Early 19th Century Appalachian Lock Panel shape??

[Dr. Tim-Boone]

OK, the lock panel has not been brought down to final depth around the lock yet ... later. Wha I am doing now is working my way to the shape of the lock panel around this late English lock..... Gun is intended to be 1815-1820.... it is a transition from a fowler style toward early Appalachian mountain rifle.

So for you Mtn experts... please help me figure out what needs to be done to get this lockpanel the right shape.  Suggestions please..









If you can draw on the pics, that would be great!! Otherwise just keep me oriented to your directions as you explain what to do....

Thanks.... I keep looking at pictures..... but its hard to make the transfer...... I think I need to bring the rear curve forward a bit and bring the rear half of the top of the panel down....but I am not sure....  I have to get some boards to do trials of this sort of thing on.... but I think you can help!!

[Pete G.]

I think I would take the top/rear down a bit more from about halfway back. I usually try to sort of sneak up on these things little by little, sometimes just handling the piece and sketching on the wood while parktaking of an adult beverage. Since she is a mountain piece, whiskey might be appropriate. Be sure to re-examine in the morning light though before you start cutting wood. Sometimes it takes several such sessions.

[Meteorman]

I keep looking at pictures..... but its hard to make the transfer......

Boy, do I know THAT feeling !
I sit at the computer and stare at lock panels I like, and then I walk down to the shop and something happens like I'm starting over.
Might hafta start printing and tracing, like someone suggested elsewhere.
I've started making a side-by-side photo for direct comparison with lock panels I really like, like these from Roger Sells and Jim Hash from the blog. 
I replaced my stock with yours just to give the idea. 
If I scale the sizes of each lock the same, it's helpful to me.
Good luck and looking forward to seeing how it turns out.
/mike

[Dennis Glazener]

Here is how I did one with a lock similar to yours.


Dennis

[Dr. Tim-Boone]

OK, Those are really helpful pictures!!! Gotta bring the top down a bunch!! and the tail in  a little closer... Dennis, the tail of my lock is a little lower than yours ..and I am using a hooked breech, so that changes things a little too, but seeing it the way you did it really helps.

Yeah Meteorman, those pics really help.  Thanks for going to the trouble guys!!!

[G-Man]

Part of it depends how much of an "Appalachian" look you want to impart.  Fine English shotguns using these types of locks have finely shaped and detailed moldings, whereas by the timeframe of your lock style, the mounts and architecture of some of the well known mountain gunmaking areas - upper East Tennessee, for example, were becoming pretty stylized and distinct.

Take a look at the lock and sideplate panels on this rifle, for example - this is a little East Tennessee rifle, probably around 1830, with a square tail "AW Spies" flintlock (converted).  Note the straight, angular lines to the rear/bottom of the panel, and the straight, flat underside to the lock area.

http://contemporarymakers.blogspot.com/search?q=Original+inspired+Roger+Sells


Good luck

Guy

[Dr. Tim-Boone]

Thanks Guy,

The forestock will look pretty Appalachian.....has a 46" tapered and slightly flared smooth OTR barrel.. long skinny turkey gun but hopefully with some South Appalachian flare.... moving from English French fowler styles toward Appalachian but still using fowler TG, hooked breech and oval vs. square toe. No buttplate & no entry thimble. It will have a beavertail/Monte Carlo cheekpiece and maybe a grease hole......hey you can hunt bear and hos with a .62 cal and PBR too...........

I know, no one has seen any smoothbore Appalachian guns like this but its my fantasy and I'm sticking to it....

Any other suggestions are surely welcome!! 
Thanks

[JTR]

I've heard of guys with worse fantasies than that! 

So your Appalachian flair is basically in the no butt plate, no entry pipe, and maybe a grease hole features?
How about a semi Fowler/semi Appalachian forge made iron trigger guard, and a just over the nose of the comb barrel tang?
John

[Dr. Tim-Boone]

Appalachian style lock and side panels and Appalachian style inlet washer/sideplate wth one lock bolt also.  If I had a welder I would have lengthened the tang on the standing breech......  I have a steel fowler guard for it. real plane and I will use screws to attach it. I will make a pretty straight single pinned trigger for it.

The butt will have a pretty deep curve in it (but not too much cause it is a bird gun primarily) and the bottom of the butt stock will have a little concave curve to it and I plan to carve panels on the back that look like the panels on a Wiley Higgins butt plate.  We will see if I can match my vision of it....

