Don’t try this at home

First, do no harm.’ The much-quoted essence of the Hippocratic Oath doesn’t actually appear in that particular work at all. The words are certainly attributed to Hippocrates, but appear elsewhere entirely in Of the Epidemics, in which he begs medical practitioners, “with regard to disease, namely, to do good, or to do no harm”.

These words are appropriate ones with which to begin a discussion on home gunsmithing. The guns you may be planning to work on were made by time-served craftsmen at the top of their game. Time may have been unkind to their creations, but unskilled restoration or repair work is the unkindest cut of all, to paraphrase a line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

As a