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What’s involved in a full gun service? By Max Cope, Gun Room Manager

We are extremely fortunate to have access to the incredible talent that is James Reynolds, The Woodworking Gunsmith working with us on site at Thimbleby Shooting Ground.

Gunsmiths, sadly, are rather few and far between these days as we have seen a gradual decline in Britain’s gunmaking skills and industry since the Second World War. There are several gun makers still operating in the UK though these artisan makers tend to serve the high end market. The Italians now seem to be the powerhouse in shotgun production with Germany and Japan contributing a sizable amount also.

James’ speciality is stock manufacture and alteration, however as his business has grown over time he has continually developed his skills, and his well equipped workshop means he can usually produce any part needed from scratch, should it be needed. Making parts for long out of production guns, or bespoke works in stunning walnut are always exciting, though alongside this work there is always an undercurrent of the much more mundane, but no less important service work.

In a recent discussion James and I agreed that many of our customers may not quite know what is involved in a full gun service, and quite how much time and effort goes into this. So I asked James a few key questions and to photograph some of the stages of a gun service, and explain what happens and why.

Max: Is it important to service your gun?

James: Gun servicing is important, and the longer I’m in this trade the more I truly come to believe this to be true. Neglect your gun at best risks competition scores or memorable game days being ruined, parts failures with associated down time and bills, and at the worse end of things, parts in dangerous condition or putting yourself and others at risk, its rare that I see anything really worrying but it does happen and over the years I’ve uncovered all kind of home brew repairs, failures and serious neglect. Once properly serviced, your gun is going to function and perform at its best, and you can shoot with peace of mind, knowing it is fit for purpose.

Max: How often should people service their gun?

James: That’s a question I get asked a lot and I really find it’s quite difficult to answer, with a business head on I should be shouting about how yearly servicing is absolutely essential, but our customers deserve more than that sort of pushy mercantilism. There’s shooting and shooting, I get people who think they “shoot a lot” doing a hundred odd clays a week, and people who “do a bit in the season” and shoot back to back double gun days at a cost at more than my yearly income, its one of the great things about the sport is that is available and enjoyable at all levels but for servicing it leaves a lot of questions, how well do you look after and clean your gun day to day? Are you out in all weathers? Was your gun bought new three years ago or is it grandad’s heirloom? If your gun breaks down will you miss out on the best day of the year or that winning score? What’s at stake?

So with that being said what I often say is, for most normal fair weather sportsmen who take a bit of pride in their equipment and look after things one good service every 5 years would be a great place to start, I say this because I see plenty of “new guns” come in with little issues at five or so years old sadly experience tells me that the default position seems to be to not service at all until parts have worn them wobbly, a few key screws have worked themselves loose and a spring’s completely failed.

I have my customers who have loyally brought their guns in year after year, usually they have made this decision after their guns have let them down too many times before, and I take real pride that my skills are so valued and that hopefully a keen eye for detail means that their next season and seasons to come are enjoyed without a hick up. Game guns are always worth servicing annually, damp cartridges, driving rain, and quickly running a rod through the bores before leaving the house take a significant toll on guns and accelerates the build up of fouling, rust, grime, dirt, grass, seeds and everything else that seems to work its way to disrupt a gun’s inner workings. If you spend a few hundred quid or a few thousand quid on game shooting, its pretty upsetting if your trigger doesn’t reset when the best bird of the day curls over you, or you end up borrowing the keepers second best Baikal for the afternoon, all stories I’ve heard!

Max: Is there anything people should or shouldn’t be doing, to help look after their guns?

James: There are a few things that can help, as I’ve said above its always worth looking after your guns, so making the time to sit down, get your cleaning equipment out and disassemble and thoroughly clean your guns, letting them dry slowly if wet plenty of expensive and fine guns have been ruined by complete neglect.

Misplaced “care” can also do plenty of damage however; buy a good quality cleaning kit, and use all parts of it, phosphor bronze then properly jag and patch your bores clean before lubricating them with some light oil. Clean the action as best you can, using sprays to loosen any fouling, and small brushes and cloths to get into recesses, use a slightly oily cloth, with light machine oil to help protect the surface. Greases should only be used sparingly, a light smear on the hard bearing surfaces ( knuckle of the action, back of the forend loop ) and sides of the lump is more than enough.

Storing your gun barrels down is always a good idea and people are always amazed to hear this; the reasoning behind this is that all your excess oils will run down both the interior and the exterior of the barrels and out the end. When stood the other way up all the oil over the guns lifetime and all the fouling and grime it picks up and moves with it, works its way down though to the face of the action, in through the under bolt slot and firing pin holes and deposits all this gunk into the mechanism, the oil is then soaked up by the wood like a sponge.

