I could see as soon as I opened the box what a trap for the newby re-enactor these Indian Muskets are. Six Hundred Dollars or so for the piece is almost irresistible to someone starting out. When I’d heard some re-enactment groups won’t allow them on the field, I just nodded because I knew why. The low price matched the quality of the gun. It was supposed to be a First Model…”Ranger” or "carbine"…Brown Bess.
The website pictures look as good as the gun does in the movies
Ever since Earl Stott of Rogers Island and Burt Loescher of “The History Of Rogers Rangers” ( a Ranger bible, by the way) birthed the idea of cut down Bess’s, vendor shortened muskets jumped all over the market. Back in the eighties, my own Ranger Company ( Rogers Rangers, Boat 17) had several of them in our ranks, but those were all Japanese or Italian. Like those guns, this was a little short of the First Model. It had the most of the hardware but the stock was a little lean in the toe and the ramrod channel was, at best, drilled and left to a metal rod. I had been to Rogers Island and held samples of cut muzzles, and don’t care to participate in the discussions over whether or how muzzles were cut. That’s down there with whether or not Rogers jumped off the Rock.
The websites touted all the movies these guns were in. I wonder if the chrome like shine on the metal was because of this. I could not wait to get rid of it. There’s a very wide selection of guns on these websites. They truly look handsome and the Vendors have a good outlet in the movies. Maybe in re-enactments if the safety officers do their jobs and the buyer is willing to ship a bad one back. The rest of us, however, are not in movies.
The original idea of making this gun better and teaching myself some techniques on the fly while doing it survived the forum remarks and opinions of in-the-know folks I spoke to. About a third of those folks condemned and spat upon the gun as a product, a third told stories of dropping a deer or a boar, getting the piece to group and other stories of normalcy. Eighty percent probably thought I was nuts.
By now I was making less mistakes in my work, wood was fitting better to metal, my tool rack was full of the right tools and this gun would serve as a platform to attempt things I had not yet attempted. I have a penchant for cobbling and re-purposing stuff, and going Kamikaze on this product would be worth the time and effort. For one thing, I wanted to learn to solder stuff. For another, I wanted to play with different finishes to get an antiqued look. Tuning a lock could not have a better candidate to work with. Then there was drilling out a ramrod hole…
Greg and Brenda Dixon have three qualities about them that I find significant enough to add to the desire to go there at least once a month. For one thing, if they think I’m nuts they hide it well. For another their advice and product selection is admirable, and for yet another they never say no when I want to buy something. When I told Greg what I was up to I knew I’d get good support and hoped they got a good laugh at the dinner table. Didn’t say a word to Chuck about this, though. I wondered if he’d try to burn me as a witch if somebody let on.
The first thing to go was the barrel. It was the worst part of the gun and surely the cause of every concern. The lugs were welded on in a way that just looked fishy and for some unknown reason it was too small. Camera ready, but not even a hint of the bulk of the First Model Kings Arm. I drilled the touch hole and ran a patch down the barrel, only to have the feel loosen drastically about a foot from the breech so that the patch slipped off. I wondered whose life I saved by buying this gun and running this exercise. Lord, I love Track Of The Wolf. I had a new barrel fitted with plug about a week after I ordered it, and seeing the proof marks was downright reassuring. A little Larry Potterfield on YouTube and I actually soldered a front sight and the lugs. It only took about an hour and I did not even use any Marine Corps Mouth in the process. With minimal work on the barrel channel all the way down the stock, You can take it to the bank that the Statue of St. Joseph in my shop helped.
The second thing to need attention was the lock. I had to learn how to tune and then go ahead and tune extensively. The biggest criticism being that the steel did not cover the pan by the touch hole, and I had to grind and file the bolster about a 32nd of an inch to make a better mortise fit that was flush on the barrel. I took some pressure off the sear spring and now it cocks smoothly. I lightened the springs and filed some of the steel tit so as to get more shots out of a flint. The original lock took the flint all the way down after ten pulls. Now it gets about thirty. The modifications I made still produced a shower of sparks and kept the flint going.
