Thanks very much to all for the nice comments.
Dr. Tim I am down in Baton Rouge and have been working the day job so much that it is hard for me to get time at the rifle bench. I have been keeping an eye on you though and you have been turning out some nice stuff yourself.
Mr. Bill that is a great honor thank you.
Guy the guard is one of the things I liked most about this rifle. fortunately there are very good photo's of this rifle in Whisker's Gunsmiths of Virginia. I was able to scale the guard up from these photo's and thanks to Hershel and Frank's guidance at the forge I was able to turn out a decent copy. I may take this and cast a brass guard from it and see how it comes out. I really enjoyed building this rifle and would not mind building a brass version.
The aging of the metal parts was done using Hershel's process of boiling in a clorox and water solution. I almost let it go to long, I engraved all the parts before hand and when I pulled the parts out I thought I had lost all of my engraving. A little carefull work with a wire wheel helped save the day. I probably had to much clorox in the solution or let it boil to long.
The stock was scraped not sanded. This being a red maple stock with bold stripping I thought it turned out well with the scraped surface. I could not get it as smooth as you can get with sugar maple. I have not mastered that aging process for the wood so I will let use help me out here. This rifle shoulders and holds beautiful and shoots like a dream. I am going to give it the Iron Man test in a few weeks. There is a 75 shot match at my home range I should find any bugs then.
Tim, Maarlsral, heinz, Tom C, Mike R, Capt. Fred, Rich, Tom E, thank you all.