You can always tell a second hand gun that’s been a little too loved with excess oil, lots of gun oils are sold as “wood safe” but as rule I keep anything that I’m putting on metal far away from the wood, the tendency is to wipe the oily cloth over the wood and look at how the shine has a pleasing effect on the wood, but over time this usually damages the finish, and further down the line the wood too. The tell tale sign of oil soaked wood is dark staining where the wood meets the action. Guns in this state are at best very challenging to refinish requiring very careful work to slowly draw out years of oil from the wood, but the oil can over time break down the lignin which is the natural glue that holds the fibres of the wood together weakening and compromising the stock. In bad cases on hot days the oil will expand and sweat out of the stock, I’ve had guns that become difficult to keep hold when shooting in this condition, it’s just very easily avoidable. There are plenty of good products for wood, and household furniture polish is probably better for cleaning and polishing your wood than any of the branded or unbranded cleaning oils that are principally designed to clean fouling and give a level or rust protection.

Max: Do you enjoy servicing guns?

James: I used to hate it, its quite mundane work and it can be monotonous when you’re doing one after another, I used to find it a bit overwhelming when I had a fistful waiting to be done but these days I think as I see more and more value in it, and I take more and more pride in it, partly the reason for this is that I’ve seen some really shoddy service work, and also service work that’s been charged for when it clearly hasn’t happened at all. Taking the time to be thorough, and working with care and knowledge and refining my servicing process over the years means I know I’m doing my best for the customer, Returning customers year after year gives me great pleasure, we share a fantastic customer base at Thimbleby and it’s always nice to see them here.

Max: Give me a break down of your gun service

Below is a timeline of the stages of the service, undertaken in this case on a well-used Miroku 6000 produced in 1992 – and likely has not been touched since! The customer highlighted some reliability issues which are typical of a gun requiring a full strip, clean and inspection. As you will observe below, I gun can look clean enough externally but hide a serious mess internally.

James: Whenever I get a gun in for service, especially with its a new customer or someone who’s “throwing” it at me out of the blue, I usually ask for some background, experience has taught me that often people only decide to seek out a service when things have already gone wrong ( usually more than once! ) but strangely they then don’t feel that that could be useful information to me.

Once all the details have been noted and the gun booked into the register, I inspect the gun overall, first getting a general feel, from which practiced hands can deduce a lot, then straight on to disassembly.

Initially I start much as you would at home carrying out a routine clean, breaking the gun down into three segments. I usually start with the barrels, disassembly at this end is pretty straight forward removing the ejectors and any chokes, checking and noting for obvious things such as a missing sight bead. Even at this stage we can see things that owners have overlooked, so often this is a choke that’s seized in and that the customer has given any attention to; just because a choke isn’t unscrewing itself freely doesn’t mean its safely screwed home, what happens over time is that chokes that are loose get packed out with fouling, cleaning oils, more fouling and rust, each time the guns shot and over time this packing around the choke can make it appear tight, over time this can cause considerable damage, eventually gasses from cartridges can work their way behind the choke sometimes causing an expensive or sometimes irreparable bulge, or stripping the threads from the choke entirely. Bore solvents are used to deep clean the barrels, so these are applied and left to soak while I turn my attention to the ejector work and cleaning the chokes.

As with everything when I’m servicing I start by cleaning everything by hand, I believe this is really important, I could just throw everything in a bucket of solvents but by cleaning manually you can’t avoid physically inspecting each part – certain parts are more critical than others and some parts can be prone over time to fracture – ejectors often develop cracks so by manually cleaning them you can spot them, and arrange to replace the part before it completely fails on the big day. When this happens its usual several parts, springs, plungers, and extensions that come flying out into the long grass, in a situation like this, the stitch in time really would have saved your pocket.

While I keep the workshop fairly well stocked there are huge varieties of parts even between similar models and it just isn’t possible to keep every part on the shelf some are hard to find and others are long out of production, parts that fail are usually known or prone to failing in the same or similar ways, whilst we have pretty good support from most major manufacturers prior to the game season its not uncommon to find needful things going out of stock as gunsmiths up and down the country rush to prepare neglected guns for another season – so if you leave things too late you can end up with a job stalled waiting for parts on back order or for me to find time to manufacture from scratch.

Once the bore solvents have done their work I clean with phosphor bronze, patch through till clear, then lubricate, prior to reinstalling the ejectors and the chokes I polish them up and oil them, and clean and polish the breech face; now the barrels are clean inside and out there are several little tests we do, one of which is to “ring” the barrels to check for loose ribs, we sight the bores to check for pitting, dents, scoring, bulges, and any other barrel defect, we measure the wall thickness and if there is anything concerning I would advice the customer, on best practice or further works needed.

