Mar 282022
 

My blog has lots of posts going back a number of years, mostly about restoring and engraving antique firearms.  They are about what I do, and are not meant as a guide for you to follow.  You are responsible for what you decide to do, and whether what you want to do is legal in your country.  Be aware that many antiques are of historic importance, and in many cases restoration may reduce their historic and financial value.  You should consider carefully what effect any restoration may have on the value, and take expert advice – the wrong restoration or too much, even well done, can drastically reduce the value of antiques.  We may own them, but we are actually custodians of them for future genertions to enjoy.

 

From the engraving on a Joseph Manton Tubelock

 

DIARY

14th February  Been busy battling with my Bambu 3D printer that is printing badly for some unknown reason – I’m trying to make an ergonomically designed windlass controller with a couple of push buttons that can be held and operated with one hand – I’ve got a good design but first I had problems with the parts warping ( I’m using ASA filament and its a known problem)  I fixed that but the filaments are not bonding as well as they should and in places it looks like knitting unravelling!   I am also trying to make a fitting to adapt a small pump to screw on to the top of 5 litre water bottles – again using my 3D printer, but it turns out the thread on the water bottles is a 3 start thread, so I am having to learn how to do that in Solidworks!  PLus today I finally got round to casting the breech block for the Warner Carbine of American Civvil War vintage.  It worked, but not perfectly – I had some shrinkage around its middle as I didn’t have an adequate reservoir of molten metal in the feed to make up for the shrinkage on cooling.  I am also a bit concerned that I didn’t get a clean burnout of the wax, so there are some marks in the surface.  Nevertheless it filed up to fit perfectly in the functional areas and I was able to drill it for the pivot and make a firing pin and drill its hole, so it would be functional if not very beautiful.  Clearly I’ll need to have another go before I pack up all the kit in the workshop until I have another casting job.  I’ve still got the breech block catch to cast too…..

 

 

4th February  Mostly doing a bit of gardening – Giles is getting married and the party is in our garden – its a mess!  So I was doing a bit of destruction and trying to prop up a bit of trellis – will need a new post…..  I did take an hour this morning to turn up a steel fitting for the mouth of the burner tube – the principle is supposed to be that if you have a fairly sudden increase in muzzle diameter the flame will make an eddy and this will tend to sustain the ignition,  which can be a bit ficcle at times.   I made the mouth so that it is constricted a bit for the last inch or so before opening out to an inch bigger siameter.   Maybe I get a better flame, but it is still fairly likely to go out when in the open air if the flow is faster or near the burn rate – but it seems more stable when its is in the furnace and near the furnace floor.  AT some point I’ll embark on the investment casting, but that is a whole long day’s activity as the investment takes hours to burn out at 730 C.  I might just try a sand casting as that should be much quicker – I  3D printed a pattern today wtih added draft so it could be lifted from the sand.  I moved a big chunk of this post to a BLOG UP TO 13 JAN 2023 post so that scrolling is a bit less tricky!

2nd February   Since I started on the preparations for casting the breech block, I thought I’d better carry on and sort out the furnace.  I looked at several burner designs on You Tube but didn’t feel like going hunting for obscure pipe fittings etc so I had a hunt around the various junk piles.  I found a perfect centrifugal fan,  just the right size for a forced air burner, and a suitable piece of old steel tube and a block of 25 mm brass rod, plus a bit of plastic flex pipe from a pool vacuusm cleaner and a plastic plumbing fitting that was the right size to join the flex pipe to the steel tube as a push fit – almost made already!  Quick 30 minute job designing an adaptor from the fan to the pipe and getting it printing, then turned a spiggot for the rubber gas pipe on one end of the brass and milled an aerodynamic bit on the other end to go through the tube wall as the nozzle.  Great fun drilling a 1 mm hole 10 mm deep in the brass for the gas nozzle inside the burner tube – I was amazed that my little milling machine chuck could hold a  1 mm drill and drill the hole without breaking the bit but it has a very slow manual feed option.  The shaped  brass nozzle is a tight push fit in the hole I cut in the steel tube, and is sealed in with heat resistant gasket cement ( although the heat doesn’t travel that far down the tube). By the time that lot was done the 3D printer had produced a smart adaptor with a mounting foot – the wonders of modern technology – it would have taken me a day to fudge up a solution in the past. Connected it all up with a simple voltage controller on the fan and poked it into my ‘furnace’ which is just a pile of refactory bricks and lit it – when I’d got the pressures right it melted a bit of brass in a crucible with a lot less effort than it took not to melt it yesterday!  Result.  Looking again on You Tube I think I might be able to make it a bit better by producing some turbulence in the tube – I’ve seen advocates for a right angle bend in the tube and a flare at the end – I might try, but it is usable now so I probably won’t bother.  There was only one cock-up – I didn’t notice that the convolutions on the flex pipe made a left handed thread and I put a right handed 5.5 mm pitch  in the fitting – but it seemed to fit anyway!

Nozzle projects into centre of tube

1 February – Oh dear, another month gone and I didnt manage to blog.  My excuses are as follows (in truth none are really sufficient to justify my sloth) – I changed my computer as I was getting a bit fired of the desktop and its foibles, so I bought a reconditioned laptop – a rather better one than I would have been able to afford new at 1/3 the new price and only two years old.  That took me a while to get set up – then there was the annual tax return that is always a pain, although this time the tax man owes me a bit.  Then I have been doing a You Tube video on health, ( Ageing Well No1 –  see on the CLL post) and also having the occasional clay shoot.  I haven’t forgotten the Warner breech block – I had some filament that is supposed to work for lost wax casting but it was supplied as a loose skein and it turned out to be very brittle so I couldn’t rewind it onto a spool to fit my printer. Anyway I bought a different make of looseable wax and have now printed up a wax with attached risers at about 1.6 % oversize to allow for the brass shrinkage when I cast it.  Today I ventured into the depths of my shed and recovered my electric kiln for baking out the investment to get rid of the wax and heat it ready for casting, and to my amazement it wotked immediately and got up to the required 760C  quickly.  The same can’t be said of my impromptu furnace, which failed to melt a trial pot of brass.  Looking at the design of the burner and checking out a few You Tubes I think I’ll heve to make a new burner tube,, so it will be a week or so before I get tound to casting.   Oh, and another thing I did,which was supposed to be a You Tube but hasn’t yet, was to test out a rust remover that I came across called Evapo-Rust, that  works by a chemical process called chelation, in which molecules of iron oxide are grabbed in a chemical embrace and removed from the surfaces while leacing the iron itself untouched.  It works very well, and is not a strong acid or alkali  so it is quite a gentle action while removing all the rust effectively – of course since it goes for the rust it also goes for any browning on the parts – in fact it strips browning veray quickly – 10 minutes of so – whereas it takes overnight to derust a really rusted part, if not longer.  It is much less vigorous than the electolytic derusting I used to use, which works by releasing active hydrogen on the surface of the rust, which turns the ferric rust to loose ferrous black oxide by grabbing one of the oxygen atoms from the rust.  Electrolytic derusting is risky for springs due to hydrogen embrittlement, and can delaminate bits if there are internal cracks, but it is better at loosening screws, which Evapo-Rust isn’t so good at as it doesn’t penetrate cracks so well.  The other disavantage of Elapo-Rust is that it doesn’t work if the metal is oilym whereas electolytic does as the electrolyte is caustic and removes oil.  ON balance its a lot less fuss than the electolytic process – so I’ll probablly use it in future – the fluid can be reused many times. (About £20 per litre from Toolstation – next day)

Wax for Warner lost wax casting

2nd January 2024  –  I stole a bit of time from Christmas family celebration and our traditional new Year Breakfast for 60 guests.  Putting away a few of the ‘junk’ guns littering the place I came across a Warner’s Patent  American Civil war carbine that I bought years ago minus its breech block. During and just before the Civil War there was a rush to design breech loading carbines to sell to the Union  Government – indeed the govenment bought some 40 (?) different carbines in quantities from a few dozen to hundreds of thousands, and of a confusing number of different designs and, more importantly, different bores and chamberings, as many used their own patterns of cartridge.  The Warner Patent was one of those that originally used its own special ammunition – the Warner .51 (?) rim fire cartridge  ( I think  all the cartridge carbines offered were  rimfire ?).  Warner had a factory that made his patent pistols, and got a contract from the govenment for 1000 carbines, and struggled to get a satifactory pattern arm for them, and was very late delivering and had problems getting the ammunition made.  He then got the Greene Rifle Works to take on the manufacture of the carbines and they secured an order for another 3000 which were converted and later made for to .56-.56 Spencer ammunition, since the Spencer carbine was being used in large numbers.  The Warner had various problems and not all the initial 1000 appear to have been issued, and none  of the Greene 3000.  After the war  all the unissued stocks were auctioned off and a large batch went eventually to France, but I think with the Warner cartridges although they were Spencer chambered!   A number were proofed in England and sold off – these were often chequered on the stock.  Mine is a UK proofed Greene model – not sure about the chambering, but probably Spencer.  Mine – No 2099 –  is missing the hinged breech block.  The action is all brass, including the missing breech block.  I had been playing with making a breech block years ago when I bought  it, and even cast up a rough lump of brass, but it got no further.  Anyway when I looked at it I figured  I could use my 3D printer to print a breech block and cast it as a sand casting, or try 3D printing in a wax filament that can be burnt out for lost wax casting.  The advantage of this is that I can get the shape right by printing plastic breech blocks til I get it right – each takes about 45 minutes to print – then when I have a design that fits perfectly I can use the computer to scale up the model to take account of the shrinkage of the final casting and make my block with minimal finishing.  So far I’ve made 3 plastic prototypes in PLA  and am getting very near to a perfect fit – its a bit of a fiddle as the original block wasn’t made to any exact geometric shapes so I’ve had to fudge it in Solidworks CAD. There is a good book – ‘Warner Civil War Cavalry Carbines’ by Col. J Alan Hassell, USAF (Ret.) and I did have a look at one some time ago in the restricted weapons archive in Leeds.

Photo from Col. J Alan Hassell’s book.

Breech block made of PLA plastic, not Gold !

 

 

25th December  – Happy Christmas to you all – and good shooting/collecting for next year.  I have been a bit busy sorting out bits of the ‘estate’ for the Christmas festivities but have had a couple of outings with the Westley Richards 11 bore percussion.  I  was shooting clays and on more or less the last stand I changed the way I looked at the clays and started to hit more – not sure quite what I had been doing, but somehow I seem to have got much better, touch wood.  I had a very pleasant shoot a couple of days ago with Tom double pegging.  We got pegs that didn’t see much activity but I managed to hit half a dozen for ten shots which is way better than I’ve ever managed before – the usual overall  average for shoots is about 3 1/2 shots per bird, falling to 4 or 4 1/2 if there is a strong wind.  On this shoot the wind was quite strong to begin with – 20 mph perhaps, falling later and then geting up a bit at the end.    Anyway hope to be back in the new year when we have got a big new year’s day party out of the way!  I was sorting out guns that were lying around the library to clear it out and came across an American  Civil War carbine – Warner’s patent – that is missing a breech block.  I suddenly realised that I could make one by 3D printing one slightly oversize in some filament I have that can be used as a mould in lost wax casting, so I might have a go at that in the new year.  Would be good to make the outerwise sad gun into somethng nice!

8th December = still clearing out old papers from the office – so far I’ve cleared  out 7 full box files and 5 big ring binders  and found a lost V5 for the big old Royale mobility scooter we have got to get rid of….. Know anyone who wants an oldish but almost unused one – still running?  Anyway I haavae at least reclaimed a bit of shelf space.

6th December – Its a bit cold in the workshop so I’ve been doing a bit of clearing out in the ‘office’  and catching up on some 3D printing I’ll need for sailing next year.  At the moment Im struggling with the printing of screw threads – if I print them vertically they print perfectly, but because the resultant layers are across the screw threads they are quite weak as the layer to layer bonding has the least strength, but printing them any other direction involves the printer putting in support structures as it can’t print overhangs, and they stick to the threads and spoil them – I’ll get there in the end.  I went to see my haematologist on Friday and was talking about doing a You Tube video on exercise and he thought it would help some of his other patients if I did one with my experience of CLL – so I did – its on the recent posts here.   I’m getting swept up in the usual pre Christmas panic  to get the house habitable and fit for parties, so I’m not sure how much longer I’ll have time to blog until January!  I was hoping to attack another gun restoration soon – I was thinking to restore my big rampart gun – it would be great to fire it – probably needs a quarter of a pound of shot!

3rd December  – almost gone into hybernation as its so cold in the house, except by the AGA or around the living room stove. I sometimes wonder if there is anything in this new-fangled central heating people talk about, but like anything invented after the muzzle loaders were replaced by breech loaders. I have yet to be convinced!    I  did have a really nice day out on Friday – sunny, pretty calm and quite frosty, but dressed up in multiple layers we shot for about 4 hours without getting cold.  I managed one of my good days – so obviously padded out like a parcel didn’t affect my shooting.   Cleaning my gun I had difficulty getting the right hand lock out because the sear spring tab had come out of its slot, and when I tried to get it together the little tab on the sear spring just wouldn’t stay in the slot cut in the back of the lockplate.  I cleaned out the slot with a flat graver, but that didn’t solve the problem.  The tab wasn’t well defined – I think it had given trouble before, so I filed around it and made the shoulders a bit sharper, and eventually got it to hold.  I hope that is now OK.  I realised that I now do all the small fiddly jobs under my microscope, and  would find it difficult to do them without – about time to get my cateracts done – my eyes are not bad enough for the NHS to do them, so I suppose I’ll have to pay!   Thinking about my most used tools, I reckon the vice ( see post somewhere on the website) I made for my microscope must be my most used home-made tool.  I recently found the ball vice I bought when I started – it got abandoned as it was too tall –  I ought to sell it, it worked well except that it raised the optics too high, there not being enough room between my knees and my eyes to fit in a bench and turntable, the ball vice, the objective distance of the lens, and the height of the microscope.  I’m currenty in a 3D printing phase – making bits for the boat next year, and trying to keep warm.

26th November – Slight problem with the Lancaster left lock – got it all working out of the gun, or so I thought, then put it in the gun and couldn’t get the cock to go down fully – took the cock off and dug a bit more out of the groove on the back, but then couldn’t get the sear to lift enough to clear the half cock bent – I was fitting the lock for the first time, so I wasn’t too surprised that the trigger plate wasn’t lifting the tail of the sear enough. So strip the lock (again – how many times?) and remove the sear, heat the arm to red heat and gently bend it in the right direction.  Usually the only thouble putting a lock together again is getting the sear/sear spring fixed – how and when you do it depends on the design of the lock mechanism and bridle arrangement.  The sear spring is almost always held at the top end by a screw about which it is free to pivot but is located by a tab on the top arm of the spring and a slot in the back of the lock plate.  Sometimes the design allows the sear spring to be removed with the bridle in place – in this case the spring passed under the bridle so has to go on before the bridle.  You then have 3 components to juggle before the fourth, the bridle, goes on. In this case the spring went on first, because its otherwise a fiddle to get its tab in the slot.  By holding the sear spring closed with long nosed pliers its possible to slip the sear in place, and then raise the sear against its spring sufficiently to introduse the tumbler, then put on the bridle  and finally the cock.  Anyway it took me two iterations to get enough bend in the sear arm to lift the sear enough.  Put that together and noticed that the barrel bolt was not held in, so had to put a little pin through the wood and the slot in the bolt ( cut off end of a safety pin & a dab of superglue to stop it falling out of the existing hole).  Quick wipe over with a slightly oily rag (only a little oil so as not to darken the wood next to any oiled  metal, and its back in its case and away off to storeage.  Pause now while I work out what to tackle next – I’ve got a few bits of an early long gun – stock and very long barrel, in pretty poor condition and no lock, but it does have  very fine engraved brass trigger guard – I have a flintlock plate that might fit with a bit of fiddling and a possible cock and frizzen – all  of which will need some parts making and a lot of welding – it wouldn’t amount to much if done, but would make a wall hanger – I’m tempted (a bit).  I also have the parts for the other Wogdon, but that’s a very long job to make the stock, make waxes and cast the silverware  and get into practice for some quite critical engraving – maybe I’ll leave that as I do want to get on with some bits for the boat – I need to design a new mount for the tablet near the steering position and a fixing for a stainless pipe extension so there is something to hold on to when it gets rough –  plus do some more Navigation software…. sounds like a busy winter – plus I did resolve to try to clear out a lot of the clutter round the house and workshops………

25th November – Bit more work on the second of the Lancaster locks – almost there – seems to fit together quite nicely and looks the part – the locks and safety catches work now.  I was scanning through the results of the recent Bonhams sale of the Gerry Penrose collection – or at least I think it was only part of his collection – I know Gerry and have looked at his collection several times and think there is more to come.  I was keen to see what prices the lots fetched, given that there were so many examples of lots of the gun and pistol types, so it was really a buyers’ market – from the prices realised and David Williams pre sale estimates I think with very few exceptions things didn’t go above the top estimate and, assuming that the estimates in the catalogue are hammer prices and the realised prices include buyers’ premium, then the average selling price was near the bottom of the estimates, and possibly below the bottom estimate in some cases.  I guess all the lots have to go somehow, sometime.  I was interested to see the Lorenzoni repeating flintlock carbine fetched £9000ish against an estimate of  less than half of that – I had been very tempted to go to the sale and I did fancy it at the low end of the estimate but not the realised price!  A couple of Colt revolvers sold OK, and the .44 rimfire Winchester  went well – all things I’d have looked at but almost certainly not bid on, and which have probably sold to the U.S.  None of the cased Adams type revolvers sold – I thought the estimates were a little on the high side although I do like those pistols.  In general the market for long guns isn’t dead, just resting! and the market for pistols is not brilliant but is always better than long guns as more people have room for them.  Pretty little cased pairs of travelling pistols etc. are sought after – they don’t take up much room, are usually in good condition and are nice to handle.  My comments on the overall prices are based on the catalogue descriptions as I have not seen them except on the wall in Gerry’s  gunroom, but I know some of them have had work done on them – I think I’d worked on one of the guns he had but I can’t remember what it was.

