Great subject. Ooooh, I'll play!
To add to Londonshooter's articulated-but-fixed fore-ends, here is another Gustave Masu:
And a gun signed Robert Marrison of Norwich, with a Belgian copy of a Beatus Beringer action made by Jean Louis Mathieu Godin of Herstal, Belgium:
Then there is the immoveable fore-end of the Bastin action, from the Bastin Brothers of Hermalle-sous-Argenteau, Liège, on another gun from Gustave Masu:
Contrasted with a superficially similar but wholly different action, by Maximilien Nicolas Colleye of Liège, Belgium, on this gun retailed by August Gottlieb Schüler of Suhl:
Here is an earlier version of the Lefaucheux action Brybenn pictured above, this one on a gun signed Châlet, Père et Fils of St. Étienne:
To make the point anything is possible, you have the combination of a detachable wooden fore-end along with a Lefaucheux lever, like on this one by Jean-Baptiste Rongé et Fils of Liège:
And then, you have the weird and wonderful world of bar-in-wood hammer guns, where everything is done to hide the fact there is an articulated fore-end at all.
Here is a John Blissett of London with the Joseph Vernon Needham patent side-lever fastener:
A semi-hidden bar-in-wood by Reuben Hambling of Salford, Manchester:
Exquisite bar-in-wood by Parker, Field & Sons of London:
Another bar-in-wood by William Powell & Son of Birmingham:
And to finish, two bar-in-wood guns with the "crab-joint" by Westley Richards of Birmingham:
Pull-lever action:
Rotating lever action:
As you can tell, the matter of the fore-end on a breech-loader is of great interest to me, very much a part of the earliest development of the breech-loader.