1. The chambers and bores are thoroughly polished to remove years of baked-on carbon and lead following that a normal rod struggles to push out. At this point it is also clear to see any dents or bulges in the barrels that the customer needs to be made aware of. Here you can also see the breech face is ‘faced-off’ to remove corrosion and this also aids to gauge how long since the gun was serviced as the striations wear.

For-ends are simple and therefore often overlooked; a significant amount of “feel” comes through the forend/ action joint, and the most common thing to find here are stripped screws, pins walking out the side of the iron, fractured ejectors, loose woodwork as well as all the ordinary, rust, grime and dried out grease. As with everything its fully stripped down, manually cleaned and inspected, hand polished, lubricated and put back together – if there is any undue wear, or ejector work out of timing this is addressed at the end of the service; this way I know I’m bench testing the gun as the manufacturer intended it to be put together. For things like pins walking out we can usually install hidden set screws to lock pins in place.

The barrels and for-end freshly cleaned, screws lightly locktighted and everything properly lubricated, are now put to one side, and attention turns to the action. The action is the most “complicated” area for the uninitiated, when you have serviced as many guns as I have you know they only go back together and work properly one way usually before the game season I often wonder if I could disassemble a gun blindfolded, I suspect many gunsmiths up and down the country feel the same, understanding the parts of the mechanism and their specific functions is important, its why I don’t use grease that thickens and dries with age in trigger work. Again the process starts with full disassembly and cleaning of parts, there are many specific things I check on individual models of guns but more generally I am always concerned to look over the condition of sears, bents and safety functions, we never want to see rounded or chipped sears damaged bents or safeties that are not so safe. Sometimes there are issues that are individual to particular guns; light strikes crop up on some of the “light weight” Berrettas when cocking dog spring plungers occasionally seize in their holes, Older Brownings top lever springs get progressively weaker overtime, combined with other issues this can result in them opening after firing and Perazzi’s with week top-lever springs and auto safety’s can cause the safety to come on after firing. Whether it’s a £300 or a £60,000 gun they all have their strengths and weaknesses, and experience has taught me to look out for tell tale signs. When problems are identified I usually try to measure and quantify the issue, it means I can then perform a quick check such as using the pull weight gauge on the top lever to assess the strength of a spring and compare that against the weight of one with a recorded failure.

2. Disassembly begins – decades of muck made up from carbon, powder residue and oil have built up, slowing the mechanism up.

 

3. Fowled parts are removed and placed in a tray. The top lever spindle is especially mucky.

 

4. Smaller parts are segregated into their operating groups for initial inspection.

 

5. Here we can see that the action has trapped a lot of oil-soaked carbon over the years – not ideal for reliable function. The rag demonstrates this!

 

After manual cleaning, I put a number of parts in the ultrasonic cleaner – this is a warm bath of water and detergent, the ultrasonic is great for cleaning out engraving and also hard to reach areas like fouling caked up around the back of firing pin holes which can slow and shorten their effective travel. This cycles repeated until the action and key components are thoroughly clean, other parts, some parts of the action benefit from light polishing, I always polish firing pins and ejector rods, it looks pleasing, and makes the action feel nicer by removing friction and drag, once the action is thoroughly dry, its oiled and I begin reinstalling parts again, at every point I am checking against known previous failures from a catalogue or hundreds of guns, firing pins are measured for correct protrusion, and by doing this every time, through my own experience and that of my customers, I can say with a good degree of confidence if your guns is in a good state, or if an issue you experienced was due to a cartridge rather than wear in the mechanism.

6. Parts fresh out of the ultrasonic cleaner, an extremely effective piece of equipment for removing grease and grime.
 

 

.7. Parts reorganised ready for the hand polishing stage.

 

.8. Hand polishing underway, to ensure parts interface with one another with as little friction as possible and hold lubrication.

6. A fully lubricated and reassembled action! At this point function is tested and sear engagement verified for safety.

    
   

 

7. In all the servicing process generally consumes 5 hours of James’ time as it is truly fully involved. Hopefully this brief insight will encourage you to get your gun booked in for a new lease of life and appreciate the graft, knowledge and expertise that a service requires!

People are reluctant to look at cartridges for issues, but sometimes its absolutely the culprit, I have seen a few this year where I have serviced a gun only for a customer to report continued issues; in the end we took a random sample of cartridges and found that randomly distributed were cartridges with shallow rims, meaning that the cartridges sat too deep in the chamber causing light strikes, sometimes this is hard to catch because if the gun was held to shoot a driven target barrels pointing up, the weight of the cartridge pushed it against the breech face and more often than not was successfully fired, once the cartridge had fired the brass would swell masking the evidence of the shallow rim, but if the gun was levelled or shooting down, the light strike and misfire was inevitable

Once everything is confirmed to be in good order, I try and record any observations, and any parts replaced are noted in my book “bottom firing pin replaced”, sometimes this is useful for future reference.