How is a best gun made?

A best gun is a shotgun or rifle built to the highest standard entirely by hand. There is no single maker: the work is split among specialist trades - barrel making, action filing, stocking, lock making, engraving, finishing - and a setter-up fits the bought-in parts until the whole gun opens and closes as one piece of metal. I watched the heart of that trade, action filing, in July 2026 in a Birmingham workshop with Haydn Hill, and saw the firm end of it at Westley Richards the same month.

A best gun is defined by how it is made, not by how much engraving it carries. Every part is worked and fitted individually, to that gun, by hand and by eye - not assembled from interchangeable, machine-finished components. The action is filed until barrels, body and lockwork close with no play and no gap; the stock is shaped and chequered to the customer by hand; the locks are made and fitted; and only then is the whole engraved and finished. A plain best gun with no decoration at all is still a best gun. A heavily engraved gun built from machined parts is not.

So it is not the same as a factory gun, however good, where parts are made to interchange and fitting is minimal. And it is not the work of one pair of hands. In the old Birmingham way the trade was broken into more than fifty separate crafts, and a single gun could pass through some fifty pairs of hands before it was finished. The best gun is the sum of all of them, made to close as one.

The trade's words are worth having.

Setting up is the fitting of all the parts into one working gun; the setter-up, or action filer, is the craftsman who does it. The action is the body of the gun where the barrels hinge and the gun locks shut. In the white means finished in bright, unhardened, unfinished steel, before hardening and engraving. Jointing is fitting the barrels to the action so they hinge true; striking up is filing a surface smooth and flat. A boxlock carries its lockwork inside the body of the action; a sidelock carries it on plates at the sides; a droplock, or hand-detachable lock, carries it on a plate that lifts out of the gun without a tool.

The barrels are made first, or in parallel: tubes bored, joined, struck up and regulated so both shoot to the same point. The action filer takes the rough action body and the barrels and fits them together, jointing the barrels to hinge true and filing the body until the whole thing locks shut with no gap. This is the slow heart of the job. Haydn Hill described it to me as taking metal off a thousandth of an inch at a time, trying it, and taking a little more - by hand, by eye, sometimes with the part held in a flame to read the colour of the steel.

Around that fitting, the stocker shapes the walnut to the barrels and the action and chequers the grip; the lock maker builds and fits the lockwork; and the parts are hardened, so the bright faces the filer left take on their finished colour. Only then does the engraver cut the scroll and the lettering and inlay the gold, and the finisher blacks the barrels and oils the wood. Every stage assumes the one before it was done right, because the fit underneath cannot be corrected later.

The proof of it is a gun that opens and shuts like one piece of metal, with the faces meeting so cleanly there is no daylight between them - a standard you cannot fake and cannot hurry.

The archive has documented the heart of this trade first-hand. In July 2026 it spent a morning with Haydn Hill, an action filer working the old Birmingham way in a workshop that still carries his family's name, doing alone the setting-up that once sat at the centre of a whole city's out-work trade. The same month it went inside Westley Richards, one of the last firms building complete best guns by hand, and up to its engraving bench with Léo Lambert.

It has not yet stood and watched every trade that goes into a best gun - the barrel making and the stocking in particular are still to document - and this entry will only claim what the archive has actually seen. The full account of the craft is the monograph A Best Gun, By Hand; the engraving end of it is gun engraving, and the firm and its history are in A Morning at Westley Richards.

Hand gunmaking is a recognised endangered craft on the Heritage Crafts Red List. A trade that once employed a whole quarter of Birmingham and much of the West End of London is now carried by a small number of firms and a thinning population of individual out-workers, many of them ageing. The specialist trades within it - action filing above all - are the fragile part: a firm can survive the loss of its own filer only if there is another to buy the work from, and there are fewer of those every year.

It is learned by apprenticeship and years at the bench, because the fit that defines a best gun is judged by hand and eye and cannot be taught from a book. Every working filer, stocker and engraver who takes someone on is a load-bearing part of the craft's future. The archive's Learn a Craft directory points to where the trade is taught, and the craft monograph sets out the trade and its history in full.

What makes a gun a 'best' gun?
A best gun is the top grade a maker builds: made entirely by hand to the highest standard, with every part fitted individually rather than assembled from interchangeable components. The action is filed so barrels, body and lockwork close as one piece, the stock is shaped and chequered by hand, and the whole is engraved and finished. It is defined by how it is made, not by decoration alone.

What is action filing, or setting up?
Setting up is the trade of fitting the parts of a gun into one working whole, and action filing is its heart: the hand-fitting of the action - the body where the barrels hinge and the gun locks shut - so that barrels, body and lockwork close with no play and no gap, worked by hand and eye a thousandth of an inch at a time.

How long does it take to make a best gun by hand?
A best gun is the work of many specialists over many months, often a year or more of combined skilled labour. At Westley Richards a hand-detachable-lock gun may take something like six hundred hours of handwork before it is even engraved. The number of hands and hours is exactly what makes it rare and costly.