Wednesday - April 20, 2011

Peiper’s First Gun Porn Post

And it may well be his last, since everything, and I mean everything, will be downhill from here. Well done old chum. All I did was type in the words and paste in the links and pictures.

VO Gun & Rifle Maker Sweden is a small family company founded 1977 by Mr Master Gunsmith Viggo Olsson. With a passion for hunting rifles and craftsmanship he wanted to realize his dream of building the worlds most exclusive hand made rifles for hunting and collection.

Now his dream has come true. Together with his son Gunsmith Ulf and carefully selected staff he is now building the worlds most exclusive hunting rifles, all by hand.

VO Gun & Rifle Maker Sweden delivers Limited Editions, Exclusive Collections and Tailor Made Rifles to royalties and celebrities all over the world.

That’s the lead in from the company website. They are not kidding one little bit. The father and son company sells to kings, crown princes, and Arab oil sheiks with bottomless pockets. You know what they say about if you have to ask the price? I don’t want to tell you, because you can not afford these. Your house is probably worth less than even one of their regular guns costs, if they made something as mundane as a regular gun. They do not. Everything they create is a work of functional art, a true masterpiece in the finest wood and metal.

The action is essentially a Mauser, but one updated and improved, tuned and polished to the utmost degree, and then embellished with museum grade engraving. The high figure walnut stocks are selected from specific trees all over Europe, then carefully felled and air dried for 3 or 4 years before the blanks are even cut. The stocks are carved by hand. It takes 5 weeks to get the oil finish just so, and then the checkering is cut. By hand, by a master of that skill, without any shortcuts or safety lines. Each rifle comes with at least 2 barrels and grain matched fore stocks, and connects to the main stock via a patented mechanism. The set gets a handmade leather case, which in turn gets it’s own custom made outer case. This is as good as it gets. Art that goes bang.

Their latest creation is also their best creation. Every VO Vapen rifle is entirely handmade, but the Falcon Edition raises the bar significantly. It is VO’s first Mannlicher style full stocked effort, and the precision lapped and crowned barrels are made from fully modern Damascus steel. Damascus steel barrels are made by folding layers and layers of metal together and then hammer welding them into a barrel by twisting lengths of the layers into a spiral around a central form and then heating and beating until a single solid piece emerges. This is the way it used to be done, back when steel was a very rare thing that only came in small amounts. But those barrels were as weak as they were beautiful, because all that hammer welding was quite uneven when done by hand. Such rifle barrels are generally only safe to use with the milder black powder cartridges. Modern Damascus steel is made from the very best steels available, and is hammered together under intense heat and pressure by giant industrial machines of exceptional strength and precision. The barrels have no voids or weak spots, and can safely handle even the highest pressure modern cartridges. VO takes those barrels and then makes them both accurate and beautiful.

The Falcon rifle, the first in an edition that will be limited to five, carries far less engraving than you might think. The tapered octagonal barrels are plain, because it would be crass to put engraving on the organic patterns formed by the Damascus steel. The engraving is all free form artwork, with a falcon motif on the pistol grip cap, the bolt shroud, and the receiver. Perhaps the trigger guard as well. The bolt handle continues the motif and adds a slightly whimsical touch; it has been hand carved and gold plated to be the falcon’s leg and talons grasping the ball end.

The use of Damascus steel and engraving featuring Peregrine and Saker falcons is no coincidence. We know where Damascus is. The falcon is the symbol of the Royal House of Saud. This rifle, and probably the whole set, will be purchased by someone in the Saudi royal family. VO Vapen does a lot of work for the Arabs, doing his best to bring back to Sweden as much oil money as he can. Several of his other rifles feature engraved portraits of this sheik or that, and he even has one rifle that is an ode to a particular mosque. That rifle is another thing of beauty, incorporating in it’s embellishments several of the grand architectural and decorative features of the building itself. These rifles take months and months to build, so the sale of just one of them pays the salaries for the whole workshop. Good for them. Sell the Arabs fancy toys, and sell more toys to the insanely rich. I admire that profit taking drive almost as much as I admire VO Vaden’s ability to turn serious mechanical machinery into serious works of art.

Oh, Ok, I’ll tell. The rifle costs £511,000. That’s $820,000, give or take a shilling or two. That makes it the most expensive new rifle ever made.

You can read a little bit more about it and admire more pretty pictures here, and here, and even read the terse and nearly rude article at the Daily Mail here.

But for those who can truly appreciate firearms like this, who love fine wood and extraordinary engraving, you must visit VO Vapen’s web page and spend a marvelous half hour or so exploring. The web site is as elegant and as well made as their firearms. Walnut lovers be warned though: the figures you will see there are nearly beyond your imagination. Put it this way: this next pic is merely Vapen’s background image:

the actual rifles are better.

Posted by Drew458     on 04/20/2011 at 09:17 PM   
Filed Under: • Guns and Gun Control •  
• Comments (4) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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