A few weeks before my grandfather died he gave me his shotgun.
It was a Spanish V G Bentley that he brought in 1955 for 50 pounds in Sydney but over the years it had seen lots of very hard use on the farm it was used every day for years and would spend a week at a time just lying in the back of a Ute or on the tractor he hardly ever cleaned it and by the time I got it one firing pin was broken and it had lost 6” of barrel to a cousin trying to put a copper solid through a full choke and it had spent a few years in a old outdoor dunny.
I learnt to shoot with that gun when I was 10yrs old and I got my first fox with it when I was 12.
To start with it was covered in surface rust and it still had a broken firing pin in the right hand barrel the wood was stained with years of oil and had some good dints in it
I started by rubbing back the barrels with steal wool and Nycolube 127 until it was smooth and all signs of rust were gone. I rubbed it with Birchwood Casey paste gun blue and continued to do this until it was a nice dark finish.
Next was the wood it had a nice strong walnut stock but due to years of oil soaking in, it was stained very bad so I removed the stock and sprayed it with oven cleaner and let it soak in after 15min or so I plunged it in water for a minute and let it dry (I did this 3 times).
I then sanded the wood with steal wool and applied linseed oil to soak in then I rubbed it back I did this a few times as well.
I sent it to a local gunsmith to make a new firing pin and to test the action he replaced both pins for me and bead blasted the action as well.
I got it back right on it’s 50th birthday and just in time for hunting trip Charleville in QLD on a 200,000ac property.
On the second day we were driving down a bore drain looking of sign of pigs in the bank when we saw 3 pigs walking parallel 150m into the mulga scrub.
We got out and the guys with rifles were going to stalk strait in and I headed about 200m down the drain and moved in line with them into the scrub the idea being that I was best equipped to deal with any running pigs 5min later there was an explosion of gunshots and I could here a crashing through the scrub and a heap of squealing a few seconds later I saw two pigs running my way I moved forward and lined up the biggest one a let rip with a load of SSG’s it hit the brakes and sat there with it’s spine broken I lined it up and gave it the second barrel and it cessed to squeal the second one stoped and looked back which might best be described as a tactical blunder as it soon joined its mate in the land of eternal slumber.