Tom,
I appreciate your comment on the lock because it gives me the opportunity to explain a couple things - first a little background on the gun. Those of us who are familiar with the late flint period guns of Central Virginia will probably recognize a lot of the elements I stole when building this rifle. For those who are not, take a look at the book "Gunsmiths of Virginia" by James Whisker and you will see a bunch of flintlock rifles with these elements. The gun itself is a hybrid and has to be looked at as a contemporary rifle, and here comes the exlanation part.
The rifle I made is in part based on brass mounted guns made around Staunton Virginia, where now the CLA is based. I thought it would be cool to tie a bunch of ideas together for this one. If you go a little to the south west , during the same time period iron mounted flintlock guns were being made, and since that's what I do I took elements from these guns and threw them in the blender with the rest of it. I came up with a "contemporary" rifle which seemed to really suit the situation well, a modern gun with it's roots right where the CLA is located.
It is hard for me to explain what I am trying to do most of the time but I have been concerned lately that some of what I am doing will be misrepresented - let me try to explain this a little better. Most of what I do i guess is my interpretation of original pieces and sometimes even that is a stretch in the authenticity department to say the least, particularly with the earlier rifles. I do make some guns that are true to their ancestors form but I don't want to see the others misrepresented as being historically correct, again the "early" guns in particular. A good example of this would be the last set of pictures I posted a few weeks back, the gun definitely has some features you'd recognize as "early" but on the whole it's not based in fact. I am working on some different ideas for the early guns that ought to be interesting, more on that another time
Guy I didn't mean to de rail your topic, had the urge to express myself. I had the good fortune to be able to see all the auction items at Martin's Station, Va a couple months ago, I know it's always good stuff, but man just outstanding work. The good / evil twin knives from Billy Heck and Joe Seabolt ought to be sold as a set, I think if you separate them the planets might crash into the sun
