Jim,
Not much else to tell about the pistol, except that I really don't like the way it turned out very much. Back in high school, in the late 1960's, I had built two or three rifles. I worked on a couple more while I was at the U.S. Naval Academy from 1972 to 1976 but, as you might expect, there was not much time there to work on guns. Besides, it was not exactly "regulation" to be building guns in your room, so I had to keep all the parts and hand tools hidden. My roommate used to say it looked like I was building guns to break out of prison. At any rate, when I graduated, I went off to sea for the next many years and there was no time for much of anything else except what the Navy had me doing. By 1998, I had resigned my commission and was back ashore with the "grass combing lubbers" and decided one day to take up building a flintlock or two again. I bought the brass work from Bill Kennedy for the pistol shown. He was also selling barrels, but the profile I wanted was only 8 inches long and I wanted one that was 10. I called Bill and asked if he could make one longer and he said he could. After waiting for almost a year, the parts showed up. The brass castings were OK, but the barrel had a big lump in the outside profile where it had been extended the extra two inches I had requested.
To make a long story short, I wasn't sure what to do with it and I was busy with the aerospace business I had recently started, so the parts just sat for a while. About mid 2000, I started in on cutting out a stock, re-machining the outside barrel contour, and inletting parts. Not too far into the project, I realized that I hated the shape of the grip and was faced with the age old question of, "do I keep going with this miscreant or start all over?" Having then recently discovered the ALR site, and seeing the quality of the work being produced by other makers, I was sure I would make several more major mistakes and thought it best to continue the project the way it was as a training method. Once completed, I could take it apart and redo the whole thing.
At the same time I was teaching myself how to engrave and had cut nothing but a pile of steel and brass practice plates. The cutting was going OK but I had no eye whatsoever for an appropriate 18th century design. Since the pistol was not coming out well anyway, I thought it was a perfect opportunity to engrave something other than practice plates and, what the heck, the pistol wouldn't look any worse for my poor engraving style. So I finished the parts, did the inletting and carving, cut the engraving, and completed the pistol. Then I went out to shoot it and had a great time. (The Chambers lock worked so much better than the locks I had made for myself as a sophomore in high school !) So I didn't take it apart and do it all over. I just kept it as an early example of what I hoped would be better and better work and started in on a blunderbuss later that year.
On the old board we had a discussion one day about each of our "early works". Some had commented that they had kept things that they had made early on but that they would never show them to anyone. Others related stories of how, after they had learned more and increased their skills, they had dismantled some of their first projects, saved a few parts and built new guns out of them. In my own case, I had cut some nautical theme scrimshaw work on whale's teeth for my mother when I was in late grade school. Many years later, after I had gotten much better at scrimshaw, I asked her for the teeth so I could polish off the childish engraving and cut her much better ones. She was horrified that I would want to destroy what I had done as a boy and replace it with what I could do as a man. She said if I wanted to make her a better scrimshawed tooth to go right ahead but leave the old ones as they were. She said the work I had done as a boy captured a moment in time of who I was and what I could do at that point in my life. To destroy it would erase part of the history of what I had learned and how my skills had improved over the years. So, in keeping with her logic, I never rebuilt the long rifles I had built in high school (as I had always intended) and I never rebuilt this pistol. It looks bad, but shoots fine and I keep it as a reminder that we can and should always strive to improve our work. I always find something wrong with my own work when it is finished and always say that I will do it even better next time around.
