Restore, Renovate, Ruin

One of the most difficult decisions faced by gunsmiths is the question of firearms refinishing. It is usually not a problem as most of your customers will bring in a battered modern gun and want it refinished and/or reblued to erase several years of hard use. The situation changes dramatically when the customer presents you with along out of production, very collectable firearm and asks for the same service.

What do you do when your customer wants his grandpa’s first generation Colt, original Henry, or some other collectable firearm refinished? Normally I will try to talk them out of devaluing a collectable piece of history by explaining that the gun is worth far more in its rough, worn condition than it will be if it is refinished. Sometimes I’ll pull out the Blue Book and show them what refinishing will do to the value.

In other words, I make every effort to dissuade them from doing anything other than the minimum necessary to preserve the piece. The problem comes when the customer just doesn’t care. I faced this very issue recently and, because I work with a lot of old guns, I face it quite often. A customer presented me with an early 1894 Stevens Favorite with the rare fourscrew sideplate chambered in .25 Stevens, a rimfire cartridge. The gun had been left in a barn and was totally trashed.

The stock had pieces of steel inletted into the cracked wrist to hold it together. Someone had drilled and tapped those steel plates and used round-headed machine screws. Looking down the bore was like inspecting the sewers of Paris and there was so much pitting and rust on the outside you couldn’t even read the company name marked on the barrel. The customer wanted it restocked, buffed, blued and converted to .22LR.

I tried to get him to agree to a general cleanup and to simply leave it as is but he simply would not hear of it. None of my explanations regarding the cost of the work being more than the gun would be worth or the rarity of the gun made an impression. The tang screws are matching replacements, a nice touch. I’d hate for the screws to be mismatched! At this point, I had a moral dilemma. If I refused to do the work he made it clear that he was perfectly willing to take it to someone else to have the work done.

That put me in a no-win situation as I would simply lose the customer and the gun would be devalued anyway. If I did the work I risked a reputation of ruining valuable collectable firearms. No matter what decision is made, I can promise you someone will criticize it. I know that from experience. Personally, I have come down on the side of serving my customer. My reasoning is simple.

It is his gun and as long as I have taken pains to explain the options and my reasoning, the final decision is his to make and not mine. You may not agree and that is fine with me. In fact, my best friend and mentor disagrees with me completely on the issue and, while I agree with his view that objects of historical interest should not be altered, the guns he refuses to "ruin" get "ruined" anyway. Although he

25 Stevens bore was not salvageable. This gun cries out for a barrel liner. feels good about his decision, he hasn’t saved the gun. The upside of the desecration of a collectable is that a firearm that was not in shootable condition and chambered for around no longer commonly available is put back in use. From the collector’s point of view, I have taken a valuable collectable and turned it into a $100 rifle. From the owner’s viewpoint, I have taken his grandfather’s rifle and brought it back to life.

From my point of view, I have taken a wallhanger, stopped its deterioration and put it back to work teaching kids to shoot. Who’s right? All of us! Each statement is true. Enough philosophy, let’s look at how the job was done. The first step, after being certain the gun is not loaded, is to completely disassemble it. That is rarely as easy as it sounds. Screws that have been rusted in place for a hundred years or so are stubborn and refuse to be removed without a lot of effort.

The secret to removal without ruining them starts with patience. A good penetrating oil like Kroil applied to every place there is a gap and allowed to work overnight might not help every time but it will certainly do no harm. I then go through my Brownells Magna-Tip screwdriver set and find a bit that fits the screw slots as snugly as possible.

I chuck the screwdriver bit into my drillpress, lower the bit into the screw slot and, with the gun clamped firmly in place, I bear down on the drill press handle while turning the chuck by hand. This method keeps the screwdriver bit firmly in the screw slot at a 90-degree angle and does not allow it to cam out. This trick was taught to me by the same friend I mentioned earlier and it will remove all but the most stubborn screws without buggering up the slots.

In fact, it will occasionally See the October 2011 of American Gunsmith to see how it was done in my home shop. twist the head right off the screw if you’re not careful With this project, the disassembly went smoothly until I got to the barrel. Sometime in the past the barrel must have shot loose as both the takedown screw and the barrel shank had been semi-permanently locked in place with a heavy-duty thread locker. No amount of grunting, groaning or my choicest curse words made any impression on them.

In the end I had to resort to a propane torch to heat them to the failure point of the Loctite before it would give up its grip on the barrel. I hate to use heat and I had tried everything else I could think of before resorting to the torch. Not knowing up front if

The rear sight was installed off center at the factory. It was left that way on the refinished gun at the owner’s request. the barrel had been sweat soldered in place or was simply rusted solid made the torch was my last resort. The process of converting the gun from .25 Stevens rimfire to .22 Long Rifle rimfire was relatively simple. A .22 barrel liner drill and .22 barrel liner was purchased from Brownells.

These liners are really terrific and the drill has a pilot on the tip to guide it so that the job can be done with a hand drill if you don’t have a lathe. The fly in the ointment was that the .22 pilot was very loose in the mostly rusted out .25 bore. I carefully measured the diameter of both the pilot and the bore and made a simple sleeve to fit over the pilot to keep the drill centered in the bore.

Once this had been taken care of it was simply a matter of securing the barrel in a padded vise and drilling a really deep hole. The liner can be either soldered or epoxied in place. I used Brownells Acraglas Gel because it is quick, easy and gives along working time without all the heat required to keep solder melted in the barrel while the liner is inserted. Once the Acraglas sets up, the liner is cut flush with the muzzle and chamber end of the barrel.

The muzzle is squared off and crowned, and the chamber is cut with a .22 LR reamer. The reblue was done after all parts were draw filed to remove the pitting, then hand polished and degreased. I used Dicropan IM and the method described in "Small Shop Bluing With Brownells Dicropan IM" (American Gunsmith, October 2011.) An heirloom to be handed down to his children and on. Sometimes you have to stop short of perfection to maintain the integrity of the part.

The most difficult part of many projects involving old, out-of-production guns is finding parts and this project was no exception. Fortunately, the Internet provides a number of sources and I was able to locate a stock and fit it to the gun. With his now devalued rifle, and a lighter wallet, this gun’s owner is happily using the rifle his grandfather taught him to shoot with to teach his own son to shoot.

Despite all the differences of opinion on whether I restored, refinished or ruined this old single shot, that ain’t a bad result. AG