L&R Bailes lock information

[smart dog]

Hi,
This is off topic with respect to the Bailes lock but not with respect to my experience with L&R products, which spans 1980-today. I have a brand new L&R Queen Anne round-faced lock. The forged mainspring is crudely made with no tapering or finished shaping.  It works, but has a dead feel. I will replace it with one of my own making.  The assembler did not grind off all the flashing on the back of the top jaw before fitting it and drilling. As a result there will be a gap between the top jaw and the flintcock that I will fill with weld and file to shape.  The toe of the frizzen is so rough that it grinds against the frizzen spring and prevents the frizzen from opening more than about 20^o.  One section of the sear spring is ground almost paper thin.  I will make a replacement.  Despite the fact that the lock plate is sufficiently long to accommodate a longer sear and sear spring, the sear is very short reducing its leverage. As a result the release pressure at full cock is twice as heavy as Chambers round-faced English lock. The frizzen has that silly lug on the bottom that fits into the pan. The pan is shallow so the lug hits the inside of the pan preventing the cover from closing fully and sealing with the rim of the pan.  Plus the lug leaves little room for priming powder.  I will remove it and fit the pan cover properly.  The lock cost $18 less than the Chambers round-faced lock.  I will put more than $100 of my time in to bring it up to an acceptable standard.  I bought it because it is the only round-faced lock of the right size for my project unless I ordered castings from TRS or Blackleys. 

L&R no longer makes cast springs for the Durs Egg lock so to replace a spring on an older Durs Egg, you have to fill the mainspring pin hole on the lock plate and drill a new hole for the new spring. You also have to inlet the new spring because it buts up against the lock bolster further back than the old spring. More insidiously, the slot in the claw on the spring does not line up with the stirrup on the tumbler. The stirrup pushes the spring out from the plate a little and the stress eventually will break the stirrup unless the slot on spring is widened considerably. 

dave

[Captchee]

 Im with ya Smart Dog .Next year  Ill have 40 years doing this for  both a living and  for a few years as an enjoyable hobby..
Im Glad Jim has  came out with a few different locks . It doesn’t seem that long ago  a whole lot of people were slapping Silers on everything .
Davis IMO is also a good lock . But  I have a few with miss drilled tumblers  and bad frizzen. In fact Jerry Huddleston and I fought one such frizzen a few years back.
 
 I just ran into  those  very  issues with the Durs Egg last week .
 However I was able to order a new spring from  MBS that fit without re drilling .
 If you cross parts numbers  you’ll find that the Durs Egg takes the same spring , sterup and tumbler  as the Manton and if I recall the Baily’s
 I would  also add  that  depending on how old the Durs Egg lock is ,  you  may run into  tumblers with different sized  hub  on the tumbler   causing the bridle to need to be drilled out .

 I dread the day when   CNC work takes the place of a few hours of hand work . With business , time is money . So I get what Mike is saying .
However  with the new 3D  scanners , I fear  it wont be long tell  near exact reproductions will be made in a mater of a few hours .
I have no issues with spending alittle more time on  something .

[Mike Brooks]

Silers....Back when I started in '80 there were some new styles of locks just coming on from L&R and Davis. I used the $#*! out of all of those so I wouldn't have to use a siler. (L&R was a far better lock then what L&R produces today ) Seems about everything was built with a siler flintlock back then as they were about the only high quality lock you could get. In 36 years I'll bet I have only used a dozen Siler locks, just got so tired of seeing them back in '80 when I got started. in fact out of the dozen I have used probably 1/2 of them were lefties.
Nothing wrong with a Siler, they are excellent locks, just an old prejudice of mine.

[Bob Roller]

Silers....Back when I started in '80 there were some new styles of locks just coming on from L&R and Davis. I used the $#*! out of all of those so I wouldn't have to use a siler. (L&R was a far better lock then what L&R produces today ) Seems about everything was built with a siler flintlock back then as they were about the only high quality lock you could get. In 36 years I'll bet I have only used a dozen Siler locks, just got so tired of seeing them back in '80 when I got started. in fact out of the dozen I have used probably 1/2 of them were lefties.
Nothing wrong with a Siler, they are excellent locks, just an old prejudice of mine.

The early L&R locks were troublesome because foundries had no comprehension as to what was needed
and I remember L.C.Rice telling me that quality control wasn't in their vocabulary.They did quantity and
that was IT.I was told by one foundry operator that the level of quality control I wanted would bankrupt
a government and my answer was that it should be the norm throughout the industry. I think L&R was in
the lock business before 1980 and that was a very bad time to be dependent on indifferent foundries.
I well remember lock plates that were hard as glass and just as easily broken and frizzens that made few
sparks even when touched to a grinder
I offered high quality locks in the 1980's but the attitude was "If it's for a muzzleloader it HAS to be CHEAP"
and my response was to start exporting my locks to people who spoke poor English but GOOD German.
The increased foundry costs are now forcing makers who are totally dependent on them raise their prices and
rightfully so. The fact that ANY of this stuff is available at any price is a wonder to me and those of us who
for years have serviced this VERY NARROW market should be thanked. I really don't care anymore about who buys what or
how cheap they can get it or from who they can get it from.I may still make locks but I will not pay anyone to buy them.
In the above mentioned time frame if I wasn't filling a German order I was making bronze transmission bearings
for obsolete automatic transmissions as well as other small and simple auto parts so I had A DECENT INCOME.
One of the pleasures I got from this transmission work was to make bearings for modern units that thought they had
a captive market and would try to sell a planetary gear system for $1000 but wouldn't sell the bearing needed to fix it.
Getting back to muzzle loaders,the twin brothers of Cheapo and Junko are OVER,get used to it.

Bob Roller

[Mike Brooks]

If it's for a muzzleloader it HAS to be CHEAP"

Always been a factor in the M/L world. If I built modern guns I could double or triple my dollars per hour.

[Captchee]

 very true bob .
 i have invoices from Bud where i bought  builders locks for 20.00 and finished silers for 35.00.
sounds cheep now but wasnt all that cheep back then
 i still have one of each out in a box in th shop . one of these days im going to mate one of them up with a Getz barrel that i have . one Don made up in Secaucus.
Sure doesn’t seem like its been all that long ago .