Ep. 895: Project Punt Gun | 12 in ’26

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Mediater podcast. I’m Spencer new Art, joined today by Seth Morris and Max Barta. Today’s episode is a little different. We are going to be talking all about punt guns. If you’re not aware, we bought one a few years ago, then we shot it. We filmed the whole process, and you can go watch that right now on the meat Eater YouTube channel. This is our fifth installment in the twelve and twenty six series that we’re doing this year. That’s twelve long form films that we’re dropping in twenty twenty six. This film is probably the most different of everything that you’ll see on our channel. The other episodes have more traditional outdoor adventures where Yanni does an archie bear hunt, Clay chases mountain lions with hounds. The only thing that we hunt in the punt gun episode is clay, pigeons and watermelons, so very different. And some balloons and some balloons and some paper targets and some hats. Yeah, we’ll talk about in a little bit. So this is a story, you know, about conservation and a very badass gun. Today we are going to be answering your questions about the punt gun. Although Steve and I host the film. Max and Seth were there every time we shot the thing, so they got real familiar with it. And then Seth and Max even got to shoot it. We had six shells with us. Steve and I shot five of them. We had a sixth one. We said what should we do with this thing? Should we just throw it in the river? And then Max and Seth they said no, no, no, let us shoot it. So they did. And so we have a piece of the film here that didn’t make the final cut. This this is behind the behind Max and Seth shooting the punt gun.

00:01:40
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is really bonded our friendship.

00:01:43
Speaker 1: I’ll tee it up with this real quick. Sorry. We only had one shell left, but two people who wanted to shoot it. So they were going to pull the rope together. That’s how you fire the punt gun. You pulled this rope that’s like, I don’t know, two feet long. And so they they were very kind and they pulled the rope together. But I noticed something in the film play it for us film. Seth brings back the hammer he got that on it on Three’s what I what I wanted to bring up is Seth has his hand on the rope, and then Max trumps him and reaches in front of hand to get to grip further up the rope, and then Seth says, hold on, and then he reaches in front of Max’s hand again. It was just like a little that’s right, they were doing a totem pole of hands. Whoever got to be closer uh to to the trigger? Who do you think actually shot it? Which one you pulled the rope?

00:02:55
Speaker 2: I felt like I had more than it.

00:02:58
Speaker 3: It felt pretty equal, even think so I was more on your hand.

00:03:02
Speaker 2: Yeah, almost, hold.

00:03:05
Speaker 1: Phil, Can we see it again? Could you like really slow it down. Let’s get a good look at who maybe and the film you help us decide? Here which one of these two shot the punt guna Hamm’s back.

00:03:16
Speaker 3: Going to grab Max grabs in front of him.

00:03:19
Speaker 1: Yep, cute, And now.

00:03:23
Speaker 2: I had the majority. I had that little anger point.

00:03:26
Speaker 1: Okay, now we’re gonna shoot it. Here we go. I think both It looks pretty slacky.

00:03:32
Speaker 3: Yeah, that looks it looks like Seth. It looks like Seth. Jacket starts the motion first.

00:03:38
Speaker 1: Okay there, but then I felt like Max had a more aggressive hole. We’ll call it fifty to fifty. I’m I’m going to.

00:03:47
Speaker 2: Say I’ve shot a punk gun, whether Seth Polden or not. Oh yeah, I was thinking about this. I think I don’t think there’s ever been a punt gun in Montana before this. Would you say, that’s a pretty fair point.

00:03:59
Speaker 1: I mean, this is not punk gun country. These things were used way east the Chesapeake Bay in Europe. That’s a good point, Max, If I had to guess if one came through here, No, yeah, you know.

00:04:12
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:04:12
Speaker 1: We’re gonna talk to Rock Island Auction later in the show. Those are the guys who sold us the gun that are then going to resell it. All that money is going to go back to the med Eater Land Access initiative. But leading up to us buying the punt gun, they had mentioned that sellers will come to them and say, I have a punk gun that I want you guys to sell. But in reality it’s not a punk gun. It’s what they would call to be a pigeon gun or a fort gun. Now ours like hits the nail on the head for the definition of a punk gun. I bet there they were obviously fort guns here at some point, maybe some pigeon guns, even though I don’t think that was in Montana’s culture either. But as far as the only punt gun, that’s a good point.

00:04:53
Speaker 2: Max.

00:04:53
Speaker 1: We’re gonna call that the first punk gun, I would.

00:04:55
Speaker 4: Say, so unless there’s some like private collectors, you know.

00:04:59
Speaker 3: Yeah, probably not though.

00:05:02
Speaker 1: Yeah. So on today’s episode, we’re going to answer your questions and then we have that interview with Rock Island Auction. So those guys are the expert on old firearms that we’re gonna chat with them. That’s gonna be a lot of fun. Here’s the first question. This is from Nick Sikowski. He says, feels like ages ago when first discussed. Exactly when was the first conversation about it? Nick is referring to the punt gun. He’s right, this has been a long time coming for Nick. I tried to get us the cleanest timeline of the punt gun leading up to us buying it. The first time it was discussed it was in December of twenty twenty one on an episode of med Eater Trivia. Trivia was still in its infancy. It was so young, in fact, that the episode that this happened on it was just called Game on Suckers. That episode didn’t even have a number after it. For context, the episode that came out this week is CCXXII. That’s what is that, Max and Roman.

00:05:59
Speaker 2: Don’t ask me, take.

00:06:02
Speaker 3: No clue.

00:06:02
Speaker 1: Two hundred and twenty two. I was gonna say, that’s two hundred and twenty two in real numerals. So the episode we talked about this on didn’t even have a real ma numeral. It was literally the first episode that said game on Suckers Now, Like, wasn’t our technically our first episode of meat Eatter trivia because there was a period where we would do trivia and it was like a kangaroo episode inside of a regular episode. This was the first time we pulled that away and made its own show. Anyway, just some background for you. What was the question do you remember Phil’s going to play it for us again? This is that on that episode in twenty twenty one clip Phil.

00:06:38
Speaker 5: Yeah, so Spencer for this question, Spencer, I actually showed the room a picture of the punk guy that asked what it was called. So here’s the audio of the rest.

00:06:45
Speaker 1: Oh the correct answer is the punt gun, oh Man. The average punt gun ranged from a two gauge to a four gauge and could fire over a pound of pellets at once. Wow. They are very rare and hard to come by, though. I was able to find a few in online auctions, ranging anywhere from four thousand dollars to ten thousand dollars.

00:07:05
Speaker 3: You can buy one.

00:07:06
Speaker 1: You could buy one. Are you going to buy one? No? I’m not seeing you like pony up five thousand bucks? Yeah?

00:07:12
Speaker 3: On my how serious you were?

00:07:13
Speaker 6: You know?

00:07:14
Speaker 1: Yeah, because we could shoot it. I would love to have that.

00:07:18
Speaker 2: That’s the gents gun.

00:07:20
Speaker 1: That’s the beginning of it. You know, Max knows this, Seth knows this. If you want to get something done immediate, or you just need to get Steve excited. Yeah, so as you can hear, Steve was excited about it. And it didn’t take long until like those sort of maybe should we could we to Steve was like, yes, let’s let’s get a punt gun. So here’s the rest of that timeline again. That was December twenty twenty one. January twenty twenty two, I found some punt guns online. They range in price from four thousand dollars to eight thousand dollars. I talked to one seller. He said that him and his buddy shot theirs. They stood back to back, and what they did was they had one guy who stood in front and he let the barrel rest on his shoulder, and then the other guy stood behind him and he sort of pressed the butt of the punt gun against his shoulder, just like if you were shooting a regular shotgun. When they pulled the trigger, that guy said that his buddy had his collar bone broken.

