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For the last couple weeks I've been lurking around the Double Rifles forum and have to admit I'm a bit intimidated by the diversity (and price!) of many of the doubles discussed here. During the last couple years I've refined my gun collection, sold and traded off many, upgraded the better pieces with calibers and actions more to my personal tastes. I prefer newer production with exposed hammers (and minimal or no litigation driven "improved" safeties and action redesigns) - 1/2 cock works just fine thank you! I've recently bought and traded off modern production and custom Browning and Winchester lever actions and single shots and finally have refined my shooters to freshly rebored (plus a couple rebarrels) single shots in traditional older U.S. calibers: 50-110 Win, 45-90 Win, 30-40 Krag, and 25-35 Win. I've traded off or sold all of my new production Winchester lever actions (couldn't learn to love their rebounding hammers and firing pins and tang safties) and replaced them with '80's production Browning Win. copies - traditional 1/2 cock hammer safety but in modern steel and heat treat. I still have to finish my Browning 71 lever rebarrel from 348 to 45-90 having sold my Browning 71 50 Express, either extensively rework or sell my remaining Browning 1886 45-70, and am counting the days till my Browning 1895 30-40 comes back rebored to 405 (along with my rebored 25-35 single shot).

I do love loading and shooting the older rimmed cases - guess 50 years ago as a youngster spent too many hours reading of Teddy Roosevelt's adventures, and a little later Hemingway and Ruark, and Corbett's Tiger hunting - but finally deciding that I'd likely never hunt Africa, or the East or South America and by my late teens planned instead to homestead in Alaska or coastal B.C., possibly guiding in big bear country. The bigbore Winchester levers made sense for me, but the custom guns were out of reach financially and I trained as a tool & diemaker and found a master gunsmith mentor, and finally 35 years ago ended up in Maine, married and mortgaged to an old 90 acre farm, alternately working at various jobs (included managing a toy/hobby store for 10 yrs - "hobbyguymaine"!) and running my own machine shop. My younger daughter will graduate from college this year, we've just moved into our new and smaller "retirement" home on the 26 acres we kept - feeling the squeeze of urban sprawl.

A couple years ago my my Mom passed away suddenly leaving a small inheritence, and since she'd always been very vocal regarding my "unrealistic daydreams", I felt there was some poetic justice in investing in some better quality firearms! After years of perceiving my new gun price slot in the $200- to $500- max range, along with at times selling rifles to pay off a bill - buying a NIB rifle for a $1,000 + and immediately shipping it out for a $500- rebore and new sights etc. has eaten up most of that cash! I've also upgraded my reloading tools and bought enough components to reload for years and I'm now really pretty satisfied with what I've got ... except ... does anyone else ever fantasize while carrying a double or bigbore in heavy cover? Unlikely I'll ever get to Alaska much less Africa, but that DR lust and fascination (along with the tool & diemaker's love of fine metalwork!) has been here for nearly 50 years! I've carried short barrelled Rossi hammer side by side shotguns during bird season and while night investigating 4-legged prowlers around our livestock, and a hammerless tang safety double would be foreign to me, though even 40 years ago I'd always page through Gun Digest, ignoring bolt actions but studying the DR listings. Since the first ones showed up in North America I've been aware of the Pedersoli Kodiak 45-70s and their controversial reveiws, and with my own first centerfire 40+ years ago being a 45-70 single shot, and still my cartridge of choice for most of my hunting, the only stumbling block was the price and that stumbling block get's a little higher every year!

By way of introduction, Joe (hobbyguymaine)

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