I don’t age anything, its not historically correct to do so. I mean a new rifle was a new rifle then or now. Looking at something 200+ years after the fact is not really educational as to int appearance when new nor is is realistic to age things. Making a rifle to use in reenactments, etc, that looks 150 years old is silly. This is how it looked 150 years later and likely, in the case of a FL Kentucky it would be converted to percussion and then disabled so the kids could play with it for who knows how long. Yeah it happened. I had a man tell me that as a kid he was given a shotgun to hunt with and wore away part of the buttstock dragging it by the barrels since it was too heavy to carry. I know people in my age range that played Cowboys and Indians with a Johnson (IIRC is been about 40 years) percussion military pistol, a TIFFANY Colt and a Ball lever action rifle. Wore all the gold wash off the outside of the cyl of the Tiffany. This would have been in the 1950s or late 40s. The Johnson still looked pretty much new. Nipple was still blue, I doubt it had ever been fired. Bore and breech face shiny. They told me that their Grandfather had a collection and BURIED a trunk full of guns in NYC when the Sullivan act was enacted. So guns that were thought of little value got used by kids. And many show this. The man that told me of dragging the shotgun had a collection of Kentuckies when he left for Canada to join WW-II. He said when he got back there was only a junker and the stock of one of his “good guns” left. Scrap drives.