24th November – Sorting out the locks of the Lancaster i made in 2014 and didn’t finish!  Cut the half cock notch in the Left Hand lock tumbler – fiddly job as the bent requires that the sear is held even if the trigger is pulled, so it needs to be filed as a narrow angular cut, quite sharp.  Of course no needle files of the correct profile exist, so I have to take needle files and give them a dead edge running to a sharp angle using my diamond hone – I was wondering today what the most essential tool in my workshop was – I guess the hone comes pretty high!  As well as modified files I also hone hacksaw blades down So the teeth cut a V shaped groove – obviously they don’t cut brilliantly but are OK for starting the shape – I use them for starting the slots in screw heads too.   After the bent the next job was to fix the safety catch which works by engaging a groove cut in the back of the cock – when the gun is at half cock the safety can be slid in and locks the cock from being fully cocked or from being let down.  The safety has a springy tail with a pip on it that engages in one of two small pits on the face of the lock.  It’s incredibly fiddly – I’d made the safeties before, but when I came to fit them I found that one of the screws that secures them from the back of the lock had got lost, so had to make a replacement – its the smallest screw I’ve ever made, and I’m not sure I want to make any smaller.  I couldn’t remember what the thread in the safety was, but looking through my stock of taps and dies the only ones I had that were small enough were 9 B.A. so I must have used those – it fitted!  The safety catches were usually blued and so I found a place on the AGA hot plate that was around 300 C and popped the safety under a couple of folds of aluminium foil and shut the lid for 5 minutes – not perfect, but not bad!  Job done.

Fixing 9 B.A. thread is up through the knob – not much room there!

 

9 B.A. screw still attached to the stock- the squares are 1 mm.

Arrow shows fixing screw of safety catch

Finished new lock for restored s/n 3331

Lock from original Oval Bore Lancaster s/n 3076 made a few years earlier than the restored rifle.

I must have been better at engraving in those days – I’m quite out of practice now!

21st November – A thought struck me – assuming it takes a  goodly while for any lead ban law to be passed and then there is a 5 year delay on game shooting I’ll be almost 90 by the time it hits – so perhaps I shouldn’t worry from a personal point of view – anyway around then I plan to be sailing round the world single handed ( it’s on my bucket list) – about the only way to achieve a ‘First’ in that enterprise is to do it older than anyone else has!  I have a little problem with my Westley Richards percussion gun – one of the plugs by the nipples is looking a bit ragged, and I feel I ought to replace it – the other one has been plugged with steel.  The problem is, how are they fixed in, and what are they made of?   And why are they there?   They plug what must be the only way to bore through from the bottom of the nipple to the powder chamber in the breech.  Some breeches on double guns did have a hole from the opposite side that it hidden in the joint between the two breech plugs, but I think that relates to Nock’s patent breech , anyway I certainly haven’t ever seen it on single barreled guns.   The small hole through the plug was thought to reduce the recoil – there was a theory that small holes in the breech had that effect, but of course the only way it could affect the recoil is by allowing some of the explosive gas to escape, with the main effect being to reduce the muzzle velocity of the shot – although the hole in the plug is too small to have any significant effect.. It has also been suggested that by blowing some of the gas through from the chamber it might have had the effect of clearing fouling from the area – at least that probably doesn’t breach any principles of physics.  Another idea for the plugs is that they are a safety valve – blowing out before the breech pressure gets high enough to damage the barrel etc.  or blow out the nipple – but that is probably a bit advanced for the thinking of the period – or is it? Next problem – what are they made of  ?-  John(?) Manton had introduced platinum (Platina) in 1805 and I guess it wasn’t that expensive as it was used in touchholes and later for lining nipples – so it would have been in use by the time percussion guns were being made.  I guess alternatively it could have been silver, but that is maybe a bit soft for the job.   I can’t find any direct reference to the fixing of the plugs in any of my books but I’m told that they screw in – by Kevin who has replaced one.  That seems to be the only realistic way to fix them, although I did wonder if they could be spread into a recessed bore by tapping in with a hammer , but they would need an inner rim to support them.  To remove the bad one I’ll have to cut a slot in it or drill it out I don’t use thread extractors as they invariably expand the thread and lock it even tighter- they are more or less OK in hardened steel studs!    As I probably can’t lay my hands on enough platinum to turn up a stud,  I’ll have to make it out of some other material. I’m tempted to use titanium- which I’ve used for many years for making nipples without any trouble, but my experience of using it to make a touchhole was a disaster – it flamecut very badly after a few shots and would have blown out if I hadn’t checked it after the first time I used it.  I  think it would be OK as long as it didn’t have the hole through it, but I’ll probably resort to stainless steel to be on the safe side.   I’ve started to cut the half cock notch in the Lancaster tumbler – The old lock mechanism I fitted to my new lockplates was from a shotgun – Ive had to weld up the old half cock notch as its not in the right place, but the main problem is that as a rifle it would need a detent on the tumbler  preventing the sear from entering the half cock notch when it is fired by a gently squeeze – its not a problem with shotguns as the trigger pull is much firmer.  I don’t think my skills or patence is up to fitting detents to non dtented tumblers, so I guess I’ll leave it so it does go into half cock and full cock, but can’t be fired in the way it would as a rifle.

20th November –

THIS IS IMPORTANT!

If you shoot muzzle loading shotguns this may be your last chance to keep the sport alive act now – deadline 10 Dec!

The recommendations of the HSE Opinion on lead in ammunition have now been published and are, in summary a partial restriction is proposed on lead in ammunition for rifles and pistols of any calibre or type, breech or muzzle loading, as I understand it mainly for two reasons;- 1) For live quarry rifles it has not been shown that there is an adequate substitute that is equally effective  – using a less dense metal means the bullets have to be longer to retain kinetic energy and that affects their stability and the accuracy is impaired, so leading to less clean kills.  2) For most target shooting lead recovery is possible, indeed it is necesary to preserve the safety of sand bullet stops – there will be a ban on the use of lead in rifles and pistols in ranges that are not approved for the use of lead ammunition, but HSE expects that most ranges will be so approved – it will ban, at least in theory, checking your rifle at a target in the field to zero it.  Unfortunately there is no such luck for shotguns – a time limit of five years is proposed for live quarry, including game, shooting, and 3 years for clay shooting – there will be a derogation for shooters in international competitions where lead shot is required by the competition rules..  There is the statement that 22% or shotguns can fire steel, and no mention of muzzle loaders.   There is now a chance for us to have our say on the practical and social implications of a ban on lead in muzzle loading shotguns.  The survey closes on 10th December, and it is vital that every shooter of muzzle loading shotguns (specifically) replies to the survey as soon as possible.  Alternatives to lead for the antique muzzle loaders that many (or most?) of us use are not proven not to damage soft iron barrels, and in any event the muzzle velocities using black powder, and the breech pressures that these guns will stand will not let us achieve the high muzzle velocities that are necessary to give our  reasonable sizes of shot in alternative metals like bismuth sufficient  pellet energy to work at the ranges we need. We don’t have the option open to breech loaders of upping the charge!   Changing to larger shot sizes means much leaner shot patterns at range, resulting in more pricked birds.  There has been no research on the use of Bismuth in old barrels so there is no evidence that it is not going to damage guns that have survived for up to 200 years so far.   My own view is that I don’t really approve of game shooting with breech loaders – the bags are too large and its too easy to get trigger happy – I prefer the enforced slower pace of muzzle loaders!  My interest in clay shooting is partly as an adjunct to game shooting, and partly as because I enjoy all aspects of our great heritage of old guns – many still in fine condition, from restoration and repair to collecting and using – a gun is not a real historic artifact in my view if it can’t be fired, which is why I restore guns to working condition even if I’m actually never going to shoot them.  Clay shooting is almost invariably a social activity – you very occasionally see a lone shooter using the ‘delay’ button on the clay traps, but for the most part its two or more friends – my clay shooting friends  are an important part of my circle of friends with whom I share a common interest in old guns, not just in propelling spheres of lead towards disks of clay!   Many, but not all, of my fellow shooters are post retirement and it also a significant part of their social life – one of the things that impresses me is the support many give to any of us who become ill or find it difficult to join in.   If we do not succeed in getting a derogation for muzzle loaders it will kill off the sport overnight – there is no alternative – its up to us to make a strong case in response to the survey, and to enlist other muzzle loading shooters.  – it not an opportity for a general rant, however!   We acknowledge that it is actually a small number of people involved, but its a negligible contribution to the problem and almost certainly puts much less lead into the environment than the live quarry rifle shooting that will continue to use lead – but the individual impact on those people will be significant

Click on the links below ;-

HSE Opinion report  

HSE SURVEY

 

See also Martin Crix’s comments – better put than mine and in more detail!

Martin Crix comments etc

 

20th November as well! – I Finished cleaning up and putting together the little 7mm centre fire walking stick – the only problem was that before the trigger didn’t pop out when the sleve was rotated, and when I took it apart a small spring dropped out from somewhere, that I assumed was the spring that should have pushed out the trigger.  Anyway there was no proper mechanical way that I could see of fixing it, and I concludud in the end that it was slipped in between the wood and the inner metal sleeve, and just stayed there!  Well it seems to work, and there was no other way to fix it.   So that can be put to bed as restored.

16th November – Very pleasant shoot today, and the rain held off.  I had a bit of a problem getting to grips with the different gun but I got there in the end!   I discovered that the pegs that go with my cap dispensers are not really a tight enough fit and the dispensers can fall off the pegs, as they did for me a couple of times today, so I came home and modified the drawings and ran off a couple to check that they were better, and opened up the parcel I was about to send off and changed the ones in there.  I’ll now replace all my stock and print up more cappers – they seem to be quite popular at the moment!  If you have weak ones and want them replaced just email me.  I have been shown one that broke one of the arms, although none of the many I have used a lot have broken – I’ll see if I need to thicken the arms slightly. |Most of the other broken ones I’ve seen are one of the other types advertised on ebay, but I have happily replaced them with one of mine!  Easy changes  are the great benefit of 3D printing – it takes me less than half an hour to effect the changes and set a new lot printing, I get the prototypes in another half an hour  – imagine if they had to be injection moulded as in the pre 3D printing era – the cost of the mould would be  hundreds of pounds if not more.

15th November – I weakened, and redid the Cook’s Patent cane mechanism – I wanted to do a bit of TIG welding as I hadn’t touched it for a couple of years as I’d run out of Argon, and anyway I didn’t like the look of the piston shaft when I looked at the photo on the blog – I find that things always look worse in photos – I often deliberately take photos because it reveals faults that I don’t see in the flesh.  Anyway I managed to weld up the little bit without closing up the hole.  While I had it out I looked at the spring to see if I could sort out the cap firing – I decided that the spring was too short – when the piston hit the cap there was no tension left in the spring,  I didn’t want to use a longer spring of the same diameter wire as the initial tension would be too high, so I opted for a longer spring but a slightly thinner wire – 1.2mm instead of 1.6mm.  Anyway it all went together nicely and now works just fine, including firing the cap.  I decided that I wouldn’t do any restoration on the exterior as the original paint finish is, well, original – any attempt to refinish it would just look wrong in my book.   So job done…  Next up I got out my little 7 mm breech loading centre fire cane – I think these were used by naturalists and hobbyists with very fine shot or dust shot for collecting specimens  for taxidemy, or possibly with bulleted breech caps.  This one is very fine, very slim and encased in dark wood – you would never suspect it housed a gun – the only clue would be that the silver ring rotates and a trigger pops out.  There was a bit of a problem as the wood casing was rotating on the metalwork and opening and cocking it relies on rotating parts of it, so I stripped it down – probably just as well as the very thin barrel was quite rusted on the outside and could have split the wood if it rusted much more- also the trigger no longer popped out.  So far I’ve taken it all to pieces and cleaned up the outside of the barrel, then I had to stop to get ready for tomorrow’s shoot.  I realised that the overshot cards I had were slightly too small for the Westley Richards 11 bore and I didn’t have a card punch that was the right size.  After an abortive attempt to make one from a box spanner – I couldn’t harden it properly because I ran out of Propane, I knuckled down and turned up a proper one from a piece of EN8 bar – bit of a saga  as it was a large bar and so had to be reduced in diameter, so I got the suds pump working after some fuss, then it more or less flooded the whole tray of the lathe! Anyway (always lots of ‘anyways in this blog! ) I did get it done and bored and milled the side away to get the cards out.  In the chuck of my miller it bangs out cards in no time at all – using 2 thicknesses of card and a wooden fixed block I turned out several hundred  in ten minutes.  I ought to take the time to make a cutter that throws the cards out – I have to stop this one every 20 cards or so to unload it.

Proper job now!

Another walking stick – very graceful, unlike the previous two.  – 7 mm centrefire

11 bore  card cutter for overshot cards.

14 November – I finished the J R Cooper write up and its gone off the MLAGB to see if they want to publlish it – I hope it will draw forth some useful information if it get into print.  I got back to sorting the Cook Percussion cane that a correspondent to this blog had suggested a way of repairing.  I turned up a bit of bar, put flats on it and drilled a hole throught the middle and  put it back in the lath and turned tha pins down and parted it off and then filed a square in the hole – fitted fine and now cocks and the mechanism fires off but although it hits the caps it doesn’t do so with enough force to ignite them,  That could be because I replaced the spring with a somewhat less strong one as I thought the one that was in there had been too strong – it didn’t look as if it was original – and I thought it had resulted in the mechanism breaking. Or it could be that the sliding bit I made was too thick and just caught the end stop as the piston hit the cap – the cap has been hit lightly, but obviously not quite hard enough.  As with the J R Cooper I can’t make up my mind whether to pursue the issue or leave it since it does function and its unlikely that anyone will ever want to fire it in ernest – I certainly don’t intend to. I could take it apart again, although I did cheat and use a drop of instant glue on the cross pin in the damaged hole in the piston rod that I’d threaded into the piston shaft.  We shall see…  I  am on a shoot on Thursday – I may forsake my nice little Nock single 16 bore for my much meatier Westley Richards 11 bore double, although its obviously a bit more to lug about all day – still my weight exercises might with luck mean that I still have some muscle in my arms!   I guess the next gun on the agenda is the Lancaster Oval bore – I realised why it wasn”t finished while I was doing the restoration – I’d sent off the cocks of my proper original Lancaster to Blackleys to get copies cast for the restoration, and it took 2 years to get them, by which time I’d started something else!  Looking back at the post on this website for the Lancaster I realise it must be around 10 years since I started this blog and put up gun stuff – there was some house building stuff before that, not much!  Anyway I should celebate 10 years of gun blogging!  In that time I’ve had 4 million visits from half a million visitors in total !  The UK is the biggest single audience, but taken together there are a lot more overseas visitors than home visitors – mainly American, Russian and German visitors, but quite a few from China,  Australia and Canada plus a steady trickle from all over the world.  I get over 100 visits a day every day.  Really quite amazing the reach of the site!  I think it must be the biggest gun restoration site on the web in terms of  the range of subjects covered and the sheer volume of material – there are 2200 photos on the site and its about the maximum size for a University of Cambridge Thesis!  I’m not sure how much storage it takes up on the server – fortunately available storeage  on my ISP goes up with time as the size of my blog increases!  Anyway some photos of the Cook cane;-

I ought really to put a dab of weld on the end of the piston rod and use a better pin!

