Shop is humming with British guns

[smart dog]

Hi Folks,
Thank you all for looking and commenting.  Maria is home for the summer and working full time in the Braintree Hill shop.  I am really excited and proud to post this.  Maria is finishing her officer's fusil.  It was originally rifled but when the original owner dropped out, we are having Bob Hoyt ream the bore smooth to either 0.66 caliber or 0.69 caliber.  We prefer the larger bore but left the decision up to Bob depending on barrel wall thickness.  The rifled 0.62 caliber barrel was very heavy but well balanced.  The smooth barrel will be much lighter and better suited to the new owner.  He portrays loyalist Sir John Johnson and patriot general Phillip Schuyler at living history events. The high end officer's fusil is perfect for him.  Maria started putting details into the carving around the tang of the standing breech.  It is a bit challenging because the black walnut has very tough grain issues.  You cannot cut toward the breech or the chisel will hog out a big chip.  You can only carve toward the butt.  Regardless, the rolling rococo shell, appropriate for the 1770s, is coming out well.  It still needs some smoothing and cleaning up but she is doing a great job.   




 The gun has a wrist plate copied from an original fowler in my possession.  We cast it in fine silver using the Delft clay casting system.



She then had to clean up and file the edges and sculpt the details and polish the plate.  It involved chiseling with die sinker's chisels, engraving, smoothing with stones and abrasives, and stippling deep relief with a single point punch.  I would get Maria started for each task and then let her go.  She created a masterpiece. 





dave

[rich pierce]

Great work!

[Bob Roller]

Be glad you have her.TODAY,I went to the shop to finish a double set trigger and found out that That reaching up to smack the collet draw bar is now a painful movement to change the end mill aggravates an already painful shoulder joint condition.I have done little since 2019 but now it will be less.I hoped to revive the small SMR types and the long bar Hawken style but to quote Bob Dylan,it's all over now baby blue and I do thank all here who bought them..
Bob Roller

[smart dog]

Thanks for looking folks and the encouragement,

Maria inlet the wrist plate with a little help from me when needed.  It is a complicated design more challenging than she has done before.  It came out almost perfect.




We then drilled it for the anchoring bolt which passes through the stock and is hidden under the trigger guard.



That is how good quality wrist plates were secured on British guns.  They usually were not pinned from the top although a few were mostly (not always) on cheaper grade guns.

The next step was finishing the details on the stock prior to staining.  Here Maria is doing the final details on the carving around the standing breech using low angle light which illuminates the rough spots.





Note the precise inletting in the lock mortise.  If you are trying to reproduce good English quality, you have to pay attention to the details and live up to a high standard of work or you won't achieve that goal.  We are ready for initial staining of the stock.  The wood is American black walnut but must look like English walnut in the end.  We found and used a very dense blank of black walnut with fabulous flame figure in the butt.  The first coloring task is to stain it with pure yellow aniline dye dissolved in water. The yellow dye kills the cold purple brown common to black walnut and warms it up more like English walnut.  Next we will use alkanet root stain infused in turpentine and then finish tinted with LMF's walnut stain.





This will be a great gun when finished.

dave

[Daryl]

Stunning already.

[Pukka Bundook]

Dave,
Maria has done a fantastic job on this gun.
The wood carving is So Clean and perfect. The shell is stunning.
Congrats to you the teacher and Maria the student. She is miles ahead of a lot of us already!

[smylee grouch]

Oh YES. Every thing is so crisp and clean. Dave, as you noted the inside lock in letting is so English in quality I'm curious if she burnished any of it after in letting?  Great work all around. 

[flatsguide]

Very nice work indeed! The shell carving is beautiful, with a fullness not often seen.
Richard

[Martin S.]

Your work, and hers, is stunning.  Well done to both of you!

[Bob Roller]

Maria is a treasure.Skill and beauty and a good level of interest and that's as rare as a football bat.

Bob Roller

[Lone Wolf]

Maria is a treasure.Skill and beauty and a good level of interest and that's as rare as a football bat.

Bob Roller

And yet fortunately, both do exist.

[smart dog]

Hi,
We are busy.  I have another English sporting gun in the works.  This time based on John Manton from the early 1800s.  It will use a Chambers late Ketland lock, which I remodeled the exterior to remove it from the export lock category to a first quality lock but without the sliding safety.  I have to cut the ovalu border and reshape the flint cock. The owner wants a single set trigger although I am not a fan of those.  I have to think on that.  The owner is from Quebec and is a very fine target shooter and hunter.  It has been a fascinating journey watching him navigate the Canadian regulations.  It will be half stocked with a steel rib and the stock is a fantastic blank of figured maple.  Most British guns were stocked in English walnut but a few, including some by John Manton, had figured maple stocks.  It will have a Rice barrel mounted with a chambered breech with a hook and tang.  The mounts will all be engraved and charcoal blued.

