Browning B25 Chasse Windsor 16

I recently read somewhere that John Moses Browning invented the over-and-under shotgun. He certainly did not, but his famous B25 became one of the world’s most enduring designs.



Browning filed his first patents on the gun in 1923 and 1924, but he never did get to fire a production version.







He died in 1926, while waiting for Fabrique Nationale in Belgium to finish the first batch of guns. It was the end of a remarkable design career, which encompassed some of the world’s most successful military weapons as well as sporting guns.



The company once boasted that the B25 was made up of 22 different types of steel involving 794 precision operations, and that craftsmen performed 155 hand fitting operations. In other words it was, and probably still remains, a present-day production engineer’s nightmare.