"In olden times, when weapons were not so varied in style, a good gunsmith was a national treasure, a cherished craftsman-artist, importuned and honored."
Here is a thread where we can post about talented gunsmiths and their gun shops.
We'll see if it flies or not.
Let me start with an article about Dan Dwyer of Mission Hills California. I heard about him in a thread by BigdaddyUSMC.
That follows is a newspaper story. It is a old story from the LA Times but I thought members might enjoy it.
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Top Gunsmith Repairs the Best : Weapons: Dan Dwyer repairs rare and beautiful weapons, work that is beyond the skill of ordinary firearms experts.
In olden times, when weapons were not so varied in style, a good gunsmith was a national treasure, a cherished craftsman-artist, importuned and honored.
Nicolas Noel Boutet--"Boutet of Versailles"--was such a man. Henry Hadley of England was another. So was Michele Lorenzoni of Florence. There were others.
A man such as these, a creator who could design a gun and make it and maybe decorate it too, was singular, distinguished.
Dan Dwyer of Mission Hills is such a man. Of course, weapons are more numerous and varied now, and the world has become so crowded that his fame does not spread across the entire land.
He may be unknown nationally, but in San Diego County, Dwyer is the man to see about repairing a rare and beautiful weapon, work that is beyond the skill of ordinary gunsmiths. Around San Diego County, when someone has a problem an ordinary gunsmith cannot handle, or if someone owns a rare and beautiful weapon that, for repair, should be entrusted only to a sine qua non , the call is usually for Dwyer.
Whatever it is, they say, Dwyer can do it. "I had a 200-year-old, double-barrel flintlock English pistol, willed to me by an ancestor," a customer said recently at Dwyer's shop. The customer, who asked not to be identified so burglars would not try to liberate his weapons collection, wanted the old pistol in working order, even though he would fire it only a few times for sport and then display it in a case.
"Dan had to remove the barrel, had to unscrew it, to plane it. He had to make a wrench, with hand threads, like the barrel had, in order to do this," the customer said. Dwyer also had to make several parts for the antique weapon. He did everything necessary. And the gun worked perfectly. "I'll never forget that," the customer said. Then he said it again, awed, and added, "The average gunsmith wouldn't have known what to do.
"
The customer had stopped by with another museum piece, this one made in Scandinavia with one long rifle barrel and two shotgun barrels. It was about 200 years old, was not working properly, and he wanted it restored. Dwyer would know what to do. "He's the last of the masters," longtime friend and customer Bert Wright said. "He's a true artisan."
Wright, who was on the San Diego Police Department Revolver Club from 1952 until retiring from the force in 1981, and who was team captain and coach for much of that time, competed with pistols Dwyer made.
"He made special barrels and put them on .38 (caliber) Smith & Wesson frames," Wright said. "There's a recoil factor you want to lessen." (Dwyer obviously lessened it, because Wright is known as a crack shot.) "Dan's a master machinist. What he can do with a lathe. . . . I used to just stand around in his shop and watch him work."
And this from Bruce Cavanaugh, a co-owner of long-established Krasne's Gun Shop, downtown:
"I've never known any work of his to go wrong. He takes his time. He's very, very, very careful of his reputation. He's selective concerning what he'll take on, the gun and the person. His reputation is much larger than his list of customers because of his selectivity."
Dwyer, 83, is the senior gunsmith in the county. His shop, Sportsmen's Equipment Co. at 915 W. Washington St., is a large and dusty machine-filled room that has been his headquarters since 1964. Before that he worked nearby in Hillcrest, where he also sold guns and fishing tackle.
It was in Hillcrest in about 1952 that Dwyer repaired what he said was the most expensive gun he has worked on, a two-barrel English-made Purdey shotgun "valued then at $15,000 to $18,000, today $27,000 to $30,000." The oldest he has worked on were flintlocks from the period of the American Revolution and German matchlocks from the 1600s, weapons so primitive that they were fired by the user holding a slow-burning match to the powder in the breech.
In a 1955-1964 hiatus from gunsmithing, Dwyer was on the federal payroll as an engineer working on missiles. That, too, is part of his story: Despite his reputation as the longest-established and probably best gunsmith in San Diego County, Dwyer has never called gunsmithing his main toil.
"Gunsmithing has always been an avocation with me," he said. "My life has been almost entirely with the armed services. For the last 25 years, gunsmithing has been play, mostly, or I wouldn't have done it, because it's not the best-paying."
But he was "born to it," he said, possessing an adventuresome mind and an inordinate skill with tools. A good gunsmith, he said, must be in tune with the shooters. "It's a combination of experimenting with the different things that come up and a great deal of ability to mechanically contrive--and some degree of artistry. The woods are literally full of gunsmiths, and a hell of a lot more that profess to be and some that really are.
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