Bill Smalley has passed away

[Olle]

Originally Posted by Ron Wood

A true craftsman and a neat guy. I totally enjoyed his Borchardt project posts and helped out where I could. I do not recall him ever posting detailed photos of the finished gun...I wish he had, it was a magnificent project. I am very sorry at his passing. I would love to know more about him and his work. RIP Bill Smalley, you were what this hobby is all about.
Ron

I had the pleasure of meeting with him at his house, and it was almost overwhelming to see his projects. He was a true renaissance man, and he was into guns (everything from flintlocks to centerfires), model railroads, RC planes (piston and jet engines) and pretty much any hobby where he could use his creativity, engineering skills and craftsmanship. I was expecting to find a very well equipped shop with state of the art equipment, but he actually did most of his work in a simple shed out in the yard, and the most advanced piece of equipment I saw was a Chinese mini lathe. He even did some of his work at the kitchen table when it was too cold or hot to work in the shed.

The Borchardt was only one of his projects, he showed me several guns he had either made or modified. One was a Colt revolver of some kind, he said it was so rare that he had only been able to locate a cylinder for it, so his solution to that was to build a whole gun around the only part he had. It reminded me of those Chuck Norris stories: "When other gunsmiths make spare parts for their guns, Bill makes guns for his spare parts"

I wrote an article about him for a Swedish gun magazine many years ago, but like I told Rich in a PM: Bill didn't really want any publicity so I had to promise not to show the pictures I took to anybody here in the US. I'm thinking that the Borchardt would be ok to show though, as he did show that himself here on the forum. I just have to think about it.

At the time I saw the Borchardt, it was almost ready for live test firing, I believe the only thing left to do was the recoil spring. I did get to fire a primed shell though, like Bill said: "Just so you can tell everybody that you have shot a Borchardt". I'm not sure how far he got after that, but last time I was in contact with him it sounded like he was actually ready to fire it with live ammo. He didn't have a good place to shoot so I invited him over for a test run, but we never got to do it.