It's really not too bad, KJOHN; I am more interested in HOW they work than how WELL they work on the range. With the health problems I have had in the last few years, I will never amount to much on a rifle range again.
But there are still all those neat ACTIONS to collect. Just this week I paid this month's toy budget..... for a ZULU shotgun. Thing is, there never was a real "Zulu" gun (apart from some marked as such) and it is highly unlikely that a Zulu ever saw one. They are French Tabatieres (Snuffboxes), which are unlicensed, relatively crude and unsafe copies of the Snider, made mostly from French smoothbore Muskets going back at least to 1822. A lot of them are chambered for a 12-bore 2-inch shell, which is what I intend to shoot in the thing..... with .690" 480-grain round balls. With a plastic wad/cup, accuracy should be at least equal to what the guns originally put out in military service: a man-sized target at 100 yards will be hit most of the time, given that it is REALLY unlucky.
And that's enough for me. I'm having fun, I'm still learning about the things and it is an ACTION that I don't have for reference.
Likewise, I am more than willing to take a grody old Werndl which would never be a display piece, just so long as the ACTION is there and the bore is shootable. With a half-decent Werndl to play with, I won't have to sell the cat and mortgage the house to get a SOPER if one shows up: the Soper action was closer to a Werndl than it was to a Snider..... and I already have a Snider.
To me, condition of the inside of the thing is everything; condition of the outside means very little. This is why my "collection" largely looks like a junkyard. Apart from a few nice pieces and a very few minty ones, most of mine have been rode hard and put away wet...... and I have always been like this. I searched for years for a 1911 Steyr pistol, back when none were available and the Internet did not exist. When the Chileno Steyrs hit the market, I was working in Central Newfoundland. Tom Bongalis phoned me at work...... from North Vancouver...... to ask if I was still looking for one. I said "yes", of course, so he told me what they were going for. Well, it was really a no-brainer so I started to say something and Tom cut me off. "Don't even bother saying it, George," he said, "You don't care what the outside of it looks like but you want the best barrel I have. I've already got it picked out for you; here's the serial number......!"
That old gun with its Krnka torque-locked rotating barrel is absolutely the Cat's Meow. With that kind of technology available, 102 years ago, I have NO idea why the Browning dropping-barrel design has even survived! As a consequence of getting this one, the only NEW gun I am interested in trying out would be one of the new Jordanian Vipers, which is a Wildey improvement on the Krnka system.
But a Werndl will show up, one of these days, for a very good reason: the ones which hit the market back in the '60s were in STORAGE for many years. Armies do not STORE junk: they scrap it. But if they had one in storage, it might have been bashed-about and ugly, but it would have been serviceable, more or less. It might not ever be the centrepiece of a fine collection, but I can still learn from it..... and that's what I want.
