Oh, how I wish I had 10 grand sitting around!!!

https://www.gunsamerica.com/9271499...ey-Richards-by-Thomas-Bland-and-Sons.htm

Valued at 100 grand if restored?? I smell a rat...only 10 k...humm
Why would you restore it..wouldn't you want every battle scar..

I thought it might be a 7 X 57 of his!

Well it is a double rifle.

Once when I was in a collectors firearms store, a beautiful Pre '64 M70 in my hands the clerk said "this rifle once belonged to the actor Clark Gable". Does that effect the price I said as I handed it back to him. I feel the same way about any celebrity's rumored property.
I wonder how much an autographed piece of paper would be worth?

Thought Bell used a bolt action .318?

Also,isn't the ammo for the .318, a 250 gr bullet?

I thought it was a 215 gr. bullet....

No matter, the 180 grainer, especially for a man who like " Long parallel sided bullets" raises a little red flag...


That plus the seller didn't know how to spell 'provenance'...

Don't be too hard on him Ingwe, he does know how to spell 'bullshit'.

From the link:



I have my copy of "Wanderings" to hand. In Chapter IX, Bell tells of his hunting in Liberia in 1911. "Here I landed with my little camp outfit and a decent battery, comprising a .318 Mauser and a .22 rook rifle."

More references to the .318 Mauser follow. The next chapters concern his hunting along the Bahr Aouk river between modern Chad and the CAR. "I had a .318 and a .22." One could suppose that the Bahr Aouk hunt took place directly after Liberia, but I don't see a date in my quick scan of the pages.

Bell recounts having double rifles in calibers above .40 in Africa, but says that he seldom used them after discovering the usefulness of, first, the .256, then the .275 (he sometimes called it a .276) and then the .318; all in bolt actions.

Bell may have once owned a .318 double, but I don't see a reference to it in "Wanderings of an Elephant Hunter." Maybe a closer reading could find it.

Bell didn't fully explain in his books a lot of what he did. In chapter XIII of "Wanderings" on "Buffalo", he wrote: "On one occasion when in want of meat I hit a cow buffalo in the lungs with a .22 high-velocity bullet."

Was it a Swift? He doesn't say. Doesn't say when he did it, either.

If he has a letter from Thomas Bland and Sons that shows WDM Bell took delivery of this rifle, then it's likely good. The old English gunmakers kept very good records. When W. J. Jeffery's was acquired by Holland and Holland, I asked H & H to research my Jeffery's. Not only did they oblige, but they produced the orginaly build ledger complete with the craftman's signature and gave me a copy of it. If they have something similar for the Bland, I'd be good with it.

The "$100k if restored" statement I'm sure was just a casual observation, as in "if this gun were built new today it would be a $100k gun". That's a bit inflated, but the price of H & H Royals and Purdy's aren't that far off.

On the other hand, $10k for ANY classic English double rifle in an over .30 caliber is a good price.

Think the 215 gr was used in the .303 British.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.318_Westley_Richards

Be damned,there was a 180 gr load for the .318.

318 from the Kynoch site:

318 Rimless Nitro Express

Developed by Westley Richards around 1910 for use in their Mauser type bolt action rifles this has been and still is a very popular round for use against non-dangerous game.

180gr@2700 fps
250gr@ 2400 fps.
-------------------------
It is a rimless cartridge, so it would be unusual. Thomas Bland & Son no longer exist, but their records are kept by Woodcock Hill. They are on the net.

Also, a bespoke Holland or Purdy (sidelock) will run north of 200K...and quite a long waiting list.

Jorge I beat me to it, I owned a 318 W-R and 180 and 250 gr .330 dia bullets are what you use, its pretty much a hand loading deal now! At the time I thought it would be kind of cool to shoot and hunt with, that was short lived, you can get the same thing pretty much out of a 338-06, I just when back to my 338 winchester, less of a problem with finding or making ammo!

Woodleigh makes a 250 gr .330" soft and solid for the .318 WR.

Buyer beware...I'd like to see the letter of provenance.

180 grain bullet would be the proper "express" loading of that cartridge.

10k is a little over-priced for that rifle without provenance. With solid provenance, 10k is comfortably under-value for that rifle.

So since it seems to fall somewhere in the middle, it makes me wonder about how solid the provenance is.

Always buy the gun, not the story.

If indeed its Bell's rifle and regulated for the 180 Express loading, its highly doubtful it ever got used on elephant....would make a good meat gathering rifle, and he did plenty of that.

The provenance would be something very easy to verify by serial number and Bland's records that are readily available as I posted above. That said, according to the seller there is a letter with a supposedly very clear trail, that and the fact Taylor's RIDICULOUS idea of ejectors making noise so he had them disconnected in his doubles lends credence.

Bell didn't have a lot of love for doubles.
he complained of dirt and dust getting into them and vegetation preventing them from being snapped shut.

Those Brits know how to put a double together, don't they?

Beautiful.

Seems to now be sold or removed...

I remember in one of Bell's books him talking about a 318 double that he discontinued using because it would split cases. Turns out later, when checked, one of the chambers was oversize.

I could totally be misremembering though.

Did Ingwe buy it? He needs a new heavy rifle since I have his old one.

No. His new heavy rifle is a 6.8spc in a bolt gun......


One day you'll see it on GB for tens of thousands....

Pesos?

I once had a pre-64 '06, reportedly stocked by Walter Abe in CA for John Wayne. Beautiful gun, but I couldn't get documentation. It was pretty heavy and I traded it.

We know that John Wayne had a large collection of rifles and Walter Abe made rifles for him.

Without provenance documentation, you don't have anything other than what you're holding...

