Some built in a longer top strap, extending over the comb, to produce greater stability this was sometimes mirrored by extending the guard strap in a similar manner. Unsurprisingly, gunmakers came up with a number of novel solutions or, at least, designs intended to render breakage less likely or debilitating. You certainly would have no opportunity to have a competent gunsmith deal with the problem for you. It is bad enough if you break your game gun on a pheasant shoot in Surrey, imagine how much worse if you were an explorer or hunter in Africa in the mid 1800s, your most vital piece of equipment ruined and your life perhaps dependent on it. Gunmakers and their customers have wrestled with the problem of stock breakage since the earliest days of the sporting gun. More than an inconvenience, this represents a huge financial outlay, often one that will cost more than the market value of the gun. I have had guns brought in for restocking that have been put on the back seat of a Range Rover and sat on, or leaned back on while in a slip, only for the owner to unslip it for the next drive and find it in two pieces. Any sharp blow in a lateral direction, or leverage of a similar kind, will snap the stock at the wrist, typically around the area where the hand-pin hole is drilled. What these stocks do not respond well to is being dropped or sat upon. If reasonably well cared for, a properly made sporting gun stock will remain in place and intact through hundreds of thousands of fired shots and decades of carriage in the field. There are plenty of examples of stocks made a century and a half ago in regular use that still do their job with confidence and ease. Actually, it is fairer to say they are vulnerable when subjected to stresses they were not designed to withstand. Gun stocks are weaker than you might think. What options do you have if your gun suffers a catastrophic stock break? Diggory Hadoke takes us through the possible solutions
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