10th November – I’ve finished writing up the construction of my dinghy and I think I have enough photos for an article in Practical Boat Owner, so I’ll send that off shortly.  I have started to write an article on the J R Cooper for the Black Powder Mag of MLAGB but realised that most of the existing photos are terrible – I didn’t have a decent setup when I did the original ones, and the latest ones I just did for a record as I worked, so I’ll probably have to take it down again to photograph it properly.   Writing the article I mentioned the Jones Paternt that I have, so I got it out to have a look again.  Its a rather fine gun, made for Royalty somewhere in Germany to an 1833 patent.  Its a double barreled shotgun and meant to be a weatherproof action with enclosed hammers and nipples. It doesn’t have a magazine for caps like the Cooper so the top slide has to be opened to reload caps by sliding it backwards . Strangely the caps fit onto the noses of the hammers and had the percussion compound applid to the outside of the cap so that it fired when the hammer hit the nipple, which came out through the centre of the hooks in the breechblock, as in the Cooper.  Again you wonder what the real advantage was – if its raining you still have to open the slide and fiddle around capping the hammers and carry around caps that are not readily available, plus of course its still a muzzle loader with all that palaver  – I’m not convinced by it, I can see why it never caught on!  Here are some photos of the Jones Patent No 7610 serial No 169 of about 1833;-

9th November – I just realised that the J R Cooper is made of what was called Tutanag in the 19th century – I’d heard of it as used very occasionally for making pistol bodies etc  but never for long guns – I now know its the name used to describe alloys of about 50% (?) copper and variable amounts of tin and zinc, so I was right in my guess as to the general composition of the non ferrous parts of the Cooper,  I’d just never associated it with the old name for the alloy.  It clearly wasn’t a precise alloy of the components, just a nickel silver wasn’t a precise mixture of copper and nickel, whereas Britannia metal was a proprietory alloy of fixed composition.   So at least I can properly describe the gun now!   I spent today writing up the construction of my little dinghy as I want to publish the plans etc some time.  I also want to publish some 3D printing plans etc for boat parts.  I may have to start another website, or at least reclaim one of the other 10 I already have, as this one is banned on some business servers as it mentions firearms – even my Talk Talk mobile network by default stops me going on my own website!  I think I can get them to switch off the block – I must check it out before I go sailing again as I want to blog from the boat.   I’m wondering if its worth keeping on trying to get the Cooper to fire off caps – I hate to give up at this stage, but am not sure of the best way to proceed – it all seems to work except the caps don’t fire – maybe the piston isn’t hitting hard enough or doesn’t travel far enough – I can just insert a penknife blade between piston and nipple and there is certainly less force than I would expect – but I can’t see anything wrong with the mecahnism – obviously needs another examination…… My main lesson from the Cooper is that its too dangerous to have got anywhere in the 1840s – not knowing if there are caps in the magazine  and not being able easily to flush them, and not being able to see the state of the tumbler would not have appealed to the 19th century gentleman, any more than they do to me!

7th November – I tried out the capping on the J R Cooper – but my modified caps wouldn’t work – they transferred to the nipple OK but didn’t fire. I’m not sure if it is because the caps are old and faulty or not very sensitive, or quite possibly they need a bigger impact than the piston gives – you can see a slight imprint of the end of the nipple on the inside of the cap. the metal of the drawn caps was thicker and maybe they were more sensitive.  So the saga is not yet over…………  I got another spam call from ‘Bank Security’ yesterday – its a recorded message saying you have had two transaccions on your account and press 2 if they are not right – then you get to speak to someone who wants to know your name, date of birth and which bank!  So you give him some made up details and he then says you have to ring security at whatever bank you told him and gives you ‘their’ number which will be an 020 3289 XXXX number. I try to take as long as I can to keep him on the line while I go to look for a pencil, then to find some paper – the longer you keep him occupied the fewer innocent people will be bothered by him.  Ring off after telling him he is a bloody pain and a pretty incompetent scammer!  If you then google the number you will find on a website that there are lots of  020 3289 numbers that have been used by scammers for months. If you think about it, they must make money out of some pretty gullible people, which is despicable, or they wouldn’t do it.  It makes me very angry that this easily killed fraud is not stopped – given how easily the police can track phones when they want to, and how easily phone companies can disconnect lines, and how publically the information is about which lines are misused it must be because the authorities just don’t care.  Given that they mutter about how important it is to tackle low level crime, its pretty appalling – I am trying to start a campaign – I must have had about a dozen of these calls in the last 6 months…!

6th November – Had a bit of a problem with my super  Bambu 1X 3D printer as the filament broke in a couple of places inside the tubes and  extruder  and I had to partially strip it to clear the bits – its a beautifully engineered device but everything is so small that its very fiddly – the screws look a  bit like the tops of pins!  I don’t know what had happened to the filament, it seemed to be rather brittle when I tried to bend it so I’ll be careful when I next use that colour – trouble is its my standard colour for cappers and card dispensers – pine green.   Well, I wasn’t happy to leave the J R Cooper without knowing whether the cap system would work completely including voiding the caps after they had fired, or rather when the gun is moved to half cock – I didn’t hold out much hope of finding the right sized caps of the correct construction so I decided that I’d have to modify existing overlength caps.  That suits my favourite activity of toolmaking!  I made a jig to hold the caps at the right depth so I could just file off the excess length – I drilled a series of 3.4 mm holes in an 8 mm steel plate and opened up the top 4.6 mm to 4.8 mm diameter.  I can drop the caps in the holes firing side down and gently file off the skirt that protrudes above the plate, blow out the swarf, push a short tapered brass rod into the mouth of each cap to make sure its round and any burr is opened out, the GENTLY push the caps out with a matchstick through the 3.4mm hole.  I am of course very conscious of the nature of the caps, and wear safety glasses and work very carefully and gently making sure that I am never directly in the firing line if any cap were to fire.   Anyway it works and I now have around a dozen caps that seem to be the right dimensions so tomorrow I will repeat the multiple firing experiment – just the caps, every time I look closely at the ?brass, tin, zinc ? alloy and its cracks I doubt the gun would stand being fired.  I do like to shoot most of the guns I work on if sensible and legal, but not at the expense of damaging them!  Even if they are not shootable I do like them to be fully functional up to  that point.

Cap filing Jig   –  The top row of holes were  slightly too large, the lower row are  just right.

5th November – Gunpowder, treason and plot etc.   I set about cutting a new thread yesterday, and managed to have another saga of cock-ups – I caught the lathe tool on the boss  of the thread and slightly off-centered it – after I’d turned it down to finished size too. It wasn’t bad enough to spoil the job luckily, just slightly annoying !  Then I broke off a 2.5mm drill – but again luckily I got the bit out.  Anyway after a bit of messing about with the tipped tool that had a bit of movement in the tip, I got a good thread and was able to finish the job.  I was able to test the reservoir of the Blissett up to a couple of hundred p.s.i. and it seemed OK, but not surprisingly the old sealing valve didn’t seal at all , and as it is horn and I couldn’t get it off I decided it was best left as it is – then it’s no danger to anyone from trying to fire it as it won’t hold air!  I  did a bit more playing with the J.R.Cooper – I found that the length of the caps was pretty critical for the magazine as it is, anything over about 4.65 mm tall jams the drum and won’t load – I managed to find about 8 caps that were below this limit – it would be possible to file more of them down I guess, but at least I have enough to test out the feed.  Loading the caps through the hole in the cover is a bit tricky but OK, although you have to hold back the clock spring while you do it so its a fiddly two handed job.  The caps feed all the way round and arrive in the steel tumbler block. If the lock is on half cock or fired they are pushed against the side of the piston, then when the lock is cocked using the front trigger the caps all shuffle up one , and one sits in front of the piston.  Pull the trigger and it shoots forward – if the barrel is off it just projects forward fairly briskly, if the barrel is fitted it presumably lands on the nipple and fires – I haven’t tried that yet, but I have shot a few caps out of the lock so I know it does feed.  I made a repair to the break in the top tang – as it is made of some unknown alloy I soft soldered a piece of brass into a recess I’d filed in both parts.  It was just as well I didn’t try hard soldering as the metal swelled o one side of the joint and I had to file it down and recut the engraving and recolour the metal with brass/bronze browning from Blackleys – not a perfect repair by any means, but I thought it ought to be made as strong as reasonably possible in case it is ever fired.  I don’t intend to fire it because of the many other cracks in the mystery alloy, but I may fire off a few caps to test the mechanism.   I realised the serious  design flaw in  Coopers design – Once you load the caps through the slot in the cover there is no way of seeing how many are in the magazine, or of  getting them out without unscrewing the left side of the breech – 4 small screws – except by firing them, although if you take the barrel off you can ‘fire’ them through the hole on the false breech into the barrel groove  (see photo below) and recover them.  You can go from the lock being fired to half cock by partially pulling the cocking trigger, and half cock is safe in that the piston is sticking out into the place where the ‘ready to fire’ cap would be – thus there is no cap in play.  Going into full cock withdraws the piston , thus allowing the next cap to take up position in front of the piston ready to be fired.  The main problem is that there is no visible indication of the state of the gun – whether there are any caps in the magazine or not or what the state of the lock is – fired, half cock or full cock.  It is thus inherently unsafe, which may have been the reason it never got beyond a prototype, for that is what I believe this gun is.  The only indication on the  gun is ‘J R Cooper  Patentee’  – no patent number nor the word ‘patent’  – so perhaps the ‘Patentee’ was a bit of a con – after all he was a patentee of a number of patents, just not one relating to any of the features of this gun!   He did however take out a patent in 1838 for a single barreled gun with an enclosed lock, but that didn’t have a cap magazine, and did have a form of cock extending through the right side of the action body – so this might just have been a follow-on experiment.  I tried ‘firing’ caps without the barrel in place and the magazine works well – cock the gun using the cocking trigger, fire it and a cap is projected, cock it again and fire again and a second cap is projected….    I just tried the same with the barrel in place ( its Nov 5th)  and a nipple in the barrel – but without loading the barrel, and the first ‘shot’ goes off fine but the cap doesn’t come off the nipple, so the second cap hits the first one and partially over-rides it but doesn’t fire (see photo) .  I tried tapping the butt on the ground gently but couldn’t get the cap to drop off the nipple, although when I lifted it with tweezers it came off easily.  It is quite probable that Cooper would originally have used caps formed from a cruciform of copper rather than a drawn cup, in which case the caps would have opened out on the nipple and would more easily fall off as they tend to do with our modern caps – the other  old caps I have were mostly brittle copper bent from cruciform blanks, whereas the only ones I could find that were of the correct dimensions were ductile solid drawn copper.  Assuming that suitable caps existed, I think the gun would have worked as intended.  I am certain that the safety issues relating to the cap magazine and the lack of  any means of seeing the state of the firing mechanism and the difficulty of clearing the magazine would outweigh the convenience of not having to cap the gun for each shot = after all you still have to do all the muzzle loading stuff with powder, wads and shot anew for each sho, not to mention having to take the lock apart to clean it each time it is used or it will corrode horribly.  Next problem – find short, wide cruciform caps!  But basically that just about wraps up two jobs!

Looking down the barrel groove the cap is visible through the nipple hole in the false breech

 

The collision  problem with drawn caps – the first fired one didn’t fall off the nipple

despite being a loose fit, and even if the butt is tapped.

3rd November – More work on the I R Cooper cap reservoir and feed.  After going through all my boxes of old caps I found a box of caps that seem to be formed by drawing as cups, unlike the more normal caps that are made as a disk in the middle of a cross of thin sheet copper that is then bent up into the tube, so that when the cap fires the arms of the cross can spread and the cap fall off. They look very like cartridge primers but without an anvil, but the tin says percussion caps!  Anyway the tin had two sizes of caps in it, so when I’de sorted it out I had perhaps 40 caps of what appears to be the right size.  I could now try to sort out the feed mechanism and get the clock spring working, which involved a bit of adjustment with clearances etc.  Along the way I saw why the ‘pawl’ is fitted on the peg rather than being fixed to the spring drum – it actually follows the caps into the path in the steel firing block and will, I think, push the last cap into the way of the piston.  Fingers crossed it might all work – at least as well as it did originally.  I’ve tried various parts of the feed process, but haven’t yet put it all together, let alone fired off caps – but I am beginning to think that the system might work after all!   I got distracted by another job – I needed to cut an 17.5 mm x 16 t.p.i thread in stainless steel  on the lathe – now I haven’t done a lot of  thread cutting on my lathe so its always a bit of a struggle to get it set up – it has a set of change-wheels (gears) and an internal gearbox so there are a very large range of possible metric and imperial thread pitches that it will cut and a set of tables on the front telling you the settings – unfortunately I overlooked the ‘Z’ gear and cut a beautiful thread that was  48/44 times too coarse!  As that was my sole chunk of stainless ( working mostly on old guns I don’t normally stock stainless)  I’ll have to cut the thread on the other end and use the bad thread end for the small  pipe fitting.  It was a very slow job cutting the thread, so I guess I wasted half a day on that stupid mistake and will spend most of the weekend when I’m not doing domestic chores remaking the thread – unfortunately it started from 35mm diaameter bar so there is a lot of messing about getting it down to the required diameter as my coolant pump is not working, so I have to take quite small cuts.  and I think I chipped another lathe tool insert!

The clock spring is not yet fitted so there is no tension on the feed – if you tension it without the cover all the caps jump out! 

I’m not sure that the cap box label is for these caps.

Far Rt cap is sitting on the piston ready to be fired, note they are just about flush with the top of the block – ? enough clearance???

Piston is between half and full cock positions.  In half cock it exactly blocks the cap position

2nd November – Shooting clays today – the weather forecast was pretty dire, so CGC was very quiet – I think only our group shooting clays and a few people on the rifle range, but that meant that the 4 undercover stands were all available and we had a very enjoyable day – I shot the Spanish d/b 12 that was left with me – in very good condition, but I found the left hand trigger a bit light, and then it double fired on me, so I ended up shooting left barrel first, which avoids the problem – but makes pairs tricky as you have to move from the back trigger to the front.   I did a bit more on the J R Cooper last night – I had a good look at the break in the top strap and thougth it had a bit of greenish crystaline material, so I washed it and scrubbed it with a small brush and it looked suspiciously yellow – a quick once over with a magnet of all the body of the action proved that it was all non ferrous – The outside has a patinated finish that doesn’t give much of a clue, and the raw metal isn’t yellow enough to be a normal grade of brass, or bronze.  I guess it is a form of Nickel Siver – of at least some alloy of copper, zinc and nickel, or perhaps some tin?  Presumably that enabled the main action body to be a casting, although I can’t see any unworked cast surfaces.  The only part that is steel, apart from the moving parts and the pins, is the block that forms the firing mechanism – tumbler housing/ piston bore/ final cap guide.  Anyway that explains the cracks, and leaves the problem of how to repair the break.  It is possible to TIG weld brass and alloys but difficult as the zinc has very low melting point and vapourises, so I’ll avoid that.  I’m not even sure I want to silver solder it as I don’t know what the properties of the material are – especially the melting point – so I’ll probably file off a step in the back of the parts and soft solder a brass plate in.   Returning to the cap loading problem, I soldered on the new pin and filed it down so that the hob will rotate with the outer cover in place, now it all looks as if its a working system I have to find out if it does actually work – I played with some caps that just fitted in the scroll but they won’t go through the slot into the steel part where the piston operates – there is room for the cap waiting to be pushed forward on to the nipple and fired, plus one other .  The size of the caps is constrained by this part of the system – the diameter has to be such that the piston only picks up the intended cap and doesn’t get caught on the second in line although there is a bit of a chamfer on the piston on the side facing the 2nd cap so the cap can be a shade smaller  in diameter than the piston (?) but not much less than 5mm – minimum 4.9 anyway.  The front to back depth of this area constrains the length of the cap to about 4.8 mm.  I have a number of boxes of old Joyce and Eley caps – some of which are empty and some are unopened, so I ought to be able to find something that fits! Well so far I’ve managed to find just one old cap that is just about perfect, at least I think it is, only with just a single cap its difficult to try the feed properly – I think the cap is a Joyce F4 No 18 – I need to find a table of the sizes of the old caps.  The normal modern 1075s and N0 11s are too small in diameter and length  – the piston tries to pick up two caps and will I think jam.  Having got the caps that will feed onto the nipple, will they stay in the magazine while its being loaded without rotating?  Watch this space……………………………………

My collection of caps – some of the boxes are empty, most have some caps and a few are still unopened.

1st November – another month gone – soon be fireworks!  I carried on working on the J R Cooper – the cap feed was damaged – the inner drum that houses the clock spring should have a peg on the outside that has a ‘pawl’ put on it that pushes on the train of caps – I can’t quite see why the pawl has to be loosely fitted on a peg rather than fixed to the drum.  The tiny peg, with its flange that fits against the drum was broken off – it appeared to have been riveted onto the wall of the drum, but from the look of it there had been a previous attempt to rivet it and also an attempt to silver solder it on, so that was obviously a weak point. Anyway the existing peg didn’t have enough left of its flange to be usable so I filed one up in brass.  I was thinking of silver soldering it to the German silver drum but I am not confident that I can handle such tiny bits without overheating them and melting the parts themselves, which would be a disaster, so I’m going to soft solder them on with tin.  I nearly got that job done, but had to go off and get dinner!   The tang of the top strap had cracked right off so I’ll need to chamfer the joint on the back and put a dab or two of TIG weld on the joint – I don’t want the weld to be visible on the front – I’m not too bothered about the strength of the joint. Anyway I had to go out and get a refill of Argon for the TIG weld and a cylinder of oxygen for my Maxy Gas torch – I used all my oxygen when I had Covid in 2020!   I’m off shooting tomorrow if we can find a moment between showers – I was hoping it would be a flintlock day but that is only possible in settled weather so looks like it will be percussion if there are gaps in the weather, or I might take an old D/B 12 non ejector that I am sheltering for a friend just to see if I can shoot with a random gun.  I’ve been idly looking through the pile of old gun mags that I inherited from my father – one UK mag from 1993 is just full of full page ads for pistols – at least a couple of dozen dealers advertising a range of semi automatic (now called self loaders!) and revolvers in every calibre imaginable – I don’t know how many were destroyed in the 1997 ban, but judging by the ads there must have been tens or hundreds of thousands in circulation.  I’ll try to get the soldering done – I have a small hot air device for soldering surface mount circuit chips that is supposed to blow air at up to 450C – I shall see if it will do the job as I would prefer not to use a flame, and I don’t think a soldering iron will quite do – we shall see.  Here are some photos – cracks seem to be endemic on this gun – the top strap is cracked in several places, and the clock spring housing below had two or three cracks visible – one reason for being very careful with the soldering!

