I recently posted a composite fowling gun that I built with a Queen Anne doglock. One of the problems I had was that lock is huge, having a mainspring that stands out from the lock plate 9/16 of an inch. Fortunately, it slipped under my barrel but it interfered with my ramrod. My forward lock bolt also interfered with the ramrod channel as well. As a result, I needed to move my ramrod channel 3/16 of an inch to the left and 1/8 of an inch down. I figured I would have to cut into the ramrod channel from the barrel inlet but was worried about weakening the forearm by having to remove all that wood.
I started this gun in Ian Pratt and Ken Gahagan’s gunbuilding class and as I was packing up Ian showed me a tool he uses for adjusting the ramrod channel that doesn’t require opening up the barrel inlet. It worked well for me and I thought I’d share.
It is basically a rod with one end peened out to mushroom it creating a nice cutting burr. It is then run back and forth in the in the ramrod hole to scrape it out.
Here is the scraper. When I started the rod was straight on the business end but as I enlarged the ramrod hole I added the bend to increase cutting leverage.
Here is the scraping rod in use.
This picture shows the burr on the business end. By turning the handle you can direct where the burr will cut. The original ramrod channel was at the top of the channel you see here. You can see how much it has been moved in the lock inlet as well as the forearm. Most of the scraping was done in the enclosed forearm.
