The bulino is a very different thing. It feels like nothing, which is terrifying in a completely new way. Holding a hammer, you feel like something, right or wrong, might actually transpire, but the bulino is so inconsequential as a thing that you feel quite naked in front of a block of steel. Where, you wonder, is the cutting, graceful tool-ness going to come from? Where are the buttons on this thing? You cannot dig this out.
Take it out and start over, and keep your handle lower to the steel. Then it will travel. With a lot of what I will call wrist yoga and a lot of concentration, I manage to send up a reasonably fine curlicue of steel out of a reasonably straight line. The notion of, say, shading the underside of a pheasant in flight on the side of a receiver is unimaginable for me. A dovetail cut means that the fat part of the dovetail shape is at the bottom of the cut.
All we actually see of the gold is the skinny top part. We can look at the process in two ways. In one view, the fingers of gold reach into, and under, the steel. The whole thing is an ancient, ingenious bit of joinery, which is why everything from First Dynasty Egyptian furniture to the drawers of eighteenth-century English dressers are joined with dovetails.
The lines are about a half-inch long. The great fine guns are that, in part. But a shotgun is also made to be fluid, to move with supreme agility, and to cast its grand spray out to a bird on the wing.
As a gun is born in the hands of its makers, they must consider all of these things, plus the ferocious demands of constant internal combustion. The brick four-story building, with its grand country-Italian eaves, presides over the village of Gardone in front of the fabbrica, exuberant window boxes filled with bright plantings at every arched, seven-foot-tall window.
The family uses it now for meetings and conferences. But at the time it was built, the villa was the ultimate in architectural statements. They are here. They make beautiful things that came from the iron in the valley. They were always bringing me and my brother to the factory, and we would be around as they were discussing the factory or they were telling us about the new products, so I had some concept of what it meant to be a Beretta.
Now, Carlo loved the fine guns, and he understood the craftsmen, but he was also an industrialist, which means, he was interested in the best technology. Army to supply its sidearms—specifically the Beretta M That contract, just renewed last year, caused Beretta to build an entire fabbrica in Accokeek, Maryland, exclusively devoted to the U.
His great-uncle Giuseppe suggested that he spend time in the premium-gun area. In addition to the fact that the premium-gun craftsmen of his generation were aging out, there was a severe market slump in the luxury gun market in the late s and early s.
Easier said than done. It had to be something different from the others, and it had to incorporate the latest technology. The models for all luxury guns are the English guns of the s.
Though supremely strong, the monoblock results in a seam, or weld, between the barrels and the chambers. So, this is how the SO 10 came to be. Just off the showroom and consultation rooms where clients can order guns sits the section of the fabbrica where the SO 10s are built, a large high room of about five thousand square feet, walled off with glass.
There is no special hush here; it is still very much a part of the fabbrica. The barrels and the receivers are milled in another part of the factory, but this is where the company keeps raw blanks of Turkish walnut for the stocks and forends and where the guns are physically made. The main work in this section of the factory is the assembly—the stocking, and the fitting of the receivers and barrels to the stock.
This room is his realm. He came, he says, to the factory as a teenager. Now the company sends him to meet with premium gun clients around Europe and the world. Also on display are Olympic skeet and trap shotguns, arquebuses, Mausers and a fine collection of John Browning-designed weapons. Conspicuously absent from the otherwise thorough collection were the AK and M combat rifles. For the firearms enthusiast, spending hours ogling over the weapons in this small but impressive museum is something not hard to imagine.
An early part of the tour includes a brief stop at several automobiles which seemed strange for their inclusion until Paolo Santoni, Beretta factory tour guide and retired senior engineer and designer for the firm, explained that for a short time, immediately after World War II, Beretta tried its hands at producing cars.
The experiment didn't last long, with only three cars having been built, and soon Beretta was back to making weapons and accessories. Through a labyrinth of hallways, corridors and stairs, the tour continues until finally turning a corner at the top of a modern stairwell. Lying before visitors at the top of those modern, sterile stairs is what must be the cleanest and neatest and entirely modern fabrication floor you will ever see in a modern weapons factory.
Beretta has been supplying firearms to the Armed Forces and Police Corps of Italy and numerous other countries for many years. The greatest success story regarding pistols is the fact that the American Armed Forces and State Police Forces started using the Beretta 92 series in In the same year it also supplied about 40, pistols 92 series to the National Turkish Police Force. Beretta won its first Olympic Gold medal in clay pigeon shooting in Melbourne in ensued by frequent Beretta victories in major international competitions.
It won medals at the Olympic Games of Rome , Munich , Montreal , Moscow , Los Angeles , Seoul , Barcelona , Atlanta , Sydney , Athens and Beijing not to mention the numerous medals it has won at World Championships starting from At the London Olympic Games, Beretta confirmed its sports vocation by securing one gold, one silver and one bronze.
Beretta competition shotguns have won more International Competitions than any other brand. Industriousness, inventiveness, traditional methods, attention to the needs of its customers and its craftsmen, as well as ongoing research, technological improvement and state-of-the-art manufacturing methods are the foundation on which Beretta has built its image. Since its competition and military firearms have brought the trademark of this historical gun manufacturer.
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