Still waiting for parts for my mill, so I can work on the main springs for the percussion locks I’m building.
I’m going to use one of the locks on a Fleeger style rifle with sterling silver furniture. I decided to start making the butt plate by carving it in wax and have vacuum-cast by a firm in Norway. Never done wax carving before, but it was surprisingly quick and easy and seems like a good way to get parts you only want one of. Took me only one day to carve the butt plate. But, calling it wax carving is a bit of misnomer. You can’t carve wax with chisels and knives like wood. If you try, it breaks. All shaping must be done by sawing, filing, rasping, and scraping. There are a lot of good books and youtube videos on the subject. Most are about jewelry making, but the technics are the same.
The three main grades of carving wax are Green, purple, and blue.
Green is the hardest and most brittle wax but can hold the finest details.
The blue is the softest and most flexible of three, it’s easy to “weld” and bend with heat.
The properties of purple in the middle between green and blue.
I chose purple for the butt plate because it’s going to be hollow out, and purple is stronger than blue and less brittle than green.
I drew the pattern in Qcad based on pictures and meaurments from the book “The american longrifle, its art and evolution” and tracings of orignale Fleeger rifles, Ron Luckenbill kindly sent me.
The wax pattern is carved 7% oversize to compensate for casting shrinkage.
The profile pattern was glued on using Scotch weld spray glue and cut out on a bandsaw using a blade for wood.
The side profile was clean up with a wax file. Remember to keep everything square.
I glued the end profiles for the tang and plate to the wax blank.
Most of the tang was sawed out with the bandsaw. The plate was done with a jeweler saw with a wax blade and wax rasps.
Wax blades are spiral twisted to keep them from clogging with wax. Wax rasps and files have relative few very coarse teeth to keep them from clogging. They are not very sharp but work great on wax. They don’t clog like wood rasps do. You can get a set of wax rasps on ebay cheap for less than 20$.
Hollowing out weakens the part, therefore it pays to finish the outside of the butt plate first.
The bulk of wax was removed with rasps and final shaping by scraping with a carpet knife.
The yellow butt plate is one I did in butter board. The casting firm wanted 300$ to make a wax mold from the butter board model. Cheaper to carve wax when you are going to cast only one.
The wax was then sanded down to 600 grit and polished first with denim cloth and last with a pantyhose.
The hollowing out was done with a rotary wood rasp on a foredom tool. It works great at low speed. At
highspeed, it melted the wax and clogged.
The last picture shows the tools used.
From left to right; carpet knife, wax rasps, wax file, foredom rotary rasps.
Best regards
Rolf
The casting went great. Here are pictures of the finished butt plate. There is still some clean up ang polishing to do.
Best regards
Rolf
