Pukka, thank you! While it’s true that most guns around the period of the Turvey gun that Dave pointed out in RCA 1, you can find quite a few or most devoid of ornate carving they were around nevertheless. I have a few other books that help a lot were you will find this carving; Great English Gunmakers, Griffin & Tow and Bailes and The Manton’s Gunmakers.
I used all these books plus others as reference to design the shell behind the breech. After designing and practice carving the shell it was quite some time before I designed the forward carving of the stylized “leaf” that joined the shell. I did many sketch variations without referring to any of the books just to see if I could come up with a pleasing idea of my own. Later after looking at a lot of different photos all five or six of my different sketches have all been done and carved before, so the old saying of” nothing new under the Sun” held true.
The rifle I’m building is not a copy of any particular rifle but a “fantasy” rifle incorporating a lot of features that I like...the horn cap as an example.
Another thing I found as very interesting is the way that ornate features waxed and wained over the years. Take the buttplate as an example at first there was none and as it evolved it became very fancy and the long tang was almost half the length of the comb. At its peak it was long and ornate with a lot of detail that took quite a bit of time to inlet. As time past the length of the buttplate tang became shorter , shorter and less ornate and easier to inlet. Look at the Niedner and Winchester buttplate, they had a very short tang and then there was no tang at all.
I appreciate your thoughts and comments.
Cheers Richard
