Dick / Dave,
Thanks for the compliments on the Ballard. Although it came out well, I am certainly not any sort of restoration expert. I just wanted to get the rifle back into shooting condition without over doing it. The rifle has a little background. A fellow I worked with at a large aerospace company, almost 30 years ago now, knew I did some gunsmithing work. He stopped me in the parking lot one day and asked me if I would look at something. He had the pile of rifle parts in the trunk of his car and he asked me if I could do anything to get the rifle back in shooting condition. This was, of course, long before the internet, and I had no idea what the rifle even was let alone where to find parts, etc. He gave me the box of parts to let me look them over and see what I could do. After a few months of poking around in old books, I had identified the rifle as a Ballard but didn't have the time to track down missing and damaged internal parts. There was no butt stock at all and the forearm was so badly damaged as to be unusable. Funny, he did have the butt plate, but the serial number stamped inside the plate did not match all the other serial numbers on the rifle. All the other numbers did match. The bore was badly rusted but all the rest of the metal work was only lightly pitted and still in remarkably good condition. He explained that his folks had owned a ranch somewhere in central California and he had found the rifle in a meadow when he was a kid (probably in the 1940's some time).
After a year or so, I had made no progress with it and brought the parts back to him. He wanted me to hang on to them just in case something in the way of information or parts came along. So, I took the parts home and stowed them under the work bench. Kids, jobs, house remodeling, the Navy...all conspired to push the box farther and farther to the back of the storage space and I completely forgot about it after many years. I left that job and started my own business. The fellow who had given me the parts retired and then passed away a few years later. So the box sat until last year when I got on the internet and tracked down that it was a Pacific model Ballard. Parts were available from Wyoming Armory and they could reline the barrel. So I had the relining done, refinished the metal work and re-stocked the rifle.
From the serial number, and the model, it looks like the rifle was built sometime in the 1880's. How it ended up in the meadow on the ranch is anyone's guess. I will test fire it soon and will enjoy hearing it speak out for the first time in perhaps a century. I have written this story down and placed the note under the butt plate so that, long after I'm gone, at least this much of the story will go with the rifle.
Dave C
