THE END IS NIGH

As you may have seen in my last article, I’ve been carrying out a restoration of a post-War Webley Mk1 which was mechanically pretty good, but had serious cosmetic flaws. It was now time to carry out yet more work to return this pistol to its former glory.

The main body of the pistol and the barrel were now in presentable condition and almost ready for refinishing. Before continuing with restoration work on the small components and screws, I decided to repair the broken right-hand grip. This had the bottom corner missing where it had snapped across the blind hole for the location dowel.

The grips are made of Bakelite, a “thermoset’’ plastic which is quite brittle, and breakages like this are common, but tricky to fix invisibly. The grip was prepared by cleaning the area of the break with emery paper and then degreasing it with acetone.

Then, using Sellotape, a cavity was formed into which a two-part