00:08:16
Speaker 2: Oh, just like an episode of Jackass.

00:08:18
Speaker 1: It’s exactly like that.

00:08:19
Speaker 3: That sounds like a terrible idea.

00:08:21
Speaker 1: Yeah, bad idea. We didn’t buy any of those punt guns. I think some of them floated closer to the category of pigeon gun, which we’ll learn about later. Just didn’t love any of those, so we didn’t buy him. But again, this is the timeline of how it unfolded. February of twenty twenty two. I found a five footer at an antique mal in Wisconsin. I called them. They wanted fifty five hundred dollars for it. The seller was unsure if it would shoot, didn’t want to change the price, and that was an important thing to us. We wanted to buy a punt gun that we thinked would work. And so because we couldn’t figure out if that one would actually fire. We walked to way there. February twenty twenty two, someone reaches out to me with a hot tip that Rock Island Auction has two of them coming up for sale that summer. Again Rock Island, they’re the biggest auction house when it comes to historic guns. Here’s some examples of the guns that they have sold in the past. Han Solo’s DL forty four heavy Blaster that sold for one million dollars. They sold two Remington Revolvers that were owned by Ulysses S. Grant. Those sold for five million dollars. And then they sold a Winchester eighteen eighty six with the serial number one, so literally the first ever Winchester eighteen eighty six that sold for one point two million dollars. Just to give you an idea of like the kind of guns that they traffic. That’s who had two of these punt guns for sale March of twenty twenty two. Here are some emails with Steve. Here was one where he said, quote, as my dad always said, you can’t lose your ass on punt guns. I don’t know if Steve’s dad actually said that, yeah, but I like, you know, be like, as Abraham Lincoln said, you can’t trust everything you read on the internet. Like I feel like that’s what Steve was doing. But I’m just like trying to give you more context of how excited Steve was about this. The next day he says, I can’t wait to mount it to a boat and set out some soda bottles like ducks. Here’s an email from a few weeks later, he says, we gotta buy the damned punt gun. We’re poised and ready. And then a week after that he says this will change our lives, and then he put in parentheses for the better. So Steve is now excited. And I ended up getting approved a budget here at meat Eater of twenty thousand dollars to buy a punt gun. And as we talked about on that old podcast from December, Steve was interested when it was like four to eight thousand dollars. So some strong negotiating by me to get us up to twenty thousand dollars. Okay, May of twenty twenty two, this is the day of the auction again, twenty thousand dollars budget, not a penny more. Rock Island has two punt guns up for auction. First punt gun this was the one. If I just got to pick, like which one we were gonna have, I would want the second one. That’s the one we ended up getting. The first punk gun. It was a smaller model, less prestigious brand. Rock Island estimated that it would sell for between twelve thousand dollars and eighteen thousand dollars. I bid up to our ceiling of twenty thousand dollars. Two bidders blow right past me. The gun sells for twenty five thousand, seven thousand, more than the high end estimate.

00:11:28
Speaker 2: I wonder what those people are doing with it, you know, like why do they want it so bad?

00:11:31
Speaker 1: I don’t know. I’m gonna ask. I’m gonna ask Rock Island Auction later, like who is the buyer? What does this person look like? What are they gonna do?

00:11:38
Speaker 2: Because we have a reason, yeah, yeah, we goal.

00:11:41
Speaker 1: Yeah, and they’re probably not gonna shoot theirs, you know, probably not. Yeah. So that was punk Gun number one, seven thousand dollars over its high end estimate. Second punk gun this is the one that we want. It’s much bigger, it’s older, it’s from a more prestigious brand that’s Holland. In Holland Rock Island estimated that one would sell were between sixteen thousand and twenty two thousand, five hundred. So if it follows the pattern is the last punk gun, that means this one’s gonna sell for thirty thousand. It’s basically me and one other bidder, and I assume that this other person is the odd man out from the last punt gun auction. They went back to back these two auctions. Bidding goes fast. I quickly get to the ceiling of twenty thousand dollars and then it just ends. The other guy doesn’t go anymore, which I was kind of shocked at at the time. I didn’t think it was going to work out, but it was a big relief because that was the gun that we want.

00:12:34
Speaker 5: This guy went past twenty grand for the first punt gun.

00:12:38
Speaker 6: I don’t know.

00:12:39
Speaker 1: I don’t know that it was him who was competing. I just assumed that he was the odd man out who didn’t win the smaller one for sure, and if he would have went to twenty thousand dollars and one penny, I’d have been out, and he didn’t do it.

00:12:52
Speaker 2: Come on no, you wouldn’t.

00:12:54
Speaker 3: You would have pitched in of.

00:12:55
Speaker 2: Like your one hundred bit right.

00:12:56
Speaker 1: You know what I think I could have I could have explained it away to later. I’d be like, Steve, it was gonna get away.

00:13:01
Speaker 2: What do you want me to do?

00:13:03
Speaker 6: You know?

00:13:04
Speaker 1: Exactly? So that that is the origin, That is how we got the punt gun back in May of twenty twenty two. All right, next question here, this is from outdoors Biggie. He says, what are the punt gun’s stats? All right, it was made by Holland and Holland in eighteen eighty five, so that makes it one hundred and forty years old. One hundred and forty one years old, I think, uh, six years younger than the light bulb, a decade older than the radio, and it’s actually older than the state of Montana. Just to give you some context of like the technology that we’re working with. This would be the equivalent of someone taking a gun out of Max’s safe that he just bought today and then shooting it in the year twenty one sixty six. You can’t even fathom, like, well, what’s the world going to look like in twenty one sixty six? I have no idea. But that’d be like if someone took Max’s brand new gun that he got today and then shooting it down.

00:13:57
Speaker 2: I was gonna say it hopefully like my kid’s going to be doing that, But I was like, oh no, I got to add a couple more gades. Maybe kids kids.

00:14:04
Speaker 1: Get you know, great kids, they’ll be talking about how you know, great great great grandpa Maxwell shot a punt gun back in.

00:14:13
Speaker 2: The day old wow.

00:14:17
Speaker 1: Hopefully they’ll still be able to look up the video may it’s right, yeah, who knows more stats. It’s a two gauge shotgun. If you listen to trivia, you know this. But when something is listed as a gauge, if you have a twelve gage shotgun, that means you take twelve balls that fit in twelve lead balls that fit in the end of a twelve gauge barrel, and that equals a pound. So that means that if you had two lead balls that fit in the end of our barrel of our punt gun, that would make one pound. That that is like as big as a punk gun gets seven and a half feet long. Sixty pounds. It’s an awkward sixty pounds though, Like this is always being carried by a couple people around here. Nine and a quarter inch shell. It’s a original walnut stock, and then it has a gray paint that Rock Island told this is the original gray paint and it has about ninety five percent of that left on it. So those are the punt gun stats, all right, Chase Howard says, if you can answer what’s the overall cost per shot? We had six shells, Max and Seth take a guess as to each what each one of those shells costs?

00:15:23
Speaker 6: Was in it?

00:15:23
Speaker 5: Right?

00:15:24
Speaker 1: It was filled with It was a little over half a pound of number six bismuth, and the shells were made of brass that I think was nickel plated. So that’s that’s the what we’re working with. And yet it was a nine inch shell half a pound of number six bismuth. What do you think that cost us forty five bucks a pop for way way more? Take another guess. I’ll give you some more context. The punt gun came with one singular spench shell that seemed to be original to the gun. Like that shell that came with the gun was probably fired out of that gun. It was made for that gun. You know, one hundred and forty years ago. That’s we had that thing to work off of. We had to pay a machinist an engineer to do some cad drawings for us to figure out what the best materials are ship this thing across the country, which they didn’t ship. They actually drove it over here personally because it was like basically an explosive. At that point. We joked about this. I don’t think it was ever in the film, but like when you’re handling one of these, you’re like, do not drop that?

