When I opened the box on this thing I did not get any surprises. The "Ranger" Brown Bess was as cheaply put together as I expected. One look at the barrel and the goo used as grease and I verified my first suspicion....plastic has a definite use when working on a gun.
Here's how....
Take the barrel out of the musket. Drop a rod down and find the breach. Clean the goo off the rod. Mark it and see that the pan is somewhere in the breech. Drill a hole and find out that the bit does not struggle in the plug but breaks through the barrel, so the plug is mis-shapened at best or there's something else you don't know about it at worst. Now engaged the plastic.
Log onto the Track Of The Wolf Website. Put the plastic next to the computer. Find the Colrain !st Model Barrel and plug. Punch the numbers off the card onto the order form. Wait for the truck.
Simple.
What surprised me when I started this, though, was the vehemence and extension of the comments in my other post ( Cobbling a cheap musket). Some of the guys opening fire are, in fact, better craftsmen than those who made the original guns back in the eighteenth century, supplemented by better tools, materials and lighting and having an innate talent that the rest of us have to admire.
Of striking interest was the diagrams of the breechplug/barrel that were contributed. Also helpful was the recommendation ( albeit in a roundabout fashion) of where to go to get a real barrel, and, unless I get censured or kicked off this forum, I would recommend that these comments be installed permanently.
That's because the gun itself was clearly a pig....to a shooter. Since there are a lot of relatively new shooters out there who would be lured into this website by the price, there is a legitimate concern over safety.
The website and vendor, however, is not marketing to shooters overtly. All of the publicity centered around which movie was using what guns. Having built so many gunbelts for the cowboy shooters and shoes for the reenactors, it was obvious to me that the important thing in the market was the visual. It was up to me to ensure the craft quality. Maybe the website should have more pro-actively warned a potential shooter who was likely to put a real bullet into this thing.
In their best moments movies are an illusion. The guns in them only have to look good. Especially when carried. Anybody who looks closely at the hardware in an historical movies can spot the non-firing replicas, the dumb props from the prop shack that were not intended to work at all, and the period incorrect.
But that ain't the point here. The point was to see what I'd have to do to get a pig to fly. So, I am sorry if I did not explain myself well.
What I want to get my arms around ( and I don't care how much time I have to spend doing it) is what these guys were thinking in the 18th Century when they won a bid to assembly parts in the armory, or what they had to go through when their rangers got a batch of poor guns. Where's the unwritten stuff that we won't get to use to answer questions about their culture, or life style, or work practices?
I already know that the inletting is sloppy, the castings flawed, the Indian Walnut is just this side of Cedar, the lock sparks by destroying flints and the ram rod won't hold up a rose bush.
If I ever write another book, the part about the journeyman gunsmith will be a little more real. After all, it is not just the hard facts because the common thread we all have in this is the fascination with the romance of the period.
Ps...I have no idea why I am so thick headed. Semper Fi, Do or Die, Ooh Rah.
