Hi,
The folks organizing this year's Gunmakers Fair in Kempton, PA are hard at work setting up the seminars and demos. For years, a group of us from ALR provided demos of methods and materials as well as a variety of seminars. This year is no exception. I cannot speak for my colleagues but I am planning 2 seminars and 1 or 2 demos. The first seminar will discuss the sequence of steps to build any long rifle or smoothbore. I will not discuss methods and such but rather when to do certain tasks and in what order, and how the sequence can help you prevent problems and tears when making a gun. This is a topic BJH and I discussed some years ago. My second seminar will be on making Brown Bess. It will be a deep dive into the historical details of the various patterns and how to duplicate them. I will also discuss how to rework some commercial repros to make them more historically accurate.
I've not decided on demos this year and would like some input from you. I like to change things year to year sometimes coming back and repeating a topic but not in consecutive years. So what topics might some of you like to see? Keep in mind the demos need to be short and focused so inletting a swamped barrel is not a good topic for that venue. Over years our ALR group has covered carving, silver wire inlay, sharpening engravers, making tools, making scrapers, fixing inletting mistakes, stains and finishes, inletting small inlays, making ramrod pipes, designing guns, shaping the wrist and lock panels, cutting lock panel moldings, and casting with Delft clay. I know I left out some things but you guys get the idea of the type of topics that work as demos. In my case, I would love to see a demo on incised carving by a really skilled practitioner like Ed Wenger. Anyway, if any of you have ideas or suggestions for me, I'd like to hear them.
dave