The stock was somewhere in between Walnut and Cedar. When I fit the barrel and drilled the ramrod hole I had to be careful. The Ramrod. I suppose you could call it that. I guess it was put on there without switching out the thimbles used for metal rods or drilling the stock, because it was ridiculously tapered at the base and rounded at the blank tip. It broke like it was made of Balsa, so it fit neatly into the garbage bag.
I had to wait for a ramrod drill bit to make its way via back order. When the bit came in after three weeks of waiting I had the hole reamed out in five minutes. Little bit in, little bit out. Little bit in, little bit out. Tie the bit to the channel with a lace and put a little English on the bit so as to keep it from coming out the stock. I don’t even know whose video I saw on YouTube for that tutelage. I fitted some brass to rough out the trumpet shaped end of the wooden rods I’d seen in Redcoats And Brown Besses.
I can understand how the workers over in India may have been so pressured to crank these out the door as to be almost criminal in plopping on some filler and not even sanding it, or leaving paper sized gaps in wood to metal. If it has a redeeming quality at all it is the ability to suck up stain after I stripped it and made it look as dark as all the originals I have ever seen. The originals were likely darkened with age, this one I darkened with water based leather dye because it soaked in and raised the grain so that modest whiskering produced an aged look that won’t make it through the photos. Unfortunately you can’t see the combination of True Oil and Danish/Linseed that gives it that greasy piled on look that originals have.
Every step of the way I was watching videos. So, now I knew how to solder without burning the shop down, drill new pin and lock bolt holes without having the exit hole on the far side of the stock come out in a different zip code, tune a lock and drill a ramrod hole. Then, as if it were guided by St. Joseph’s hand, I learned how to brown the metal parts. I had to buff the brass because it was poorly polished, and I did that entirely by hand. Hated it, but I did it anyway.
With the first three Bess’ I owned years ago, I had to carve out a cheekpiece because the Kings Arm was meant to be fired from the hip while in ranks. I did not even wait for this one, and now I can get an eye to sight down the barrel with only marginal discomfort.
If I ever Trek again, I won’t carry one because they are so darned heavy. We are pretty sure the average height in the 1700’s was between five foot four and five foot seven, and the fact that these guys carried these things in the woods routinely convinces me that I would not want to get into a fight with any of them.
Once I got the absurd shine off the metal parts in the lock, browning that and the barrel was so easy. I am convinced that is due to cold brown product quality rather than my skills. Here’s what I ended up with just before I shot the pie plate at twenty five yards.
I already acknowledged that I was a hobbyist and would never ascend to the level of the professional rifle makers. I base this on the experience of my prior training with shoemaking. Many living history shoemakers out there know how to go through the motions, but my master taught me all the intricacies of the knowledge base behind making the shoe…everything from how a badly made shoe can make your hair hurt all the way through the math of the foot and pattern. That same idea in gunmaking is the difference between me and the real Pro’s. You guys don’t doubt that the Dixonses, Brookses, Houseses, Gusslerses,Kiblerses, Chamberses and Turpinses and so on know a lot we don’t…right?
Here’s what I learned working on this pig before I got it to fly;
1. Unless you are going to at least improve and at most consult an expert on how to upgrade, don’t buy one. In fact, tinkering can make it worse. In their out-of-box state they are unreliable and we can’t do enough to warn the novice about them
2. Yeah, I got to pick up a lot of techniques on this expendable platform, but at least half of that was putting videos of experts to the wood and metal. Don’t dink around with these without carefully prepping each operation.
3. If I wasn’t retired with a lot of time on my hands and with few financial worries, I dunno whether it would ever have crossed my mind to play around like this.
4. The cost of this was only about $160.00 less versus buying , say, a Track Of The Wolf or some other quality kit or parts set. HOWEVER, there are a lot of mistakes I am not going to make when I tackle my next Chambers Kit or gun that started out as a stock blank. I can’t price that.
5. The Vendors are outside our borders, so there is no real regulation on them and asking the Government to help is….well…asking the Government to help. I just wish these guys would take the time to caution shooters about their use and context.
6. I still don’t like shooting a Brown Bess.
Don't shoot yore eye out, kid
(or blow your head off with one of these out-of-box)
The Capgun Kid