Maria is working on her officer's fusil.  The barrel is with Bob Hoyt to get rebored smooth and at least 0.66" caliber. She is working on the wrist checkering.  The current task is to punch the dots into the checkering diamonds. The first step is marking the location of the holes with an awl and then punching the dots with a tapered punch.  Each punch has to be the same so she counts the number of taps (4) with the chasing hammer so each hole is the same diameter.  It is coming out great.





I am helping her with engraving the lock.  We are reproducing the engraving original to this Griffin lock and it is coming out well.  The photos don't do it justice because of the lighting.  It will be very attractive and historically correct. 





Note the "wild boar" head engraved on the tail.  In our interview with Ethan Yazel, we discussed engraving and carving real animals versus 18th century renditions of animals.  Most of the British engravers never saw the animals they had to engrave and their work shows it.  So the challenge becomes, do you engrave a modern image or and 18th century image?  Historical integrity is crucial on this gun so the animal looks like a cross between a fish, horse, and a hairy pig, and that's the way it was.

dave 

[Karl Kunkel]

The Lion & Lamb rifle wouldn't be near as appealing if the rendition of the lion looked like a realistic representation of a lion.

[smart dog]

Hi Karl,
Thank you for that.  You are exactly right.  The lock is now ready for case hardening.  I think Maria will leave it polished bright after heat treating rather than temper bluing.  The lock is TRS series 662 Griffin fowler lock that we modified quite a bit.  We shortened the nose of the lock plate and lengthened the trigger bar on the sear.  The short bar was clearly meant for a skinny gun so we extended it with welded steel to allow for the thicker wrist of this gun.  The cast mainspring had a deep crack in the bend so we forged a replacement. Virtually all of the cast in engraving was redone.  For that I helped Maria.  Cleaning up the lock plate and flattening it inside and out meant meant losing a lot of the cast in engraving.  Same with cleaning up the flint cock and battery.  We filed, sanded and polished the components flat leaving just the traces of the old engraving.  Then we re-engraved them and added Maria's name. It will be an excellent lock fully up to the English standards of the time for function and decoration for a 1st quality lock.

   






Despite starting another English sporting rifle, I am also working on a Dutch musket for Matt Keagle, the senior curator at Fort Ticonderoga. That will be an interesting project because I know so little about Dutch muskets and their documentation as to styles, features, dates of manufacture, and export to America is very poor. I have the appropriate references and I will tease it out by examining originals.  They were used by Americans in fairly large numbers both during the F&I war and the Rev War.

dave

[flatsguide]

Hi Dave! Are you planning on documenting your build of the English Sporting Rifle. I and I’m sure many others would enjoy following and learning if you do.
Thanks Richard

[Bob Roller]

The Chambers Late Ketland is ideal for a custom mechanism with a linked mainspring and I have used it for several lock projects in the past.
Another good one is the R.E.Davis Twigg..and I made a "3 pin"mechanism for these and no complaints yet.I was told that some of these are being used for a display but have no idea as to the veracity of these reports.
Bob Roller

[smart dog]

Hi,
I helped Maria with the side plate.  I designed and cut it.  It looks very 18th century as it is supposed to.




dave

[rich pierce]

Great scene!

[smart dog]

Hi,
I did some more engraving to help Maria with her fancy officer's fusil.  The owner wanted thistles and tulips engraved somewhere on the gun (he is Scottish and Dutch).  I engraved them on the butt plate. 

 


It all looks very 18th century English.  I also engraved the standing breech.





Again it all looks like it should for the time.

dave

[rich pierce]

Very pleasing.

[smylee grouch]

Agreed, great design and execution.

[k gahagan]

Beautiful work by both of you.

[Daryl]

Maria's signature is SO beautifully mastered as-is the rest of her engraving. Bravo!

[Jim Kibler]

Dave,

Do you really think this engraving is representative of even mid grade eighteenth century English work?  Come on…. You need to study more.

I’d be happy to defend my statements with original work. 

A man on a fast horse would think it looks okay, but when you start to look at details it falls apart.

I believe this is the truth.  Is it okay to post?

[Jdw276]

Um it is a custom order for customer and the want fancy engraving per the notes on the 29th.  I thought if the customer is paying they are always right.  Unless it is a mass produced item and that is any item not just a lock, stock and barrel.

But what do I know I am a lefty that is looked down upon by many.