Over the weekend a gentlemen was shooting a lightened Winchester Model 21 12ga. The gun was bequeathed to him by an old time factory master gunsmith who had built it for himself while working for Winchester. The fences are massively milled removing more than a half and inch of metal from the rear. This leaves a sculpted vertical plane with just enough metal to contain the pressure from the shot. The watertable is then milled as one might see on a small gauge parker. The gun was finely engraved with gold inlaid birds by one of the Sr. Engravers at Winchester. The gun was apparently, however, never completed. And, for 50 years it sat as a lovely frame with what could have been the evolution of the model 21 design. The new owner had Galazan produce a set of barrels and a stock to his dimensions for the gun. And, on the skeet field very few clay pigeons escaped unscathed. I had never heard of such a project and it makes a lot of sense for a gun that was made out of very fine steel and which was massively overbuilt for use as a shotgun. The gentlemen indicated that the bequeath in the will was to him with the notation "some assembly required".
Always interested by these engineering ideas which never made it to production. In the case of this gun whether that is because of the cost of milling and fluting the fences or fears about whether it was strong enough, all that I can say is that I was pulling for the gentlemen and when it went boom, everything came out the barrels. I believe the assembly was done by Mitch Shultz of Gunsmithing Ltd in Fairfield, CT, who is no stranger to a Model 21. Interesting shotgun.
04-08-2011, 06:45 PM
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