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Hi Mehul, this Italian bullpup may well be the work of a renowned master, but a job done on a Monday morning when he had a bad hangover. No, I have never patented any gun design. I think this to be rather futile, as nearly any "new" design idea concerning break-open guns was most likely patented by some forgotten British, French, Belgian or German gunsmith more than 100 years ago. If you care to go through my other posts you will see that I do some gunsmithing myself, but mostly only for my own use. Over the years I have done enough repairs, have looked inside many guns and have watched and investigated some accidents and failures. So I feel quite qualified to tell a good design from a so-so one. This is why I don't like Blasers, all of them, will never stake my life on a Krieghoff double rifle. The "new, revolutionary" Merkel Helix straight-pull repeater leaves me cold after I had a look at it's innards, you simply cannot outwit old Archimedes. Bullpup designs leave me cold. IMHO they are all ill-balanced and butt-heavy. They may be the thing for an one-armed person, but by God's grace I still have two hands and prefer a gun to balance between them. And, with the muzzle so close to your face, muzzle blast and noise is unbearable, especially if the thing is fitted with a muzzle brake. By coincidence I visited the IWA yesterday. An Austrian named Pfeifer showed me his bullpup rifles, www.pfeifer-waffen.at . His are also single-shots, available to order from .22lr to .458 Winchester. These are not prototypes, but custom production guns, available with wood stocks or Kevlar ones. They may be a wee bit longer than your Italian prototype. With a 66cm = 26" barrel over all length runs to 70cm = 27.5", depending on thickness of recoil pad. As I said, I will never buy such a thing nor do I deem it an appropriate hunting instrument, but to my eyes Mr. Pfeifer's creations are much less offending than Signor Rigido's contraption. |