Remains of the original peg joints on the spring drum, what we in the trade call a ‘mess’

replacement peg in the making – keep things attached to a decent ‘handle’ as long as possible!

Ready to solder – held on by flux at the moment – will probably need something better although capilliary action might work.

31st October – Not content with the number of jobs I have on the go I started another!  Its been bugging me since I took the J R Cooper to the shoot to ask for info – I just had the feeling that I had to find out if it would ever have worked, and just how it was put together I so out came my collection of gunmaker’s screwdrivers ( much thinner blades than normal screwdrivers – mostly ground down by me ).  The way its put together is not like any other gun I’ve taken apart, and it was a bit of a mystery how one got into it.  The top plate comes off easily enough and reveals the top of the tumbler and the link and piston that does the firing, and the top of the block that the piston slides in.  The barrel comes out as per normal, except that it has a quite small and tapered nipple sticking straight out of the back of the breech block.   the Left side ide plate with the drum that holds the cap magazine comes off, but that just leaves an inner side integral with the ‘trigger plate’ and right side After that it wasn’t obvious where to begin.  The trigger plate is screwed through to the top tang and the top tang is screwed to the trigger plate – removing both screws releases the top tang and also the stock – leaving the trigger plate with the spring attached together with the integral  side plates and the lock mechanism. A bit of work with a Mole Wrench and a wrap of leather as a spring compressor removed the spring.   Two screws from the right side plate now release the block containing the tumbler and piston and piston guide plus the channel through which the caps have to travel to present themselves in front of the piston.  Its now possible to temove the tumbler pivot and get the tumbler out with the link for the spring and the bridle to engage with the cocking trigger – now almost there.  One problem remains, and I haven’t yet sorted it –  The trigger guard is fixed by screwing into the lock plate ahead of the cocking trigger but won’t rotate because the front, cocking trigger gets in the way, but the front trigger wont go through the hole in the trigger plate as it seems not to be large enough – impass!   I’m sure that is all a bit difficult to follow – I’ve taken loads of photos but I’m not sure they will really help that much – I’ll put some below.  Anyway I think I can see that it might work – it does look as if there is a bit of corrosion around the piston area so I guess it has been used, and the engraving looks quite worn – in fact I wonder if the mechanism within is actually a MK 2 or MK ?  version as the external wear is not quite compatible with the internal state.  Anyway the result of my stripping it is that I can see how the caps must have been fed to the piston, and can see that it needs the  original, larger old caps – of which I have plenty.  The nipple is really tiny, smaller than a modern 1075 or No 11 nipple, but then I guess the cap doesn’t have to stick on the nipple as its just thrown on by the piston in the process of firing and then has to fall off on its own account.  The larger caps fit well in the magazine too.  The magazine needs working on, the clock spring that drives the caps has come unattached and will need refixing, and the spur on the inner rotating drum has come off so there is nothing to drive the caps round.  I’ll have to sort that out.  The other problem is that the tail of the top tang was cracked and has now come off, so will need a dab of weld – only I have run out of Argon.  Enough excitement for one day!

Here are some photos – for a general view etc see my original post – look in recent posts…

The clock spring and hub have been removed here. The side visible is an integral part of the trigger plate

Gun is pointing right! the other pictures are pointing left – confusing eh?

Top view of the one part trigger plate/side plates with tumbler block removed

This block with tumbler comes out from between the side pieces of the trigger plate – this is a view from the front

There is evidence that its been fired during its life – so it must have worked!  A total pig to clean though!

30th October – I did get the bell engraved, and I didn’t loose any more tips although I did have to sharpen my graver a few times.  That took me most of the morning as holding a bell  rigidly and rotating it around under my microscope takes a bit of fiddling – still, one job out of the way.  I started gently clearing out my outside shed and came across my box of assorted small O rings, so it seemed like a good idea to stop clearing and see if I could find O rings to act as seals in the Blissett as one of the leather seals had disintegrated and I think another one or two were missing. Anyway I came up with ones that seemed to fit – I’m something of an O ring freak as most of the equipment I built for a living depended on O rings for its survival down to 4000 meters deep in the ocean  , and I got pretty fussy about exactly how they worked, and what the tolerances were.  I’m minded to test the ones I’ve put n the Blisset to see if I have lost the touch!   I did have one reasonable wholemeal sourdough loaf last night, and one that was like a brick….. more work to do there, I don’t want to give up just yet!  I took the J R Cooper single percussion gun (see post – currently near the top of the recent posts list to the right of this page ) to the shoot earlier this month as there were a couple of my friends who handle many more antique firearms than I do by way of their work, to see if they had ever seen anything like it – they hadn’t, the only thing they had seen vaguely similar was the Jones Patent weatherproof  gun, one of which I also have but which appears to be much later than the J R Cooper.  The Cooper has a cap magazine on the left side of the lock and a piston that sits between the hammer and the cap when the cap is on the nipple.  There are two mysteries, or maybe more – first is how do the caps get from the drum magazine with a watch spring drive onto the nipple, and then after firing, from the nipple to the exit port?  And what did the caps look like, were they just normal  Joyce caps as used on most percussion guns – the nipple, if I remember correctly, looks just like a normal nipple.  The gun is fully finished and engraved all over the totally enclosed lock housing, and looks as if it has been used a fair bit so presumably it did work – I have a box that has some of the bits of the cap drum that I was trying to mend, including the watch spring waiting for me to get round to the job – maybe that another one to add to the list – I have never stripped it right down, so I might do that – Having cleared out my ‘engraving/indoor’workshop and put up a fire alarm I can now light my woodburner, so its very tempting to find jobs to do in there!

Red arrow is a face seal, green is a piston seal – the piston seal is perhaps a shade too thin?

There didnt seem to be seals here before, but they would have been necessary to avoid leaks

There is a face seal at the bottom replacing a leather seal

29th October  – Work ckearing out the ‘engraving workshop’ continues, nearly done. Now need to move on to the outside workshop which if anything is in a worse state.   I started a new engraving job – putting a script inscription round a handbell that Penny is presenting to the College when she leaves – I got as far as the first letter and I’ve already broken the tips off two gravers – I hope its just bad luck as there are lots of letters still to do and there is no going back now!  I’ve been struggling to make sourdough bread these last few weeks – it started off well, but my early success didn’t last and I’m struggling to get things to work – an indication of how bad it’s got is the fact that I’ve actually taken to following the recipe in a proper bread making book fairly precisely!  The dough is just turning out too sticky and collapses – I have a couple of different sourdough starters so I think I’ll have to change back to the original.  Basically I am finding it is a very messy and wasteful business that takes ages and needs thinking about days in advance, whereas simple yeast bread I could make in about 4 hours  from start to finish, with probably only about 20 minutes actual work and 100% success.  I seem to have a whole list of jobs to do at the moment, and am struggling to get them under way – I did manage to put  my overshot card dispensers on ebay today and made more stock and ordered more springs, and sent off a packet of cappers that had been ordered.  I am trying to write an article on building a dinghy based on a design I came up with and built almost 50 years ago – prompted by a couple of people down at the North Fambridge marina this year  asking me where they could buy one  – its taking me longer than it should… Plus I need to make a part for the Cooks patent percussion cane, and wind up things with the Blissett- I’ll probably pressure test the reservoir, and do the stored energy calculation so I’ll probably have to make a pressure adaptor.   Plus the garden needs its pre winter going over and so on and so on!!   I did get round to putting my account of our delivery trip from the river Crouch up to Inverness on this blog – see recent posts – and on the boat subject, of course Ive still got a load of design and construction and software ready for  next season!    I fondly remember how leisurely it was when I had a job……. Oh, and I ought to get round to selling the C5…………………….

On the Caladonian Canal in Inverness at the end of our delivery trip. Peace at last!

26th October – Not only did I get the new No 5 UNF die, I also found the two I already had!   Anyway that job is now put to bed.  Re. the Blissett, I did a quick calculation of the probable safe working pressure of the reservoir, of course bearing in mind that I don’t know what steel its made of so I assumed it was a low grade mild steel – I also couldn’t measure the wall thickness properly – I could only tell that it was somewhat greater than the 2.7 mm I could measure at the outside end after the screw threaded ring, and  the internal diameter was about 27mm,  so the ratio of wall thickness to radius is about 5:1.  Calculating the ‘hoop stress’, which is the stress acting round the wall, and the principal stress it experiences, the maximum tensile stress should be about 5.5 times the internal pressure.  An intenal pressure of 500 p.s.i,  which I read in ‘Air-guns and Air Pistols’ by L Wesley was typical for air canes, would therefore result in a tensile hoop stress of  2750 p.s.i.   A relatively weak mild steel has a tensile strength of  around 40000 psi so there is a safety factor of x 14.   That would suggest that it could stand a higher internal pressure, even with a safety factor of x4 it should be safe up to 1500 psi – similar to the pressure used in modern air rifles? Of course its unlikely that the rest of the mechanism would stand that pressure, and I’m sure that in the times when these canes were in use it wasn’t possible to make convenient pumps that would work at that pressure – I notice that you can buy air gun pumps that claim to reach 6000 p.s.i on ebay – I shudder to think of an air rifle working at that pressure.  Anyway I have no intention of trying the Blissett out, I’m just curious about the technology as always !  I noticed on You Tube there were a number of (USA) videos on ‘dieselling’ spring air guns where you introduce a bit of oil into the piston chamber which is vaporised  by the motion of the piston and ignites with the compression and produces an extra pressure that increases the pellet velocity by around 40% ( strictly illegal in the UK if it pushes the  pellet energy above 12 J – or  does it become a firearm since it involves an explosion?) – I can remember when I was young we thought you had to keep oiling everything to stop rust,  including putting oil down the air path and I remember the smell and the thin smoke – I wonder if we were actually dieselling then!  One You Tube claimed that putting a small smear of Vaseline in the recess at the back of the pellet also worked and produced a 40% velocity increase, but I’m a bit sceptical on that one as I don’t see how it could vaporise. Enough of the Blisset et al…………   Maybe when I’ve got a bit further with the clearout of the workshop I’ll post some photos of it – I can then move on to clear out the outside workshop with my machine tools and woodworking machines which is an even bigger mess as I haven’t worked in there since I did stuff for the boat!

 

 

25th October I have started the massive job of sorting my gun workshop – I had boxes of electronics piled all over the woodburner so had to find homes for them all, and it was/is a mess!  The trouble is that its like archeology on a rapid scale – my interests change from time to time, which means putting a layer of some different technology on top of the last layer –  gun restoration, engraving, welding, cnc machining, electronics, school projects, computing and 3D printing.  Anyway I’m on a mission to rationalise and vacuum up the grot and get rid of stuff I’m never going to need.  History warns me about getting rid of stuff – I threw out a load of plastic parts for some equipment I’d made for a client ten years before, and the next day he rang to see if I had any spares – sadly the bin had already been collected!  That lost me several hundred pounds. On anther occasion I threw out two large boxes of printed patent specifications I’d been sent when I acted as expert witness many years ago, only to be asked for my opinion on a similar case shortly afterwards.  My policy now is only to get rid of stuff that I know I can readily buy again!  When I got bored with clearing out I went back to the Blissett air cane and made a tool to strip the valve assembly to see how it was made.  It is as it appeared from the outside, a spring loaded valve, probably horn, sealing in a conical steel surface, all in good condition.  I got to thinking about these early air weapons – they all shot quite hefty lead balls.  The heaviest .22 cal airgun pellet weights 1.5 grams with a maximum velocity of  less than 125 m/s  to be legal at 12 Joules although most pellets are much lighter ( .4 to .8 gm) and travel much faster. The balls for the air cane are 36 bore, so weigh 12 grams , which means that for a comparable muzzle energy they need a muzzle velocity of  just 44 m/sec, i.e. a reasonably fast car doing 100 mph could just outrun the bullet.  If you want to work it out –  kinetic energy (Joules) = 1/2 mass (Kg) x velocity squared (m/s squared). Or to put it another way, if fired from the shoulder standing,  parallel to the ground the bullet would have a job to travel more than about 25 – 30 meters before hitting the ground- so sighting would be a bit of a problem!  I got the No 5 UNF die to finish off the cock screw for the Lancaster so maybe I’ll do that tomorrow after I’ve been to the dentist. I think the post I did on the Lancaster restoration must have got lost when I had a website crisis a few years back, so maybe I’ll dig out the photos again….. Here is the Blissett valve assembly……

The internal thread is 11/16 x 16 t.p.i. – not very common but Tracy Tools has taps and dies

Blisset Air Cane valve assembly – tool still attached

Blisset Air Cane valve seat

23 October – I spent the weekend down in Wales sorting out father in law’s house to go on the market.  I made a couple of cock screws for the Lancaster today – I had a couple of failures as I sheared off the thread while turning the head – I drill a t hole in a bit of bar and tap it so I can hold the screw to turn the head, but I took too big a cut!  I also managed to break a 2.5 mm drill while making the hole in the bit of bar – not very clever all round – then I had to do one for the original Lancaster and had a bit of trouble sorting out a suitable thread – I think its 5 UNF but to my suprise, that is about the only die I don’t have for some odd reason – its missing from my set.   THe restoration project Lancaster is only missing the half cock notch on one lock, so the other will act as a guide.  I haven’t put detents on the tumblers, which as a rifle it should have, but that is probably a step too far at this stage.  Rifles need detents whereas shotguns don’t as the trigger is only pulled very lightly on a rifle – not enough to hold the sear out of the way of the half cock notch, whereas one gives a shotgun trigger a more solid pull that keeps the sear clear while the tumbler rotates.  In fact it is a normal reaction when shooting a shotgun for the trigger to be pulled a second time involuntarily – this makes the design of single trigger mechanisms on double guns quite complicated as it needs to ‘loose’ the second pull and not use it to fire the second barrel.  It is interesting that once the development of the ejector mechanism for double barreled shotguns had reached a plateau around 1885, the gunmakers were searching for something else to encourage users of their best guns ( which were very long lasting!) to keep on spending and the attention switched to single trigger mechanisms – there were 91 patents between 1894 and 1910 relating to single trigger mechanisms.  Most ‘ordinary’ guns now use pendulum systems based on recoil to avoid firing on the second pull – which occurs very quickly after the first pull while the recoil lasts considerably longer, so the pendulum is still in the recoil position during the second pull and only connects the trigger to the sear after the recoil.

19th October – I  had a very pleasant day’s shooting yesterday as the guest of a good friend,  mostly partridges but a few pheasants. Quite challenging for everyone as there was a strong wind and partridges doing 50 m.p.h. with the wind behind them!  I managed to find the way into the mechanism of the Blisset Air Cane – there was a collar on the muzzle, I could just make out the joint, when unscrewed the cover just slid off the mechanism (I’d already taken out the sights and lever of the loading shutter).  The mechanism was all very clean and rust free and as soon as I’d made a strong enough key to cock it from a hex key, it worked just fine.  The tumbler is wound directly by the key and the sear (shown above, removed) engages it.  When the button on the sear is pressed the tumbler is rotated by the hefty spring and flips the ‘hammer, that in turn drives the firing pin out.  The tumbler overshoots the ‘hammer’ which is then free to rotate, allowing the firing pin to retract under the rush of air from the resevoir, which then allows the chamber valve to close rapidly and stop the flow of air.  That is important because the resevoir holds enough air for many shots so the valve must shut off as soon as enough air has been released.  My book on air weapons says the pressure used was 500 p.s.i. and that its very tricky to replace the valve on the resevoir, which may originally have been horn. On the subject of horn the horn handle of the Blisset was badly cracked and had bit s missing so I filed down some horn dust and mixed it with Araldite and built up the missing parts – doesn’t  look too bad. I got to looking at a few of my long guns from my cabinet to make sure they were happy, and had a bit of a shock that I had left a couple that I’d worked on in an unfinished state.  My Lancaster Oval Bore rifle that I’d been restoring some years ago and thought I’d finished and put away in the case I fitted  out for it turned out not to have had the half cock notches cut in the tumblers, or cock screws made, or one of the little safety sliders made.  Also the complete one I used as a model was somehow missing both cock screws – I dont know what happened to them – it was complete when I got it so I must have taken them out as models for the restoration one – strange.  Anyway I started to make new ones as I’d just got a couple of new lengths of steel bar.  The nearest thread I could find for the cockscrew was M3, which of course can’t have been what it was, but UND 4 was too small and UNF 5 too big.   I also found the Venables that I’d tried to resolder the barrels of and had made a mess of soldering the bottom rib – I suppose Ill have to redo it, which is a shame because I got a lovely brown on the barrel.

