Thread: Resurrecting a great vintage rifle ( poor photo heavy )

I recently stumbled upon a truly great rifle that clearly had great pedigree and it came home with me.

J Coster 500 3" BPE Single barrel, Jones rotary under lever, side hammer.

It was missing its hammer and the fore end take down key was seized
Both faults would have likely saved it from further abuse over the years.

As found

This was clearly a very fine stalking rifle in the day.

It is most likely converted from a muzzleloader around 1895 ish
Julius Coster ran a small gunsmithing shop in Edinburgh for only 10 years after he left Alexander Henry's where he was a workshop foreman.

I was able to get it taken apart and completely stripped.
The lock has a stalking safety and fly. Both are features of very fine stalking rifles.



And this shows the small fly. This allows a very light trigger pull without risking the trigger sear falling into the half cock notch at speed and breaking anything
Trigger pull is a crisp clean 3 pounds even



Big strong clean breech face



And nicely fitted Bar Lock into breech

So first thing to do is fit a make do hammer and see if this beauty goes bang

Find a hammer in my hoard that can be forced to work



Tap a screw on the hammer nose to get roughly correct protrusion

Hence the search for single barrel shotguns? A line of bespoke 500 BPE stalking rifles for discerning hunters?

Tap a screw on the nose to get roughly correct firing pin protrushion

I had to remove the stalking safety to get this to work temporarily



First three shots at 50m from a standing rest
Two shots from me almost toughing and one by a friend just wide there to share the joy of this occasion

So some research and this image arrives of what the proper hammer might have been like



Ask around lots of guys and 5 very nice hammers come up from Southland and one from CNI
Fit up the best option and do all the painful work to make it work with the stalking safety as well



Buy a rough old Boswell leather case





Make some changes to take the very different parts of the Coster



Lots of work to remove the lock and remove and repair some broken parts and make a new key.
Reline the new parts with felt and cover the worst of the moth eaten parts with new felt

Nice!

Amazing stuff! Beautiful rifle.

The nice new hammer still needs to be hardened and tempered.

But it is essentially finished.
It has a very good bore except for the last 50mm at the muzzle ! Which is supposed to be the most important part for accuracy.

Well I got lucky because it shoots pure lead powder coated bullets extremely accurately considering its open express sights.
I can get three shots into about 30mm at 50m and then BP fouling starts to spray them around.
But its a stalking rifle and three shots with this would be a barrage

It is a delight to shoot as around 8 1/2 pounds

Unlike my Webley of the same type and caliber which is 7 1/2 pounds and likes the exact same bullet weight and load

And to finish off the photo essay

Here are the J Coster and Webley 500 3" BPEs together

Thanks for sharing David & thanks for the dedication you apply to these lovely old rifles.

The purpose of this post is that there haven't been many relics posted lately ( lots of relics posting ) and I have been pretty quiet ( for me ) on posting vintage rifle stuff.

This one is such a special rifle it is nice to share the images at least

Amazes me that they are even out there to be found still...

We need a write up on the comparison between underlever and toplever. David you are now thd gun correspondent from The Times 1885 "Hunting edition" What can you tell us?

This is awesome, I will have to put something like this on the project list