mehulkamdar
(.416 member)
05/07/04 01:57 PM
Re: Forgotten and lesser known best gun makers

470 Nitro,

It's sad isn't it? Anna Salai is the new name the politicians gave Mount Road and Madras has been renamed Chennai...
Anyway, the former gunsmiths at P Orr and Sons now all have their own shops. Sammandan and Sons is just a few hundred metres down the road at the corner of Mount Road (I'm not going to call it Anna Salai ever!) and Triplicane High Road, Hindustan Armoury is at Anna Pillai Street, Shikar Armoury near the Luz Circle, Scott and Sons is at Egmore and you have some smaller armouries at Periamet and Nandanam. If you go there, you will definitely see much more than silly air rifles though these days they seem to sell more handguns than hunting rifles or shotguns.
If you would like to see some good double rifles or older Raj Era boltguns in India, you should visit Delhi or Bombay and I could give you the names of some companies there whom you could check with. There are also some good shops in Kanpur and Ranchi but the biggest ones in Calcutta are all gone forever - O C Daw, G M Biswas, Manton etc.
When the Karumuttu Chettiyar people bought the P Orr and Sons company, they kept the name for some time. Now they have renamed the company something else but everyone stills calls it P Orr and Sons. The disgraceful watch showroom is still on the ground floor but the upper storeys have been turned into a garment sweatshop - a sad end to one of my favourite places to go to some twenty five or more years ago. Incidentally, I have occasionally seen some rifles retailed by them under their name on websites including Gunsamerica in the US. The only positive thing is that these guns are probably in much better shapemoutside India than they ever would be over there.
I am not in India at the moment but do let me know if you go there sometime - we could meet for a drink at my club which is not far at all from the old P Orr and Sons office.
Good hunting!



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