Of course it is so rewarding to do a job in the hands on, 18th c manner - even if it does take ten times longer than when using modern tools.
That's why the pros, who do this for a living, prefer precarve/preinlet stocks and bought componet sets. Their customers neither want nor can afford all this hand work just for the base gun. They'ed rather spend their money on the embelishments.
Andy 
I'm not sure that's true Andy. I think it is pretty typical for a professional builder to work from a blank and make all components except the lock, barrel, guard and butplate. Some may work from precarves and buy parts sets, but I don't think most use this approach.
Jim, you might be right. I was repeating what a "pro" had said in another thread. Every builder has their own reasons for building and every buyer also has their own requirements. An serious 18th century reenactor wouldn't want a High Art gun, and a High Art buyer wouldn't want a near copy of a 1770 gun.
Using, or trying to use, 18th century tools is something cool for some of us. And it looks like this segment is growing.
Andy
You need to define "high art".
There are fully evolved Kentuckys dating to the 1770 period. Wire inlay and/or elaborate carving, engraved patch box etc.
Being decorated and expensive (like a swivel breech perhaps) does not mean the rifle was not to be used.
This is refuted by surviving rifles and even accounts from the past.
Kentucky rifles are FUNCTIONAL ART FORMS or should be at least.
What re-enactors would do today is not 18th century no matter how much they might want to pretend it is. They are contaminated by, 1: other re-enactors they "learn" from and 2: a 20th century mind set and all the history between 1790 and today.
The "plain gun" thing is more likely an outgrowth of the abandonment of carved decoration on guns and furniture in Europe by the late 18th early 19th century. While the carved rifle hung on decades longer in some areas than in England, for example, the austere fashion took over here as well.
By the late 19th century the ML rifle largely survived in the more remote areas of the east, Appalachia for example, where the rifles were often painfully austere. But this had nothing to do with the 18th century American rifle.
Dan