00:16:30
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah for sure.

00:16:31
Speaker 1: Okay, so take another.

00:16:32
Speaker 2: Guess you said one. Wow, after all that, imagine if it was TSS in there.

00:16:38
Speaker 1: Imagine like, what does a TSSHLL cost right now? Twenty bucks?

00:16:44
Speaker 2: It’s very around that fifteen buck yeah.

00:16:48
Speaker 3: Like two twenty.

00:16:50
Speaker 1: One thousand dollars. It was one thousand and thirty two dollars shell. Oh god, okay, so that’s roughly here.

00:16:59
Speaker 2: Here’s waste that much money on a shot.

00:17:01
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:17:02
Speaker 1: I don’t think I didn’t know it until Chase Howard asked this question. I I was like, I don’t know, probably like, you know, two hundred bucks a shell. And I went and looked up our invoice. It was four hundred This is per shell, four hundred and seventy dollars in materials, four hundred eighty dollars in fabrication and assembly, and then a five hundred dollars flat fee for doing the cad work to make it all possible. So divided by six, that’s another eighty dollars per shell, for a grand total of over one thousand dollars a shell.

00:17:30
Speaker 3: We’re way off.

00:17:31
Speaker 2: Yeah, but surely they didn’t cost that much back then, and when people were actually using punk.

00:17:35
Speaker 1: I mean, I can’t fathom.

00:17:37
Speaker 7: That they did, just if you adjust for although my bet it was expensive because a lot of a lot of punk guns back then were loaded through the barrel right like you drop down a scoopful of gunpowder and then like a probably a cardboard wad, and then a handful of pellets.

00:17:56
Speaker 1: Ours is breech loading, so it’s loaded more like a traditional shotgun. I bet those things were expensive to make back then as well.

00:18:03
Speaker 4: I wonder if you get, if you get a flock of ducks on the water, how many rounds of like twelve gage bismuth would it take to kill the amount of ducks one shot of the punt gun killed?

00:18:16
Speaker 2: Good we’ll never know.

00:18:18
Speaker 1: Yeah, twenty thousand dollars punt gun, and then you know it only takes twenty shells to equal the price of that. Now with our auction, when we auction this thing off in August, you are getting one of the spent shells. Actually you’re getting two. You’re getting the OG one that we based our modern ones off of, and then you’re getting one of those modern spent shells. That way, if you want to shoot this thing, you can go have your thousand dollars shells made as well. All right, eighty six Spencer says, did you figure out approximately how big the spread would be or it’s lethal distance? Our first shot was to determine exactly that. I think we wound up. It was like an eight foot by eight foot spread at thirty yards. If you were gonna shoot a twelve gauge at thirty yards, max would like a thirty inch spread. Is that what you’d expect? Yeah, I mean, I know there’s a lot of factors and.

00:19:12
Speaker 2: Yeah, different chokes and stuff, but yeah, I mean you’re probably, if not maybe like a forty.

00:19:16
Speaker 1: Inch okay, thirty or forty inch spread at thirty yards or the twelve gauge, So we were like three or.

00:19:21
Speaker 2: Four that’s probably a pretty open choke probably, Yeah, So like.

00:19:24
Speaker 1: Four x that was our spread. As you’ll see in the film. We do some different tests to be like if we were shooting ducks on water, which which we replicate with balloons, we put balloons from like twenty yards out to eighty yards. We pop the balloons out at eighty yards lethal distance. I bet you could kill a duck with a BB in the right place at one hundred yards, don’t you think. Yeah, like if one of those found the brain of a mallard, Yeah, that’s a dead mallard at one hundred yards.

00:19:51
Speaker 3: Yeah, it would have been interesting to.

00:19:55
Speaker 4: Maybe do like a water melon at one hundred yards, just to see like how, yeah, the penetrate of those pellets or you know something that could you can measure the penetration or ballistics jail or something, yeah at one hundred Yeah.

00:20:07
Speaker 1: I think if if a punk gunner used this, they would like kill some ducks dead dead at twenty yards, Like those things would be obliterated, probably not even gonna make it to market, and then they would have some that, you know, just get one BB in the right place beyond one hundred yards, but I bet they were wounding.

00:20:23
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, And I was thinking about this earlier. I was like, yeah, so after like one or two shots of the punk gun, is like, what are they gonna do with all the cripples? You know, they have to like round those up too.

00:20:35
Speaker 3: Or maybe they had some shotguns in the boat.

00:20:37
Speaker 2: I would have to imagine.

00:20:40
Speaker 1: Yeah, I imagine at the edge of that spread, it’s just like you’re probably wounding maybe as many as you’re killing. At that point. There’s just a lot of ducks that aren’t probably flying away from that scenario, but aren’t dead either. Silas Hayes says, do you think your punt gun was used? If so, and where We’re gonna talk about this with Rock Island a little later. But the peak punt gun era was roughly from eighteen eighty to nineteen ten. That’s in both North America and Europe. Our gun is from eighteen eighty five, so it comes around like right at the beginning of when punt gunning was really hot. Now our gun shows some signs of use, like there’s a little chipping in the paint, it’s missing a screw, it has signs of where it places where it would be attached to something. A lot of punt guns at that time like wound up just in the bottom of lakes, in the bottom of rivers and the bottom of estuaries. Ours survived one hundred and forty years, so I don’t think it was used a ton, but I bet it shot into some flocks of birds. And someone along the way thought that the engraving was potentially a custom job on our punt gun. It got a handle, it’s got yeah, so it’s got a walnut stock that’s like, I don’t know, twelve inches long or so, that’s got some engraving. And then there’s some engraving around where the barrel meets the stock as well, and someone pointed that out and there like that that looks like it would be custom. You know, that was a special order to Holland.

00:22:13
Speaker 6: In Holland.

00:22:14
Speaker 1: The other thing I learned is when you look at the punt gun history, you’ll find there were obviously like these were used by blue collar hunters that were making a living off of selling ducks and geese. You’ll find instances though, where they’re sort of like punt gun tourists who are, you know, a well off newspaper owner in London. In London, like a well off banker in England who just wants to experience the thrill of doing a punt gun hunt without any evidence at all. I think that’s who bought this punt. I think it’s one of those folks who like they weren’t doing this for a living, but they enjoyed, you know, hunting and the outdoors, and they wanted to go try this sporting thing, so they like you know, commissioned Holland and Holland to make them a beautiful punk gun with some customer engravings, and then I bet they went and used it a few things. But I don’t think this was used by like a market hunter who was living in a shack and this was like his bread living. Yeah, for making it.

00:23:09
Speaker 4: I wonder you said Rock Island said that that paint on there was original.

00:23:12
Speaker 1: They said it was original, which I think when most people look at that, they’re like, no, that came around later. Rock Island said it was rigil and they estimated ninety five percent of it was left.

00:23:21
Speaker 4: I wonder, see when I looked at it and I just it looks like someone put it on there. It does, and I wonder if that is the case that this punk gun was used, like maybe Chesapeake Bay salt water.

00:23:35
Speaker 3: Sure if they put that paint on there the ceiling from getting rusty.

00:23:40
Speaker 1: You’re right, yeah, it’s it’s almost. Yeah, it’s kind of shocking to hear that that’s original paint because you’re like, no, somebody came around in like nineteen sixty and thought they were like sprucing it up. And it’s like, I don’t have any way to confirm this, but it looks like a thick amount of paint too, like multiple coats of gray paint went on that barrel.

