Herb, thanks for sharing the pictures of this Hawken rifle.
Wayne Robidoux drew a set of blue prints of this rifle back in the early 1970’s. The set I have is dated October 18, 1971.
IIRC, the drawings were the product of a class project when he was in college or a vo-tech school.
He ended up advertising the set of plans for sale in
Muzzle Blasts and other BP magazines in the 1970’s and 1980’s. This one is from the January 1972 issue of
Muzzle Blasts.
As described in the ad, there were six sheets of 30” x 42” drawings in the set, plus three 8” x 10” photographs of the rifle. The course must have been a mechanical drawing or precision machining course because these are the most detailed and comprehensive set of blueprints I’ve seen for a muzzleloader. Wayne Robidoux provided drawings, dimensions, and details sufficient to make every part for the rifle with the possible exception of the barrel. Here are some of the details from his drawings.
As
sqrldog and
PPatch mentioned, there was a lot of discussion on this forum a few years back about this rifle and Wayne Robidoux’s blueprints. As a result, Robidoux Inc. ran an ad in the April 2014 issue of
Muzzle Blasts offering the blueprints for sale again. This is the ad you were thinking of Mr. Lienemann.
There has been quite a bit of inflation between the early 1970’s and 2014, and the price for the blueprints had increased from $12 to $99.95. I purchased the set of prints I have in the early 2000's when Wayne Robidoux was still alive. As I recall, they cost just under $30 then.
Wayne’s blueprints were available at the beginning of the Hawken craze and advertised regularly in
Muzzle Blasts. Yet, I find it interesting that none of the companies that made semi-production and production Hawken rifles appear to have utilized Wayne’s blueprints—not Green River Rifle Works, Sharon Rifle Barrel Co., Ithaca Gun Co., Ozark Mountain Arms, or A. Uberti & Co/Western Arms Corp. Had one of these companies consulted Wayne’s blueprints when they started up, they would have been way ahead of the curve.
It wasn’t until GRRW began the Bridger Hawken project with the Montana Historical Society in 1975 that they had access to an original Hawken rifle similar to the one that Robidoux studied and drew 4 years earlier. After 1976, GRRW began building and selling a mid-1850's Sam Hawken pattern rifle based on the Bridger Hawken as their standard pattern Hawken rifle, but it is also very similar to the rifle in the Nebraska History Museum under discussion.
One of the myths that circulates in the muzzleloader community is that the Santa Fe Hawken from Uberti/Western Arms Corp was built from a set of blueprints that had been drawn from the Kit Carson Hawken (sometimes it is the Ithaca Hawken that is a copy of the Carson Hawken). Leonard Allen of Western Arms Corp never made this claim. He apparently sent Uberti, as a prototype for the Santa Fe Hawken, a custom rifle built with Cherry Corners parts or one of the first Ithaca Hawken rifles that came off the assembly line. Had Leonard Allen sent Uberti a copy of Wayne Robidoux’s blueprints, the Santa Fe Hawken would have looked a lot more like the actual Carson Hawken.
It’s good to see some current photographs of the rifle to go along with the Wayne Robidoux blueprints, so thanks again, Herb.
