I bought this old parker shotgun at a local gun show, 150 bucks, a true project gun
any way you think of it. I bought it specifically for the purpose of
restoring it and but the purpose for the restoring was just so that we could
teach all the different aspects of bringing an old shotgun made in the late
1870s back to serviceable condition, back to where it looks just like new. So that
was the that was the concept behind it. Looking the gun over obviously some time
in its early life the the stock was broken so maybe someone fell onto
whatever and I described the stock is something that grandpa made and it was
the first stock grandpa ever made, built out of a 2x4 or something like
that. So some fairly inexpensive welding work done on the the trigger
plate to get the whole thing back together then grandpa restocked it and
apparently there was some type of a serviceability to it when he finished
with it. So as we as we look at the gun we think okay where in the world do you
start, you always think lock, stock, and barrel on
any kind of a gun. You know what work you have to do to the lock, the
receiver. What work do you have to do to the stock, the stocks, the buttstock and
the forend and then what work do you have to do the barrels. So when you break
it down like that you think okay I got to work on the lock, the stock, and the
barrel. It makes a little bit easier to digest in terms of how much work there
is, but you really have to restore the action mechanism itself and then of coarse
polish and make it new again. You have to put brand new stocks on it and finish
them and checker them the way they were originally and then you have to
address the barrels which were loose you have to tighten up the barrels you have
to refinish them polish out the insides rechamber them so it's a very very
big project. So while we've done all this work here at Midway, let me make it clear
that the we do not offer this work for as a
service, but if you were to send this gun a gun similar to this out to a
professional gunsmith to do this type of restoration work. To replace the stocks
on it, to rebuild the lock, to rebuild the barrels, probably you'd wind up with four
or five thousand dollars in it. So you would never necessarily think about that
being a good value proposition if the gun was in the family and and had a
family history and you wanted to restore back to the way it was when grandpa
bought it you might be interested in spending a lot of money on it. Otherwise
it's it's just a labor of love and something that you can that you can
teach with. Anytime you're going to restore any old gun the first thing you
got to do is you got to disassemble it and do an inspection and so when you do
that disassembly you're looking on the inside of the gun you're looking at
screws and pins and and parts and and you're beginning to understand what's
broken and how the gun has been used and abused through the years. So some of the
stuff we could see from the outside, but on the inside, you got you know a hundred
years of gunk. But you can begin to understand what it is that you're going
to have to do and really the scope of the project. Probably the most
significant, the trigger plate, of course had been broken when the stock
was broken and it had been kind of braised back together, so we had to we
had to repair that. So you have to cut out the old braze refixture it up and
we use TIG welding then and we welded the trigger plate back together and then
of course you've got to file out all the extra weld, but we were able to do all
that and all those parts came out really just like new.
Looking then to work on the receiver the receiver was color case hardened
originally when it left the factory so in order to polish that you really have
to anneal it. So the annealing process is pretty simple you just basically
heat it up and cool it down slowly on a control basis and now it is soft steel
that you can get a file on and then you can polish it out. So polishing out the
receiver is a very important piece in restoring and it's a lot of
hard work to polish metal. A lot much much more difficult than what it is to
polish out the piece of wood. So once you've got it cleaned, inspected, the
small parts built back up, the receiver annealed, the receiver polished, then
you're ready to do what we call the color case hardening project and that's
up that's pretty neat in and of itself. It's really basic, you just have to you
have to pack the receiver and the other locks the other parts that you want to
color case hardened into a basically a charcoal VAT get it in the oven heat it
up hold it and then cool it very quickly by quenching in water and you get one
you get the surface hardened which is what you wanted but you also get more
carbon into the surface from the charcoal and the byproduct of all that
is that what we call the color called color case hardening and you can see the
beautiful colors and that's something that all shotgun aficionados are interested in.
After everything is polished up we needed to put the word Parker Brothers
back on the back on the locks very very small amount of engraving. It's very
detailed so we simply did a tracing of the word Parker Brothers on an original
gun, copied that over onto the locks and then we were able to cut those very few
strokes that it takes to say Parker Brothers on the side of the locks and
that's just something that you want to do to make it look like it was when when
grandpa bought it.