00:23:59
Speaker 3: Yep.

00:24:00
Speaker 1: So to answer the question from Silas about was it used, I think it was used, uh, but not used a ton r next question was from Mike Stefan, How did you know it wasn’t going to explode and were you worried about it exploding?

00:24:16
Speaker 6: Uh?

00:24:18
Speaker 1: Yeah, Seth and Max were there every time we shot it that first time. Were you guys worried?

00:24:22
Speaker 3: I was? I was behind a vehicle.

00:24:25
Speaker 1: I was not.

00:24:26
Speaker 2: I was film and Steven Spencer their reaction, so I wasn’t. My back was to the gun and everything is just like fingers crossed. This doesn’t explode.

00:24:35
Speaker 3: I was worried.

00:24:36
Speaker 4: I wasn’t worried like the the barrel was going to explode or anything. I was worried about the integrity of the breach. Yeah, like stuff blown out the back.

00:24:45
Speaker 1: Yeah, a little bit of this shows up in the cut. But the first time we went to shoot the gun, it was like a pretty cold day, and I guess we hadn’t fully confirmed that the shells fit inside of the barrel at that point. So we get there and we realize that it’s just like very very close, but it’s not making it in the barrel. So Steve starts, you know, taking gunk out of the barrel, which is why we also thought it was used, because it had some build up as though it had been shot in the past. And I’m sandpapering the shell and We’re just like trying to get rid of some millimeters to make this thing work and eventually work. But that’s what you were concerned about.

00:25:24
Speaker 3: Seth Yep.

00:25:25
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, we’re just like doing a lot of manipulating in the field trying to make it come to Yeah.

00:25:30
Speaker 2: After that first shot, we like slowly trusted the gun more and more. You know, we like our rope trunk a little bit.

00:25:37
Speaker 1: You know, we got by shell number six. When Seth and Max shoot, they’re like touching the gun full trust.

00:25:45
Speaker 6: Yeah.

00:25:46
Speaker 1: Yeah, I wasn’t so much concerned about an explosion. But I guess what I was mildly concerned about was the recoil of it. You have to let a gun like produce recoil, You have to let it buck a little bit. If you don’t, if you just clamp everything down as tight as possible, you’re just like stressing out the mechanics of the gun. That’s that’s not good for it. And so we’re like, I feel like walking a tightrope trying to let the gun recoil, but not recoil too much where it like becomes a danger to us. And so that felt like a balancing act. What we ended up doing was we I found out later it’s called a trunnion. A trunnion is what that connecting point is called.

00:26:28
Speaker 2: Uh.

00:26:29
Speaker 1: We had a fabricator, uh Travis Fabrication here in Bozeman who made us Spartan, Travis bart Barton Fabrication. He built us a mount that we get attached to a trailer and then we had some sandbags on that trailer. Uh and and my concern with the recoil wasn’t warranted. It all worked out well. The gun was able to rise when it shot. We had to go back and cite it in each time, so worried about it exploding a little bit. And and as you see in the film, like the first time that we shoot it, Steve attaches a rope to it. That was his dad’s tree stand rope. Like his dad would be in a tree stand he needs to bring his bow up. That was the rope we used. And as you guys point out, and then I.

00:27:13
Speaker 2: Think we tied another rope onto that. Oh yeah, yeah, get us further back.

00:27:17
Speaker 1: Uh huh. It didn’t feel like the original rope was going to be the difference between us, like losing an arm or not. Okay, next question was from Billy the Kid Rock that’s a great name. He says, do you think the punt gun would be good for hunting anything besides ducks?

00:27:35
Speaker 2: Yes?

00:27:36
Speaker 1: What snow geese?

00:27:39
Speaker 6: Yeah?

00:27:40
Speaker 2: I mean just another form of waterfall. But I don’t know anything else.

00:27:45
Speaker 4: What’s those like starlings or sparrows that are invasive? They’re always all bunched up. I bet you could you could and.

00:27:52
Speaker 2: They do those big waves.

00:27:53
Speaker 3: Yeah, you can hurt on those things.

00:27:55
Speaker 2: Yeah, you can do a hurting on the flock of winter turkey.

00:27:58
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:28:00
Speaker 1: I thought that was the absolute perfect thing. Like any short of an elephant, You could kill anything with a punt gun. But the ideal scenario is using it what they use it for, which is like, you know, sneaking into a flock of ducks on the water and doing one shot that brings down a hundred of them at a time. Some historians think that that is where the phrase get your ducks in a row comes from. It’s from punt gunners waiting until they felt like they were at the perfect spot in the flock to pull the trigger. But I was thinking about what else it would be good for turkeys in like the fall or the winter. I can recall it a deer hunt I was in in the Black Hills in late November, where all of a sudden, I found myself in the middle of a flock of turkeys that must have been like one hundred to two hundred turkeys, and they were just all around me, and they were moving past me, and they were like mildly aware of my presence, but obviously they felt some comfort in their numbers. If you had a punt gun in that situation, you’d been eating turkeys for years, lots of Thanksgiving meals.

00:28:57
Speaker 4: I one time back in Pennsylvania, we had a hard winter and it was like a deep, crusty snow, and there was this one farmer that was spreading manure on the fields, like on top of the snow.

00:29:10
Speaker 1: Huh.

00:29:11
Speaker 4: And there was a winter flock there that I like quick counting at like nine hundred birds.

00:29:16
Speaker 1: Oh my goodness.

00:29:17
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, Like birds came from all over just to be there.

00:29:22
Speaker 1: That would be the perfect scenario to use a punt gun. Or if you were like baiting feral hogs for example. I think anything that you were baiting and like creating a congregation of critters in one spot, that would be the ideal use.

00:29:37
Speaker 4: Ye’d imagine you could size up shot in those things and put like buckshot in there, right definitely.

00:29:42
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, you could probably do like a turkey load equivalent, you know, where it’s like different varying sizes of pellets all at once. Now, like the punt gun thing, though it fought, they become illegal in North America in nineteen eighteen. That’s when the Migratory Bird Act comes around, the reality is they start to fall out of fashion. Before that, you have pump pump shotguns show up in the eighteen eighties, Semiato shotguns and the early nineteen hundreds, and the market hunters who were using these they kind of learn that actually, we can be more efficient, we have to plan less logistically, it’s cheaper, it’s easier to use if we just go out with a shotgun we can hold against our shoulder, like, we can be better market hunters in that case. So when you’re talking about like the punt gun being outlawed, folks were starting to go away from it, like before it actually becomes illegal, and now you know this has been the case since nineteen eighteen or ten gauge is the biggest shotgun that you can use if market hunting was still allowed today, though, I don’t think you’d see guys out there with the punt gun.

00:30:47
Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s just not efficient.

00:30:49
Speaker 1: No, as you can see when you know when they cost one thousand dollars per shell.

00:30:53
Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s it.

00:30:55
Speaker 1: It doesn’t worry. Okay, crank Jobs says, what was the most un expected thing you learned from the experience? You guys have any thoughts on this when we were shooting it.

00:31:09
Speaker 3: Honestly, the the damage it did to the watermelons was a little unexpected.

00:31:14
Speaker 1: You thought, more or less.

00:31:15
Speaker 4: I thought I thought it would be less for some reason. I just thought the pattern wouldn’t be that.

00:31:21
Speaker 3: I don’t remember how far we were away from.

00:31:22
Speaker 1: Them, he was like thirty yards thirty.

00:31:24
Speaker 4: I just thought the pattern would be more spread and it would just be like a bunch of holes.

00:31:27
Speaker 1: Sure.

00:31:28
Speaker 4: That. And another thing I did not expect was how like I expected it to be way louder.

00:31:36
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was kind of like a soft boom.

