See a need, fill a need, become rich.

[englishman_ca]

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v206/ ... itting.jpg[/pic] Simon Young in his rich guy outfit.

Hi, My name is Simon and I am an addict.

A Lee Enfield addict that is. First caught the bug as an ACF cadet and shot the No.4 Always wanted one, but for me that was not a real option living in UK.

I am now an ex pat and live in Ontario, Canada. And guess what? I can own and shoot as many Lee Enfields as I want (or can afford).

My hobby seems to be evolving into Lee Enfield restoration. In Northern Ontario, there are lots of sporterised rifles around. Where I live, rifles are considered just a tool for keeping meat in the freezer. Forget about trying to get your car fixed or calling a plumber to fix yer pipes during deer or moose season, both are considered national holidays up here.

Rifles are to be found in many strange places, most cottages and cabins have one or two stashed away somewhere. Form follows function. Many of these cheap rifles have had the wood cut back by Bubba to make an honest utility rifle. My mission is to restore some of these gems back to their original mil spec.

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Only one of these rifles is original, the top one. The other two are current restoration projects. Both needed full wood which took me years to find.

I am obsessive compulsive in that the parts that i gather have to be the correct with proper inspector marks and manufacturer stamps. Epay is one source, gun shows and other collectors are another.

What I have found is that many of my contacts have full length barrel guns anfd the furnature, but no full length miltitary stock. There is a need for full wood. I know that if I found a warehouse piled high with original spec full length stocks and butts for MLE and Sht LE, I could sell every one of them in short order.

Cogs are starting to turn. I can smell burnt toast (sorry, that's a Canadian joke).

I have spoken to several local gunsmiths who have duplicator machines for making gunstocks from a pattern. They can make me a set of wood if I have a pattern and can wait 12 months for them to get through thier back log.

Hmmm, the light bulb just went on! I see a need.

I am not fishing for orders here, but would like to ask a general question as to whether you think that there is a market for GOOD repro stocks.

I have hooked up with a stock maker in California who has decent utility grade English walnut and a DUPLICATING MACHINE! He can make me as many stocks as I want. Roughed out and needing minor final inletting and final shaping and sanding.

Further investigation tells me that a professional wood duplicator is not out of my reach, about 10k will get me started. Business plan coming together.

So what are your thoughts gents? Brand new, stock sets that have been hand fitted to an action? Final finishing required? MLM, MLE, SHt LE mk.1 with cutouts for volley sights. Oh boy, here we go, I've already started designing my sales catalogue.

And then there is the Martini stable. Possibilities.

All it is gonna take is for somebody to get off their duff and get it together. I can see the potential of selling to a world wide market.

'See a need, fill that need, become rich'

So what do you think? If fit and quality were there, do you think that collectors would buy?

[Tom-May]

Simon,

Find the right place to advertise and I suspect that you could find your arm being torn off in the rush to grab them.

Btw, it's worth checking on the legal side of exporting to (and importing into) your target market(s) outside Canada.

Good Luck

Tom

p.s. I'd be interested in a set, if it came with the rest of the CLLE

[Woftam]

Simon,

I'm an addict also. While I don't have need for the service you envisage (yet) it would be comforting to know it is available. Currently it seems to be at least as difficult (if not more so) locally to source an original barrel as it is to source an original stock. So my "pig-gun", built around an MLE action will stay a pig-gun a little longer.

Other random thoughts on your project are -

I hope you get rich doing what you enjoy.

Someone (Gary Barron ?) was doing this in the US but has closed down. Might be worthwhile investigating why, as well as what happened to equipment and stock.

I believe there is an operation in the UK doing the wood for the MkV, MkIII, MKIII* and No8.

When you say SHt LE MkI are you just talking of the forends or are you going to do the front and rear handguards as well ?

I echo Tom's thoughts on exporting/importing. Australia seems particularly difficult in that regard with anything to do with firearms.

What about markings to identify them as reproductions ? Not casting aspersions on your integrity, but looking beyond the original sale.

Metal fittings, both integral (pins at the rear of the MLE forend) and external (nosecaps) ?

I don't think collectors (in the strictest sense of the word) would be your main market. I think addicts and those with an interest in restoration would be your biggest market. Other markets could be re-enactors (I'd certainly rather take reproduction woodwork out to play than the real thing) and museums perhaps.

How big a market ? Difficult to say. Certainly there would be a significant initial pent up demand, but I don't see there being a steady long term demand. However if the option was there then I for one, would assess sporterised rifles in a different light.

As I said just random thoughts, which you may or may not have considered.

[englishman_ca]

I have continued my research with regards to the manufacture of repop wood and am amazed that there are a number of rifles where stock making is in big demand. mausers, military restos and custom sporting stocks.

All of the smiths that I have talked to have orders that would keep them busy at the duplicator every day. Other work in the shop would suffer so the back log of stock orders builds.

Some good smiths with renowned work are booked up over a year ahead with custom stock work.

Copying the wood and metalwork is not difficult. It just has to be done right, on machinery like the originals.

As for identification as reproduction? I would simply stamp the year of manufacture into the wood in some place that could be easily seen once it was removed from the action.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v206/ ... d_up_2.jpg[/pic]

These were manufactured in England/Germany.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v206/ ... d_up_1.jpg[/pic]

I am thinking more along the lines of 'modern production' rather than 'reproduction' which to me infers an item inferior to the original. Mine will indistinguishable once they have been finished, except they will be brand new. They won't fool anybody that they are 100 years old.

I am a draughtsman by profession and have managed to get some good information from old drawings. I often hold parts in my hand knowing that I could make it, if I only had a tool room and a press shop!