16th October – Not much progress on anything in the last few days – except I suppose hacking down the overgrown grass in the front garden!  I’m waiting for a bar of EN1A steel to make the little slider that I need  for the Cook patent Air Cane – I did model the mechanism in Solidworks, which certainly helps to see how it goes together, and I think that the slider will work – at least I hope so.  I hoped to put some pictures from the Solidworks model on this blog but unfortunately it doesn’t seem to like the files Solidworks makes – not sure why as they look like normal .pdf files.   I’m off to a shoot on Wednesday – I seem to have collected 4 muzzle loading shoots this season, which is perfect – I might try to fix one more after Christmas, but probably not.  I am trying to finalise my drawings for my little dinghy so I can publish the plans, but today I realised that my drawing gives a part that is just biger than the sheet of ply its supposed to be cut from – that means more fiddling with the dimensions!    Looking through my collection of mostly slightly ropey guns I found it difficult to pick out some of my own repairs – I’d mostly forgotten what I’d done.   The more you look at antique firearms the more you see that have been restored or ‘restored’.  I do have a very few that are in fine condition and that I’m sure are totally original – but it actually rare that A barrel hasn’t been rebrowned or a bit of work done on the barrel engraving or the cock or cockscrew replaced.  I’m pretty sure that some of the guns that Ive had to replace the side nail on are indestinguishable from the original – I did one recently and the client couldn’t tell which was which so I guess that is a sucess.  Sorry, bit of a boring blog today!!!

13th October – Had a very pleasant day at the Derek’s clay Grouse shoot – it was good to see all the Muzzle Loading gang, but I’m happy to keep it as a fairly rare event!  I did hit a few clays, but only a few!  Looking at the weather forecast from today onwards I was forced to the conclusion that I couldn’t put off lighting the AGA another day – at least we got almost halfway through October and so far the kitchen has managed to stay above 20C all the time.  Before I could light it I had to service the burner – the old AGAs are wonderfully primitive – there is a small tank at the side of the cooker with a ball cock to keep the oil level constant, and an adjustable needle valve to control the flow out, and it then runs into a small pot that has channels running out to circular wicks that burn within concentric tubes.  Unfortunately the modern heating oil deposits carbon around the little pot and eventually blocks the oil inlet so every 3 months or less the burner has to be taken out and scraped clean and the pipe drilled out with a foot long drill.  Anyway that is now done, hopefully until Christmas.  My daughter gave me some sourdough starter, and I determined to get it to work this time – previous attempts at sourdough having been a dismal failure.  I think I understand enough about  sourdough yeasts and fermentation to have a go.  I am congenitally unable to follow detailed instructions – not sure why, just one of those things – so I always have to understand the principles behind what I’m trying to do, and then I can make it up from there.  Anyway I applied that principle to the sourdough and got a couple of really nice leaves with a good rise, so I’m pretty happy with that.  When I’ve made a few more I’ll put up a blog it.  I didn’t do any more to the canes, but yesterday one of the shooters said he had the barrel part of a Blisset cane he would give me – which might mean that I could manage to get inside one and get a working mechanism…..

11th October – I came to put away my little single barreled Nock percussion that I use for almost all of my shooting and found that the thread on the side nail wasn’t holding as the thread had worn.  The thread in the lock is 32 tpi but just a bit bigger than No 8 UNC in diameter.  I opened up a die as much as I dared and made a new side nail – it does hold, and since it doesn’t take any real strain I’ll go with it, but it really needs a slightly bigger diameter.  I’m off to Derek’s ‘Grouse Shoot’ at the grouse stand at Cambridge Gun Club tomorrow.  I haven’t been to a club shoot for a while – too much standing around for my liking, but once in a while I need to be sociable!  I need to get some more shot, so if anyone else is interested I’ll get 100Kg and pass it on.   Cambridge Gun Club now sells caps and black powder, so perhaps they might like to sell shot as well  and save me the bother.   I’m still contemplating the Cooke Patent percussion cane as even with the suggestions that have come from readers of this blog, I wasn’t really happy that I understood exactly how it worked.  My main thought was that even with the suggested sliding collar or other linking arrangements to allow the handle to close, the spring was far too strong to allow the very short handle to cock it.  Plus the spring is just a cut off bit of a spring wiithout the normal flat ends found on purpose made springs.  So I think the original spring broke, and someone replaced it with one that was far too strong, causing the toggle mechanism, whatever that was, to break when they tried to cock it, and parts to be lost.  Now that raised another issue for me!  The present spring is shorter than the available length when the piston is fired, which means that the cap is actually impacted (fired) by the inertia of the piston, and when a new cap is inserted and the cane isn’t cocked, the piston doesn’t press down on the cap and possibly fire it as the barrel is screwed in.  That is obviouly sensible.  I suppose that since the piston is only constrained by the friction of the sear on the square piston rod  in the fired position it is possible that a very heavy blow on the muzzle  end of the barrel might fire it, although the piston is not heavy.   I’m tempted to make a computer model of the mechanism in SOLIDWORKS  so I can see how it goes together – I am quite quick using it, but I don’t have a lot of experience at using it for animations – maybe I should really clear up my workshops instead of playing!   I  make most of our bread, and I’m about to verture into sourdough again – I didn’t have much luck before, but I found a book that explains the biochemistry of some of it, and I think I know why I never had any success – basically because I was too mean to chuck out half of the ‘mother’ every so often to refresh it, whereas you have to add  substantially more flour than there is mother or the bacteria outcompete the yeasts!  So unless you use or discard a lot, you will eventually be submerged by a sea or mountain of sourdough depending on whether you are using a liquid or dough like ‘mother’ .  I did have a strange happening last time I made ordinary half wholemeal bread – I made a batch of dough and shaped it into two identical loaves – both treated the same – one came out quite dense and one had a very good open texture throughout. I don’t like variables I can’t quantify!….. I didn’t fix the lights on the C5 because it was raining and I have to work on it outside.

10th October – Its good to be back – I realise what a lot of interesting and helpful people follow this blog!  For example Jorg suggested that there was probably a sliding block on the piston rod that is pulled by the handle pivoting and in turn pulls the pin that is through the piston rod – it is then free to slide back down the piston rod when the handle is shut, leaving the piston in the cocked position – which sounds right – I had a look at the bits and I think it is the only way the thing can work – so I’ll give it a try.    Much to my surprise I got the Sinclair C5 running today – first surprise was that I managed to get enough charge into the battery to test run it after the battery had sat there completely flat for 5 or 6 years, probably enough for 10 or 15 minutes of  motoring. Second surpise was that it ran at all, as I thought it had failed on me last time I used it.  Anyway I took it for a short 1/2 mile spin!  I wish it felt safer on the road – I would probably use it if we had decent cycle paths round here – it is after all only an electric tricycle.  Its now in original working order – bar the lights, which I will look at tomorrow.  Photo as promised – its a pretty clean example of these interesting relics of Clive Sinclair’s imagination!  The production designing was actaually done by Lotus cars so its really quite a clever example of designing down to a price.  The grey bodywork is a one piece injection moulding – possibly the largest single piece production moulding at that time.  Its surprisingly comfortable to ride/drive if you are only 5ft 8 ins .  It would be a totally different beast if it were designed now with Lithium batteries and the better motors and controllers that come with electric bikes.  For the record – a C5 held the world speed record for an electric vehicle of 150 m.p.h. for a while.  Apparently it handles very well up to 100 m.p.h., but after that it got a bit trixy! I would hazard a guess that there wasn’t much of the original C5 involved!  Its just a shame that going around with your nose at around the level of vehicle’s exhaust pipes is not more pleasant…..

 

9th October – Still haven’t had any inspiration as to how the Cooke percussion cane shown below could possibly work!  I am getting somewhere with the Blisset air cane – at least I have an idea.  It looks as if the outer sleeve of the barrel and action ought to come off at the muzzle end as it looks like a fairly thin metal tapered outer  tube covers everything – the only things obviously holding it in place are the back and fore sights and the lever that shuts the hole where you put the ball, which I have removed.  However, there is a dent in the sleeve that might be causing a problem and I can’t get it to shift – its probable that there is rust somewhere that is sticking things up.  I made a key to fit the square hole under the action part and although I can’t turn it more than a few degrees, it does make the trigger button move just a little.  I’ve tried spraying release oil generously around without any obvious benefit – I’m thinking that I may need to immerse the action end in the release oil to make sure it gets everywhere.  I think the visible bit of the barrel at the muzzle is brass, the action is certainly steel so its not clear if it will be possible to overcome any rust – assuming that my interpretation of how it comes apart is correct.   I did a car boot sale on Sunday to try to get rid of a load of junk from the loft that I can’t bring myself to throw out – I did  make £150, which was really not the main point of the endeavour, and I got rid of half a Land Cruiser’s load of stuff – I felt slightly guilty as I had put my prices very low to move things, and some of the other stalls were a bit miffed at me! In the end I was virtually giving stuff away.    My next little project, beside publishing plans for the little wooden dinghy is to get the Sinclair C5 (remember them?) that lives in the ‘black shed’ in a fit state to sell.  I acquired it about 12 years ago and the  boys had fun driving it around the recreation ground doing wheelies which eventually bust the front wheel.  I got a replacement and put in a new battery about 6 years ago and used it once or twice in the village but it failed going up the hill and I never got round to fixing it.  At that point they were worth about £400 – that seems now to have doubled, so its probably worth a bit of effort to get it going.  The tyres were all flat, and I can’t find a hand pump so I thought I’d take the wheels off and take them to the car and use my big 12V tyre pump – of course the wheel bearings were a bit corroded – so that was a couple of hours work to strip and clean them and polish up the surfaces = anyway the tyres pumped up fine – my tyre pump is sized for my big wheels so the C5 tyres inflated in seconds!   All the wiring and circuitry looks exactly like the stuff I was designing in 1970s – in fact obselete by the time Sinclair incorperated it in the 1985 design – but it does mean that I’ve probably got lots of suitable spare bits in the loft!  I did wonder if I might throw out the primitive electronics that only lets you control the speed by switching the power on and off, and program up a small Raspberry Pi to do the job, but that would probably spoil it from a collector’s point of view and reduce its value!  The battery has been sitting flat for many years so is probably dead, but leisure batteries for it are quite expensive just to get it going – if the worse comes to the worse I’ll buy a cheap small car battery just to get it going.  Its currently on ‘charge’. Photos tomorrow, I promise.    I went to see my heamatologist for my regular check up every 8 weeks  – he is involved in lots of research so we always get to discuss the latest findings –  in this case research linking poor outcomes with frailty in old age, and linking this to low protein intake and lack of muscle bulk  – something that I’ve been pretty aware of since having Covid badly very early in the pandemic.  Apparently the general medical view is that you can’t build muscle in old age, and they now think this may be wrong!   I did point out that I’d been doing just that on and off for the last 2 or 3 years – I loose muscle if I get lazy and don’t eat enough protein, and put it back on when I am active amd do a minimal bit of slow weight training for a few minutes a few times a week.

7 th October – I had a very pleasant clay shoot on Thursday – I was trying to emulate my success of the week before, but although I didn’t do too badly by my standards, i didn’t achieve the fluency I had the week before.  Anyway Ive been busy fettling my little wooden dinghy – I designed and made it over 40 years ago as a versatile, very light ply dinghy that was light enough for me to put it on the roof of my Landrover without too much effort and could be built quickly.  It had a fairly hard life for five years or so, but then sat in various sheds until last year when I took it down to North Fambridge to acces Sepiola which I was working on, and which was on a mooring – it was left out all winter but I now have no use for it as Sepiola is on a pontoon berth in Scotland where I hope to be sailing her next year.  Anyway while I was using it several boat owners offered to buy it as they couldn’t find anything similar and thought it was a good design, so it seemed to me to be a good idea to publish an article on how to build it with a sort of plan, which has meant reverse engineering the construction to draw up the plans for the sheets of ply, and at the same time sanding her down and revarnishing her, and I couldn’t resist putting on a few 3D printed parts since I now have a rather snazzy Bambu XI printer.   I haven’t given up on sorting the two walking stick guns – the Cooke Patent percussion gun still puzzles me and I can’t see how it could have worked – see photo below.  I have got somewhere with the Blisset air cane – Pete said it should have a small button for a trigger, and so it does – almost flush with the surface.  That leaves the small issue of how you cock it, but on close examination the small hole in the barrel part appears to have a square recess that would take a key, so I guess that winds up the firing mechanism that, when the button trigger is pressed releases the piston in the centre of the barrel end and pushes the valve in the reservoir and releases the air.  At the moment I can’t turn the square, although I havent tried very hard as I haven’t made a well fitting key yet, but I have soaked all that end of the barrel in release oil ans will see what happens.  I have yet to find a way into the mechanism if I can’t get it to work – there must be some way – it just isnt obvious yet – I will sort it in time!  It is a very heavy thing, and fires quite a heavy ball for an air weapon, and has sights on the barrel, so I don’t think it was intended to be used with the small horn handle (similar in shape and size to that on the Cooke), so I guess it had a detachable stock that was carried separately in a pocket.   A lot of similar air canes had the reservoir in the detachable stock. There was a period in history when serious air weapons where in use – The Austrian army armed soldiers with a very powerful rifle – by the way my Blisset cane is also rifled- which was considered ‘not the done thing’ by there enemies because they couldn’t locate the source of the bullets as there was no smoke and little noise.  Any soldiers captured with air weapons was executed, or so the story goes…..

3rd October – I thought I’d put up some of the photos Ive been taking of various of my guns, including the Kerr, but when I tried to download about a hundred photos I found that although they were taken on my usual camera with my usual micro USB card etc they are all unreadable!  Back to the drawing board – thats the best part of a day’s work wasted.  I did eventually get the Kerr back together after some difficulty working out the right assembly sequence, but its still not quite right= there just isn’t enough travel on the pawl to rotate the cylinder, and I can’t see what is stopping it – theere doesn’t appear to be anything wrong – anyway I’ve cleaned it and put it aside while I contemplate the next wreck!   Happen its an old percussion walking stick gun of about 16 bore – a heavy old thing painted to look like a cane, with a small horn handle at the top.  It didn’t seem to be working, so in my normal fashion I couldn’t leave it alone!  It consists of a barrel – the lower part of the walking stick, with a nipple in the centre at the top, onto which screws a section of tube about 3 inches long containing a piston and spring that fires the cap. the piston has a square rod that  has a notch (bent) that receives the sear to hold it in the cocked position.  The rod passes through a disk and has a hole through it for a pin that holds a stirrup attached to the handle.  The handle pivots near the bottom and when hinged open pulls the rod via the stirrup to cock the spring.   There is a joint in the square rod that is pinned and fixed and it does not allow for any rotations.  So far so good! the pin that passes through the stirrup and the end of the rod was bent and displaced and was a soft, useless replacement.  So – you pivot the handle and it pulls the stirrup which can pivot at both ends, and pulls the rod that cocks the gun.   But the rod is now protruding and holding the handle open via the stirrup so it is not possible to close the handle until after the gun is fired.  I am at a loss to see how it is supposed to work!  The joint in the rod is fixed, and anyway is in the wrong plane.  Working on the principle that it must have worked originally I’ll just have to ponder it some more.  The cane is marked Cooks Paternt.   And Ive got another cane, this time a hefty air cane of about 120 bore by Blissett  with a very heavy steel reservoir as part of the tube.  at the moment I’m at a loss as to how its fired – there doesn’t seem to be a trigger.  The barrel detaches and you can see what looks like the release valve in the reservoir and possibly a stud in the barrel end that might push on it to fire it, but so far I’ve got no further!   So I’d better go and find out what is wrong with the camera so I can put up some photos – drat!  You have my new smart watch to blame for this blog – the strap on my very cheap digital watch finally disintegrated so I bought a cheap smart watch as it lights up nicely to show the time in the dark just by shaking my wrist – anyway I was sitting on the sofa sort of snoozing after dinner when the watch buzzed and said ‘get up and do some exercise’  Bloody cheek if you ask me, but I did at least come into the library and do the blog!

30th September  – well its been a long time since I blogged here!   I spent most of the last year fixing up the Moody 37 yacht which I finally sailed from North Fambridge on the Crouch up to Inverness with Penny and two sons, Tom and Rory – not my favourite place to sail, the North Sea, but a lot quicker than going the other way round the coast and up the Irish Sea.  We left it to the owner’s family to take it through the Caledonian Canal to its new home in Oban.  Apart from lots of programming of navigation software and 3D printing of bits for the boat, there was quite a lot of sorting out of rigging and engine and anchor windlass that didn’t work – now I can look forward to some sailing next year around the Hebrides – we’ll have a bit more time as Penny is retiring, so we might even make it to St Kilda.   I know this is supposed to be a gun blog, but most of my work for clients dried up and I am afraid I lost confidence in my engraving so still haven’t finished Fred’s stuff.  I did carry on black powder shooting with Pete and Bev at Cambridge Gub Club from time to time, and I’ve had one game shoot so far this season – a lovely Partridge day on Foulness Island where I felt I’d done myself justice – I believe its greedy and not gentlemanly to get too many so a couple each drive suits me fine.  Tom and I had a good day last week with a couple of single barreled percussion guns and both of us were pretty please with how things went = particularly at the ‘grouse’ stand here I don’t usually hit more than one or two – this time using my usual gun I did much better.  The only difference I can see was that I shot each clay without having seen it before calling for it, whereas I normally try not to shoot at clays I havent watched otheres shoot.  I’ll have to try that in future!