00:31:39
Speaker 1: Yeah. With that said, though, there were still I think we experienced this and I don’t know which shot, but pellets came back at us.

00:31:45
Speaker 3: I think it was pigeons.

00:31:48
Speaker 1: Yeah, And someone someone noted that like, yeah, I got hit in the shoulder with the one, Like oh, I heard it bounce off the vehicles. So there was there was a certain amount of that. Anything surprised you max when we shot it, I would say, just the pattern and how good it was, you know, Like I was very impressed at thirty five yards, Like when we get those paper light up targets, I was very impressed.

00:32:11
Speaker 2: I was like, Wow, that could do some damage, you know, like I could see why people use that right, you know.

00:32:19
Speaker 1: Yeah, and uh, Seth brought up the water moltain. That’s the final thing in the film that we shoot, and that kind of goes back to the genesis of the punt gun. Immediately four or five years agoing to start talking about this, Steve was like, we gotta shoot water melons. We gotta do the Gallagher bit. We got we gotta go blow up a bunch of watermelons. And then that also allowed Steve to explain to people who Gallagher is, which I think he enjoyed equally as much as actually calling you trigger to shoot the way He’s like.

00:32:45
Speaker 3: You don’t know Gallagher?

00:32:46
Speaker 1: What Gallagher?

00:32:47
Speaker 6: You know?

00:32:47
Speaker 5: It’s not how much Steve talks about Gallagher. I think that’s the only comedian.

00:32:51
Speaker 3: I don’t think anyone knew what he was talking about.

00:32:53
Speaker 2: I will admit I did not know what he was talking about, and then like figured it out.

00:32:58
Speaker 1: Yeah. I would only like my exposure to Gallagher was from secondhand references, like your family guy would do a bit about Gallagher, I’d be like, well, I don’t know who you know Gallagher?

00:33:10
Speaker 5: He famously walked out of a Mark Marrin podcast it was and got really mad. Oh yeah, it’s a fun listen. He lasts like twenty minutes and then storms out.

00:33:18
Speaker 1: What would possibly make him so because what wasn’t this thing was?

00:33:22
Speaker 5: But it was just sort of like, what’s the deal with all the water? Like he was just kind of he was kind of poking him, he wasking the bear.

00:33:27
Speaker 1: Yeah, so I don’t think we wouldn’t be doing this podcast today. We wouldn’t have bought the punt gun if Gallagher didn’t exist, just because Steve was like so excited, infatuated with the idea of.

00:33:39
Speaker 2: I think you got to tell people who galligator Gallagher is. I think what he does.

00:33:43
Speaker 1: Steve has said this million times. He would smash watermelons on stage, and you would like, you know, wear a raincoat if you were in the front row because you were going to get you know, covered in watermelon. Am I getting that right? Phil?

00:33:54
Speaker 8: Yeah?

00:33:54
Speaker 5: I mean I think it was more than watermelon. That the watermelon was the thing that that that caught on and that’s what people remember. But it was all kinds of fruit, Spencer, not just water milk.

00:34:03
Speaker 1: Okay, well, we shoot watermelons in the film. Most unexpected thing for me was like during this research, I was I was learning, you know, about the market hunting era, and when it comes to ducks, there was only a little bit of value with the feathers. The meat was the main product. If these ducks didn’t have the meat that they had, like this market would not have existed because the feathers weren’t valuable enough on their own. The duck meat is what paid the bills, and there was like a very clear hierarchy in the prices. What would you say is like the best tasting duck Max in North America?

00:34:39
Speaker 2: Well, I think you asked someone it’s going to be something, and then you ask another person it’ll be something different.

00:34:45
Speaker 1: Mask and Max.

00:34:46
Speaker 2: I’m just explained myself, But yeah, I think wood ducks and mallards are my favorite.

00:34:53
Speaker 1: Would you say the same thing? Okay, Well, the prices like kind of show you what the American palette was at that point. A plover that’s a shore bird that you’d see it’s, you know, like a little marshmallow with toothpick legs out on a gravel bar in the Missouri River. Those cost twenty five cents per plover is what you would get to see that is nine dollars per plover in twenty twenty six. Appetizer an appetizer, sure, yeah, not a highly respected bird, which is the other thing you learned is that these guys weren’t just killing ducks and geese. They were killing herons, seagulls, shore birds, all kinds of different stuff. So a plover was worth a quarter nine dollars today, a snipe was only a little more valuable at thirty cents a snipe teal wood ducks and wigeons, that’s what Max said would be his top pick would be a wood duck that was seventy five cents per pair, so less than forty cents per wood duck, which is only slightly more valuable than a snipe.

00:35:59
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don’t know, I don’t agree with that. The prices should have been a little higher.

00:36:02
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, So black ducks those were a dollar, mallards were a dollar twenty five, and then the ones that everybody cared about was canvas backs and redheads. Those were a dollar seventy five apiece, which is the equivalent of sixty two dollars today.

00:36:18
Speaker 4: Yeah, sixty two dollars for me, I feel like I used to do some hunting on the Chesapeake Bay Back I live in Pennsylvania, and like the duck to kill was a canvas.

00:36:27
Speaker 2: Back king of ducks.

00:36:29
Speaker 3: Yeah, so it’s like people are still after him.

00:36:32
Speaker 1: Yeah, so these ducks. If you were a market hunter in Chesapeake Bay and say you went, you know, punt gunning for a night and you killed one hundred and fifty ducks, those ducks would then either be salted or iced and then put on a train, and then they would wind up in some of your premier cities in the Midwest and East coast, Boston, Chicago, Baltimore, New York. And then these would go to like the finest dining restaurants, and what they cared about were canvas backs and redheads also read. And those prices, I should explain, those came from a Good Housekeeping magazine in eighteen eighty six, that’s one year after our punt gun was made, and they said that’s what you would sell them for in New York. But the other thing I learned is that ducks fetched a higher price if they came from a place with lots of wild celery. Apparently they thought that like a duck eating wild celery ate better? Is that your experience, Max, I’ve.

00:37:27
Speaker 2: Never experienced a ducking wild celery, but I remember hearing about that, just like that East Coast region, Like that’s what those diver ducks would do.

00:37:36
Speaker 1: The three premier regions that I saw, like, if you kill a duck in this zone, that’s gonna fetch the highest price. That’s what the restaurants want. It was the Upper Chesapeake, Wisconsin’s Lake kanash Kanang, and then Texas’s Lake Surprise.

00:37:51
Speaker 2: Really apparently those were like all sorts of different regions though.

00:37:54
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, what I feel like when I hear people talk about wood duck being the best tasting duck, which is that’s not an uncommon opinion that Max has. People would say it’s because they eat a lot of acorns. Is that like what you would think it is?

00:38:08
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I’ve had ducks that eat pond scum tastes like crap, But then also ducks that eat corn taste really good, you know, So I feel like some of that has to play a factor in it. But I think the wood ducks there’s just a good ratio of meat to fat. Okay, just because they’re a smaller duck. I think the biggest ratio of meat to fat is obviously a teal, like a big fat green wing teal is just like just a small small amount of meat and just like lots of fat and a lot of people like this.

00:38:45
Speaker 1: Is it different for like a blue wing or a cinnamon.

00:38:48
Speaker 2: Well, I said the green wing teal just because they’re the most hearty, and a lot of times, like during the migration, you’ll see the cinnamon teal, the blueing teal go first all the way down to southern Texas, this even down to parts of Central America, and then the green wing till they’ll be up here hanging with the mallards in December, some of them, not all of them.

00:39:10
Speaker 3: So they just get more fat, yeah, they later.

