Fowler Butt Plate

[frogwalking]

I have been making rifles for a while (since 1965).  I hacked out a shotgun using an unchambered modern barrel in about 67.  I am now into attempting to do it right, and am assembling a Chambers 20 ga fowler kit.  On the top extension of the butt plate, there is a flat rectangular piece of brass extending downward.  Is this to be inlet an pinned to hold the end of it down (like the trigger guard) or is it just a piece of flashing from the casting process?  If the latter, it is very straight and square to simply be scrap.

Where does the top  butt plate screw go?  On the rifle, they go in the top extension, but I don't see them there in the fowler photographs.  Do they go in the corner between the top extension and the vertical part that goes against the shoulder?  If so they would be pulling downward and forward on the buttplate.  (That would seem like a good thing)

[Ephraim]

The Fowler's I have owned that peace hanging down was pined and shaped in a hook the only screw was on the butt.
Ephraim

[California Kid]

Yes they go approximately in the corner. The tab can be formed into a hook that goes into the wood eliminating the pin. Hook sinks in as the butt moves forward.

[Don Getz]

Frog......that little tab on the forward extension of the buttplate is to put a pin thru, however, if you do a good job of
inletting on it, and place one of your screws right into the  middle of the "heel" of the buttplate, you probably won't have
to pin that front portion.  When you put that screw into the middle of the heel, it seems to pull the whole buttplate into
proper place.   You will then add another screw down toward the toe, but not too close...careful..............Don

[frogwalking]

Thanks guys.  The old blacksmith/gunsmith who taught Chuck and I in making rifles back in the '60s told us to "Make 'em any way you want to, as there ain't no two of 'em alike nohow."  I guess he was telling the truth, however, I am learning that there are ways, in general, to make each one.  He also told us "The devil will get you if you work cold steel."  Probably true in its own way too.

[Dale Campbell]

Who was that guy?

[frogwalking]

Miller Lamb.  He was the last blacksmith working in the nuclear weapons plant in Oak Ridge Tennessee. He had a number of old "hog rifles" (as Miller called them) and a couple he had made.  He had not made the barrel, but had rebored and rerifled it. He made the files with which he made the lock. Of course, he forged the trigger guard and butt plate. 

Miller loaned Chuck and I an old rifle. It had forged furniture such.  We hand hammered a lead ball to fit the bore, made a mould from dental plaster and made balls to fit.  We shot the rifle a number of times.  It and been made by a man named Bean from Strawberry Plains, I think.  Can you imagine shooting a Bean?  What is it worth today? 

I have several antique powder cans.  He sold them to me full and I shot the powder out of them.

Miller got us out of all sorts of scrapes.  The worst was when I got the breech plug galled in a rifle barrel.  He told me to leave it and he will see what he can do.  Of course, he sawed the breach end off and forged a new plug and installed it. 

ne of the double barrels I spoke about earlier had a broken hammer.  Miller welded the cast iron hammer with a torch.  That was all he would use.  I have been told a number of times cast iron cannot be welded, but they didn't know Miller.

Chuck had a piece of barrel he bought from Turner for a couple of dollars.  I think it was the first 22 inches off a Spencer rifle someone had converted to a carbine.  Miller brazed a bolster on the side and put in a breech plug.  Chuck killed a deer with it years later.  It is a tiny short Kentucky rifle.  We were teenagers then, but he still has it.  I have pretty much sold all of mine to buy something else.