Restocking an old parker shotgun is uh it's quite a job and when you
consider where we started that is grandpa had restocked this gun and
typically you might take the original stock off of a gun and have that stock
duplicated and then you get all the in letting around the receiver very very
close to original. Tut we didn't have that capability because the inletting
wasn't very close along the receiver and the stock didn't have very good
dimensions. So what we did is we had a stock made from a 10 gauge pistol grip
pattern. So it was a 10 gauge stock with a pistol grip on it and we're going to
put it on a 12 gauge gun with a straight grip, nothing wrong with that. The
tangs are the same so you just have extra wood on the outside and then
ultimately we had to once we got it all fitted up we had to take the pistol grip
off and inlet the trigger guard tang into it. One of the things that I think
that most folks find intriguing is the the actual fitting of the stock and the
locks to the receiver. So you take the locks off and the first thing you're
trying to do is of course fit the stock up you're trying to fit it up on the tangs,
but the stock has to fit in very neatly and very closely against the receiver
because when the gun goes off it is that fit that keeps the stock from breaking.
So you've got to have a good tight fit of the inletting against the receiver.
Once you've got that done, obviously you have lots of extra wood, but you have to set
the locks in and an amateur on a first-time basis would not
understand the need to strip the lock plates because if you've got all this
extra apparatus on them the the locking mechanism on the inside makes it a lot
more difficult. So the first thing you do is you fit the stripped lock plates to
the stock and you get the perfect look that you're looking for and the perfect
fit. Then you assemble the locks again and now you're fitting all of the
locking mechanism itself into the stock without taking off any more than what
you have to do. So that's something I think is intriguing to most people is
how you actually fit the locks to the stock, but once you get the
stock on and you get it all dressed down and you get it all pointed up
you've got a very attractive thing. The fitting the buttplate is an interesting
thing because you've got a radius surface here, so using a sanding wheel to
get that the way you want. Of course you've got to fit in the widow's
peak here, very interesting, and of course you've got to shape that stock to where
it looks the way you wanted to look from what the original stocks would look like.
The forend is another project, a little bit easier, but when you get the forend
iron all fit up then you still have to put the wedge plates in and that's a
pretty interesting thing to put those wedge plates in without chipping it out
and then to put the little of forend tip here. So that's a big big project in
itself, just fitting the stocks taking off all the excess wood, getting the
trigger-guard in, the buttplate, all the accessories on, getting it to look like
it did well left the factory. Now you have to sand it, you have to seal it, you
have to fill the grain, you have to finish it, polish it all out nice and
you're still not finished. Now you have to checker it and if you notice this
checkering it's what they call flattop checkering so this is period for the
1870s. So the the actual checkering itself is cut with a tool that's got
parallel sides on it just got cutting teeth on the end so it's not a V tool
that would create diamonds that is that are pointed on the top, it's a flat tool,
that you have to be very careful with but you want the tops of the Diamonds to
all be flat so they look like diamonds from the distance but when you get close
to them they have flat tops so the little troughs running down between them
are just parallel sides. So you get something that's very very attractive
you get something that's authentic for the period and that's called flattop checkering.
On most old shotguns, like this Parker, there's lots and lots of deferred
maintenance if you would on the barrels. This particular gun
some people might describe it as a loose action some people might say it's loose
barrels. We normally think of the barrels being joined to the receiver and when
the barrels get loose then they need to be rejoined. So certainly the barrels
were loose on the receiver on this gun and that's one of the things we
had to do was rejoin them. That's a very interesting project, but a very
straightforward thing to do. The barrels were dented so we had to raise the dents,
the rib was loose so we had to take the rib off, and clean that all up and relay
the rib resolder the rib, lots of rust and corrosion pits on the outside of the
barrels it all had to be polished out in order to do the finishing process on
them. Inside the barrels of course the chambers were short so we wanted to open
the chambers up a little bit, the bores were rough we had to ream the bores out.
We wanted to redo the chokes in it to make the chokes a little bit more open,
so inside was chokes, polishing out, and rechambering, outside then was dents and the
rib and polishing and you can see these are Damascus barrels or actually, they are
twist barrels twist steel barrels, but you can see what we came up with
the final process. So lots and lots of labor lots and lots of love go into
taking a set of barrels on an old worn-out shotgun, if you would, and
restoring the gun in terms of the fit and function to new and the appearance
to new at the same time.