Ace of Base

Diggory Hadoke looks at the mystery of the base-fire design and ponders why it never really caught on, despite being more robust and safer than its predecessor, the pin-fire.

- DIGGORY HADOKE

There is an oft-overlooked step in the evolution of the sporting gun, which theoretically surpassed pin-fire and signposted the concept of centrefire almost a decade before Daw launched the real thing onto the British market, with his purchase of patent rights to Schneider’s design, in 1861.

Many people consider the major step-changes of style from percussion cap, to pin-fire, to centrefire but, while these are the most frequently encountered developments, there is one other relic from the period which bridged the gap between the last two, but which never became widespread. That concept was the ‘base-fire’ and it was presented to sportsmen by Charles Lancaster in 1852, just after Casimir Lefaucheaux had exhibited the pin-fire breech loader in London at the Great Exhibition in 1851.

Looking at the two ideas side by side today, it is somewhat puzzling to reflect that it was the Lefaucheaux pin-fire that largely superseded percussion cap ignition, not the Lancaster base-fire. To modern eyes, base-fire very closely resembles later centre-fire guns. The ammunition looks identical, until the primer is examined more closely, and a base-fire hammer gun looks very like a centre-fire hammer gun until opened.

Surely, Lancaster’s was a much better system, without the clumsy pins sticking out of the side of the cartridge, protruding through a hole in the barrel. Pin-fire was slower and more fiddly to load, more prone to damage and malfunction and the guns appear flimsy and unsatisfactory when compared to Lancaster’s robust and beautifully engineered base-fire guns. Yet we see lots of pin-fire guns today and few base-fires.