I wonder why they did not use lathes and mills and drill presses and stuff that the other gunmakers used.
I can understand Marshall Williams using chisels and files to build his rifle, but not this.
Back in that day, there were of course lathes, but there were few mills. There was nothing like the Deckel or Bridgeport available yet - most mills were horizontal mills, and most of those were pretty large affairs. Small-scale milling of parts could be done on a lathe (ask if you’ve never seen a milling attachment on a lathe). Many of the operations we currently associate with a mill were done back then on a horizontal shaper. Shapers are slow, but oh-so-versatile.
Those barrels were polished in two stages - first by “striking” with a file (an English term, meaning to draw-file the barrels) and then with polishing compound/cloth. The blue was doubtless slow rust blueing, not the hot salt blueing used in industrial gun blues today. One of the reasons for the slow rust blueing is that the barrels are soldered together. Look at the breech end of the barrels - see those triangular wedges in between the barrels? Those have to be soldered to the length of the barrels whilst the barrels are held in position in a fixture. If you put those barrels into a hot salt blue tank, the solder would either melt and the barrels would come apart, or the salts would work into any small imperfection in the solder joint and attack the solder and steel, eating a hole into the barrels over time.
Today’s very best guns still use slow rust blueing, not hot salt blueing. Most fine guns use at least “express” rust blueing, not hot salts.
OK, some other things to point out to people:
1. See how the wood and the metal come together without a seam or line? That’s because the wood was fitted to the metal and the two were polished down together. The tang and action will have a “draft” to them, where the metal bevels inwards as you go deeper into the wood.
2. See how the screwheads are all “timed” to line up in the lengthwise direction? That doesn’t just happen. The screws have to be fitted to get the heads timed up, then the heads are polished down to the level of the surrounding metal. If the screws are ever removed, they have to be re-installed into only the hole from which they came out of.
3. Look at the checkering on the grip. See how the diamonds no longer come to a point? See how the border line near the rear tang is nearly faded out? That gun has been handled quite a bit.
4. This is not the only three-barreled shotgun made. George MacFarlaine made at least two 20 gauge, 3 barrel single trigger guns of which I’m aware. Their barrels were set up in a triangle, essentially a double set on top of a single. The fine Italian gunmakers, Famars, makes a four-barrel shotgun today:
http://www.famars.com/famars/famars-guns/-four-barrel-/famars-rombo.html
One more thing on hand files and fine guns:
Among the “London Best” gunsmiths in the latter half of the 19th century (the pinnacle of the “London Best” gun trade, IMO) and all who sought to emulate them (including Dickenson & Son as well as the continental gunmakers), it was long known that their craftsmen had to be able to drive a file. To this day, a real gunsmith knows how to drive a file. To a gunsmith, there are a lot more files than what most people have in their garage to sharpen the lawnmower.
When you have the right files and the right skills, what you see there isn’t difficult to accomplish, but it is time-consuming - hence the prices on “best guns” in the 10’s of thousands of dollars. You will need time and training, but making a fine gun with files isn’t difficult, and it is indeed how more than a couple of them were done.
Why use a file? Because then the craftsman gets exactly the results he wants. These types of “best guns” weren’t manufactured to tolerances, they were fit with a smoke lamp, file and patience.
Still, for all the fancy elegance of European best guns, my idea of a best shotgun to own is a Winchester Model 21.