Well, I appreciate all the interest even if it's only
To watch a fool suffer.
Either way, I'm doing my best, working slowly and learning. I will likely take a long while to finish this project so you will have to wait for the results, as will I. I'm trying to get the breech figured out so that I may get the barrel inletted into a rather substantial piece of English walnut I bought from Dunlap. I'm planning to have David Rase do the inlet and ramrod hole.
The rifle will be in the style of an English sporting rifle. I'm loosely basing the rifle on Track's English sporting rifle plans, but bigger and with awkward proportions which are dictated by the large barrel. By the way, the barrel is 1.75 across the flats. That makes everything awkward. You can't just make everything bigger, unless you have the hands of a giant to make it around the wrist. I'm trying to figure out how to get a bar lock against the barrel, and maybe recess it. If I get the lock all the way up to the barrel to make it as narrow as possible it's still pretty wide. I constantly look at double rifles and shotguns and see how they recess the breech to narrow the wrists. In my mind I envisioned doing the same on this single barrel, but this would not give me any wood on the sides of the barrel at all (like a double rifle, where the fore end wood does not go above the lock whatsoever all the way to the front of the fore end).
So now I'm still drawing and mocking up. This plug shown that I made is likely trash. I think to maintain the appearance I'm going for I will need a more traditional patent breech which is wide on the lock side. The breech I made just doesn't have the material to do this.
Towards that end, I bought a bigger piece of 12l14 and think I'll make a more substantial breech plug... Then I can mill a traditional patent breech. This will only make the whole gun about 2.25" across the widest part of the stock. This isn't much wider than my 4 bore blunderbuss. I can use the rest of the steel to make a cannon barrel.
Any thoughts or criticisms of this thought process? I'm in no hurry. It took about 18 months to get the barrel. If I recall the conversation correctly, Ed said something like, "I'll make you the barrel, but I'll wait until someone else wants one too." I guess this isn't all that common.
Keith
