents is when you decide to restore a gun and after you waited a year or more to get it back -- is to shoot the snot out of it. A lot of times the gun comes back and it's "too pretty" to take to the field and it gets put away un-used in the safe and is treated as eye candy...

I shoot all my restored guns and I have the normal wear from handling and marks in the stock from me using them to pass down to the next.

[ddp]

Well said Frank....and I second that !!

ddp

[C.O.B.]

If your not going to use it then why restore it is my feelings. That use puts back some well earned patina and takes the edge off the "newness".

[edgarspencer]

Poor woman went in for a 'Butt Lift'.

[wayne goerres]

Edger if I were you I would get out of town and go hunting.

[Double Lab]

Thanks Edgar, I can't stop laughing every time I bring it back on my screen. It's like a horrible accident on the highway, you just have to look.

[C.O.B.]

Edgar you can't buy RST shells at Wallmart so you can stop going there.

[J.B. Books]

So many good points here, but none more so than evaluating each individual gun on it's own merits. A good rule of thumb might be restore if it adds value (but dont expect the increased value to be equal to the cost of the restoration and gun itself). Do not restore a gun if it will decrease the value.

I don't see much harm in bringing a tired and or broken G, P, V or even Trojan back to life and use.

I find the process of bringing back a tired gun that I enjoy shooting is fun, I am like a kid at Christmas waiting for a set of barrels to come back from refinishing or a stock rechecked or screws fixed. There is satisfaction for me in the process and enjoyment to follow. Not every dollar spent on a good shotgun I like has to bring a $ plus back to have fun, not for me anyway.

[C.O.B.]

Originally Posted by Pete Lester

I am like a kid at Christmas waiting for a set of barrels to come back from refinishing

I'm right there with you Pete. I just sent two sets of barrels to Dale Edmonds for refinishing. One set is for a grade 2 16ga hammergun and when i get these back they will determine if I have the stock refinished as well, the other set are 32 inchers and that gun also a grade 2 but hammerless 16 O frame has had some TLC already.

[Bill Murphy]

Answering Ray's question about the gun I probably shouldn't have had refinished. When I was 14 years old, in 1960, I bought a really nice little VH 28 gauge from another 14 year old in my gun club. I paid him the price of a new Savage 99 that he wanted, $130 if I recall correctly. The gun had a pretty perfect stock with checkering filled with varnish, perfect buttplate, very high condition barrel blue, no colors and good screws. In the summer of 1967, I met a more than sweet young thing at Ocean City, New Jersey. She lived in Jenkintown, so in the fall I took the Parker to Paul Jaeger's shop to have the checkering redone and visit Jannie Broughton. At that point, the gun was just short of pristine. However, I guess it was my Dad who wanted to take a trip to Del Grego's to get some work done on a 16 gauge GHE. This was in 1972 and somehow we decided for him to take the 28 gauge along. This is the trip where Dad took the pictures of Larry and Babe working in the shop, pictures that appeared in Kevin McCormack's 1997 DGJ articles on the Del Gregos. My 28 came back from Del Grego with new colors and new rust blue. It is a beautiful gun, with more than 40 years of clay targets and bird hunting on the new finish, finish it probably didn't need. In three years, I will have owned that gun for 56 years, the same number of years it was owned by its previous caretakers. I'm running out of time to wear those Remington colors off.