About
The Village Gunsmith has been offering Gunsmithing, Guns & Ammo, and accessories sales since 1971.
With almost 50 years of experience, owner Kenneth Pacheco has always had a passion for serving the shooting sports community in Dartmouth, MA and throughout Massachusetts.
Ken Pacheco started The Village Gunsmith in 1971 out of a childhood love for firearms. After serving a two-year apprenticeship with George Strickland of Smith Mills Sport Supply in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, Ken worked under Edward Lander of Lakeville Massachusetts, a full-time gun-smith since 1945.
With a combination of tutoring, self teaching and studying every available book on gunsmithing, Ken has progressed to the point where he has accomplished every facet of the trade. Such as; machine shop, fabricating gun parts by hand forging with anvil and hammer as well as machining, fitting rifle barrels, metallurgy, heat treating, metal finishing (blueing and browning), wood finishing, stock fabrication and alteration, custom work, and scratch building with hand tools and raw materials.
Ken has accomplished everything through passion, from antique restoration, building of antique guns to building modern custom target pistols and rifles. He also enjoys working on the 21st century space guns. Ken’s specialty though is antique arms; vintage Colt and Smith & Wesson double action and single action revolvers, and of course, the Colt model of 1911.
New England Rifle, built by Kenneth P. Pacheco
The flintlock rifle pictured below is a typical New England style rifle of the late 1700s. I began this project in 1984 to show the type of work that I could do and I fabricated it by hand as a gunsmith would have done in this area in the late 1700s. This rifle took 852 hours to build and spanned four years to complete. I began with a 2 1/4 inch cherry plank and fabricated all the small parts by hand. The stock was inletted and shaped completely by hand using chisels and rasps. The small parts were made completely of blank metal, the screws and pins were made from low carbon steel, and the brass parts were shaped from brass sheet metal, all the decorative work was done using needle files. The barrel is a Getz barrel, .50 caliber rifled. This project was finished in 1988 and bears my signature and date on the top flat of the barrel. I have used this rifle in some local muzzleloading competitions and have won several of them. The Colt 1911.45 caliber pistol is a sample of several I built throughout the decade of the 1990s. The guns were completely accurized from the frame up, all the bells and whistles added such as enlarged magazine opening, low mount Bomar sights, Beavertail grip safety, ambidextrous thumb safeties, oversized magazine release, match barrel with compensator, my signature, hand polished and blued slide and hard chrome plating on the frame. These guns are available for inspection at my shop.