00:39:15
Speaker 1: Well, the wild celery is what was driving the market back then. Max. If you were a punt gunner, I’ll explain how they were used a little bit. A lot of times it was used like either just after dark or just before sunrise, so that the punt gunner could like paddle into the area and be real stealthy without being seen. They had to allow for four yards of water behind them because that’s how much recoil these produced. If you were a punt gunner, no rules, Max. You can be in a national park in August if you want. Where are you taking that thing? Uh?

00:39:49
Speaker 2: Probably somewhere in the Central Flyway during the springtime hunt snow geese. Oh okay, Yeah. I don’t know if I could do it it on ducks because I like him so much, but snowgee’s are already a new sense, you know, and so I feel like I would just go carp the sky. Yeah, I would go after snowgies just because like they’re knowing to roost in large numbers, and I feel like it would be a good time. But I would have three punt guns, oh okay, one on the water, one slightly above and one slightly aimed above that like a.

00:40:24
Speaker 1: Twenty degree angle, and then like yeah, so.

00:40:27
Speaker 2: You smoke them on the water, they all get up, get another one, and then a third shot off.

00:40:33
Speaker 1: What if you were trying to play the market though, and have a bunch of canvas backs or red.

00:40:37
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, then I would definitely go to the chestapeak and you would find some canvas backs.

00:40:40
Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, set any thoughts on if you were a punt gunner.

00:40:44
Speaker 3: Where I’d go?

00:40:44
Speaker 1: Where you take that thing?

00:40:47
Speaker 3: I’d go that little hole that I hunted with you, Max at one time.

00:40:51
Speaker 1: Okay, I could even say what state you were in. No, I like that, Max.

00:40:57
Speaker 2: No, there’s it’s just a small warm water creek that well it was a pond, but there was a warm water creek flowing into it. I don’t think you could fit another Mallard into it.

00:41:11
Speaker 1: Could you get a punk gun there if you had to?

00:41:14
Speaker 3: You couldn’t have a boat, you can, ye, it.

00:41:16
Speaker 2: Would be like a canyon or just like roll it up on wheels, okay, like a fork gun.

00:41:24
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:41:24
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:41:26
Speaker 1: So the things we shooting, we don’t get to shoot any any live animals, uh in the video, but we shoot some paper targets to show you it’d spread. We shoot the clay pigeons. There’s there’s sort of a clay pigeon disaster that that you’ll watch on the video. We shoot the water melons, and then we also shoot some hats. Uh. These are hats that say this hat was shot by a punt gun. And and now we are going to sell those in the auction House of Oddities. The Auction House of Audities is going to be happening sometime in early July. Here they’re not going to be auctioned off the hats. They’re just going to have a buy it now price. There are only seventy three of them, and when they’re gone, they’re gone. And when you do buy one, you just get a random hat. Some of these were absolutely destroyed that they have, you know, twenty five pellet holes in them. If you if you shake them a little, you’ll hear the bebes that are still in.

00:42:20
Speaker 3: Like the bill, you can you can see some of the bebes too.

00:42:25
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah. The hats they have a leather patch on them. That’s where it says this hat was shop by a punk gun. Some of those leather patches just like absorbed the bb It looked like, you know, somebody was the hand of God and just put it there and pressed it in with their thumb. So anyway, we have these hats for sale. There’s other ones that only got one or two straight pellets in them. If you want to go buy one of these, when they’re gone, they’re gone. There’s seventy three of them in the auction house of bodies. You’re just getting a random hat. Probably going to sell them for seventy five dollars a piece. I know that sounds steep, but every penny is going into the land Access Access Initiative, so you’re funding a good cause. We’re also selling the punt gun shells in the auction house as well. We’re gonna have three of them that are for sale again. This will be in early July when that’s happening. You guys have any other thoughts before we do our interview with Joel from Rock Island.

00:43:16
Speaker 2: Glad to be a part of it.

00:43:18
Speaker 4: Yeah, that might be the I’m assuming it will be the last punt gun I ever shoot.

00:43:22
Speaker 1: Yeah, this person last, first and last. And you guys got a video of you doing it together.

00:43:27
Speaker 2: It’s teamwork, all right.

00:43:30
Speaker 1: The video is available right now on our YouTube channel. Now let’s do our interview with Joel Calander.

00:43:37
Speaker 6: All right.

00:43:37
Speaker 1: Joining us on the line is Joel Calander, the interactive production manager from Rock Island Auction. Rock Island is who will be selling our punt gun later this summer, with proceeds going to the Meat Eater Land Access Initiative. Joel, welcome to the show.

00:43:53
Speaker 6: That’s good to be back. Good to talk to you again.

00:43:55
Speaker 1: Now our punt gun will be for sale at the August premiere Firearms auction, tell us about that event.

00:44:02
Speaker 8: Sure, that’s our big summer premiere auctually have three premiere auctions here. This one’s August twenty first, twenty third. It’s gonna be about seventeen hundred items. It’s a three day sale. It’s an absolute, absolute event at our in person venue there in Bedford, Texas. So if you’re in the area, heck, even if you’re not in the area, come on down it is. They’re always open to the public. If you can’t make it down like and if someone wants to bit on the punk gun or see better photos of it, of course, you can always go to the website for photos, for more information, of course, to place bids on those items.

00:44:33
Speaker 1: Okay, so a few months away from selling the thing, give us a guess as to what the punt gun will sell for.

00:44:41
Speaker 8: So the good news is you have kind of an idea already right within the last couple of years. That’s a pretty good comparison because the actual gun sold in twenty twenty two. That said, our estimate now is a little bit higher. We got believe a pre auctionssment at least could change. We’re still we’re working on that sale right now. Between twenty and thirty thousand. Okay, I think there’s there’s a couple of things that go into that one tied to you guys, and you know, you guys are a pretty popular thing now do it’s uh, I got evidence that it’s a that it’s a functional unk gun, which there are too many of these.

00:45:18
Speaker 6: I mean, there are too many punt guns. In general. They’re a rare item.

00:45:20
Speaker 8: So to have one that’s documented and functionals has a.

00:45:24
Speaker 6: Piece of brass with it, that’s always a plus.

00:45:26
Speaker 8: And it’s actually surprisingly good condition for a punk gun. As you know, those things are often in a quat environments and often salt water environments. So to have one like this with that paint and it’s a Holland and Island, I think that’s that’s all going to help the value for that. Oh and it’s appearing alongside a lot of really just top of the line sporting arms, both for wing shooting and for a big game.

00:45:49
Speaker 6: So start sporting arms go this August.

00:45:51
Speaker 8: That punt gun is gonna be a headliner and it’s it’s in very good company.

00:45:55
Speaker 1: Okay, very excited. I’ll be tuning in for that action paint. Just a picture for the type of that is looking to spend twenty thousand or thirty thousand on a punt gun that they may never shoot. Who is that person?

00:46:08
Speaker 6: Sure, we actually seek quite a bit of this.

00:46:10
Speaker 8: Of course, collectors is the easy answer, right, we’re at auction house for find a historic firearms, so colectors is easy, and we’ll kind of collectors. Well, of course you have sporting arms collectors. You see that with premier brands today, Holland and Holland, Purdy, Rigby, some of those more famous names, Kriegof and what have you. So sporting arms specifically though, you may find ones for British sporting arms. You might find one specifically for British best quality firearms or even London gun makers. You may also find someone who just loves wing shooting, whether that’s you know, American, there’s a bunch of publications of course here Stateside to focus.

00:46:46
Speaker 6: On just wing shooting and hunting. You might find that as well.

00:46:50
Speaker 8: And then there’s just people who like big display pieces or things that go boom. You know, a functional piece has going to kill to a lot of people as well. So there’s pretty good again, pretty good gamut of the cross sections of colectors there.

