Original Blunderbuss Copy- Finally Finished

[davec2]

Back from the east coast.....and finished with another rocket test effort.

Made the lock, barrel tang, and thumb piece bolts....







Customer wanted a Spanish 2 Reales piece for the thumb piece.  I cast a duplicate in sterling silver and then silver soldered a female threaded insert on the back.  The thumb piece is retained with a screw from the underside of the stock.

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Starting the engraving on the lock plate.  Not very complicated....just duplicating what is on the original gun

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Had to anneal the frizzen in order to engrave just a couple of boarder lines.  Here I am coating the annealed, engraved frizzen with a ceramic coating so I can reharden the frizzen without a lot of oxidation on the surface.






Cock, Lock plate, and frizzen engraved.  Here I have them, along with the top jaw, top jaw screw, and feather spring in a cardboard box with a "hot pot" of water to rust them fairly heavily.

[davec2]

Took me a while but the blunderbuss is finally finished.  As originally specified, this was to be a "very similar" copy of the original 200 year old Nicholson weapon.  The intent was to use as many commercially available parts as possible and make a new gun that was basically the same size, shape, and general characteristics as the original.  I had to make the barrel, the breach plug, all the screws, the trigger plate, and ram rod pipes from scratch.  The lock, butt plate, side plate, and trigger are commercial parts.  The trigger guard was cobbled together from two different commercially available trigger guard castings. The original lock is obviously larger ...slightly bigger than the Chambers lock I used here but not as large as a Brown Bess lock.  Making a lock closer to the original would have required considerable additional effort to make from questionably available (?) castings and / or hand made parts, so I went with the Chambers lock.  The use of a smaller lock did require some stock shape modifications in the barrel breach / lock area, but I think it turned out well.  No carving.  Engraving was to be a close approximation of the original.  The fellow I am doing this for liked the idea of a Spanish 2 Reales piece as a thumb piece and, considering the connection between blunderbusses being used at sea aboard ship, the slightly piratical connection to Spanish treasure appealed to me as well.  At any rate, here are a few photos of the original and the close copy........

[Adrie luke]

Dave

As always a great job and story.

[dadybear1]

OUTSTANDING JOB!!!!!!

[flatsguide]

Nice!

[Bigmon]

what a craftsman and artist. Great work!

[Marcruger]

Oh man......that is fantastic.  Your crisp work always stuns.   I will not show this gun to my wife as she'll insist we have to have one!

I agree on the coin thumbpiece.  It looks super on there. 

Thank you so much for sharing this one with us. 

God Bless,  Marc

[Craig Wilcox]

Work of art, Dave - and simply beautiful.

You build like a rocket scientist or something!

[davec2]

Thanks to all for the kind words.  I need another blunderbuss like I need a hole in the head, but I really like this short barrel....and I was completely surprised by Seth Isaacson's comment at the beginning of this thread on how most of the originals he has handled were between 20 and 10 bore.  The 485 Naval brass was easy to machine, so I'm thinking about making another barrel between 20 and 12 gage and about 12 1/2 inches long.  Actually, the more I think about it, the more I like making a "diminutive" blunderbuss with a 20 gage barrel......................................this muzzleloading stuff really is a sickness, isn't it.....