I'll post some slow (glacial speed) progress. With making flints every night progress is slow.
The project is a tribute to RCA #19. This walnut-stocked smooth rifle has very early styling, an octagon to round barrel, a French fusil buttplate engraved with a lady with a liberty cap, and an early styled guard engraved with a panther standing, holding a pike. The carving is very simple, just a lobe behind the tang and a volute behind the cheekpiece. Shumway attributed it tentatively to Berks county but it's generic and probably fits into the 1750's-1770's. It has great architecture like an English sporter. This one may be a keeper for me.
The project starts with a Getz oct to round barrel profiled off the original, but this one is .54 rifled. I am using a fancy piece of black walnut, very dense. A Chambers Early Germanic lock is being modified, not done yet, but I got rid of some of the banana. I made the buttplate from Reeves Goehring's "blob" I think, and modified a marshall guard including adding more to the spur.
Here is the rough sawn buttstock, about wore my arm out.
![](https://americanlongrifles.org/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fv513%2Frichpierce%2Fmy%2520guns%2Fbuttstockcolor.jpg&hash=33b3cb32a6a84e0296fce9f56e729bfee92b5746)
Top view
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Lock inletted
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Here's the buttstock rough shaped, first pass, when I was still figuring things out and asking for advice. I was tempted to put in a subtle stepped wrist, bad idea.
Other side
More progress
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At this point I asked Taylor and Tom Curran for advice as I am gtting into the shaping stage and there's no going back once wood is removed. I got good advice that I followed the last couple days and made a couple more changes as well that brings it into better form.
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I don't have pix yet but I inletted the front of the tang of the buttplate deeper to fix the comb line more to the original as suggested by Tom (above). Then I fixed the toe line to be straight. Last night I saw the pitch on the buttplate was off so I re-sawed the buttplate "inlet", taking about 5/16" off at the toe and tapering it up to nothing. The Reeves buttplate is so soft and thin it conformed easily to the new shape. It's coming along and I should be able to post more pix later this week.