[bgf]

Dr. Tim,
That is an absolutely crazy vision, by which I mean I love it.  I usually hate fantasy, but the Higgins stuff is just genius that puts it over the top (in both senses).  I'm not sure you need or can use a longer tang at this point, but if you do, I can weld a piece on the old one for you if you mail it (assuming we can mail back and forth for a few dollars).

[Dennis Glazener]

Appalachian style lock and side panels and Appalachian style inlet washer/sideplate wth one lock bolt also.

Tim, like you said its your fantasy but the 1815 date range you give in my opinion is a little early for a single bolt lock on a flintlock.
Dennis

[Dr. Tim-Boone]

Hmmmm....... when do the single lock bolts start showing up???    I have this cool setup with a screw that goes in the front lock bolt hole in the plate but then hooks under a screw head rather than going all the way thru the stock..  A Jerry Huddleston design.

[Dennis Glazener]

Hmmmm....... when do the single lock bolts start showing up???    I have this cool setup with a screw that goes in the front lock bolt hole in the plate but then hooks under a screw head rather than going all the way thru the stock..  A Jerry Huddleston design.

I always thought they appeared in the mountains around the 1830's but I don't know for sure. I assumed it came about after seeing percussion locks with only one screw.

As to the description you gave for the front screw head latch, I thought that was an English feature. Maybe some of the old mountain gunmakers copied that style on some of the early smoothbores. I haven't seen it used on a mountain rifle and haven't seen enough mountain smooth bores to know if that system was used or not.

Hey, its fantasy and you can make it however you want. Sounds interesting.
Dennis

[JTR]

Tim,
I would think the single bolt lock is 1830ish. At least on the single bolt flinters that I've seen. Also, I'd give the fake foward lock bolt latch feature about that same 1830 time period.

I don't know that much about the appalachian guns, but isn't the seemingly late date of 1830 pretty early on for one of those?

John

[Dr. Tim-Boone]

I hear that Appalachian style began to emerge in 1815-1825 time frame....no one seems to know for sure.   So I am trying to be early in that transition..... once it got going pretty well I think they stopped building smoothbore fowlers and changed to shotguns....or their typical Appalachian rifle.....

If it was made in  Northeastern GA or Western SC around 1815- 1825 or so the builder could have had lots of European influence as well as frontier practicality.. might have gotten the barrel from an English fowler and restocked it??

all your ideas have been great!!

[JTR]

Given the somewhat unknown time frame, I agree with Dennis and say go for it!
The couple of front lock bolt latches I've seen on originals looked pretty darned sweet, so I'd use it as well. Sometimes fantasies just need to be worked through!

John

[Dr. Tim-Boone]

Sometimes fantasies just need to be worked through!

John

Yeah that's what my therapist said!!  What do you think of the stepped wrist design feature , like Caywood uses on his Mtn Rifles?? 

[G-Man]

Stepped wrist rifles turn up from Virginia down through Middle Tennessee from the late 18th century through about 1840.  I would go with a flat toe instead of round if you do this style. 

Just some general thoughts - I have seen a number of folky/backcountry fowlers restocked up in the 1790-1820 era from much earlier import/trade fowler parts and new late English flint locks.    Granted these were not necessarily southern, but if I could make one general observation about them, the hardware and barrel were really all that was left of the English influence -  the architecture and decoration of the restock reflected the style of the place and time they were restocked.  (Again - these were back-country pieces - not pieces made in places like Charleston or Baltimore, where I would suspect a continuing heavier English influence.)  The hardware was heavily reworked into the style and timeframe of the restocking -  buttplates narrowed and shortened, triggerguard finials altered, a new folky sideplate made to match the new smaller lock, engraving filed off and partially covered over with file decoration, etc.  

There are a lot of late 18th century references indicating that rifles were pretty widespread in the Carolina backcountry pretty early, so if it were me, if I was going for a back-country vibe I'd keep the architecture looking more "rifle-like" and keep the mounts more looking like imported, reworked or reused English mounts, if that helps....on the other hand if this is something that came from Charleston, Savannah, Baltimore, etc.  maybe slip more English influence into it.

There are a couple of neat smoothbores in the archives - one was a probable North Carolina "smooth rifle" that Mr. No Gold posted, and the other is a neat Simon Lauck fowler that I believe is on Mark Elliot's website.  Dennis has also posted photos of a nice iron mounted rifle that came out of the Roanoke Virginia area that has a musket style guard and big iron patchbox, that could work as a rifle or a fowler.   I don't know the exact locations of these posts now, but these might be some good pieces to look at for ideas.