When we got back I got out a couple of my mid 1800s revolvers – I’m quite fond of the Adams revolvers and all the variations that evolved from it – one day I’ll get round to putting one on my FAC and shooting one.  Anyway I got out one of my fathers old collection that looked rather tired and in need of a bit of TLC – I don’t know why I hadn’t done anything with it before, but I guess it looked a bit boring – anyway it was a Kerr’s Parent, a bit later than the straight Adams, made by the London Armoury Company.  It differs from the run of the mill Adams derived  revolvers in that it has a detachable lock like a long gun  back lock with the cock and mainspring and sear on it, and a trigger mounted in the frame as normal.  It looked as if it needed a bit of a rub with fine 0000 steel wool and oil to get rid of a bit of surface mess that was originally rust.. In handling the gun I decided that the action just wasn’t working – It has a trigger just like most of the trigger cocked  type revolvers with a wide curved trigger and long action but it didn’t  cock with the trigger – I though from the look and feel of it that the action must be at fault, so I decided to  strip it and look inside – plus the would give me the chance to get rid of any hidden corrosion.  All the lockwork looked OK and I couldn’t see anything amiss – so I did what I should have done before and picked up Taylerson et al. ‘The Rvolver 1818 – 1865’ and lo and behold the Kerr’s Patent was made by LAC in both trigger cocked and single action form – apparently outwardly indistinguishable although most of the late ones were trigger cocked.  This one is serial 10555 so must be late, but anyway, it will be all the better for a good clean and oiling.  I found that the 0000 and oil were not really doing much, so tried my very fine rotary wire brush  (.003 dia wire) on an inconspicuous prlace and it worked fine, so gave it a gently going over and it now looks much better – but not in any sense polished – just as it should have been if properly cared for in the past.  I’ll post some photos later – I am resolved to try and put a bit of stuff on this blog from time to time – even if it is not all gun struff!  I’ll be trying to go through all my old guns – I found a couple of little pistols that had been lying on a new duster had small rust spots where they touched the duster – nothing else had any problem – I’m sure it muct have been something in the new dusters – since washed!

 

 

 Posted by at 11:52 pm
Feb 042024
 

 

 

 

13th January.  I am at last getting round to engraving Fred’s parts for a flintlock Cape gun (one rifle and one shot barrel). Its taking me  a while to re-awaken my muscle memory and get myself into an engraving frame of mind, so lots of playing about with test plates.  Fred is keen for me to engrave a bit deeper than I usually do, as my light engraving gets lost in the colour case hardening that he has done on his guns, which is pretty dramatic.  I have been using my GRS air graver to try and dig a bit deeper, but its not quite as precise as push engraving, although I’m getting better with it.  So these are a combination of push and air engraving.  I did think of buying a Lindsey air graver – I’d looked at them a few years ago, and when I looked the other day the prices had doubled and I can’t justify that sort of expense ($3000 + Tax and carriage).  On the standing breech I’ve been doing the traditional thing and using a cut out background with the pattern raised – its more work because its fiddly cutting out the background – I have been using the air graver like a little pneumatic drill with a fine rounded point to stipple the cut out background, which seems to work quite well and should stand out however it is case hardened.  I have one more bit to sort out – the bit of rib between the barrels, so I tried a couple of ideas on a test plate – I’ll talk to Fred about what he wants.  Then I have to engrave the locks – the tail ( stand of arms) is OK, but its always tricky to put names on the centre of the plate as the pan gets in the way and you can only effectively cut verticals from the bottom up, and for small lettering its very difficult to get clean starts to strokes, so doing it in a single cut makes it difficult.  The name will probably end up about 2.5 mm  (0.1 inch) lettering, and the location, which is 10 letters long will probably be around 1.5 mm or so – also the location (Shrewsbury) has a number of tightly curved letters – 2xS, R and B  that are a struggle when the lettering gets small.  Why can’t gunmakers  have names and live in places that are made up of letters that are all straight lines, possibly with the odd O or C ?

When I need a break from engraving – about 2 hours in every 3 – I’ve been playing with a number of Raspberry Pi computers as its time I re-learnt how to write code and run systems – its a struggle at times!  I was slightly heartened that when I got stuck on getting one computer to connect to the internet – my son Giles, who now is a professional programmer in Vancouver, gave up after half and hour.  I later partly got there!

If you are interested in green energy I found an app for my phone that lets me see at any moment where the country’s electricity is coming from.  For most of the last month or so we have been importing around 25% from half a dozen other countries, wind has varied from 2% to 70% (I think on a very windy late night) but is has mostly been around 35 to 45% – the app is ENERGY WATCH GB.  It is a strange and unfortunate fact that UK electricity prices are pegged to the price of gas when over half our electricity comes from renewables (a bit over 40% at the moment) and nuclear (16% at the moment).  Electricity is significantly cheaper in Europe! Anyway the wholesale price of gas has halved in the last month or so…….. A lot of energy companies are raking it in!

Notice that the tail of the tang is curved to the left  – must have come from a cross stock for a left handed, right eyed shooter.

Crown is for a military pistol – boxes are possibles for rib.

28th December.  Well, my good intentions to restart my blog at the beginning of November didn’t get far!   Still busy with the secondary double glazing, which I just got done in time   before the temperatures went below 0C .  It has made a huge difference to the kitchen and living room, considering that our external walls are flint and chalk rubble about 12 – 15 inches thick. Anyway I’m now doing a gun encraving job on a set of furniture and locks for a Cape rifle that Fred has built – he has been waiting months for me to get in the frame of mind to do it – I’m now tackling it having done a few days practive on test plates.  One problem is that test plates are nice, uniform, soft steel that cuts consistently and easily, whereas the bits for the gun are re-used bits form other old guns and are much less kind to the engraver!  I’ve done the trigger guard border and a drum and quiver of arrows on the bow, and it was sort of OK metal but with nasty pockets of ‘rot’ that leave a bit of a hole if you hit one, and patches of harder metal –  I am now doing the trigger plate, it has some original engraving – if you can call it that!  Its hard metal and was from a very cheap gun so there is no finesse in the original engraving.  I can’t do much more than dig our the rust and try to plough a few replacement strokes on what is already there – it will look better, but remember the saying “you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear”.   I haven’t tried to cut the locks or cocks or the breeching, so that another treat to come!   Quite a lot of my time before Christmas was taken up with sorting out the 3D printing of the Christmas decorations the school children had designed – that meant I had to go over all 30 designs to make sure they were printable, and then print them all, plus another 30 or so to sell at the school fair!  All done in time, I’m pleased to say!

1st November – Very heavy hail and rain storm today – out of the window I saw a great torrent of water streaming off the roof and over the gutters which were full of hail – fortunately it only lasted a few minutes.  I got another secondary glazing window in at the weekend with Tom’s help installing it – 4 down, 2 to go.   My STEM club has started again at school on Monday nights – there were 5 children, all keen on crafts and making things, and very keen to get involved with 3D printing.  Dave, who helps run it, and I are very keen that whatever we do has a tangible outcome, so we introduced the children the the  3D design software Tinkercad and more or less left them to it, with a bit of occasional help.  By the end of the hour they had produced plausible name plates, and most of them carried on with the software when they got home.  I find it the difference between learning and teaching quite intersting – I saw the teacher’s lesson plan for teaching them to use the 3D software in 6  lessons, whereas  our ‘plan’ is to show them how to start and then let them get on with it – children very soon work things out and just get on with it if they are motivated – I wish I could pick up things as quickly as they do.   I guess the problem for teachers is the ‘if they are motivated’ bit – they have to cram it into the brains of those that aren’t as well as those that are… Glad I don’t have to!   The ‘tangible outcome’ of course means I have to print a whole lot of bits on the 3D printer….   Dave’s daughter and her partner have just bought a 1904 house and as an ‘expert’ on old houses I went over and had a look to give my view on the work they were planning – I can’t supress the scientist in me, so I think I’ve set them off looking in detail at insulation values and trying to optimise the way to spend limited renovation resources in a sustainable way against a potentially large and  permenant rise in the cost of energy – its an issue that concerns me here too!   My simple answer is insulate better than you think you need, and put in as many solar panels as possible, and maybe a battery of 40 kW.hrs – then at least you can take electricity from the grid when its cheap.  There is a tarriff from one supplier (Octopus) that lets consumers buy their electicity depending more or less on the spot rate on the wholesale market in 1/2 hr chunks  –  in 2021 that varied from 2p to 100p per unit, i.e from 1/20th to 3 times the current price, so with a decent battery system (cost ~ £6000 ?)  you can survive throught the periods when its expensive and charge when its cheap. There is even some suggestion that the spot rate will go negative.  Given that the battery system will probably last up to 10 years, that could be a win – you would need to use around 2400 kWhrs. a year at half price to break even.  Needs looking into and the sums done properly – but I think thats the way things will go for many users – if you don’t have batteries the use of things like car charging will be linked to spot prices – actually it already is for some systems .

28th October – The warm weather continues here – up to 21C today – wish I hadn’t lighted the AGA but if I let it out it will suddenly get cold!  I went to take back the gun with the repaired nipple and have a look at the gun with the  cleaning jag stuck down the barrel.  I could screw the rod onto the jag. but the thread wasn’t secure enough to turn or pull the jag out, so I secured the (double) barrel on its own in a cleaning jig and  fixed that in a vice with the blocked barrel upward, and poked a small pinch of Swiss No 1 powder into the ‘touch hole’ – it was a tubelock so I’m not sure that’s the right name for the hole that the tube fires through.  Applying a lighter to a small heap of powder on top of the hole produced a small puff and drove the jag to within 6 inches of the muzzle – now, what you mustn’t do is try to put a charge in when the obstruction is part way down the barrel – that’s when burst barrels happen, so it was a case of either getting the jag out from there or pushing it back to the breech and using a bigger charge.  Fortunately there was just enough thread on the now looser jag to pull it out, so job done. I did wonder if firing a tube on its own would have shifted the jag, but the gun was already stripped down so it was easier to do it the way I did. The jag was made of white plastic and the thread had partly been stripped – it went in the bin.  I don’t use plastic jags in muzzle loaders – they are OK for breech loaders as they can’t get stuck – stick to brass ones!

26th October – I’m getting back into the late night habit – curtailing my after dinner siesta!  I got the Locktite 270 and put the sleeve in the Manton – I’ll deliver it tomorrow and have a look at the friend’s double that has the broken jag down one barrel.  Like many people I’ve been conscious of the increase in the cost of all fuels, but particularly electricity, so I decided to do a thorough check of our energy consumption – the weather is still unseasonably warm – I think it reached 20C today – so we haven’t got any heating on.  I did a check on all our electicity uses by turning off all circuits and devices etc until the smart meter said zero watts.  I have a monior system -Efergy- that records peak and off peak current but I’d turned off the necessary computer for the experiment so I relied on the smart meter.  switching things back on one by one gave me a pretty good idea of where the power was going, and I was able to account for all the consumption except for 30 watts – after a bit of head scratching I found that I’d left the loft light on since I’d finished the bedroom 6 months ago!   That may not seem like a lot of power, but at today’s price it is around £40.   The biggest surprise was our 20 year old fridge freezer – I bought a cheap plugin monitor from ebay that records the consumption of any device on a 13 Amp plug which showed that it was consuming around 2 kWhrs per day or £260 per year,  Our kitchen lights, all LEDs, would cost the best part of £300 p.a. if left on all year.   Looking at advice and figures for electricity consumption on the web I’m shocked that when they list appliances in order of power use they get it all wrong – putting  high powered devices like cookers and washing machines at the top, whereas in reality its the things that are on for a long time and often that eat up the power.   We are trying to be green, and looking at how we heat our house, but comparative figures for the cost of heating by different methods make depressing reading – we currently use oil in the AGA – that is currently costing about  12 p per kW of energy, and a coal burning stove that is currently costing around 5 or 6p a kW hour as we bought extra fuel before the price went up.  We looked at an air sourced heat pump run on eletricity, but to be efficient it needs to run at a low water temperature so, as we can’t fit underfloor pipes means very big, ugly radiators.  Even assuming an efficiency of around 250% it will still cost more than the oil and much more than the coal = and the capital cost will be around £25000 plus  = so it just doesn’t add up.  Thats the real dilemma in home heating = the only thing things that make sense are fitting solar panels – with the increase in price of electricity, with more to come in the spring the payback time for solar panels is now probably less than 10 years, and it will probably now pay to fit a big Tessla battery to juggle power and of course adding insulation if you can do that reasonably.   Its really unfortunate that  electricity is so much more expensive than any other source of domestic heating, especially now that over 40% of our electricity comes from wind and solar, neither of which is that much more expensive now than it was a year ago.

While I can see that we might be carbon neutral up to 100% of our current electricity load by 2035 if we can find some good storeage methods, I can’t see how we can replace  more than a fraction of our  massive overall energy use with green alternatives on that timescale, let alone find substitutes for all the petrocarbon feedstock!  Having said that, we really have no alternative but to try…………..

24th October  Busy making the frame for the next secondary double glazing – I bought the oak in the form of  50mm x 200 mm kiln dried lengths and am machining that down on my old radial arm saw and planer surfacer.  Mostly its going well. except that one length of wood I wanted to use for the 850 long uprights had a mighty shake up the middle that I didn’t discover till I got it down to size, so a bit of remaking was called for.  I can’t imagine how anyone could do any woodwork without the means to convert timber – although I did buy this timber specially, mostly I can make things from reused timber or some old oak gateposts I bought many years ago.  We’ve been trying to clear out some of the junk that has accumulated over Covid and which is effectively clogging up a whole large room – I managed to sell a couple of old computers on ebay today – thats a start!  My Haematologist offered me an  Evusheld antibody injection against Covid – apparently its available if you pay but not from NHS or the medical Insurers – on balance, given my impaired immune system and the fact that I am going back into school to run our STEM club and help in class this half term, I bit the bullet and opted for it – tomorrow.  I’m also having a meeting tomorrow to sort out with Dave what we are going to do with the children in STEM club – be great to get that going again.  Talking of school remined me that last week I had fixed with other people to take the boat round to Ipswich on Thursday, and on Wednesday we got an urgent email from the school saying that the ‘expected some time‘ OFSTED inspection of the school was taking place on Thursday and we had to attend  – I couldn’t as too many people were depending on me so I really couldn’t change my plans – we haven’t yet heard the result of the inspection, but people thought it had gone well.  Here are some (rather poor) photos of the insert I have made for the Manton – still waiting for the Locktite.Drilled and tapped 3/8 x 32 M. -The thread is much better than it looks here!

part way in…. I don’t want it to get stuck before it has the Locktite – 1/4 BSF x26 nipple thread

22nd October –  I’m back after a bit of a long break, for which I apologise!   I seem to have been quite busy, although I’m not sure what was occupying me most of the time although I’ve done a fair bit of work on the boat that we are going to base in Scotland from next spring.  We sailed it from North Fambridge to Ipswich to get some work done at Fox’s Marina on Thursday – actually sailed is the wrong word as we don’t have any means of putting up the mainsail at the moment as there is a problem with the inmast furling gear, so we motored all the way – when we got to the River Orwell the engine started to play up, but we managed to limp up to the Marina – so the engine is another problem to sort out.   I have started to make and install the frames for the secondary double glazing for the leaded windows in the old bit of the house – the result is fantastic. as I mentioned in this blog before, I discovered a firm that made a revolutionary form of double glazing using two panes of glass separated by a  near perfect vacuum in a very thin layer that provides better insulation values than triple glazing, which conventionally fills the much larger space between the panes with gas, usually argon, that still conducts quite a lot of heat.  The vacuum windows need some means of stopping the glass bending inwards under the external pressure, and has tiny dots on a 1 inch grid that keep the panes of glass apart.  |The panes have to be specially made to size and finish up at about 8mm thick so are easy to incorporate in more or less normal frames.  I’ve made oak frames to go behind the leaded windows, with a fixed panel either side and a sliding panel in the centre over the opening casement.  I’ve done two in the kitchen and one in the living room so far and it has definately raised the temperature in both rooms.  The thing that strikes one most when you put them in is the reduction in outside sounds and the slight change in acoustics near the windows – the vacuum is an almost perfect sound barrier – check out the glass, its called Fineo – as you might expect its expensive, but as a fraction of the overall real cost of the job its not too bad – costing my time etc I guess it accounts for 30% of the cost.

I  have recently had a few days with a gun for the first time since the last shooting season.  I took the Nock and a Beretta o/u to shoot some clays and surprised myself (and others) by managing to hit lots – must have been due to the long absence from shooting, because next time I couldn’t replicate that level of success.  I have had one game shoot, last week, at Partridge and Pheasant on a glorious warm and sunny day in Suffolk.  It looks like it may be my only game shoot of the season as with Bird Flu now virulent in the area and several shoots packing up during Covid there are not many opportunities for Black Powder shoots, and anyway the costs have escalated – last year’s £33 per pheasant has turned into £50 now.

