Hi,
I've been working on a pretty close copy of the Edward Marshall rifle for a friend and customer. It will not be a bench copy but as close as I can come without having the original in hand and using mostly commercially made parts. I have Houston Harrison's beautiful drawings of the gun and many detailed photos. Bob Lienemann, as always, has been particularly generous and helpful to me and so has Manfred Schmitz. To be honest, I was mostly ambivalent about the rifle for years. I always appreciated its significance but many makers have done versions and there are several kit versions. I was always attracted to the "other" guns from that era and place such as RCA 52 because hey were different and seldom copied. All that changed after seeing the actual gun and Bob Lienemann's photo essay in his book on Moravian gun making. I fell in love with the gun and that feeling has multiplied 100 fold as I build a copy. It is clearly the work of a European trained master gunsmith with all the good design and sophistication that implies. I am using the Rice barrel, trigger guard, butt plate, and ramrod pipes sold by Chambers for their EM kit. The barrel is 37" (13/16" shorter than the original) and 62 caliber. It is also smaller at the breech than the original so I had to make some adjustments in the stock to compensate. I am using a M&G "Albrecht" lock that I improved and modified extensively and posted previously. The stock is hard curly sugar maple cut from Vermont. Here is where I am at and I wanted to show how I modified set triggers to work with this project. First, here is the rifle at this point.
As I build it, I appreciate more and more the gun maker who built the original. It is a very great design and handles extremely well. One tip I want to pass on to others is reduce the LOP a little to compensate for the thick wrist and large trigger guard. If you want a rifle to fit someone with normal LOP = 14" reduce that by 3/8". The trigger finger has to stretch around a lot of wood.
I am currently inletting the set triggers. They present a bit of a challenge because the trigger levers need to be tall to engage the sear. Most set triggers won't do and I ended up buying Davis triggers sold by Chambers for their EM kits. They would work but they are small and the levers short such that I would have to move LOP further back than I want or that specified by my plans to have any hope of a decent unset front trigger pull. I opted for a set of L&R Hawken triggers that had longer levers and were more robust.
However, the two triggers are just too close together to mate with my design. No worries because it means I can get out my welder and my ball peen hammers, my favorite tools. Any day I can melt something with a welder and bash it with a ball peen hammer is a good day for me. So I took the triggers apart, annealed them, and then cut away at the back of the front trigger.
I heated the trigger and pried the cut wider and then back filled the gap with weld as well as adding metal here and there. The result was very good and meets my needs and looks much more historically correct.
More to come,
dave
