What did I buy

Here is a long Newfoundland gun.
No trigger guard is typical. Originally had a dog catch on the hammer as a safety.

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No, I haven't.
Have shot these. The large one is a Belgian 8ga double, the smaller an English 14ga.
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Quite the difference in barrel size! I'm curious. Is there a maker's name on the Belgian gun? Seems a lot of Belgian guns from back in the day are void of any identifying maker's mark.
 
The Belgian has no maker's name. It is a big gun. Too heavy for snapshooting. Checkering is worn off the forend by being carried over the shoulder.
 
Here's two more. The one on the left is a 6 guage or in Newfoundland it would be a 7/8 ths. 52" barrel and weighs about 14 lbs. It appears to have been made as a flintlock around 1800 then converted to percussion by a black smith in Newfoundland. The hammer is a pretty rough forging. Forgot to mention that I have shot the gun.

cheers mooncoon

 
mooncoon said:
Here's two more. The one on the left is a 6 guage or in Newfoundland it would be a 7/8 ths. 52" barrel and weighs about 14 lbs. It appears to have been made as a flintlock around 1800 then converted to percussion by a black smith in Newfoundland. The hammer is a pretty rough forging. Forgot to mention that I have shot the gun.

cheers mooncoon

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My FIL is from Change Island; he still speaks of the 7/8 ths guns. LOL
 
The beast showed up yesterday. I was told the lock didn't function, which it didn't. After getting it removed, it worked fine on half and full ####. In fact, the lock internals look quite nice. The problem was, the trigger was seized. After cleaning up the lock and freeing up the trigger, the lock functions fine. It took a bit but I was finally able to get the tang screw out and removed the barrel. I only spent about 20 minutes on the bore so far but what cleaning I did do revealed a lot of rifling left. I still got more cleaning to do to remove crud build up from the grooves. But I believe the bore will be good enough for actual shooting if one wanted to. I was quite surprised to find no cracks behind the lock plate and no cracks in the barrel channel. Both areas of wood look very nice.
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I find the lines of the rifle quite pleasing. It has trim appearance for such a big bore aided by the back action lock no doubt. The single barrel back action percussion is an interesting line of development.
 
Well it's all cleaned up and back together. It actually looks better than my photos make it look. Functions just like it should so ready for another war, lol. I made a crude buttplate out of copper for now. When I'm out at the cabin where my shop is I will make a nicer one out of steel. I was going to make a front barrel band, thinking that the front band now was likely the middle band after being cut off. Then I realized the stock has not been cut, just the barrel. So making the type of front nose piece/band it had might be tricky. I did some more looking online and I believe I found the exact gun which is a French M1840., shown in my last pic. I measured the bore. From land to land I get 0.792. Would it have been classified as 80 caliber? From groove to groove I get 0.829.
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