cheek piece on Carolina rifle

[cmac]

Have been looking through the North Carolina School of Longrifles book, and I'm curious as to what the cheek piece thickness was on the slimmer ones. Some look nearly warn off and the book has great photos but no dimensions. I think a 1/4" was probably a standard but many look even lower

[Dennis Glazener]

Have been looking through the North Carolina School of Longrifles book, and I'm curious as to what the cheek piece thickness was on the slimmer ones. Some look nearly warn off and the book has great photos but no dimensions. I think a 1/4" was probably a standard but many look even lower

What NC school? There are several different schools/geographic locations to chose from. Slim rifles are found in almost all of them.
Dennis

[cmac]

I know they vary a bit school to school and probably more so on the later rifles. How does the bear creek school compare to the Appalachian school?(Generally)

[G-Man]

I don't think you can assign a standard dimension - within each school there is a wide variety of architecture that varied not only from maker to maker but also they cover a wide timeframe.  If you look at the Kennedy group of rifles alone you see about a 40 year span and cheekpieces ranging from none, to fairly prominent.  As a general observation on Appalachian (not just NC) rifles it was not uncommon in the very late period - i.e. second half of the 19th century - for cheekpieces to become almost non-existant as Bivins pointed out but this is not true in all cases - some of these latter 19th century guns still have some highly developed prominent cheekpieces and I think it primarily has more to do with specific maker preferences and skills rather than a general trend. Overall I think it is more important to approach it - as the original builders probably did - on what looks right and in proportion with the rest of the gun.

Perhaps Michael Briggs will see this and provide some more thought?

Best regards

Guy