DF

Was Walter Abe responsible for the .460 Van Horn rifle that Bob Hagel used for an article?

Not sure.

He was a premier gunmaker in LA back in the day.

DF

Yup,he did along with Gil Van Horn. The .460 VH is a .460 Wby shortened to 2.50" so it would fit in a standard length Mauser.

Just guessing but the .460 VH is an early version of the .460 A-Square.

Is that the short version of a real wabbit gun like your .460?

DF

Yup,it is.

Here you go DF.

http://www.gunbroker.com/Item/587200713

Nice.

Walter Abe did good work. The grip shape is same or very similar to the one I had.

Maybe OK for smaller wabbits, doubt it'll penetrate like your .460.

DF

Yup,the VH is lacking in the penetration for NM rabbits.

Did it happen to be a 257 Roberts?

That .460 VH on gun broker was used by Bob Hagel for his article on that cartridge.

If that can be documented, the gun becomes more interesting and potentially a bit more valuable.

DF

From the pics in the article and the pics on gun broker is how I came to that conclusion.

Most telling is where .460 Van Horn and just to the right is the (I think) number 10. That matches the pic in the article,along with the pictures of the stock (grain flow in the butt) and muzzle brake.

Stock grain, if prominant enough to photograph, is not too unlike a fingerprint. Pretty good documentation.

Good match.

DF

Just wish I had the money to buy it.

They're asking a premium.

It doesn't look like they know what you know and can document about provenance, or that info would be all over the listing.

I'm not sure how much they'd bump the price, armed with this info. They may already be at the top of the market, maybe over, not sure. It's hard to price a one of a kind item.

DF

Think they are going by the name Walter Abe and nothing else. The price seems to be at the top. Wait long enough,might be able to talk them down to a lower price.

The Thomas Bland & Sons double rifle in .318 WR was indeed owned by Walter Bell and used in Africa by him on elephants. It was lettered to him by Bland and I have corresponded with the owner.

Bell used more than one rifle in .318 WR and gravitated to using the caliber just prior to WW1 once commercial ammunition because more reliable in that cartridge, and then on the safari that he did after the Great War with Wynne-Eyton. (He even took more than one of the same safari, he wrote of having a long and short-barreled .318.)

Its true that Bell used a 7x57 to shoot most of his elephants (around 800 with the 7mm alone) but he basically replaced it with the .318 in later years, although he also experimented with the .350 Rigby and the .416 and probably others as well. He loved his firearms.
His last élephant gun was a take-down Springfield rifle in .318 WR. (Which he never got to use in Africa though)

As far as I can find out he only had used one double in .318. This rifle from Bland is almost certainly the gun that he wrote of using to shoot comorants out of the sky (just using up ammo - he had six thousand rounds of it), and some nearby Italian sportsmen thought he was using a shotgun, and were amazed to find it was the rifle.

Bell had had ammunition problems with the .318 Ammo of the time, causing three out of ten rounds to misfire. Plus this particular rifle has been found to have a headspace issue with one barrel, which would have split the case heads on the the older brass. These issues caused him to give up using it and go back to his 7x57mm on that particular expedition.

The rifle is regulated now for the 180 grain bullet, yes, and BEll used a 250 grain solid load on elephant. But remember he stopped using this rifle on safari probably around WW1 - and either kept it by or sold it. Since then it probably had a decent hunting life in other hands, and to find it regulated for a 180 grain load is unsurprising, it would have been more appropriate for red stags in Scotland.

A lot of his decisions made back in that time were informed by bullet performance and poor cartridge reliability of the time, to an extent we don't consider nowadays, and not just simple caliber selections we might think of now.

A .303 that works every time with good FMJ ammunition that always goes off and extracts reliably is more useful than a big bore where the bullets don't hold together, the action cannot be closed when its dirty, and the cartridges have unreliable primers.
HIs safaris were months long affairs hundreds of miles walk from any resupply, reliable ammunition was important.

For example, the .303 was the most reliable ammunition of the day, (he wrote, the only British ammunition that was) being military, that and the DWM 7x57mm. Sporting ammunition of the time was not, witness the issues he had with the .318. Bullet performance as well, he might have been more receptive to larger bore rifles if the bullets did what they should. He was unimpressed with the bullets for the .416 for example, where the solid bullets behaved more like soft points.

Its tempting to think that his african rifle choices were foreshadowed by his earliest hunting experience there, when he was sixteen years old and his .450 single shot hollow point bullets used to blow apart on the hides of animals, and his .303 wouldn't extract at all due to bad cases.

Bell's hunting took place right at the beginning of smokeless high velocity commercial ammo development. It took a long time for sporting ammunition to become as reliable and effective as we take for granted today.

This doesn't mean that it was the major reason why he went with small bores - after all, he wrote emphatically that he believed the small calibers killed as effectively as the larger bores and were much easier to shoot. But that reliability - plus the heavy recoil he experienced shooting the doubles off the bench with Fraser - was why he chose small-bore military calibers in military-designed bolt actions on his first safari's.

It was a .22 Hi power. He used a Savage in Africa and later (1928) he bought a Rigby Mauser in .22 Hipower, for hunting in Scotland.
In an article he wrote that he shot 26 buffalo in one afternoon with the .22 Hi-power, with the standard 70 grain soft point bullet, killing them all with lung shots. He doesn't say exactly when, but it was in West Africa so I am picking it was just after the war.

The Bahr Auok trip took place after WW1, probably over 1919-1920, with one of his flying mates from the RFC during the war.

The .220 Swift Winchester 70 he used only in Scotland on red deer.

So, it seems stunt shooting didn't originate here on the Fire...

DF