“Is that an original?”
The gent behind the AR-15 at the hundred yard bench asked it of me as I took the case off my gun. Sometimes that question is a credit to the craftsman. Not in this time. Rascal was a kluged gun from spare parts and past mistakes re-purposed. All I wanted to do was cover mistakes with some character. I was actually taken aback.
I re- made Rascal, a smoothbore on a Chambers Little Feller stock, out of parts I had laying around this summer. I had my rookie Little Feller stock, with all its mistakes, left over from my first Chambers Kit back in 2015. It’s the middle of the three pictured here with my first clumsy attempt at a brass patchbox that was a little too crude. I considered kidnapping Hershel House but I had to settle for watching the video ad nausea and that patchbox was too vivid a reminder of how slow on the uptake I can be.
The original intention of a partial build now and a finished gun later was based on the fact that gunmakers had partials in the shop waiting for customers. Jingles Christmas even I do that with shoes. You only need one trip to Dixons, though, and a few minutes with Chuck or Greg before they point to the rack of partial builds and Schimmels behind the counter, to be willing to Kluge together a partial piece in between projects. That’s what I wanted to do with Rascal. Didn’t work out that way.
I patched up errant barrel pin holes in the stock with shoemakers pegs and used some coffee stirrers from Starbucks to put back some inletting chasms where too much was taken out. Then I selectively combined applications of Fiebings Brown and black dyes, the former for color the latter because it kinda sorta looked like worn, burned, beat up wood on some original muskets I’d seen. I kept the butt plate, one of the few things I did right on the original kit, and lock intact. I changed out all the pipes, sanded down some of the atrocious carving, keeping the pleasing, and went after an octagon to round smooth .28 gauge barrel I saw in Muzzleloader Builder Supply .
As if adding insult to injury, I had to bed it because the round was a little small, but I can go to confession soon over that.
Soldering and browning were skills I hadn’t tried yet, so I was going to learn on this piece. . When I was done, after watching the Larry Potterfield video, there were no solder beads on the floor and a brown on the metal that looks like it wore down over the years. I like bone inlays and parts and that old man trade gun sight tickles me, so I slapped them on there. Bone toe and muzzle cap and wrist inlay.
Rascal was going to be a trail walk gun for the sake of carry. I think he weighs in at about six plus pounds. Trail walks are always piggy backed on trips up north to see the grandchildren and that was part of what started this whole re-purpose project. Since smoothbores clean faster than rifles, ease of cleaning was also an objective now that I had that brass fitting and rubber hose job I picked up at the Dixons Rifle Fair where the hose clamps to the touch hole. Ease of transport was up there with the 35” octagon to round barrel that would fit in our Hyundai Accent. I pulled the brass patchbox and replaced it with the wooden one. I like wooden patchboxes even though I rarely use either.
Now this guy was asking me if this beat up assembly had seen some history other that a stint in a corner and an incarceration of goofed up parts in a drawer. I was embarrassed enough to shoot a one foot group at 25 yards that day.
It does have that beat up look, probably because it was beaten up. Outside of the barrel, the heaviest part of the gun was the Brown Bess Trigger Guard, which is so ill suited as to actually be part of a pleasing look. This would be nowhere near the high quality Poor Boy Rifles being made by modern craftsmen, but it sure as coffee was going to look like something made for a poor boy; Maybe a nondescript tramping around the woods during the French and Indian War who could not afford anything other than something this side of a barn gun or a piece that a gunsmith could unload some parts on. Maybe a gun that saw too much history or some such and didn’t survive to make it into the Shumway Hall of Fame. Components on it were reasonably authentic, but the whole piece was, at best, maybe on the south side of conjectural. I love the conjectural. For me the conjecture would be something between the extremes…all the documentation I ever encountered and the ability to fit right in with Henry Fonda and Claudette Colbert and Ward Bond…Nah!!
In its best moments this would end up an expendable piece that I could teach my grandchildren to shoot when they cleared four feet in height. I just needed to pump it up so I could be motivated to sight it in. It surprised me because it really, really tickles me. It is so ugly it is actually pretty in my mind’s eye and there is probably a kind of solitude in that belief. If nothing else, it reinforces my belief that there is a reason rifle makers made rifles and shoemakers made shoes. Nobody ever retched over my shoes, but I dunno about this gun…
Anyway, still saving my pennies to buy Shumway Books and learn more about the schools, I am willing to commit this venial sin of conjecture…the romance is just as much as the might-have-beens that did not survive time. From the first day in 1956 when I stood on the site of the colonial camp at Fort William Henry, where the massacre started, and I got spooked in the twilight, the lure of what we don’t know yet is just as great as the profit of what we do.
Last trip to the range and I got it to group 5” on a shoot n’ see at about thirty yards, which was a surprise in and of itself because I did not expect it to hit a bull in the fanny at five yards. Now I just have to tighten the group with load adjustment and controlling the urge to blink.
Of course, vanity was such that I had to make, rather than buy, a cartouche, but that’s a post in Accoutrements.
Don’t shoot yore eye out, kid
The Capgun Kid
