In the night sky, look up at the moon. There are three roughly circular dark patches that, if you squint, kinda make you think of a Mickey Mouse. the “ears” are the “sea of serenity” and the “Sea of crisis”, while the “Face” is the Mare Tranquilitatus, the Sea of Tranquility.

In the lower left of that sea rests a flag, a bunch of footprints, a handful of very expensive cameras, and the bottom half of a purpose built machine made to be used once and discarded for all eternity.

One of the legs of that machine, the very first Lunar Lander, has a little curved plaque, engraved with a picture of the Earth, and the following legend:
“HERE MEN FROM THE PLANET EARTH FIRST SET FOOT UPON THE MOON JULY 1969, A.D. WE CAME IN PEACE FOR ALL MANKIND”

Below that are the names of three astronauts also engraved, and a former president.

To a technology geek, like myself, the mere thought of this makes your heart skip a beat.

I know something about this, though, that very few people know.

If you were to peel off that plaque (God forbid), if you were to deface this monument to the greatest work of human civilization, you would find more names. Maybe a dozen, in all, carefully scribed onto the surface of the lunar lander leg, just under that plaque.

Those were the men who built it. Well, who built the legs, anyway. One of those men was my uncle Hank. He once showed me a worn, faded picture of he and his associates standing around said leg, grinning as they affixed the “official” plaque over their own signatures.

Hank worked for Bendix corporation, and he was an inspired machinist. I gained my fascination for machine tools in no small part due to watching his work- he did amazing things on the crudest of equipment in his home shop. he taught all of his sons to be good machinists, too, and though they have all had excellent educations, some of them have returned to the machine tool world. Bendix was responsible for many of the components that went to the moon, incluiding the LEM legs and one of the Lunar rovers.

Hank was also a certifiable gun nut. He was raising a family of 12, and there wasn’t a lot of cash to throw around, so he acquired all of his collection by swapping and doing repairs and other machine work he could do himself. He showed me how to blue, (though it didn’t sink in until I started doing it for myself years later) and explained how rifling was cut, even taking me to a small shop where a colleague of his made hand cut barrels. In his collection was a Ballard-Pope rifle, bought at a time when everyone wanted automatics and a single shot target rifle wasn’t on most people’s radar. He had a Springfield with a star-gauged barrel and a Unertl scope, which had never been fired ex factory. He had a handful of beautiful shotguns- a Parker-hale, a Webley Scott.

In a leg-of-mutton case on a shelf above his workbench sat a shotgun that he took to matches several times a month. It was plain looking, but he won matches with it. Hank was a hell of a wing shot, and he got that way by shooting trap. He had a trap range blocks from his house, and he loaded his own high brass shells, and spent many hours there breaking clays- doubtlessly to get the hell away from 12 rambunctious kids and the chaos they provided. Lots of practice makes a difference, and he practiced a lot.

Late in his life, at a family reunion, he told the story of the shotgun in the leg-of-mutton case. Hank had been in the navy, but had spent time after the second world war in the San Sebastian area of Spain. Being a gun nut even then, he was fascinated by the strong tradition of fine handmade guns, and he loved scatterguns. He got to hunt a little while he was there, and fell in love with the beautiful doubles made locally.

Years later, his family growing up around him, the idea of a fine shotgun would have never occured to him, nor would he ever have considered using household income for something so frivolous. And then Bendix sent him to Spain.

he went, ostensibly, to monitor the construction and testing of a machine that Bendix would later use to grind the cylinders for the shock absorbers on the lunar lander. Hank didn’t have the techno-geek interest in space travel that most of us do, so he looked at the machine from a purely clinical point of view. he spent several months there while it was being assembled, and almost a year later, went back to witness it being tested and report his findings.

In the meantime….

Hank was given an “allowance” to stay in spain. He was pretty well expected to stay in hotels and eat in restaurants, so the dollar figure of his per diem was- while not extravagant, at least substantial. Instead, since he spoke both spanish and basque, he found a small room he could rent. His landlady brought him meals. His expenses came to a tenth or less of his per diem. And he banked it.

And the very first weekend he was there, he made an appointment to visit Grulla.

In the 1950’s, autoloading shotguns were all the rage. Only hicks showed up to trapshoots with doubles, the double was the firearm of the country poor. Consequently, you could buy good doubles for not a lot of money- their popularity was at it’s perhaps lowest point. Several people were trying to get some of the Spanish gunmakers to make a line of “standard” cheap shotguns, well made but inexpensive, to sell in the US market. This never really worked out too well. Grulla, for instance, had been making fine sporting arms by hand for ages, and the idea of making a cheap shotgun rubbed them the wrong way. Seems to have worked out for them, they’re still there.

At Grulla, Hank told me, they made him shoot for a couple hours at paper targets, at large woven straw mats, at clays, at glass balls filled with feathers, at actual pigeons. They used a try-gun to get his fit perfect, and kept adjusting it until it was just right. Hank was a big man, six-six and around two fifty, with a neck like Mr Clean, so a “Standard” shotgun never felt good to him. Anyway, after spending the requisite amount of time shooting, they measured the “try gun” and measured him, and he selected the piece of wood they would use for the stock, chose the type of action and left a deposit.