Another idea for decoration, etc. - look at some of the Bull pistols - these blend English duelling pistol influences wih backcounty materials and folky artistic flair.  While they are pistols, not long guns, They convey sort of a feel of the times and place that might suit your project as well.

Guy

[Larry Luck]

Tim,
I looked at the photos in the Butler & Whisker Longrifles of Virginia and the Whisker Gunsmiths of Virginia, which show rifles admittedly north of your area of interest.  From a quick review, most of the lock panels ended in a point, like Dennis' photo.  If you would like, I can scan a couple for you to check out.
Larry Luck

[bgf]

Also, you might want to check out the Richard Allen rifle (iron-mounted and made a few miles to the SW of your target in 1815) to look at what he did with his lock panels.  The tang is also maybe relevant stylistically -- possibly worth considering as an alternative for a long tang in that area; it looks like a slightly wider, longer version of the SW Va. "pointy" tang and has two screws, if I can remember correctly. 

[Dr. Tim-Boone]

Tim,
I looked at the photos in the Butler & Whisker Longrifles of Virginia and the Whisker Gunsmiths of Virginia, which show rifles admittedly north of your area of interest.  From a quick review, most of the lock panels ended in a point, like Dennis' photo.  If you would like, I can scan a couple for you to check out.
Larry Luck

Hey Larry, Thanks.  Are they from the 1820- 30 period? I would love to see the pics. 

[Dr. Tim-Boone]

BG, The Richard Allen rifle has a lot of the features I want to imply.... .One thing I notice is that the lock panels seem to tend to gravitate toward folowing the same shape as the tail of the lock....duh!  But not always and not so much on the earlier guns...more Pointed Like the Grosse guns and the one Dennis built.

More to think on befor Saturday!!

[Dennis Glazener]

Dennis has also posted photos of a nice iron mounted rifle that came out of the Roanoke Virginia area that has a musket style guard and big iron patchbox, that could work as a rifle or a fowler.

Here is a link to it.
http://americanlongrifles.org/forum/index.php?topic=4165.0

Dennis

[G-Man]

Tim - one more thought.  The lock shape is part of the equation, but it does not necessarily directly dictate the shape of the panels.  You have to really look at how the overall architecture of the gun flows in the wrist area.

In this regard one thing you see on many southern originals is that in the period you are describing, locks became shorter and more "blunt" - either rounded or squared off - to the tail section - whereas earlier locks extended back farther into the wrist area and tended to have a more gradual taper to the plate.  So on a lot of the southern guns from about the 1790s-1810 era, especially guns with a lot of drop in the wrist, you often see southern makers adapting their lock panel shapes to support their stock patterns they were accustomed to using, to the newer lock styles.  The William Whitley rifle comes to mind - although the original lock is gone, you can see that the tail of the mortise sits fairly high on the wrist which drops pretty steeply.  On such guns the midpoint of the tail of the lock did not always end up at the midpoint of the wrist.  So they compensated by running long tapering lock panels back into the wrist, or steeply sloping the upper edge of the rear lock panel and dropping the finial of the panel actually below the mid point of the locktail - to sort of drop the visual line flowing back through the wrist down a bit.

With a squared off lock, obviously, no one used 90-degree square back lock panels as it would break up the visual flow to the piece.  But they did sometimes make them angular, as on that Tennessee rifle, as well as round or pointed.  In fact, I have often wondered if the short plate and squared off tail was a feature they started using to allow the builder greater flexibility in adapting one lock to a variety of wrist shapes, drop and trigger styles. A long pointed tail on a lock running way back into the wrist sort of dictates some things architecturally, whereas a short blunt tailed lock allows you to carve and shape the moldings to fit your flow.  Just a thought.
 
Here are those two southern fowlers I referred tio inmy earlier post. Take a look at the Whitley rifle by Jacob Young too:

http://americanlongrifles.org/forum/index.php?topic=6257.15

http://www.markelliottva.com/wordpress/2007/11/simon-lauck-buck-ball-gun/

[G-Man]

The iron mounted gun that Dennis posted and I referred to in my earlier post is another good example of what looks like an earlier-trained builder adapting that wrist area to the newer lock styles.  Good example showing him running those panels out and down into the wrist to compensate for the somewhat shorter, blunter lock. 

One more thing I will throw out there - one of the traits you see on so many southern Appalachian guns  is that the wrist section - from the rear of lock panel to the nose of the comb - is often very compact.

Guy