Beautiful Shotgun!

If Don is there tonight I'll ask price.....
But I've shot $20,000 Kreighoffs and this gun was as good or better!
I shoot a Citori XT Trap Golden Clays combo, nice gun but nowhere near the shooter the Longthorne is!
And on the butt subject, it looks like a dowel was installed and the checkering done after. I would imagine the butt would get pretty marked up if it was ever set on it. Only gun I've ever seen with a pattern carved instead of a buttplate was an old SAR .22 single my dad bought my brother for $10 back in the early '60's!
 
Big Bad said:
That's a beauty alright. Double barrels can definitely be considered an artform. I remember reading a story about a NYC gun dealer who had a rich art collector drop in to buy a shotgun to protect his treasures; he left with something like a Purdy that was valued at six figures, and the dealer figured he was a nut. Then the man came back a month later saying he'd just had a special cabinet installed to display the gun and now he wanted a cheap pump action to actually do the protection job. 'I knew I was looking at high art,' he said. 'I had to have it before someone else realised its true value!'
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That was at the original Abercrombie and Fitch store.
 
Btw, the specific gun in this thread is highlighted on the Longthorne website as a custom pinless sidelock built for a client in Canada. They went “pinless” so as to create a better canvas for the engraving.
 
Im glad you shared that beautiful shotgun. How many of those English craftsman were there? Seemingly countless. The "old" tractor shed on our farm had a 10 gauge double hammer gun up the rafters made by E.James and Co. Pretty old thing but cracked block. Once owned a Mortimer, again elegant fine engraving.

I think my love of old doubles came from the first shotgun I ever fired. Our neighbours lent me their L.C. Smith sidelocked double for hunting. What an intro to shot gunning. It wasn't overlying fancy, just some light engraving, fine wood stocked, and deep, deep blued.
 
I was looking at their website and noted something of interest (at least to me). They boast that their 12 bore over and under's have the slimmest action on the market, in other words the height of the receiver is shallower than any other gun at 2.29 inches deep. I just measured some guns of mine and found the shallowest was a Beretta at 2.42 and the highest, a Browning at 2.67 inches.
 
The interesting thing about Longthorne, IMHO, is that both barrels and "rib" are machined from a single billet of steel. None of the costly handwork that is necessary to join and regulate regular barrels is required. There are no hidden spaces that can trap moisture and rust over time. And the barrels, as a single unit, are many time stronger and less prone to being bent or dented than standard barrels.

I suspect the shallowness of the receiver is enabled by something to do with their method of barrel manufacturing.
 
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Possibly, but I think the design of the trunion and lock up as well as the cocking/ejector rods that run in the bottom of the receiver has more to do with the height of the receiver than the design of the barrels. Regardless, they seem to have revolutionized the art of fine gun making!
 
Prophet River said:
Read it in outdoor life in the early 80's, Jim Carmicheal wrote about it, if I remember correctly.
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I bet he got it from the same source then. It was in a NYT piece about investing in best guns, back in those days of hyperinflation when things were really shaky in all the markets. I think that notion mostly died when what seemed like the certainty of gun control started to rear its ugly head. Anyway, in the same period the Times was the most respected news source in the world, but look at them now.
 
I am thinking that off center plug is for a thru bolt and the stock is cast off, so the off center look, a bit strange to me with a cheap screw head.
 
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