Browning: Inventor, Engineer, and Firearms Innovator On January 23rd, we celebrated the 169th birthday of prolific firearms legend John Moses Browning. Browning is commonly coined as the father of modern gunsmithing, and his birthday is one of the most important days on the calendar. Browning’s legacy hasn’t faded one bit over the years. Now, put…
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5 Family Hunting Stories and Traditions Hunting is a long-standing tradition embedded in American culture. In some families, it is a way of life passed down from great-grandfather to grandfather to father to son. Due to hunting being a large part of family life for centuries, there is a wealth of different traditions and legends…
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Gunsmithing Career History Gunsmiths have been around much longer than armorers. First gunsmiths evolved from bellmakers, later they overlapped with watchmakers — wheel locks had much in common with watch mainsprings and escapements, and with furniture makers. The same person didn’t usually work in both fields, but the skill sets overlapped considerably. Armorers, people who…
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Metal Finishes: Bluing, Electroplating, and Spray-Coats Weather isn’t always kind to steel: rust never sleeps. For the first six centuries of its existence, guns also had to deal with corrosive residues, first from black powder residue forming sulphuric acid, then from salts from mercury-based primers. First gun finish was bluing, a form of carefully controlled surface oxidation.…
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Competitive Shooting Sports: An Introduction In this month’s discussion I will introduce you to the world of shooting sports. Firearm shooting competitions have been around as long as firearms have been in existence. In the United States, in the late 1700’s “Turkey Shoots” were organized to test the abilities of the local population. The prize,…
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How Does Trap and Skeet Shooting Differ? Trap and skeet shooting are two clay shooting sports in which participants shoot moving clay targets in various conditions. These sports originated as practice rounds for gunsmiths to shoot without harming live birds. But due to the rise of animal rights, these practices have grown into their very…
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A Brief History of Shooting Competitions and Firearms Competitive marksmanship predates not only firearms but bows and arrows: games like bocce, skittles, and cornhole emphasize accuracy, while discus, javelin, and hammer throwing emphasize range. By Medieval times, archery and crossbow competitions were famous enough to give rise to lore of Robin Hood and Wilhelm Tell. Unsurprisingly, those…
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A History of Hunting with Firearms While the history buffs are cracking their knuckles excitedly and getting ready to refute my every word, everyone else is remembering the puddles of drool they left on their desks while their history teachers droned on in class. But before you prepare yourself to feel a drowsiness that rivals…
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