Hi,
Thanks everyone for your support and encouragement for Maria and me. She did an outstanding job and will be hard at it this summer making muskets. I must admit, the fowler looks better in the hand than in photos. Somehow the pictures don't capture the elegance and craftsmanship that well. We shot the gun yesterday for the first time. It functions very well and it may already be close to zeroed in at 30-40 yards. Soon, we will bench it at 50 yards and see how it goes. Maria's objective was to build a plausible mid-18th century English fowler of good quality that might have been exported to the American colonies. Despite the extra costs of shipping, these guns were very affordable despite the quality because of the extreme division of labor in the English gun trade. Therein lies a big challenge for any modern maker of these guns. The level of workmanship must be high and there is little room for error in getting the architecture right. These are not good gun first guns to build. However, that did not intimidate Maria, and she even went further down the rabbit hole of difficulty by selecting steel and iron furniture. Brass is so much easier to work, shape, and polish. It also was a challenge to keep the proper architecture but still fit Maria who needed considerable drop at heel but a relatively high comb. Added to that are the limitations imposed because few commercially made locks and parts fit the need very closely. With careful instruction, she managed to pull it off with aplomb. It also helped to have original guns on hand to examine while working at the bench. There is probably no better example of the value, importance, and advantage of examining original guns than this project.
dave
