Original Spanish? Smoothbore

[Blackfeet]

I have been watching this auction all summer (it was listed 7 times with a starting bid of $199) and finally had to bid, I lost my self control and glad that I did. It looked like a pretty fancy unit and the pictures on the auction site did not come close to doing it justice. It is an amazing little gun. It is a roughly 20 ga./62. Someone put a great deal of time into building this one and it weighs only 5.5 lbs The bore is pretty good considering and the nipple actually looks like it is very useable and unharmed. Someone took very good care of this. There are some cracks around the lockplate but it looks to be from age. I believe that the markings put the build at 1844. The ramrod goes all the way back to, or very near the buttplate and the German? lock has external features for half and full cock. i welcome any insights as to it's Pedigree.

I was told that the Spanish inlay reads, Made for Carlos Alonso in Valencia Spain in the year (1844?)

[Blackfeet]

The lock and wedding band (two faces, 180° apart)

[Blackfeet]

The ramrod. As you can see, it appears very short but has a channel cut completely through the wrist and buttstock. Interestingly, this channel is completely hidden even with the barrel out of the stock. The rod is full length, well tapered, and very flexible.

[Blackfeet]

The sights, never seen any like this

[Blackfeet]

stock

[Blackfeet]

Inlays and engraving. There is extensive engraving or inlays on most surfaces

[mongrel]

!!!

I've never seen anything quite like that. Everything in your photos shows a very well-made gun, with a lot of fanciness put into it. Are the inlays in the metal gold, or is there any way to tell?

Evaluating something like this is out of my league, beyond the little bit I've already said. I'd guess you got way more than your money's worth. Hopefully someone else here (or someone else, somewhere, period) will know more. Please share what you might find out!

[beowulf]

very ,very interesting ! you got quite a find there ! would love to know just how old it is and where and by who`m it was made ! I`ve seen the ramrod set up like that before , but it was a .28 gauge percussion shotgun made in spain back in the sixties !

[Rev]

very ,very interesting ! you got quite a find there ! would love to know just how old it is and where and by who`m it was made ! I`ve seen the ramrod set up like that before , but it was a .28 gauge percussion shotgun made in spain back in the sixties !

Me too, but the rod was steel...
Cool!

[Blackfeet]

I am assuming that the inlays are in fact gold leaf. The lock is the one feature that I am hoping that someone will recognize. The spurs on the hammer are the 'notches'. I have not removed the lock but it is held in place by the standard lock screw but something is loosely holding the front of the lockplate. It dawned on me after I had put it away that the ramrod was in place and  might interfere with lock removal as it has to pass through the wrist somewhere. I will send pictures as I get them. What I found impressive is the fit of all the inletting. The swivel plates seem like they had been melted into the wood. Also interesting is the stock finish. There are no obvious signs of having been refinished, yet it is a nice satin finish with sharp lines. The screwheads are not buggered and the lock screw was definately hand made. The stock has very few handling marks.

Another picture of the inlay, in this case a very fine pattern of dots and filigree with a pattern of what appears to be 'L's The bulk of the symbols near the breech are stamped pretty deeply and then filled. The other pics are a shot of the only marking on the barrel, the trigger plate and one picture to show a pattern in the finish or material of the barrel. It looks to be in a slow uneven spiral up the barrel.

[Blackfeet]

Twist?

[Blackfeet]

Well, I found one site selling a blunderbuss from the same period, in this case 1830 with the same stock style complete with swivels so it would appear that the stock style is spanish. The lock seems to be of miquelet style. I found only one picture of a pistol with a spur on the hammer. This one has a notch opposite the spur

[mongrel]

A miquelet (as on the blunderbuss shown) has the mainspring on the outside of the lockplate. The term is actually specific to that feature and not to the overall style of the lock. The Spanish and to a lesser extent the Italians were partial to the type. The miquelet was an early version of the flintlock, invented sometime roughly around 1530-ish, but owing to the popularity of the design there are also percussion miquelet locks as well as conversions of the flinters to percussion. The Spanish were heavily influenced by gun/lock developments in the rest of Europe, around the tail-end of the 18th century and the early years of the 19th, and at that time manufactured a large number of guns with locks that weren't the miquelet style they actually preferred. Being a highly nationalistic people, when there wasn't heavy outside pressure (in this case Revolutionary and then Napoleonic France) "encouraging" them to build conventional inside-spring locks, by and large they built miquelets, even into the percussion era. That detail doesn't prove but strongly indicates the approximate time this smoothbore was built.

