Scott Swanson
Of The New Era
Dale Sobrero enjoys hunting but he usually doesn’t make it out of his shop until the end of deer season.
That’s because Sobrero, as one of the few gunsmiths around in east Linn County, is too busy helping other hunters get out the door and into the woods.
“I get out usually the last three days of the season,” said Sobrero, 64, as he sat in his small Cascade Gunworks office at 1113 Long St., next to Lee’s Appliances in Sweet Home. “They come running in here and I have to get them out there.”
This is his 30th year in that location, where he set up shop after moving from northern California in 1976. The small storefront is fairly nondescript – just a modest sign and a schedule of business hours. Inside is a smoke-tinged workshop whose counters and shelves are piled with gun parts, tools and all manner of firearm-related accessories. There’s a definite smoky odor and the floor is littered with cigarette butts.
“When I’m busy I don’t want to take the time to find an ashtray,” Sobrero said.
Nearly everything in the room is at a height he can reach from a wheelchair because Sobrero suffers from phlebitis, a blood disorder that results in blood clots, swelling and pain and which has resulted in the amputation of both his lower legs in 1994 and 1996.
Sobrero said he’s had trouble with his legs since he contracted polio at age 5 1/2, while his family lived in Taylorsville, in the Feather River Canyon area of northern California.
He grew up in Taylorsville after his father, a former shipyard worker in the Bay Area, decided to move back to his boyhood home.
“I was all for it,” said Sobrero, who was 5 at the time. “I was not for it after the first winter.”
They lived in a drafty old log cabin that someone had moved down from the hills.
“We spent all our time that first winter huddled around an old oil heater,” he recalled.
Sobrero broke the ball off the femur of his left leg, the side weakened by polio, when he was 12. He said no one knew it was broken and he even played football on it, so it healed wrong. That led to an operation when he was 13 that left him in a body cast for 11 months. When he got out of the cast, he had a form of rheumatoid arthritis that forced him to use crutches. He said he’s undergone “about 16” operations over the years to try to correct the problems.
After graduating from high school and from a technical school in 1967, where he was trained to be a radio operational engineer, he spent a couple of years as a radio deejay in northern California, including one in Quincy with the call letters KFIR – the last station to have those letters before the Sweet Home station got them, he said.
In 1969, he was in a serious automobile accident that left him hospitalized for a year.
“I was driving a Renault and hit some black ice,” he said dryly. “A Renault is not a good vehicle to learn flying in.”
“I kind of backed into gunsmithing,” he said. “I needed something to do and the state of California wanted to send me to school. My counselor asked me to consider gunsmithing. That was before I learned that it didn’t pay any money.”
He graduated as “Gunsmith of the Year” in 1971 with a straight 4.00 grade point average. After apprenticing at RCBS, a firm that makes reloading dies, in Oroville, Calif., for nine months, he moved to Sweet Home with a partner to set up shop. His partner soon sold out and after working with another partner for almost a decade, Sobrero has run the business on his own for the last 20 years.
“Most people who come in here just want good shooting/hunting rifles,” he said. “They don’t want to spend a lot of money.”
In addition to adjusting and fixing customers’ firearms, he does sell a limited number of guns, but he said that these days he will often just recommend a customer go to a big box store like Wal-Mart because those companies buy huge quantities of basic weapons for less than small businesses like his can purchase them.
He does sell odd ammunition, such as for a Russian .762×54, 8 mm Mausers, and .303 British firearms.
“Most people won’t carry the military stuff,” he said. “I do. One of my rifles uses a 7.5 x 55 Swiss cartridge. I don’t think anybody carries it.”
He also is an expert at finding parts for weapons.
“I probably carry more parts for guns than anybody in the whole state of Oregon,” he said. “But it seems like I never have the part I need. Luckily, I’m good at finding parts. Trying to find parts for old, obsolete guns – that’s fun.”
When business is slow, particularly during the winter, he works on his own projects. He said the most interesting guns he works on are generally his own.
“I’m one for trying experiments,” he said, showing off a series of weapons he has modified and improved, including an 1800s-vintage German Mauser – one of his favorite manufacturers.
“Very few of my guns stay original. I’m building a .22-250 right now.”
He said he enjoys going to gun shows, such as the one last weekend in Albany, where he can find parts. He said he often can beat the prices people pay for weapons at such shows.
“People buy rifles at a gun show, then they come here and find I’m selling the same thing cheaper and it’s already fixed,” he said, glancing over a display of used weapons he’s selling.
He’s clearly proud of what he can do with a firearm.
“I have a friend who talked me out of a Springfield 30.06 that I had,” Sobrero said. “He came back and told me he’d grouped five shots that he covered with a quarter from 100 yards.
“I’ve got guns that’ll do better than that,” he added, displaying a target on which one of his customers had put three bullets in the same hole from 100 yards with hand-loaded ammunition.
One customer shot a 3-inch group with a Remington 700 and came in exclaiming that he needed a new barrel.
“I told him to try different ammunition,” Sobrero recalled. “His wife went to Wal-Mart and bought everything they had in that caliber. The Winchesters put one right on top of the other, while the Federal ammunition scattered them 3 inches apart. It just depends on the ammunition and the rifle. Each rifle is different.”