In a way I feel it is appropriate, that as we publish our second edition of the Bicentenary book, we are also in a position to finally deliver our Bicentenary 'Ovundo'! This is gunmaking deliveries at their very swiftest! I regret, I can't actually remember if this gun ever had a remote chance of making the Bicentenary year, if it did it has certainly failed miserably!
With that admission made, I would like to thank the client both for his most generous commission and also for his patience whilst we made the gun, I know his fuel bill for visits during the period were huge that I even, at one point, offered him an apron and full access to the workshops to supervise the job!
The 'Ovundo' is a special gun for us and we only 'give one out' very rarely. The gun is a hand detachable lock, single selective trigger gun which has been engraved by Paul Chung.
The Opening side ports of the gun, showing the single trigger working parts.
11 comments
Your cart is currently empty.
Start Shopping
Woody Cotterill on October 16, 2015 at 12:41 pm
Dear Simon
As with all these posts on this excellent blog, I greatly enjoyed reading back into the history of these guns and the personalities that built and used them. This includes the three articles some months back on O/U at the start of this year – especially on the two Ovundo rifles [9th Feb 2015] and the essay by Vic Venters republished in his excellent book [29 January 2015].
Westley Richards’ Ovundo stand apart as the icon combining all those qualities that defined the crux of gun craftmanship in the halcyon years: aesthetics, durability, performance, and last but not least, innovation. The Ovundo is arguably the greatest tribute to all these attributes, which the late Mr L Taylor and his experts at the bench combined into the superlative elegance and capabilities of the sporting gun.
Considered against stiff competition of the period, this a hard won accolade, but it can be defended. The Ovundo drew on the suite of gunsmithing patents registered through Taylor’s tenure at the helm of Westley Richards. Perfecting the Ovundo brought together many of these innovations – including some entirely novel patents – into a single melding of lock, stock, and paired barrels.
My order for a matched pair of Ovondus in .425 and .318 WR will be forthcoming when I win the lottery :-) Thank you very much for continuing to pay much deserved attention to the Ovundo, the sporting gun that stands apart.