Hi,
Thank you all for supporting Maria. We are a hair's breath from being done. The stock is finished, everything to be engraved is engraved, the barrel is polished and tarnished, the lock is tuned and heat treated, and the ramrod is finished. This post shows a few final house keeping tasks that you may not see very often.
We fitted a brass front sight by mortising the barrel using gravers. We located the center of the barrel near the muzzle by laying the barrel upside down on a flat surface, used the top octagon flat to keep the barrel flat on the surface, then inserted a thin flat needle file under the barrel where the sight would go, and drew it out. That marked the exact center.
We just cut a flat bottomed mortise and then undercut the sides. The 4140 steel is very tough and it took some work to cut the mortise. Next we cut a brass sight from sheet and filed a fine dove tail all the way around the bottom. The idea is to insert the sight in the mortise and then peen the barrel into the dove tail, locking the sight in place. We did not know how well the 4140 steel would peen so I put flux in the mortise and then the sight, gave it a tap on top to make it stick, then sweated solder into the mortise. After cleaning up the exces solder, I peened the barrel around the sight with a punch. That seemed to work pretty well. I shaped the sight and left it a bit high.
We finished the ramrod. I had to make a ferrule for the thin end of the rod. I made one the traditional way, rolling thin sheet steel (0.032" thick) on a tapered form. I thinned the steel where the seam overlaps, fluxed the seam and soldered the edges together. It came out slightly cock-eyed but it will work fine. I then threaded the end for a cleaning jag (we will make another rod with a worm). I fitted and glued it to the rod and then pinned it.
We then installed the horn tip. We used glue but also a wedge like an axe handle.
After the glue dried, we cleaned up the end, then sanded, stained, and finished the rod.
Since November, 2022, Maria has worked with me on her gun usually 2 days a week. We covered an incredible amount of ground and array of skills. She did phenomenally well and I expect she will grow into a remarkable gun maker if she chooses to continue. Of course life is what actually happens despite our plans and she has a lot of life to go and choices to make along the way. I hoped to get her engraving by this summer. She has practiced a bit with both hammer and chisel and Lindsay Airgraver.
However, no rational person could expect her to master engraving with all the other skills in the time frame we had. She has made some strides and will get there in time but I decided to do the engraving on her fowler. We wanted a gun representative of actual English work at the time and we copied engraving from several original guns in my possession. It came out well and you will see it when we post the final photos, probably this weekend. The fowler had to be finished this week so she could have it for her final presentation to the school June 9.
dave
PS I am not supposed to reveal this to Ken Gahagan and Ian Pratt but Maria engraved a smiley face on the inside of the butt plate Ian forged.