When he returned almost a year later to run the machine off, he took the train to Grulla and picked up his shotgun. They did some final fitting work and sent him on his way. He said that moment, when they placed, in his hands, a bespoke shotgun made to measure for him and him alone, a firearm perfectly fitted to his physique and shooting skills, he said it was worth all the dinners of squid in squid ink and bad chicken and smelly cheese for dessert, the months of washing in a washbasin in a small rented room.

When I touched this shotgun for the very first time I was- maybe- twelve? it wasn’t as pretty as his Parker, and it wasn’t as big as his Webley& Scott, but it was clearly unique. There was no adornment on the locks or lock faces, the belly of the action was just smooth, the dark blue of the underlug contrasting sharply with the casehardening of the receiver. Only a few little pieces of engraving on screw heads lent any elegance to it’s appearance, it looked very plain. The stock, too, was not well figured, but predominantly straight grained and smooth. What Hank was interested in was function and not adornment, and he had gotten it in spades, he was concerned that a curvy, pretty figure in the wood could allow the stock to crack and split, so he chose a strong, straight grain. The height of the comb and the cast were horribly wrong for me, I would never have been able to shoot it, it was clearly Hank’s gun. I never had any idea what he paid for it. neither, I believe, did anyone else. I think he would have been embarrassed to tell anyone, with 12 kids to feed.

And that was my introduction to the world of hand fitted custom long guns. So when Tam speaks here in comments, of bespoke rifles, and defines them as “built up from a bare action to my specifications” it makes me shudder.

if you go to the websites of Purdey, Holland and Holland, Pedro Arrizabalaga, David Mckay-Brown,Grulla, (yes, theyre still making fine rifles and shotguns) Caesar Guerini or any of the fine makers of firearms, you’ll find the same sort of thing: Bespoke means the firearms are made, one at a time, from scratch, by an arrangement between an individual and the maker.

This term was apparently changed fairly recently, one of the first examples- well, I’ll let the master explain:

“London’s Savile Row tailors have traditionally restricted the word to clothes individually patterned that have been cut and sewn by hand. However, in a rare example of language change by fiat, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) rejected this meaning in an adjudication in June 2008. It ruled that the historic term of art had moved on and it was legitimate for a tailor offering clothes cut and sewn by machine to refer to them as bespoke, provided that they were made to the customer’s measurements. In effect the ASA removed the historic difference in tailoring between bespoke and made-to-measure.” from Michael Quinion, “World Wide Words”

I especially like this quote from the Holland and Holland website: “No part of a Holland & Holland gun is interchangeable, it is always made especially for the gun down to the smallest pin”. McKay Brown: “Although it is desirable to visit us for a fitting, we can work with measurements supplied.” Your measurements had better be good!! Otherwise you’re getting a shotgun or a rifle that won’t fit you, and you’ll pay dearly for the privelege!

Bespoke guns, in the tradition of fine firearms, are very, very special pieces of equipment.

To call a rifle bolted together with off-the-shelf pieces by even the finest gunsmith “bespoke” is to dilute the term, to cheapen the meaning.

You can buy, from Smith, or Wilson Custom, or many other fine makers, handguns which are made from castings or forgings, one at a time, fitted by hand, for not a lot of money (relatively speaking) You cannot buy a true bespoke long gun unless you spend a wad of cash, and that’s just about that. You can, as Tam correctly states, put an off-the-shelf-barrel on a used receiver and inlet a semi-inletted stock to it, and get a FINE rifle. Maybe even a SUPERB rifle, and it won’t cost you an arm an a leg to do it. But to call it “bespoke” is like calling a Civic a custom street rod because you bolted on a bunch of perfomance parts and molded fiberglass wings. Like pouring out a box of Betty Crocker’s best and calling them homemade brownies from scratch. Like buying a flat-pack shelving unit from Ikea and calling it Louis XIV. Like growing ditchweed in a litterbox in your closet under a grow-lamp and calling it Amsterdam Big Bud. Like taking Sears pants and a Kohls vest and a JC Penney jacket and calling it a bespoke suit.

Tam is free to use the word anyway she wants, of course. Just as she’s free not to use snapcaps. Hell, I’d bitchslap anyone who tried to take those freedoms from her.

But this is not “My” definition of the term, nor is it a “new” definition of the term, it’s THE definition of the term, and has been for ages and ages. The “new” definiton is “Made to order” which ignores it’s rich heritage.

One of my most cherished memories as a budding gun nut is the moment, in Uncle Hank’s machine shop, when he uncased and assembled that Grulla and let me hold it. It didn’t mean much to me at the time, as I was far more interested in the pretty, engraved guns, and the military handguns of which he had scads, but the remembering of holding a one of a kind, handmade bespoke firearm makes me wish I had taken more time to enjoy it’s craftsmanship and appreciate it’s rareness. An awful lot of the romance of firearms disapears without acknowledging the beauty of this type of firearm, and the original meaning of the term “bespoke”, and it’s wealth of heritage.

Chuck Hawks, normally (to me) a dispassionate and clinically accurate judge of things that go bang, has an uncharacteristically emotional treatise on “best guns” many if not most of which are bespoke, and if you’ve ever lusted after a fine shotgun, you ought to read it.