00:47:03
Speaker 1: Okay, we hope it’s competitive that day. Give us some history of Rock Island auction and punt guns. How often do you have one come up for sale?

00:47:12
Speaker 6: So the short answer is not very often.

00:47:15
Speaker 8: And you know, way back when I first started, I think we said we sold, you know, some right around forty thousand guns a year at auction. We been here thirteen years, so that number is if it hasn’t double that, I’d be very surprised. That’s the number one in the world for what we do. But throughout checked our records prior to this and just to see how many punt guns, it’s barely barely over two dozen.

00:47:37
Speaker 6: Wow, the coming Yeah, if you’re.

00:47:39
Speaker 8: Selling tens of thousands of guns year and that few are punt guns, so not a lot of them remain one because again we mentioned already those those kind of initial rough conditions. These are guns that are they’re working guns in saltwater conditions. And then two, of course, it speaks to the to the legislation. If you can’t use these punt guns, you know what, what are they for a lot of people lose the sort of luster of ownership. So at least when they weren’t in practical use anymore. So I’m not not too many punk guns floating around anymore.

00:48:09
Speaker 6: Even that comes through our doors.

00:48:10
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think when we bought ours, there were two punt guns up for sale that week, and previously we bought it in twenty twenty two. Prior to that, I think someone there had told me that twenty sixteen was the last time you guys had sold one. So less than one punt gun a year, it seems like.

00:48:28
Speaker 6: That’s fair. I mean, you know, you get ones like that.

00:48:30
Speaker 8: We have two and a sale most likely a single collector who’s had more than one. So yeah, but less of one punk good here as since we’ve opened, and we’ve been opened since nineteen ninety three, that’s a that’s a safe estimate.

00:48:45
Speaker 1: Now, how does the size of our punt gun compared to the other ones that you guys have sold.

00:48:50
Speaker 8: There’s so many jokes to be made here, but I will say it’s.

00:48:58
Speaker 6: Bigger than average.

00:48:59
Speaker 8: I mean, we have the there’s a lot of the seven eight, there’s a lot of the seven foot range.

00:49:03
Speaker 6: There’s a lot of the eight foot range.

00:49:05
Speaker 8: Not of course, you know any source you read, they always want to site the biggest, right, you know, these are twelve foot guns. These are ten foot guns, and they’re the forger an inch wide, and they killed you know this, many hundred things at once.

00:49:17
Speaker 6: You know, those are those are the exceptions. That’s one end of the scale.

00:49:20
Speaker 8: But punt guns, I mean, just as a genre, are so varied because they were in use for so long, I’m sorry for through so many sort of periods of development, right by so many different groups of people, through so many different firearm technologies on. So it runs the gamut. I mean, you get people who were using them more commercially, so very very large, you know, the many the most birds you could take down, the more money you were bringing in, yeah, during those commercial hunting days. And then you had people who are just trying to in their earlier days, just trying to make an extra buck and maybe put some meat on the table for their family too, So they’re a little bit smaller at that point. Here’s I didn’t have the full measurement. I have a barrel measurement eighty five and a half inches, which puts it about seven foot. You know, once you add that sort of tiller or or stock that’s on the back, that saturn extra twelve eighteen inches so, uh, it’s right in there with a lot of good seven and eight footers.

00:50:11
Speaker 6: The biggest one that we had.

00:50:12
Speaker 8: Was like just over just over nine foot nine foot seven and a half inches. So there’s somehoozies come through the direct for sure.

00:50:22
Speaker 6: Yeah.

00:50:22
Speaker 1: Now, at some point before we bought the gun, someone from your team told me that you will often have sellers that come to you guys with what they call a punt gun, but in reality they have a pigeon gun or a fort gun. So what is the difference between those three things, a pigeon gun, a fort gun, and a punt gun.

00:50:42
Speaker 8: We’re getting into the collecting knitty GrITT here, and that’s what we’re here for.

00:50:46
Speaker 6: I love it. Pigeon guns.

00:50:49
Speaker 8: They’re gonna there’s gonna be some intersection too, because eventually, when people were punting, anything that you could use that would get you close to ducks on a punt and take down more than one duck at once could have seen used as a punt gun. Right if you were just trying to put again beat on the table or make a couple extra bucks, you weren’t really picky about what it was in form it was did it function, But pigeon guns early on are for the early pigeon shoots, like literal trap shooting. You have five trap houses. They released pigeons. They could go any which direction and you had to knock them down within a circle a giant sort of area to get killed to get credit for it. If you want to knock those pigeons down fast, you wanted a big gun. So eight bars aren’t common, Very long barrels aren’t uncommon, and very very high end as well. There was a lot of money on these pigeon shoots back in the day. So here you have this size. You have really well put together pigeon guns. They could often be confused for a large punt gun. You also both you know, smooth board shotguns.

00:51:53
Speaker 6: Did you have a wall gun? Or what was a fort.

00:51:56
Speaker 1: Gun that I had heard? I heard some of them referred to as fort gun. What would that be?

00:52:00
Speaker 8: A fork gun, a wall gun, a rampant gun, sort of lots of different names all for the same thing, and it’s exactly what it sounds like. These are guns that are mounted on walls. A lot of times they will be large, very seldom if I see like an actual rifled example, but oftentimes through some sort of fork with as like a pintle or something on the bottom, because you’re actually gonna set that on top of a wall to defend your fork castle, you know what have you.

00:52:31
Speaker 6: And they’re really sort of an intermediate range weapon.

00:52:34
Speaker 8: You know, you had your small arms for closed up, you had artillery and mortars for far away targets. But right in the middle, well, you could use a really big wallgun to make an impact on some enemy troops that might be you know, sieging your position or your or your building. The last one or two punt guns, as you discussed on the podcast, these are large guns to be put in a boat, mounted in a boat, or a punt very gallow because essentially you are sneaking up on ducks on their own turf, trying to be as undetected as possible, getting within a certain range for you to really love that shot across the water and take out as many ducks as possible. Those are again large caliber, no surprise there, shotguns you’re trying to take out as many as possible. But the range of a true punt gun is everything from pre flintlock to the cartridge guns like the screwbreach Holland and Holland that y’all bought, and so everything in between.

00:53:33
Speaker 6: It’s it’s such.

00:53:34
Speaker 8: A fantastic genre of collecting once you start diving into it.

00:53:38
Speaker 1: Yeah, have you guys ever sold a punt gun that is confirmed to work like ours?

00:53:42
Speaker 6: Is? No?

00:53:44
Speaker 8: Okay, there have been a lot of quote unquote duck guns, which are again these sort of large.

00:53:51
Speaker 6: Bore it’s like four board. We have a lot of four board duck guns.

00:53:55
Speaker 8: Shouldn’t say a lot, but there’s when they do come through very high end. You’re dealing with very high end custom make from like John Dixon and Son or again Holland and Holland. People are using these as shoulder mounted four bore shotguns. And again they’re they’re for duck would they are they the type to be like mounted or secured in a boat?

00:54:16
Speaker 6: You know? But they’re definitely being used for essentially the same purpose, and they would be a flock shooting ducks. So there are.

00:54:22
Speaker 8: Those that are capable and find enough condition or I wouldn’t worry a bit about them being fired. Yeah, But as far as a true punt gun like yours with you know, pintle mounts on it and everything in the recoiled device on the bottom, all this fun stuff. No, I’ve never seen one even thought about being fired.

00:54:41
Speaker 1: Great, very excited. Now, what was any part of you nervous about us shooting the one that we purchase?

00:54:47
Speaker 6: Now? The funny answer is no, because it’s not me. Uh. But the second answer is no, not at all.

