I fixed the bend in the barrel. It looks better for it. Thanks for pointing it out. I was aware of that from pretty much the beginning,I started on the barrel. The bend is in the picture I was using as a reference, but now I've taken it out. It does look better.

Now I'm coming to texture it. Ive added the trigger. Stupidly I had modelled the whole thing, being largely, well, completely, symmetrical, and there was an odd number of divisions across its width. So i had to add an edge loop around the middle of the entire thing to be able to break it in two. Ive extracted the two parts that are going to have wood textures.

I was working through jays sand speeder tutorial the other day, and Im sure that when I pressed '3' to get a smooth version of the poly, when I rendered, it rendered the smooth version. With this though, when I press '3' for the smooth, when i render it, it renders just the basic '1' poly. Am i imagining this?

I practiced with a cube the other day and realised you cant texture the basic mesh, and then smooth it. So should I map the smoothed version(i.e, press the 3 key), apply mesh>smooth, or convert to sub-d.?