I said I'd post some photos from class, so here are just a few. Most of these were taken by Rick Brown who organizes the classes at Hershel's place and also feeds the whole crew of gunmakers for the whole class - good stuff!
Breakfast! Great food and great time to visit with new friends.
The class plus Hershel's grandaughter and daughter, Rick's mother, and Whitey the dog
Dave, who has posted pictures on this thread of his near finished class gun. Nice job!
L to R - our friend Chad and father / son team the Sean and Silas. Silas finished up a pistol he'd started on earlier this summer in John House and Daniel Casey's bear pistol class, then he started working on a rifle that had the most obscenely awkward looking precarved stock any of us ever saw. The wood was badly soft to boot. They had bought it just to get the Green Mountain barrel that was in it, but they brought the stock along for entertainment purposes. One of us dubbed it the "Velveeta Rifle" due to the spongy wood and the general cheesiness of the stock shape, and the name stuck.....
..late one night later in the week, I was staring at the Velveeta Rifle for no good reason and started seeing some possibilities in it. After some frenzied scribbling on it and a bunch of "man should we really do this?", a small group of us sprung into action, reshaping, making, modifying and inletting. We almost pulled an all nighter. Silas intends to finish it up on his own. I'll post pictures here whenever that happens. It's the gun in the vise in the foreground, modified to a 3/4 stock.
Instructor Gary Ludwig (with optivisor) helping Brad with layout. Brad was one of our people who'd never built a rifle and really hadn't had much experience with hand tools like we use. There's a lot to learn when you're a beginner, but he was eager and up to the task. We had about an even mix this time of beginners and builders with some experience.
John House demonstrating the "bleach boil" that we were talking about here on this post. In this photo John was getting started on the parts for the class gun that I built.
The bench, gun and hands of our buddy Jacob who is a dedicated scholar of some of the SW Virginia guns, so he and I had plenty to talk about!
Some of you may recognize this gunmaker! Randy has made a pile of rifles over the years and joined the class because he got his start from reading Foxfire 5 , was friends with Hershel for many years and just wanted to build that gun here at Hershel's place. It was great having him there in class and he even jumped in to help a couple of times.
Rifles by our friends Sam and Scotty. Sam is relatively new at this and is doing a great job so far. Scotty is an old hand at making guns and all kinds of related accoutrements. It's great when you can get the newcomers and the experienced makers together in one class!
Instructors on the last day of class - L to R John House, Ian Pratt and Gary Ludwig. Long week but a good one!
