We had a good smith here in town at Langley's. Peacock was his name he built me a 6 x47 on a small Sako action I had. Nice stock work, did the bluing at another local smiths shop. He also worked on my early Winchesters. You know the ones a poor guy could afford. I managed to pick up IIRC 5 Winchester leverguns with 3 being takedowns. Got them at a good price. Winchester leverguns were cheap back in the late 70's anyway. These were shooter quality with the takedowns being very loose, hence, unsafe, cheap. Well we could not figure out how to tighten up these guns and everybody said they were wall hangers. Peacock though he could fix them, but he wanted to reset the barrels. So put them aside for a while.
Got the idea to track down P. O. Ackley in Utah. Finally found him one day but he was pretty deaf and ended up talking to his daughter. She would pass on what my questions were and then relay his answers. Well once he understood the problem he gave instructions on the repair. P.O. Said to make a chisel-punch to fit the curve of the threads on the barrel and slowly peen one thread at a time working your way around the barrel. Try it to the action and peen a little, try it, until it would finally snug up. Relayed this to Peacock and as I was describing the method his eyes lit up as he realized the simplicity of the repair. Over the years Peacock fixed about half a dozen takedown rifles for me and quite a few other leverguns repairs. He was always interested in rejuvenating out of the norm firearms.
We have 2 Smiths that I'm familiar with here in Fairbanks, Gary Junk of Arctic Guns in North Pole, and Doug of Doug's repair for in Fairbanks proper.
In between Peacock and Doug and Gary, I made friends with Lee Penwell of Nabesna down north of the Wrangle's. Lee and I would do gun shows here in Fairbanks and Anchorage for about 10 or so years. He was into anything with a lever or just Classic older stuff. He always would get 3 tables one we would split, and 2 for he's pieces and parts. Boxes, bins, plastic divided boxes with parts and parts. Rare sites tang sites, you name it if he did not have it with him he had it at his place. Well he died about 5 years ago. Had my Browning 71 in his possession at the time. Took about a year to get it back. But my point, he was a good Smith with a full shop. He had a steel container with all his parts in just in boxes on shelves and such.. After his death his place was neglected for about a year or two and it snows a lot there. The conx partially collapsed and lots of water leaked in and ruined most everything. He lived on the road system, but at the end in a very remote area. Took a lot of effort to recover his guns and equipment. Good guy.