I havent had any gun jobs over the summer – except for an big engraving job that I’ve yet to psyc myself up to tackle, but recently I was brought a nice single barreled percussion sporting gun by Joseph Manton that had blown out its nipple – luckily without any injury ..  The gun was brought to me to ‘sort out’, of course minus the wayward nipple.   The nipple hole looked much larger than a normal nipple hole and the thread finer than usual and quite messed up.  Looking down the nipple hole with the microscope you could see that someone had screwed in a nipple with a different thread pitch than the one tapped into the hole – screwing a piece of sharpened wood into the nipple hole  didn’t yield a clear pitch for the thread, but a piece of modelling clay pressed in showed that the pitch of the thread had been cut at 32 t.p.i but a nipple of some other thread had been inserted.  Measuring the thread diameter showed that the nearest thread size was 5/16″ x 32 t.pi. which happens fortunately to be a standard M.E. (Model Engineers) thread. Quick shop at my favourite tool store Tracy Tools got me a 5/16 x 32 plug tap (£3)  and die (another £3) by return post.  I managed to get a decent thread in the bottom of the nipple hole, and if  I had been sure the gun was never going to be shot again I’d have left it like that and made a new 5/16 x 32 nipple, but I can’t bring myself to do things like that!   I quite liked the look of the 32 t.p.i thread so decided there was just enough metal in the breech to drill the nipple hole out to take a 3/8 x 32 thread ( another order to Tracy Tools for 3/8 x 32 taps and dies – total £12).  I set the barrel up in the vice of my milling machine (with suitable packing) and with the 5/16 tap in the nipple hole aligned it with the axis of the milling machine and took the plunge and drilled out the hole.  I kept the barrel set up and put the taper tap in the chuck and started the thread with mole grips of the tap body, then second tap. after that I took the barrel out and used the plug tap to get as far as I could, then ground the end of the plug down to cut as near to the base of the nipple hole as possible.  result a very nice thread.  Then turned up a sleeve with a 3/8 x 32 thread on the outside and a 1/4 BSF x26 hole in the centre, coned the end a bit to fit the bottom of the nipple hole and parted it off – result one nice sleeve – now waiting for some Locktite 270 to stick it in place – that is a very strong adhesive and will stand up to 180 degrees C so I think it will stop the sleveve being unscrewed when the nipple is taken out.  I’ll post some photos when I have time to take some – I’ll have to change my habits now I’ve started to post here again – I always used to post late at night and go to bed very late – a habit I’ve got out of over the summer, snoozing on the sofa and going to bed around 11 and waking ridiculously early.

I have another job pending – someone has lost a plastic jag with wadding at the bottom of  barrel and can’t shift it – its a tubelock so its not as if you could take the nipple out and pour in a bit of fine powder and blow it out – might be able to get enough through the flash hole to blow it out, or I’ll have to invent a way of drilling it out – I don’t like having to remove breech plugs in a double as there is always the chance of breaking the solder joint between the barrels.  I have come across the problem of the cleaning rod and its load getting very tight in the bore – there is a technique for avoiding disaster- first always wind any cloth or paper or tow etc on by turning the rod clockwise as seen from the handle – then when its in the barrel turning the rod clockwise both tightens the cloth etc around the jag and screws the rod up.  Now NEVER pull the rod hard without turning it clockwise at the same time – clockwise turns will tend to wind the cloth tighter on the jag and make it an easier fit in the barrel.  It’s much easier that way!  Similarly if you have to use a screw to remove athe jag’s load that you’ve left behind in the barrel, keep turning it clocckwise as you withdraw the rod.

Re 20th August – It turned out that the chap who serviced the engine this year had used the wrong replacement impeller when he serviced the cooling water pump so it wasn’t circulating the cooling water properly.  It wasn’t obvious that the impeeler was too small as the position of the watr pump stops you looking straight into it, but I spotted that the O ring supplied with the impeller wasn’t the same size as the mark on the cover plate of the pump and that it had been pinched in one place.  A proper Sole replacement is now in place and the ‘wrong’ spares disposed of.  Years of using O rings for very deep water (4000 meters and more) has taught me that you have to inspect O rings very carefully and I’m always suspicious if things are not perfect!

20 th August – Still enjoying the good weather here – a couple of days with a bit of much needed rain, but not enough to do much good.  I had a day down at the boat on Wednesday – I hadn’t realised that it was the first time it had been used since launch. Anyway we set off under engine and within 5 minutes it overheated and had to be shut down, leaving us drifting amomg the moorings – the skipper called up the marina launch and we were duly towed back to our mooring for a bit of a post mortem.  I hadn’t been involved with the engine side of things, but the seawater side of the cooling had been modified and serviced, but I think the problem lies in the closed circuit coolant system – I suspect that 2 years of lying idle might have siezed the coolant pump – the system had been filled properly and checked, so it wasn’t lack of coolant. A trip next week is scheduled to sort it out.

15th August Been busy keeping cool!  I’ve worked up to 100 lengths of the pool = I think Ill stick at that for the rest of theyear!.  There was an article in the Sunday Times saying that the recommended daily intake of protein is half what it should be – recommending 100 gm per day – I checked out the calculations I did when I was trying to put on weight – mucsle specifically, after Covid in early 2020 and I came up with 85 gm to maintain weight, and more to build muscle.  That’s quite a lotto put away – meat is around 1/3 protein or less, and to get that much protein from vegetarian or vegan diet without supplements is very hard work.  I’ve found that its very easy to loose muscle – a couple of months back I noticed my calve muscles were quite reduced, and I was struggling to lift things that hadn’t been a problem a year ago, like my outboard motor (20Kg) – anyway I made an effort to eat more protein, including a cooked breakfast, and it seems to be working  – the swimming probably helps, and I do a short burst of weights most days.  I was quite conscious that my sense of balance wasn’t really up to  clambering around on the moving deck of a of a sailing boat at sea, so I’m practising that too!  Problems you never really think about until they hit you as age creeps (or rushes) up.   I’ve been busy making bits for the boat on the 3D printer  – I’m addressing the issue that there is nowhere in the cockpit to put down a cup while sailing – an important facility that most boat designers ignore!  The boat is due to be launched today and put on her mooring – I’m scheduled to be sailing next week, but there are going to be a lot of family on board, including baby and dog, so I might just leave them to enjoy it without my getting in the way!  I’ve sent the Lowe pistol back – the client was happy for me to leave it as it was, and not attempt to get the set trigger firing to work – I’m convinced that if it ever worked, which I assume it must have done when made, it was, as they say, by the grace of God the design being, in my view, fundamentally flawed.

 

 

 

 

 

Before cleaning

Finished

The crack running from the barrel bolt now looks much less obvious

 

9th August (2).  I had an order for a couple of gravers and sharpening jigs, so got that out of the way before I got down to sorting the Lowe Pistol that I’d left in mid air, so to speak.  I had decided the barrel needed to come out as I suspected that there was a fair amount of rust underneath, and particularly at the junction of the wood and barrel, which is where its mostly a problem.  I had a bit of a scrape around on the upper surfaces and found that they had a very thin black coating on top of a suggestion of rust.  Getting the barrel out of an old pistol can be a tricky job – in this case the barrel bolts seemed set in their slots, and the visible rust along the edge of the wood raised the possibility that some of the wood might come away – there was already a split at the muzzle end suggesting that someone had tried to get the barrel out, and there was a lot of damage around the bolts where people had tried to prise the bolts out.  My technique for removing the barrel is firstly remove the lock as the rear side nail is probably notched into the barrel hook.  Then lay the pistol with the bolt heads down on a pad of bubble wrap or something else with a lot of give, and using a screwdriver that sits on the thin end of the bolt, tap very gently, checking that you are not lifting the wood around the bolt head end.  Once the bolt has moved a few mm you might be able to pull it from the head end but DON’T lever against the wood of the pistol without putting something under the lever to spread the load and only lever gently. On this pistol the barrel bolts were very firmly in place and I had to make a  25mm long strip of metal to go into the bolt slot and drive the bolts out, which I managed without any damage.  Getting the barrel out proved a little tricky too, although by this time it should be free and just lift out, this one didn’t want to come out, and I was worried it would break off some wood so I ran a razor blade between the wood and the barrel.  I put a dowel in the barrel end and tapped it gently and eventually the barrel came free.  It was, as I suspeted, quite rusty and certainly justified taking it out.  I thought about trying to get the rust off, and leaving the barrel finish, but decided that it really needed to go in the electrolytic  derusting bath for an hour or two.  After washing and rubbing it down with tissue I put it to the fine steel wire brush on the ‘grinder’ and got a very good clean finish with a suitable dark finish that will do for the final surface,  Before refitting the barrel I cleaned up the barrel bolts as best I could without removing them form the stock, and put some leather grease in the slots to ease  the next removal. I also glued up a previos split at the muzzle.   Looks good now!    Then back to the lock – which I admit I’d been putting off !  With the lock back in ( you need to ‘cock’ the set trigger to put the lock in by pushing the trigger forward till it clicks ) I tried to fire the pistol with the set trigger, but it was not reliable so I stuck to manual trigger pulls to fire it, which worked just fine.  I debated whether to take it all to bits and  do some more micro filing on the detent, but decided that the whole system was so impossibly fiddly that I might easily end up with a pistol that wouldn’t fire at all.  It made me think about why the system is so fiddly and difficult to set up, and I think I eventually understood what was wrong with this method of detenting a lock.   In a normal detent the detent itself  is not involved in the instantaneous release of the tumbler when the sear is raised out of the full cock bent – the detent is free to move a little and the additional work involved in raising the sear up the detent to clear the half cock  comes entirely from the mainspring, not the trigger plate / set trigger.  With the Lowe detent the sear has to lift the detent as well as climing out of the full cock bent, and as far as I can see also has to provide some impetus to climb to the height of the half cock notch, given the angle to the pivot of the detent – this additional force to lift the sear and detent must come in part at least from the trigger plate, or the set trigger if this is set.  Since the set trigger works by inertia and has no other force driving it, it is perhaps not surprising that it is marginal.  To me this explains quite clearly why this was not a common form of detent – as well as being very fiddly to make and set up, and prone to wear, its just fundamentally unsound in principle. Perhaps this drawing will help explain how it is supposed to work;-

sear in pencil – detent in blue is ready to fire, orange is in position to guide sear over half cock notch.  Sear needs to do work to raise detent and climb over it.

I have to admit that the proper shape for the end of the detent is conjecture on my part, but somehow the sear needs to get on top of the detent without pushing it down?

9th August.  I could have sworn I  posted a new post yesterday, complete with a couple of photos, but I must have forgotten to click on ‘publish’ I suppose.  I’ve been down in Cornwall, part sorting the cottage, and part holiday.  We towed our 16 ft dayboat (Cornish Coble) down and parked it at Mylor Yacht Harbour and had several sails around the Falmouth Estuary in lovely weather, and chopped down the encroaching vegetation round the garden – the rate things grow, particularly sycamore trees, in Cornwall is something else!  By the time I’d finished cutting back enough to be able to see out of the garden I’d generated more than we could fit onto the  available space, so I had to go and buy a shredder to compact it – I got a £66 one at B & Q which is the same as the one we have at home – its fantastic and shreds branches up to about 45mm which is about 2 or three years growth, so ideal.   Cornwall continues to get better as a holiday destination – its now much easier to get good food from farm shops, and there are three or four good bakers producing artisan sourdough bread that is really worth eating – which makes a lunchtime diet of sandwiches quite bearable.

At anchor opposite Falmouth for lunch

We even had a swim at Lamorna Cove!

22nd July  I was having another fiddle with the Lowe pistol this evening, trying to reshape the little detent that I hardened yesterday as it was getting worn by the sear and I wasn’t sure it would keep its shape.  I did a trial fit again but this time it was exactly like the original problem – no full cock.  I think I spotted where I need to take off a bit of metal ( with a diamond file as its now hard) and was removing the pivot pin with a pair of fine long nosed pliers when the pin pinged off across the workshop, never to be seen again.  It was about 1.5 mm diamete and 4mm long and slightly tapered – very fortunately I have a set of hard steel clockmakers blanks for shafts including one a fraction too big for this job, so a few minutes holding the rod in a drill against my diamond hone put a slight taper on the rod and reduced it to the required diameter.  I had to use a diamond file to nick the rod deeply and then break it, and held the little bit in a micro chuck of a dremel while I honed down the ends to fit.  – all in all it only took me about 35 minutes to recover from the loss.  I need to try he revised shape – assemble the lock AGAIN etc etc.   I’m not sure I’ll be able to give much time to it in the next week or so as I have some family business to attend to that will keep me occupied – plus I need to go down to the boat a few times to assist getting it ready to launch………  Just put it all together for the umpteenth time, and it worked, even to the extent that the set trigger fired it and it sparked up nicely in spite of using one of my home-made flints.  I only tried a couple of times, but I’m optimistic that it will go on working (I hope!).  I certainly wouldn’t want to try it too often, because even with my hardened detent there is still some wear and in my view the whole design is pretty marginal – I think I probably need to do a bit more to the pistol before I return it – I think the barrel really needs to be taken out as there is likely to be some rust underneath  and I think it will require care to remove the barrel bolts as they are likely to be rusted into the wood.  I removed some more hard black rust from the lock with the back edge of the modelling knife and 0000 steel wool and the signature now shows up well.  I would put up a photo of the new detent, but actually it doesn’t look that different from the original and I don’t have a good enough macro lens on my camera to show it well.

20th July  The owner of the Lowe pistol suggested that this particular design of detent might have been rare because it was so fiddly to make – I’d go along with that, and add that it would have been susceptible to wear that, like this example, would render the pistol useless for anything other than scaring adverseries!  By comparison, the ‘normal’ detent on the side of the tumbler is much easier to make and much less critical and less susceptible to wear.  I didn’t get a chance to do any more to it – I hope I can get it to work, but I’m not sure yet!   I did a bit more on the boat, fitted the second jib sheet car, fiddled around with a new lock on the hatch board and fitted a bit of trim in the saloon.  I also took down my little wooden dinghy that has stood in the shed unused for 20 odd years.  I built it about 40 years ago as a challenge after aquiring a few sheets of 1/8th ply from a bankrupcy sale  (“take as much as you can before the bailiffs come in this afternoon, and drop me a few quid in cash” – even included a nice BMW coupe that I couldn’t afford to insure so didn’t take – to my everlasting regret!). My challenge was to make an 8 ft dingy light enough to carry on ones back with the building taking less than 24 hours work.  I stiched together a model from card and a needle and thread and then scaled it up to  stitch and glue full size.  I got it made and one coat of 2 part polyurethane in the 24 hours, I’m sorry to say that the secod coat over-ran!  It is a fine boat – the seat ( ‘twart’ – obviously the wrong word as that implies across)  runs fore and aft so you can always slide to balance the boat.  The aim is to launch Sepiola in the next couple of weeks onto her mooring.  Going from here to the boat I use Google maps.  It offers you a choice of 3 ways that are almost the same time, but the one I use most often varies in detail from journey to journey and I often take a wrong turn, whereupon google routes me through many tiny roads because it won’t tell me I need to turn round !  Strange thing is that I always get a different route when I ask for the return journey – a slightly flakey routing algorith that I’ve noticed usually starts off on major roads and descends into back roads as you near the destination, When returning it takes you straight to a main road and then descends to smaller roads.  Annoying!

19th July  One would almost say it was a hot day, I had to retreat to my workshop that stayed at about 25.5C so I was able to work on the Lowe pistol.  Our house its pretty cool as its old and solidly built and has most of the accomodation in the North part, but if the heat lasted for many more days the advantages would be lost.  Playing around with the detent, I concluded that the reason it didn’t work was that a vital bulge had been worn off  so the sear could slip out of full cock without activating the detent to block the half cock notch.  The only way I could see to try to make the lock work was to make a new detent, which is what I was doing today.  I started with a bit of 2 mm spring steel and annealed it – that way I can harden it when I’ve finished if it works.  Making an accurately shaped bit just about 4 mm x 2.6 mm is OK as long as its still attached to a bit of metal you can hold, but once you get to the stage of fitting and trying it you have to separate it, and then the fun starts – for one thing I am terrified that I’ll drop it, and I’d never find it on the old brick floor,  then to file it you have to hold it so you need a small high precision vice.  To get the shape right I threaded the old one and my version on the same axle and checked under a X15 microscope, then took a few strokes with a very fine file while holding the part in the vice, then checking again.  When it came to getting the bit that engages the sear, I filed it under the microscope with my finest file.  I’m still working on it – of course to check if it works you need to put the whole lock together, mainspring and all, and also put it back in the pistol as you need the trigger blade. I must have done that at least half a dozen times so far, and taken the detent in and out about 20 times.  I think I could strip a flintlock with my eyes shut now!   I’m not there yet – I have now got it so that it will hold both half and full cock, and fire from full cock with a firm pull as the sear has to climb up a bit of the detent – it won’t yet fire by the set trigger – at least that is an improvement!   It’s by far the fiddlyist job I’ve ever had to do, and of course I don’t really know the correct shape for the active face of the detent – I just hope I don’t take too much off and have to remake it!  I did manage to get a swim in – 50 lengths, the pool is getting a bit green in this heat despite the chlorine – probably needs an algicide.  I finished the sear spring yesterday – I carelessly forgot it was a left handed lock and bent the spring the wrong way, so I had to straighten it out and rebend it – I didn’t close the joint fully up as I didn’t want to overbend the metal twice – its a bit wavy too but  it works just fine.  Off to do a few jobs on the boat tomorrow…..

