All,

Thank you.

Buying this piece from GNG was a good experience for me. I hadn't heard of them prior but after dealing with them on the subject double I look forward to doing business with them again. If anything they undersold some of the nice features. The openness and honesty of Joe and his staff was a welcome relief after dealing with a couple, fortunately rare, "operators" in my search for a high-end clamshell.

As to knowing who the maker is, I'm still in the dark. I've included a couple pictures of some stampings on the barrels that have yet to be identified. They're not that easy to see but if you look close there are two squares with what looks like a "K" inside of each. One set (stamped on the .280 Ross SXS) is a little clearer than the other which I found on a Greifelt clamshell (upper portion of picture). Most often these marks have to do with the barrel maker but I am not sure at this point. The other stamps are standard issue proof marks. There are two stamped letters that look like "DH" on the barrels as well but they are probably inspector stamps. I haven't seen a blitz action Greifelt clamshell and I don't see them noted in an early Greifelt catalog that I have so perhaps it's not a Greifelt. Of course there is that chance that the person ordering this piece didn't want the screws and pins that run through the side panels of an Anson & Deeley boxlock messing up his game scenes so he (or she I suppose) insisted on a blitz action, who knows? In the Autumn 1997 Volume 8 Issue 8 of The Doublegun Journal Fredrik Franzen wrote that there was a thought that Otto Selisch of Wiesbaden specialized in making clamshell receivers and sold them to the various gun manufacturers in Germany. In recent correspondence with Fredrik he told me he now believes that many manufacturers, most notebly the Merkel folks, made them.

What would please me more than knowing who made the piece would be knowing who ordered it. I'm not sure if the gold and platinum initials on the top lever are "MR" or "RM" but whoever this person was they did not skimp on goodies.

It's all these little mysteries that make collecting the German arms a bit of a challenge, for those of us who are always curious.

Regards,

Marcus