Finally started back working on a gun I purchased parts for a long time ago. Been sitting in the back of the safe, and in boxes for 14 years.
It will be an early Lancaster, most of the parts are from track of the wolf. Don't remember if it was a kit, or just me picking and choosing. The stock is fancy maple partially inlet (barrel channel cut, and rod hole drilled). It will have a 36 inch straight 15/16 .54 caliber green mountain barrel. I'm trying to remember what my plans were at the time, but I think I just wanted a hunting gun, and swamped barrels were a lot harder to source at the time. That or I was worried about the extra work, and couldn't find a stock inlet for a swamped barrel in my price range.
Anyway, the gun was more work than I expected at the time, a combination of some really poorly sand cast parts, and poor tools had me give up on it.
I've gotten a lot more handy over the years, and finally figured I better get this thing built. I'm posting this here to log my build, ask questions, and record my mistakes for future builds.
Not having a lot of wood working experience (I mainly work with metal on a farmer scale), I decided to do some carving before I even touched the gun. Figured it'd be good practice just getting a feel for chisels on wood before I start trying to inlet things.
My first try was pretty ugly, but I learned a bunch about what not to do. Starting design was too complicated, and I made all kinds of gouges I didn't want, cut too deep, slipped etc.
Having learned a bit, I grabbed a simpler design, and did some tracing in inkscape. Inkscape is great, as the vector objects you draw can be easily modified and scaled, plus it's free.
I purchased some 4 inch wide curly maple boards to practice with. The board has a stock like bevel sanded into it with an angle grinder and flap disc. I figure the bevel will up the difficulty a bit, and hopefully be a better learning platform.
To get the drawing from the computer to the wood, I did some researching and saw that acetone does a good job of transferring printer ink (toner) to wood. I tried a couple different things, but found it worked best if the paper was held down very well, and if you applied a heavy coat of acetone before pressing the paper firmly against the wood with a putty knife.
Pretty nifty, even colors transfer well.
Cut out the outlines with a small 60 degree V chisel and wooden mallet. My biggest issue, aside from cutting lines I probably shouldn't have was making the cuts a similar depth. Had to go over things several times, but It did get easier.
With the basic outline done, I started removing background. This was all done with a #3 sweep 5mm wide Pfeil gouge. I discovered on my last attempt, that I don't have enough hand control yet to remove wood with a straight chisel.
With the bulk of the wood removed, I tried a few different methods for smoothing and blending the background. I had the best luck by getting things as smooth as I could with the gouge, then going back over stuff with a bent scraper, and some small riffler files. Maybe once I get more practice in, a straight chisel will be more controllable for me, which will hopefully make things faster.
After getting stuff leveled, and coming back with some sandpaper, I went back to work on the design. Tried various methods of trying to add 3 dimensions to the carving. Some worked well, others not so great. My biggest issue here came from mistakes made very early, some in the drawing process, and some when cutting background lines. Some things I just couldn't fix, and others were problematic as I didn't understand the design well enough when tracing. I think just jumping in and starting to carve was a good idea though. I now know more about how I should be drawing my scrolls. Think I'll come up with a standardized approach when drawing, so that I can have a clearer idea at the start of where I want highlights and depth to be. I've also been sourcing books with original work to get a better feel for how you can manipulate the wood to get the looks you want.
The majority of the cuts here were made with #3, #5, and #8 gouges, along with more uses of the V chisel. The result is a clumsy poor copy, but better than I thought it would be. I'll probably sand this one off, and try again with something else.
To be continued... Hopefully not in another 14 years....
