A mate and I went to Kempton Park on Sunday and picked up a lovely HW35 Vixen Luxus in very tidy condition. There's the odd mark on the metalwork but it's superficial with no dents, deep scratches or pitting. The stock has a few dents and scratches but hiding underneath is a beautiful piece of wood. Some muppet has put a dark brown treatment on the stock while the action was in it resulting in the cylinder and back block having brown patches on it.

I've had the gun apart and all innards are the original chromed finish including the mainspring which was unfortunately broken into three pieces. There's the original leather piston seal which was in place too.

We saw one Vixen for sale up there for £550 but in my view it wasn't as good as the one I got and I paid a lot less than that.

I'm going to fully clean the action inside and out, I've got the small rust patches and excess stock finish off the cylinder and block already. I'm going to strip the stock and refinish it in the original colour and finish. The breach seal was plastic but crumbled due to age, the spring washers on the barrel axis bolt were missing so these will be replaced. I'm going to convert the piston seal to a new style Weihrauch one and the mainspring needs replacing.

So a couple of questions, the mainspring needs replacing and I can safely assume originals are no longer available added to this the piston guide was matched to the spring, so what's the best option? The spring is OD 20.8, ID 14.1, coil thickness 3.3mm, number it coils 29, so a Titan number 9 might be in order. Secondly how rare are theses and what do members know about them?