Bill: Thanks for the suggestion. I've been thinking about my brother and his Elsie. This was his first shotgun bought long ago in Northern New York. He was a teenager. My brother has fond memories of hunting snowshoe rabbits and squirrels back in the Sixties with this gun. We think it was a different brother--now gone--who put too heavy a load on the gun and blew the barrel. For my brother I don't think anything can be really be done. The gun will never be the same. Just like those times can never come back. It was a different world.