The notches on the hammer and the sear operating horizontally (sear nose moves sideways to engage and disengage the notches on the hammer) instead of vertically (trigger bar presses up on the sear arm, sear nose drops to disengage a notch in an inside tumbler, allowing the hammer or cock to fall) were also a design feature used on miquelet locks, as well as other primitive versions of the flintlock. When the lock is removed you'll most likely find the trigger pinned high in the stock, well above the sear, so that when the trigger is pulled it presses BACK instead of UP against the sear arm, and the sear will be anchored to the lockplate so that it pivots sideways instead of up and down. This system was a holdover from wheellock design and persisted in use long after development of the more efficient vertically-moving sear we're used to seeing. Most often the sear nose engaged holes drilled in the inside surface of the hammer, instead of actual visible notches around its perimeter, as on this lock. That may be significant -- small variations on the basic idea often have great meaning to gun experts who know what to look for. Unlike me, just recollecting things I've read and making a few general guesses.

I'd like to see a close-up of the lockplate itself, to get a better idea of whether it's an original percussion or a conversion from flint. On a conversion you will see plugged holes where the frizzen and frizzen spring both were secured to the lockplate, and sometimes if the lockplate wasn't carefully smoothed and refinished you'll find traces of the original pan.

One point I find interesting about this gun -- Rev some time ago showed the gun he mentioned, a smoothbore made in Spain about 40-50 years ago, that had a metal ramrod that slid all the way through the stock of the gun and into the butt. At the time I saw his more-or-less modern version I just thought it had been put together by some manufacturer not knowing the "correct" way to install a ramrod. Now looking at this original gun I realize that I'm guilty of exactly what I mock others for -- a form of tunnel vision that says if something isn't done the way I'm used to, it's somehow wrong. The only "wrong" involved was on my part and due to my knowledge being incomplete. Obviously the maker of Rev's gun was just doing exactly as had been done for a couple or more centuries, in that general region.

Now I know a little tiny bit more than I did, and I appreciate not only seeing this very cool gun but the lesson taught in the process.

I have a book on one of my shelves, here, called "The Flintlock: Its Origin And Development" by a Swedish scholar named Torsten Lenk. It's tedious reading even for me but it's very, very thorough and has lots of fine pictures to illustrate all the general styles and specific details described in the text. If I find time I'll wade into it and see if I can't come up with something about those notches on the hammer.

[Blackfeet]

Prepare to be awed .

To begin with, the slight 'catch' that kept me from removing the lock from the stock was not in fact the ramrod or even a trigger guard screw. It was a pin mounted on the lockplate itself that is inserted into a metal receiving insert in the stock. I assume that this allowed the removal of the lock without dropping it on the floor . The workings of this particular lock are works of art. I half expected a Rube Goldberg method of pulling the sear. What I found was a mechanism that today would be tough to duplicate as there are no manufacturing marks to be found. There is virtually no rust or corrosion. everything is coated in what might be similar to cosmoline.

The sear has an adjustment screw for let-off and the trigger bar is indeed vertical and the actuation lever out to the side.

I realized that I had forgotten to give the sparse information that I had received from the Pawn Shop where I bought it.
I talked to the pawnbroker and was told that the gun came is as part of a collection of about a dozen that the seller's father had collected during his career in international sales. He had mentioned the Middle East, Europe, Eastern Europe and England. The bulk of the collection were even more ornate and oddly shaped guns that from his description pointed to the Arab countries or ottoman pieces, some he said looked like hockey sticks. In reading the inscription on the barrel, it appears to have been presented as some sort of award? At any rate, it has probably been in a collection or hanging on a wall for most of it's existence.

[Blackfeet]

The steel stock insert