Building British Guns A Different Way

Does the revolutionary design of the Longthorne shotgun, including barrels made from a single billet, mark James Longthorne Stewart as genius or maverick?

- Douglas Tate

It is seven years since the launch of the Longthorne shotgun, with its barrels machined from a single, solid billet of special Swedish steel. In that time, James Longthorne Stewart has continued to improve his revolutionary design, although his initial idea may have a longer history. Over a century and a half ago, Sir Joseph Whitworth secured a patent for “cutting both barrels out of the solid from a single piece of metal”. This poses a question: is Mr Stewart the great mechanician (as Sir Joseph Whitworth was called) of our times? I asked Elaine Stewart, James’s wife and Longthorne’s marketing director, what was the genesis of James’s idea and whether he was influenced by Joseph Whitworth?

“James originally started making the barrels conventionally but being an engineer wasn’t satisfied because they were never going to be straight. He decided that making them from one piece of steel would achieve this and realise the precision he was after. At this point he was not influenced by anyone. We were not aware until after we had launched the gun in 2010 that Whitworth had experimented and patented a method of making barrels from a solid billet. The fellow who told us is now a customer of ours, who also has two Whitworth guns.”

The significance of creating both tubes, the ribs, lumps and chokes out of a single 27kg block of high-quality steel is that the barrels are trim and light but also unbelievably strong; substantial without being bulky. They are so strong that James Longthorne Stewart can stand on a set, bridging two blocks of wood, and they don’t bend. I even came across a photo of someone driving a Range Rover over them without harm.