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Well, the 1880 Lifter 10 Gauge I have been working on since November is nearing completion. The first pictures I show are the gun as purchased.Metal was good, the barrels were better than I hoped inside and the mechanicals were good. The downside is that sometime in the far past, the gun had been dropped hard or something hit on top of it. The trigger guard was bent with the threaded connector replaced with a screw, the trigger had three breaks and was bent some, and the original stock was completely missing, having been replaced with a low grade Parker stock that didn't fit, was beat up badly and had multiple cracks in the headstock. The interior of the head was oil soaked and punky, and the original skeleton butplate had been ground to ruin and cobbled onto the "new" stock. The reason I bought it was that it was a Grade 3 Lifter and had Parker Laminated steel barrels, even though marked on the water table as a D.
The second pictures show the gun as it sits now.
I welded and repaired the trigger plate, reamed the 9 gauge size barrels by about 0.005 inches to remove the minor pits and flaws and made a new buttstock. The barrels were sent to Breck Gorman to have a few small dents removed and then refinished. I finally got it all back together today.
I still need a few things. I haven't had time to repair and finish the trigger guard. I found a used (badly used) hammerless gun trigger gaurdon eBay that is the exact same profile as my original. I filed, polished and blued it for the time being. When I get the original serial numbered and engraved guard finished, I will replace it and touch up the inletting and finish. I haven't found a replacement buttplate yet, so I left the stock long enough to install a skeleton butt and put a 1/2 inch rubber pad in it's place. I also need to move the stock shield from the bummer stock to the new one.
I am going to hold off on the checkering until I make a decision on the forend. The one on the gun right now is the 1880 original, but I have a roughed out new one that matches the buttstock exactly. I will probably fit the new one to see what it looks like before making a final decision. I don't want to have two forends to checker. At the end, I plan to wet sand the finish with 1000 to 2000 grit cloth and rub in a final few coats of Timberluxe. The finish right now is three coats of Watkins Danish oil as a sealer, 6 coats of Truoil of an old bottle I keep because it has thickened and then 6 topcoats of Timberluxe fast drying.
All in all I am pleased. The gun, being a 3 grade lifter with Parker barrels is a desireable gun, but without the original buttstock, it's future is more as a shooter than a collector. I didn't think the cost of a professional replacement would ever be justified financially, so I decided to go with a lower priced stock with modern shooting dimensions. With this work, I think my investment will be easily recoverable and I will get a lot of enjoyment from it.
The Following 26 Users Say Thank You to Arthur Shaffer For Your Post:
__________________
"I'm a Setter man.
Not because I think they're better than the other breeds,
but because I'm a romantic - stuck on tradition - and to me, a Setter just "belongs" in the grouse picture."
George King, "That's Ruff", 2010 - a timeless classic.
Just a note for anyone interested. Not too long ago I was really active for a few years in a .22 benchrest association. I did pretty well, winning three different National Championships in four years, in different categories. I did all my rifle building, and experimented with varying lightweight stock designs. I experimented with carbon fiber as a reinforcement, and ended up builing an unlimited style bench stock that weighed less than 1-1/2 pounds total. This compares to a typical 5-7 pounds. I made it from laminations of aircraft grade balsa wood, paulonia (used for wooden surfboards), and carbon fiber. The stiffness was unreal.
I have worked on two or three lifter parkers recently, and all of them suffered from headstock failures of one kind or another; from cracks, internal cracks to complete breaks.
This is where purists should maybe step away.
OK. SInce this is not an original and not supposed to particularly copy one, I decided to see what I could do to strengthen it. Before starting the actual inletting after roughing it in, I trued the head as perfectly square and flat as I could, then laid on a layer of biaxial carbon fiber tape across the face of the head, set in saturation epoxy, and clamped it to the action to fit it. Later, after getting the inletting close, I basically removed the internal cuts in the lock areas barely deeper than the depth of the lockworks, leaving the outer perimeter areas untouched. I then made a teflon plug slightly smaller than the locks and laid in two layers of the same biaxial tape on all the inside surfaces of the locks recesses. I clamped in the teflon plug until it dried. I cut a rim to support the locks against the carbon fiber layer at the proper depth, and after cutting the recess for the locking bolt, I reinforced the inside of it with a layer of oriented fibers set in epoxy.
The point of this was to build a completely reinforced composite headstock structure which would be strong and not crack under recoil. Call this experimental gunsmithing, but I wanted to try it out. It could turn out to be a good tool to solidly repair a cracked stock. Yesterday, I made up some moderately stiff loads and tried the new stock with no untoward results.
When I break down the gun for checkering, I will take a couple of pictures and post them.
The Following 2 Users Say Thank You to Arthur Shaffer For Your Post:
hope the stock holds up about all I shoot are heavy and magnum loads....I busted a stevens stock one time by doing the old string and being around the corner thing..put the stock against a pine log when I pulled the trigger it latterly broke the stock in several pieaces..busted and broke the cheek panals plum off the gun.brokre the wrist half into...lots of damage to the stock...the round I shot was a 3 1/2 inch magnum I had rechambered it to the 3 1/2 inch shell...I picked up all of the pieaces of the stock I could find...several days later I decided I would try to fix the stock instead of getting a used one... I got some gorillia glue some long wood screws glued and glass beaded that stock...put the stock back on the gun and done the string test again only this time the gun wasfree floating nothing behind the stock...I put a box of 3 1/2 inch shells thru the gun thus proofing the barrels and the stock...that was 15 years ago the gun has been on lots of duck hunt and turkey hunts its my wet weather gun...its held together mighty well I m sure your stock will hold up under heavy loads as mine has...in fact I ve got to pretty up the stock some day you can still see all the glue and screws that hold this old stevens together...ever time I see them screws I think about the day I tied her to the pine log....charlie
The Following User Says Thank You to charlie cleveland For Your Post:
04-17-2022, 12:37 PM
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