Well.....I got caught up for a while in the Southwest Airline meltdown....stranded for a while in the LaGuardia airport in Brooklyn. Got to spend several extra days with my grandson though, so it was OK. Then back to Nashville and on to St. Louis before returning to SoCal. And then I fell right into a TON of aerospace work that has fully occupied my time since and will for a while. However, I did have a little time to work some necessary preliminary things that needed to be done before I take apart the gun carriage for all the wood refinishing.
Some of the "irons" still need to be mounted (like the sponge & rammer stop, the sponge & rammer chain, and the ear plate) before starting on the wood work. The sponge & rammer stop and chain hold the two rammer / sponge assemblies in place under the trail for transport. The ear plate and key hold the worm in place for transport. In order to locate these for mounting, I needed to have the sponge & rammers made up correctly....and it took a surprising amount of research to find the necessary details to make these correctly (I received a huge amount of help from the great folks on the web site
https://civilwartalk.com/forums/ ). Then it took me a fair amount of time to find and order (from Maine) 1 1/2" ash dowels long enough to make the rammers. Long story short, I finally found the dowels, the required maple blocks to turn the rammer heads, and a sufficiently accurate way to make the sponges (without killing and skinning my own sheep !) Now that the rammer & sponge are close to being done (never thought that this part would take this much effort.....
) I can locate and mount the irons on the underside of the trail.
So here are some of the parts in work......Trimming the maple blocks for the rammer heads
Turning the blocks....this was a combination of doing some of the turning on a metal lathe and some on a wood lathe at much higher RPM...
The completed rammer heads......the groove in the small end is for a copper band used to nail the rammer head in place and to help keep the thin end from splitting....
Rammer head mounted on the 1 1/2" dowel.....
I had to turn down the opposite end of the rammer shaft a slight bit to fit a lambs wool paint roller. Made of real lambs wool but much easier to use and replace than skinning a lamb and nailing the hide to the shaft.
Had to borrow a friends lathe that had a head stock large enough to get the dowel through to do a nice job turning the taper to fit the socket on the worm. I could have "whittled" this to fit but lathe turning did a much better job of it.
Mounted worm.....
With the rammer & sponges done I will know exactly where to mount the required irons when I disassemble the trail from the axel and flip it over to attach these items. I will also be able to mount the key plates at the ends of the rammer & sponge chains so that they are in the proper location to hold the rammers and worm without being too loose or too tight.