I also choose not to receate a 21st century piece, because my customers want something that looks like it's from the 18th century, like there clothes, accoutrements and camp gear, etc.
Make sense?
The only thing that strikes me odd with that statement, and I'm not directing it specifically at you but at the re-enactors in general.
They are (pretending) to be in the 1700's/1800's (which ever), the clothing is period correct and looks like "Ma" just finished sewing it by hand. Likewise their tools and accessories are right out of the period, look like they were maybe made by the local blacksmith or bought, imported, to one of the hardware stores.
Yet, when it comes to their gun/rifle it has been artificially aged 200 years.
I just don't get that part of it. If it's supposed to be 1700-1800 should it look "new".
I just can't see someone, back in the day, walking in to Dickert's or Armstrong's shop and saying - yes, I would like that rifle but can you make it look 200 years old...
LOL. Yes, Galamb, we reenactors are sometimes unpredictable, quirky and even sometimes downright contradictory as you put so well.
I've been a reenactor for almost 40 years from the French and Indian War, Rev War, War of 1812 and War Between the States. I also see no point in aging a firearm or any other gear to look any older than it would have looked in the time period I portray and of course how old and perhaps worn it naturally would have been then. It is totally contradictory to what reenactors are supposed to do, IMO.
Since the 70's, there is a great deal of new/old information that has become easily accessible and items have become more and more authentic and that's a very good thing to my thoughts. Yet I also understand our pocket books will allow very few people to be totally "authentic" to the period, if that is even possible, which it probably is not and will never be due to the fact things we use will almost never be how they were actually made in the period. For example, I doubt anyone today will take beaver pelts and use Mercury to separate the finer hair to make the best beaver felt for hats. Another example is while I have always strived to get period correct eyeglasses, I have no problem with getting my prescription lenses put in them.
As to period correct guns, only a very few of us can afford to have a gun built exactly like it was done in the early to late 18th century. Back in the 70's, I started telling fellow reenactors (who were what I considered overly demanding) that if someone like Wallace Gusler did not hand make their gun, it was not authentic no matter how good it looked. In the 70's, I used a Navy Arms Brown Bess Carbine to portray a Continental Marine Sergeant while knowing it was not a "correct" Sergeant's Fusil. However, no one was even making a correct repro lock for one then and buying an original or having one totally handmade was out of the question. In the 70's and early 80's, I used my Old Flint Rifle for reenacting French and Indian War and Rev War even though it is a Golden Age Rifle, because that was as close as I could afford. I retired that gun from reenacting those periods in the late 80's, though. Yet even in the early 2000's, I occasionally reenacted French and Indian War Period with my Perdersoli Short Land Pattern Musket that did not come out until a few years after the war. Sure, I would have loved to have had a P1742 made from a Rifle Shop or TOW kit, but I just could not afford one for how little French and Indian War reenacting I was ever going to do. Making and buying and replacing items to keep as correct an impression as possible for a Private Soldier in the 42nd Royal Highland Infantry Regiment, The Black Watch, and for the Rev War is expensive enough as it is. GRIN.
Today we are blessed with an exceedingly wider range of reproduction locks, barrels and furniture than we even dreamed about in the 70's. That makes it much easier to be "as historically correct as possible" than ever before, yet we will never be totally authentic.
Bottom line, I'm the type of reenactor who LOVES rifles and guns that look like they could come out of an 18th century shop or Arsenal, but does not have to be an exact copy of any one original rifle. I also don't care if modern machines were used to make them and I certainly don't care if the screw threads are hand cut or even correct TPI for the period. I applaud those who try to follow a certain school or builder and make their guns as close as possible to the style and some variation was normal back then, so why not now, as long as they are keeping generally true to the period and style?!!.
Gus
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