So we will see. I am going to get a dozen test pieces made up. I have friends who are into restoring and have dibbs on every one of them which will keep the cost down for everybody.

I have had some amazingly good stuff come out of Pakistan for testers. They can make top quality stuff when they want to, if they have the right materials, and cheap too. They tend to use older machinery, which is just the right technology to duplicate the manufacturing process.

I will let you know how the California made stock sets work out and I'll post some before and after pics of a couple of Bubba's sad looking rifles.

[tonsper]

Great looking repros. I too am a Lee-Enfield addict. It is seen in my constant search for parts to replace what Bubba has chopped up 'to make it better.' Hope to see your products available.

[Woftam]

Simon,

Those samples look very good. I look forward to the before and after pics.

Modern production vs reproduction is (I think) a semantics issue. If it looked right, fitted right and did the job you could call it reincarnation for all I'd care.

All the best with it.

[dromia]

Hi Simon,

Firstly let me welcome you to these forums and thank you for sharing your interesting project with us.

I have had some peripheral experience of this last year when I helped a gunmaker friend of mine to source furniture for Enfields he was making up from his old parts stock.

The key to it all was price, collectors will pay top sterling for original but the price expectation for modern production/repros is a lot lower. There are people here who make a very good job of restoring Enfields, especially on some of the more esoteric actions, and they are priced accordingly, expensive. They do sell but very slowly as collectors like me will want to save the monmey for when an original comes along and they are too expensive for the average shooter. The cost of the new furniture is a big element here.

The sub continent could offer you the right price however my experience of remote suppliers is that they can be more trouble than they are worth when quality control goes wrong.

However these are the challenges that make such projects worth while and it is overcoming them that gives success.

Good luck

[englishman_ca]

As I understand, Gary Baron, the gentleman making repro wood is no longer doing it. He is in Canada. I have not talked to the gent, but apparantly, his little business was a bit of a hobby and he got too busy doing something else.

Too bad for us because his work was very good, he finish fitted the wood to an action. Well made stuff.

I intend to sell my goods to the restorer, somebody like myself that likes to restore Bubba's rifles back into serviceable shootable condition. I have a number of sporters that all they need is a forearm and furnature, but try to find original replacements. Very difficult. But a new production stock set would be just the ticket. Even a rifle with worn finish looks good if the woodwork is in nice condition. We are talking about shooters not just wall hangers.

I see a rifle that is mechanicaly perfect, sighted dead nuts on, with worn to zero finish but squeeky clean and with a nice grain hand rubbed oil finish walnut stock. That is where I am going with this project.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v206/ ... a/bsa3.jpg[/pic]

These three are my current toys. They are not wall hangers or gun safe queens, I've put hundreds of rounds through them.

I have a couple of Martini projects on the go, also waiting for wood.

There are probably one or two readers of this thread that could put a new wood set or a forearm and handguard to use. How many people would buy that old SMLE if they knew that they could replace the wood and put volley sights back on it without having to mess with wood, just a straight replacement?

I wish somebody was doing it, I'd buy a couple today.

There are two outfits in the UK doing wood for SMLE and Martini. Some of it is modified new old stock from the 50's. Good stuff too!

But nobody seems to be doing it for the Long Toms. Maybe not the demand, but this is an exercise and should be fun.

So for my taste, an old rifle in good shootable condition is a good rifle whether the stock is original or brand new. If it looks identical and fits as well as the factory item, that is all I would want.

Some are concerned with the ethics of repro wood being passed as original. I can relate that to another of my hobbies which is restoring old Jeeps and army trucks. Sure it would be nice to get New Old Stock parts to restore a vehicle, but if the supply of parts is non existant, there is nothing wrong with hand fabricating a replacement. If it looks identical, what's the diff? To me, it is still an original truck.

But a different set of rules apply to guns, otherwise I wouldn't shampoo the engine of an original Jeep because removing the crud would be removing it's history.

Antiques and furnature. There's another one! Sometimes furnature has to be repaired and materials replaced to bring it back. If something is still 66% original materials, it is still considered original. Go further than that and it doesn't count. One typical application of that rule is a dining set of table and four chairs, except that one chair was missing from the set, so parts for one chair are fabricated from new materials. The three chairs are taken apart and reassembled with a third of the replacement parts. Each chair will have 33% replacement parts and the set would still be considered original. I'm talking big bucks high end stuff here, not just Farmer Brown's wooden kitchen set.

So I guess that there are two schools of thought for rifle collecting. Those who look at originality as the key. And those who look at condition.

I can see definate different points of view when I show off some of my rifles. For example I have a No.4 that looks mint but was FTR'd in the fifties. Some collectors think that this downgrades the rifle because it is not as it was first manufactured. Others who collect and shoot would take a look at its mint bore, clean bolt face, its tight headspace and dissagree.

I would go for the shootable rifle before a wall hanger, no matter how original it was. But then again, I might just buy the wall hanger, change the barrel, put new wood on it............

[dhtaxi]

Nice looking rifles by the way.

[Woftam]

Simon,

We all buy our firearms for different reasons, have differing views on what constitutes a desirable rifle and have different uses for our rifles. I think your division into originality and condition camps is really talking about the extremes. Most of us fall somewhere between the two.

I'm with you on the idea of shooting them rather than hanging them on the wall. My rifles run the gamut from completely original to representative sample to only the action is original. And if the woodwork was readily available then I would revisit decisions made not to restore a couple of them.

The antique furniture mob sound a little odd.

66% original parts + 33% new made parts = an original ?

Can't buy that at all. However that may just be the way I look at the world.