Working with a stuffer, the cycle is remarkably fast.
Once reloaded, the hammer is pulled to cock and the gun is ready to fire.
To open the gun, the shooter only needs to move the lever - no need to touch the hammers. It has the same Jones lever, but this time with rebounding hammers, which dispense with the half-cock position. Though the Thorn did well, the next gun was faster still. A gun with good weight distribution, easy to move and with weight between the hands is a faster, more instinctive gun to shoot than a barrel-heavy over-and-under. The gun should also be fitted so that it shoots flat - the eye looking straight down the rib, not like many game guns that are set to show a lot of rib and throw 60% of the pattern high. It has to be sharp focus on the bird, move with it, mount on it and fire as the butt hits the shoulder, moving the gun as you do so. You don’t have time to mount the gun and swing or track the target. This helps a mount-late, shoot-fast style. For grouse shooting, you benefit from a stock shorter than your usual length. In fact, of all the guns used, it may be the best grouse gun in the battery. Once closed, the hammer has to be pulled further back, to full-cock, before it can be fired.Įven this, the slowest of the guns used, was surprisingly effective. The shooter has to rotate the lever back to its closed position manually. The Thorn has a Jones-patent rotary underlever, which is inert, meaning there is no spring to return it to closed automatically when the gun is shut. The first move is to pull the hammers back to half-cock, then operate the lever to open the gun and remove the empty cartridge case. Without half-cock, the hammer would continue to press the striker into the cartridge cap, effectively bolting the gun shut. This enables the gun to be opened and reloaded. Half-cock sits the hammer clear of the striker, but in a position from which it cannot be fired. Prior to about 1867, it was necessary to move the hammer to two positions during operation. The slowest of the guns was the Thorn, which has non-rebounding locks. Shooting single guns with a ‘stuffer’, rather than double-gunning with a loader, we kept up a rate of fire that surprised most observers. The beauty of clays is that they are plentiful, regardless of the breeding season, which has been poor on most moors this year due to snow in May.Įven a rotary under-lever gun can be re-loaded fairly rapidly, if the correct technique is practised. The shooting varied, as does a real grouse day, with butt changes ensuring that some ‘grouse’ were direct incomers at speed, others were crossing the horizon and, on the end butts, long, lone birds slipped down to the left or right. How would they perform in the company of a group of shooters using modern guns? I decided to take four guns - an 1885 Stephen Grant 16-bore sidelever hammergun an 1873 Thompson 12-bore Jones underlever hammergun an 1874 W Thorn 12-bore Jones underlever hammergun and an 1885 Purdey 12-bore toplever hammergun. Any issues with a gun are quickly exposed under these conditions. Packs of grouse put the pressure on to fire and reload fast. Driven grouse demands fast reactions and a gun that is instinctive to get on to a target that may be visible only fleetingly. Any mechanism merely requires practice to become second nature. They handle better and are not as slow to load as some think.
I contend that older guns are as reliable as modern guns, perhaps more so. People think they can’t cope with the repeated shooting on a hot peg or are unreliable, slow to load or fiddly. I hear a number of criticisms of old guns. Ideal for fast grouse coming over a short horizon. The beauty of these old guns is their perfect weight distribution and controlled speed of movement. Want to buy a single issue of Shooting Times, Sporting Gun or Airgun Shooter?.Choosing the right bullets for deer stalking.British deer: A guide to identifying the six species found here and where to stalk them.Country hotels offering shooting facilities.
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