00:54:53
Speaker 8: I mean, if there’s a group of guys that I and I trust to do the research with the outdoors and sporting its, it’s the folks that meat eater. Now, if you were two guys in a row boat taking it out, I might I might be a little more concerned. You’ll still have a quality maker like Holland and Holland. Yes, those are sort of like legacy arms and just they laughed in their heirlooms. So you started out with good materials in good condition, and you’re smart about it.

00:55:17
Speaker 6: Everything everything wi lined up perfect.

00:55:19
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that’s also why it took us four years to get to the point where we could make the film about us shooting the punt gun.

00:55:26
Speaker 8: I mean, I wasn’t going to bring it up, but I’m I’m sure it might come up once or twice in the comment.

00:55:30
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, Now, how is selling a punt gun different from your typical firearms. I imagine there’s got to be some real logistical challenges that you guys go through selling, you know, an eight foot gun.

00:55:43
Speaker 8: Yeah, I mean the selling parts easy, right, an auctioneer and banging hammer at the front of a room. But everything around it is required, you know, to accommodate that that massive size. So whether it’s trying to take the photography of it, you know, to put it in our catalog, or to put it on the website, it uh transporting it even around the building, run our facility, getting it set up on our preview haul down in Bedford, Texas, and then of course eventually shipping it to a new owner. They all have they all have their their issues come up with which, by the way, if.

00:56:17
Speaker 6: You’re an in person, better boy, we would encourage that.

00:56:20
Speaker 1: Yeah. Our punt gun when we bought it, it showed up in a literal crate, I think multiple crates actually, So if you are the person who buys this thing and it’s going to be shipped to you expect a giant piece of wood coming in the mail and that’s where your punk gun will be inside of. Now, our punt gun, as most were, was made in England simply because that’s where this style of hunting was the most popular. So with that being the case, what is the most what is the most English thing about our gun? Is there something you look at that makes you go, oh, that gun? It was made in London.

00:56:55
Speaker 6: We can’t talked about earlier, but the Holland and Holland.

00:57:00
Speaker 8: Essential best quality gun, a London gun maker that’s been around since with eighteen thirty five, so the first one hundred ninety years, fifty last year, one hundred ninety years last year, and they just airloom quality. Like I said, legacy type guns the type you pass on. And of course we see him come out of some pretty impressive collections. Those are guns that will regularly draw six figures, high artistry and embellishment. But there are also guns that you should not be afraid to take out and use, maybe true to form with a punt gun, absolutely fantastical and Holland, So Holland and Holland is just quint essential British gun.

00:57:39
Speaker 1: Somebody we showed the gun to told us that they suspected the engraving around the barrel most likely made it a special order or a custom made gun. What do you think of that.

00:57:49
Speaker 8: Theory, Yes, especially given when your gun was made, which I believe was the late eighteen hundreds, correct.

00:57:56
Speaker 1: Eighteen eighty five, is what we could come up.

00:57:58
Speaker 8: With because the initially, you know, we have the early eighteen hundreds where hunt gunning is kind of coming into its own right.

00:58:07
Speaker 6: You have a lot of sailors, you have deck guns. How do we use these? What do we do when we’re out of the service.

00:58:11
Speaker 8: You know, there’s a lot of or mutual origins there from that British sort of age of naval warfare. But initially these are people who are, like you said, not doing this commercially, and so it’s whatever you can get, and a lot of times they’re very rough. Sometimes you might put it together at home if you can’t get those materials, but very very sort of singular purpose. As it goes on, it becomes essentially a score of the gentry. You know, the well healed and well to do are taking this very difficult, rough hunt. I mean, this is cold hunting. This are cold shooting muddy went salt water, like you might be out all day laying on your belly and like rowing a hunt that’s very physically demanding there’s a lot going on there, so to turn it into a sport at the end of the nineteenth centuries kind of what happens. And then you see more of these let’s say, accomplished gun makers getting into act, like Holland and Holland. John Dixon’s another one that made some four board duck guns, and it becomes you see the engraving, you see a finer quality in these guns. Yours is the only one I will say that’s in that punt gun form that looks like essentially duck artillery for lack.

00:59:30
Speaker 6: Of a better term. That it does have the engraving.

00:59:32
Speaker 8: On it, that scroll work, that scroll on a canvas work on there, and even a little engraving up in front of the trigger underneath with a little scene of the of the goose. I have no doubt that, just based on it’s time alone, you’re looking at a their premier manufacturer. Already by the eighteen eighties, Holland and Holland, they’re getting national acclaim in royal endorsements, and with the engraving on there absolutely an order for someone well to do.

01:00:00
Speaker 6: I wanted to go out and fry fund gunning. It wasn’t essential. It wasn’t to make money, but they want to try it out.

01:00:05
Speaker 1: Yeah, some real artistry on that gun. Now, besides our punt gun, what other guns from that auction are you excited about?

01:00:13
Speaker 8: So the good news is there are some. The bad news is we have a giant auction coming this weekend. Oh and the American Sales two and fifty years celebrating American history. So I can’t talk too much about August just yet, but I will say three things about August. One, as I mentioned earlier, you’re in a host of sporting arms that should.

01:00:36
Speaker 6: Rise and tide floats all boats.

01:00:38
Speaker 8: Sorry for the punt gun pun, but that should help all the sporting arms in that sale. And that’s what we do, we build auctions. There is a second. I will say the August premiere has one item flagship of the sale does have an estimate in the seven figures. And I will say about the August premiere that there is a gun so famous in that sale I would I would wager that everyone in your room right now has seen a photograph of it.

01:01:11
Speaker 1: Okay, great, that’s that’s a wonderful tease. And after this interview, Joel is going to tell me what that gun is so that I know and I don’t have to wonder anymore. Now, tell folks how they can learn more about the August auction where our punt gun will be sold.

01:01:25
Speaker 8: Sure, actually, since that auction will be over welcoming off to be over Saturday, go to the website on Monday. We will have essentially a sixteen page highlight portfolio that you can flip through digitally on our website. Uh, you’ll see the big dogs front and center on the front catalog, on the back catalog. If you go to Rock Island Auction dot com, they will have that highlight portfolio of the catalog for anyone who wants to see the punt gun and to place some bids on it. That to be available around mid July. Well, of course, bench make y’all aware of that, and you can you can spread the good words we can trying to raise some funds.

01:02:01
Speaker 1: Here, Okay, very excited, and Rock Island is graciously waving all of our fees that normally come with selling a gun through them. That means they are helping put as much money into the land Access initiative as possible, So we really appreciate that. Joel, thank you for helping US fund more conservation projects, and thanks for joining us today.

01:02:20
Speaker 6: It’s been a blast. We’re happy to come back.

01:02:22
Speaker 1: Aytime, Okay, talk to you again. Thank you bye ye all right, that’s it for this episode. The punt gun film is on our YouTube channel right now. Please go watch it. It’s a lot of fun. Old guns are cool, big guns are cool. This is as old and as big as it gets. So if you like history, if you like conservation, if you like firearms, you’ll like this video, so please go check it out. It’s available right now. Don’t forget to go buy your punt gun hat at the auction House of Oddities that will go live sometime in July. You can also bid on the shells there. We have three of them that we’re going to be selling. And if you want to buy the punt gun yourself, you can go do that at the Rock Island Auction in August. You can participate virtually. They’ll set you up really well. I bought the gun from Bozeman, Montana, while the auction was happening. I believe they were in Illinois at that point. Now they’re located in Texas, so you don’t even have to be there in person to participate again. That’s Rockland Auction dot Com that is happening at the end of August. All right, that’s it for this episode. Thanks for watching, Thanks for listening.

01:03:33
Speaker 6: By now