1 mm graph paper – critical surface marked by arrow.

17th July – Quite a warm day, at least up to about 3 p.m. – every nice day I’ve planned to have a swim at about 4 p.m. and every day it’s clouded over about then.  I did get up to 60 lengths yesterday so not doing badly.  Still messing about getting the boat ship shape, and doing odd jobs outside while its so nice.  Today threatened to be too hot so I moved to the indoor workshop for a bit of work on the Lowe & Son pistol.  Actually all my workshops are pretty cool in summer – probably the evaporation of all the damp!  Anyway I thought I’d try Bev’s suggestion and turn the little detent up the other way, so I knocked its pin out to release it.   Tip;- if you have to knockout a pin rest the object on a bit of lead sheet folded 2 or 3 thicknesses and hammered flat – that way the object is ‘dead’ and won’t bounce around and the pin can sink into the lead and doesn’t get lost – it even works for driving the barrel pins out resting the wood on a lead block – it avoids accidentally driving out a chip of wood.   I found a pin punch that was the same size, more or less, as the pin so I could easily put the detent back in and inspect its action.  So, sad to say, that doesn’t seem to be the answer – put in the other way up the detent wont go down far enough to let the sear into the half cock bent, although from the point of view of the full cock bent, things seemed a little better – so original orientation half cock works but full cock wont hold, reversed I havent tried assembled, but it looks as if the opposite happens – full cock works but it won’t engage half cock……There are some signs of wear from the sear on the detent, which might suggest that it did work once, although the ‘nose’ of the half cock bent does appear to have been impacted by the sear and burred over.  That is a bit of a mystery too, as would probably have stopped the gun being fired – why do that enough times to burr over the top of the bent?  So I’m no further forward on that puzzle – I am still trying to believe that the gun has worked with the parts that are there now,  but my faith is wavering!  I decided more evidence was needed – I need to make a new sear spring so the I can see the gun in action properly, so I got a bit of 5 mm spring steel and milled it down for the blade – its now ready for final fitting – I need a UNC 3 die to cut a new screw to hold the spring – I managed to get the old rivet out of the lockplate, and the original thread  in the lockplate was intact, and a slightly loose fit to UNC 3, so I’ll have to expand the die as far as possible.

Tumbler and detent on 1 mm squared paper  – arrow points to slot in tumbler for the detent.

This is how it was – you can just see the detent in the main bent – see arrow, the perspective is a bit unhelpful!

Here the detent is reversed and is visible blocking the half cock bent it won’t go down any more.

Reversed – this is a s far down as it will go, so stopping hte half cock bent.

Part made sear spring.

13th July  Decided to strip the carburetor of the 4 hp outboard for our dinght as it will only run with the choke out, suggesting that the fuel isn’t getting to the engine.  I seem to remember checking the fuel pump some time ago and it was OK, the fuel filter is OK too.  The dependence on the choke suggests that one of the jets is partly bunged up or some other part of the carb after the float chamber.  Anyway I had a look on YouTube for an idea of what to expect during the job and took it all apart – a bit of muck in the float chamber but not much evidence of bunged up jets.  I remembered that I’d ‘inherited’ a small ultrasonic cleaner when Giles emigrated so put all the parts in that and got quite a bit of muck in the bottom of the cleaner that must have come from somewhere.  Now waiting for the new gasket etc set.  I had a problem with it overheating when I last used it, and stripped and replaced the water pump, which was completely solid with salt, and took the head off to clean out all the water passages.  It still got too hot even with the thermostat fully open, so I removed it altogether and it was better. Now I’m trying to get it all right!  Saturday is the Helice Shoot at Rugby – I’ll be there!  Just got another two of the kids’ keyrings to print for tomorrow morning,  unlike most of the 3D printing which will run unatttended to the end, these require the filament to be changed to give a colour change just for the text,  so it has to happen at exactly the right point.

New sheave and axle assembly

 

12th July  Busy printing 29 keytabs for a class at a Haverhill school where a friend teaches – the kids designed them, so one or two needed a bit of remedial work.  I’ve been gently working on the dinghy to get it in shape for taking to Cornwall later in the summer.  Bev left a comment about the detent on the Lowe and Son pistol suggesting that it has been removed and mistakenly replaced the wrong way round as had happened to one of his locks.  Makes sense as no amount of wear would explain why the sear hits the detent when its trying to engage the full cock bent to cock the pistol.  I’ll try reversing it when I get a moment. Its not the sort of job an amateur would undertake, so I guess it might be done by someone who had never seen this type of detent – but why would they leave it in place the wrong way round? And why for Bev’s lock too?  Mystery….. We’ll see if it works when reversed…. watch this space.    I’ve been gently cleaning off a few bits of rust on the pistol – my preferred tool is the back edge of a modelling knife blade, very slightly polished to make sure it isn’t scratching the metal – it scrapes off the rust without damaging the patina underneath,  then a very light rub over with the 0000 steel wool and oil stop more rust and leave a good surface.  I guess it really needs the barrel taking out as there is bound to be rust underneath at the edge of the wood.  Its a fine pistol and I’m trying to avoid doing too much to it as its originality is important.  If its something like the Rigby wreck I did recently, anything is an improvement,  but the better the gun, the less is justified in my book.  Oh and I finished turning a new sheave and bearing for one of the ‘cars’ on the track that adjusts the angle of the jib sheets on the boat — not the dinghy ( sorry about the jargon!).  (makes me realise that I jump around from one hobby/pastime/job to another at a dizzy pace – perhaps that why I’m not really an expert in any of them!)

Keyrings designed by the 10/11 year olds using CAD software – pretty good effort.

 

10th July  Received a nice pistol to work on – Hermes left it on the doorstep of next door, who were away – they are terrible (Hermes, not the neighbours)!  Anyway now have it and its quite unusual – A silver mounted pistol, not hefty enough for a duelling pistol, but I suppose what you would call a ‘horse pistol’ to be carried in a holster in front of the saddle – a pair that is.  Anyway its unusual because its a mirror image of a normal pistol, with the lock on the left side – its a complete mirror image, the barrel bolts even go in from the right side – they usually go in from the left side like all pins etc.  Made by Lowe and Son of London with hallmarks on the silver for 1787 and the maker’s mark for Moses Bent, a fine silversmith.  It is in good condition, there was some superficial rust on the lock etc that was hidden behind some sort of blacking, but the engraving, which has very fine lines, is still sharp, and its cleaning up OK.  The faults are that the sear spring has broken, and somehow the lock fails to engage full cock.  The inside of the lock is in very clean condition with only a trace of rust around a few bits of the edge.  There is one very unusual feature of this lock – it has a set trigger, with adjustment behind the trigger, rather than in front as is usual, so it needs a detent to carry the sear past the half cock position – the seat only gets a tap from the trigger blade if the set trigger is used, so will fall into the half cock bent without the detent to guide the sear past the half cock notch.  This pistol has a form of detent that I’ve never seen before – I havent seen it described either.  The tumbler is quite wide and a tiny detent is pivoted within the tumbler.  It looks as if its meant to lie flat when the sear is in the half cock bent, but  then when the sear is in the full cock notch it catches the detent as it climbes out of the full cock bent and the detent deflects it over half cock bent.  The trouble appears to be that the detent gets in the way of the full cock bent and the sear engages it, causing it to pivot up and carry the sear over the half cock  bent rather than fitting properly into the full cock bent.   I suspect that the detent is worn or damaged – I dont see that it could have had a spring within the tumbler.  Anyway, I will sort out the sear spring first – some bodger has made a rivet and rivited it through the original screw hole – Anyway a nice pistol and a nice mysterious project for the blog….  In the meantime I’ve got my small outboard motor running and started to varnish the spars of the dinghy that we are taking on holiday to Cornwall later in the summer.   I had fun with the 3D printer – I bought some new filament called PLA +  and found that if I followed the specified setup for PLA+ the print of my mug holder took 28 hours instead of 16 for normal PLA!  I tried both settings, but the slow one is definately best, so I’m now watching while my printer chunters through that job….  Oh and the awimming pool has come into its own – I manage 40 lengths – about 350 meters today, I’m trying to increase by 10 lengths a day up to 100 lengths….  And here are some photos of the Lowe & Son pistol – they worked in London and had premises in Westminster from 1796, not sure where they were before this. Blackmore’s book lists them as in business from 1792, but they were clearly working earlier that that on the basis of this pistol.

 

 

Notice rivetted head of Sear spring fixing

Tumbler with the mystery detent – I’m not sure in detail how it should work – as it is it won’t let the sear engage full cock

6th July  Guns are a bit neglected at the moment, although I am going to the Helice shoot on 16th at Rugby Clay ground – its a great sport and the Anglia Muzzle Loaders make it an annual event (Covid excepted).  Its really tricky shooting – I’m not particularly good at it but enjoy it – son Tom only shoots about once a year but is pretty quick – last year he just missed out on the shootoff.  I’ll need to get the dust off my faithful Nock.  I’ve been down to the boat several times – I spent Monday lying on my back with my head in a cupboard fitting new hoses to the loo – not my favourite job, then on Tuesday I was helping Tom plumb in a new sink – lying on my back with my head in a cupboard……. getting a bit boring.   Being in the boat mood, I will have to recover our dinghy from the farmer’s field and check it out – maybe use it once more and then sell it – I’ll have to fix the outboard first.  Bit of 3D printing – clips and bits for the boat – I’m also making mug holders to fix somewhere on deck – in Scotland in particular, hot tea and hot soup are essentials for the helmsman, so they need somewhere to put a mug down that won’t slide off when the boat heels – I think if I 3D print one with walls with air spaces it will help to keep drinks hot – little creature comforts are important !

3rd July  – months tick by – perhaps we’ll have a bit of proper summer, its been a bit miserable for using the perfectly functioning but cold swimming pool.   We’ve given up shooting over the peas, the pigeons have migrated to the wheat and our farmer doesn’t have any so that game is over – I’m still sitting on 200  No 6 catrtridges.  I’ve been busy on bits for the boat that friends kindly let me work on – I had to remake one of the blocks (pulleys) that fit on the deck to take the sheets (ropes) from the jib (foresail).  It was a bit of a puzzle as to how to take it apart, although a post on a website helped, so I made a short video of how to do it.  I’ll put it as a post on this website so a google search will find it – its also on You Tube @ https://youtu.be/rTFfx7-J-7w.   A regular client is sending me another flintlock pistol to work on the lock – it looks a little unusual from the photo, and has a couple of faults – the sear spring is broken, and then fired from full cock it gets caught in half cock.  I quite like fiddling with lock mechanisms, so that should be a bit of fun and will provide some proper gun stuff for this blog – at the moment I’m not working on my own guns, and not shooting the muzzle loaders, so not much to report.

 

27th June – I can tell you confidently that the wood pigeon has become almost extinct overnight in our part of the world, and not because of our success in culling them!  On the previous occasions when I’ve been out I get through 40 or 50 cartridges in 3 or 4 hours and see hundreds of birds over the pea fields, even if not very many of them come our way. Tonight I managed 4 shots in two hours, and that only by taking anything vaguely possible – The two of us managed one pigeon each!  Not sure why – I think maybe the pea leaves near the ground, which is what the pigeons are after, are getting a bit dry and yellow, also it was overcast and the wind was quite variable –  we didn’t even see many in the distance.   Maybe we left too early, but one feels a bit of a fool standing idly in a field all evening.  We’ve been trying to work out what the pea crop will be used for – the peas are clearly not for the table although about ‘eating’ size now,  –  the farmer says they wont be harvested for another month by which time the foliage will all have died back and the pods dried out, maybe a fodder crop.

26th June – Sorry about the void in blogging – last week was hectic – Dave and I did a class on Earthquakes at school that required a lot of preparation, and we also did STEM club.  On Wednesday I had another Covid jab and went down to see a friend’s boat (Moody 37) that we may be able to sail in Scotland next year – by happy chance it is similar to the type I was looking to buy a month or so back, so I am glad I didn’t!  I will help with working on the boat a bit to get it ready to sail up there, and probably help sail it there.  By the time evening came I was reacting to the jab with flu like symptoms that laid me out for a day.  As part of our STEM club I’d 3D printed a set of parts for the children to make SAFE boxes, but stupidly left the safes in the back of my car in full sun on Tuesday, forgetting that the PLA platic I used is not very heat resistant – anyway nett result was 2 sets were warped out of all possible recovery, so had to remake them – 10 hours printing each plus a few  hours assembly – all done now but I feel stupid!   I haven’t done any more gun stuff as its really too nice to be indoors – the swimming pool turned out not to be leaking noticeably if I shut off the pump, so we are now swimming – its quite chilly in there still, but pleasant.  I went pigeon shooting again on Monday using my multichoke Berretta 687 and got on with it Ok – I think at the end of 4 hours I was getting my eye well in when the pigeons tailed off!  I’m going again tomorrow so we’ll see how my eye is!  This gun has a hard butt plate, and I only had a thin shirt on, and used around 40  29 gm 1450 fps Superfast Pigeon cartridges so I’m thinking that I might slip a sponge butt cap on !  I could get away with a little longer stock as the comb is a tiny bit high and it would slightly depress the barrel end – we’ll see – I also have to remember to take my specs with a bit of sellotape over the top of the left lense to stop it mastering – if I’m not careful I end up rifleing if my eyes get confused and that is not good – I need to keep both eyes working, just enough haze in the left to let the right eye dominate – its amazing how the brain and eyes work it out.

17th June My optimism concerning the swimming pool and leaks was not justified!  It is leaking at a rate of around 500 litres/day.  I spent a couple of hours today injecting red dye near any possible leaks to see if it would be drawn in to the leak – the loss amounts to around 1 litre a minute, which should give a just about discernable flow rate close to the leak.  So far no success.   I decleared an end to the browning of the harding pistol, and put it together – it is now officially finished, at least until such time as I feel energetic enough to remake the frizzen spring with a roller.  I spent a happy few hours yesterday late afternoon standing in a pea field shooting pigeons on a flight path with my o/u 12 bore and an odd assortment of cartidges – some heavy loads for high game, so I never knew what recoil I’d get – I am lucky in that I’m not particularly conscious of recoil, and can happily shoot full loads  with only a light top.   I was shooting with Pete, who has now had around 170 pigeons off that  field – there are hundreds of them feasting on the peas – unfortunately some of the ones we shot fell amongst the peas, and its not really possible to get them without doing more damage to the crop than the pigeons do, so they are left for the foxes, red kits and buzzards.  Here are a few pics of the Harding;

Complete with working  home knapped flint!

14th June – We are having a few hot days, so will be trying the swimming pool – miraculously it doesn’t appear to be leaking, or only very slightly – not bad for a 14 year old plastic bag!  I’ve been in and out of school this week as the year 6 are having their leavers trips etc – a group of 8 are doing  a MasterChef week cooking a starter, a main meal, a dessert and then some canopes and I’ve been the main judge – quite a responsibility. but the children have done pretty well – Their main courses were all well cooked and appetising – I helped one pair with their main – they had a sirloin steak and wanted it medium rare so I had to tell them to half the cooking time given in the recipe – I dread to think what would happen to a fairly thin (1/2 in) steak if you cooked it 4 minutes each side – not so nice!  Anyway I offered to make some prizes on the 3D printer – which I am doing at the moment.  Starting in black and changing to flourescent raspberry for the lettering is quite pretty, so thats what I’ll do.

  Test 2 colour lettering.

12th June – the pump on the swimming pool filter was seized when I came to test it, so a couple of hours spent stripping it and freeing the rotor – not sure what was stopping it rotating, probably rust between rotor and stator – anyway now seems Ok. ( Thinks – thanks to WD40!) – I guess being in the garden all year round for 14 years is bound to take its toll – I’m amazed that any of it works – last year I had to patch a rubber hose joint – using self amalgamating tape and hose clips as the rubber had more or less perished and I couldnt find a replacement.  I wonder if in future I might be able to print a flexible pipe on the 3D printer?  I decided to use the frizzen spring without a roller, as I want to put the job to bed for the time being.  Bit of a problem tempering the frizzen spring as I’d just let the AGA out as it was pretty hot in the kitchen and its summer!  I just about managed a dark straw temper…  I knapped a small piece of flint that fitted the cock and put the pistol together – minus the barrel that was in the cellar being browned. To my great surprise the flint produced a healthy shower of sparks – twice…. so my wobbly flints do work, at least twice!  I do need to replace the copper washer behind the cock as it shows – I’ll have to turn off a thin steel washer on the lathe and file a square hole in it.

11 June – Started to fill the giant plastic bag that is our summer swimming pool. Tom (son) came over to help struggle with the bag, which is a massive and heavy object about 30 ft long – I’m dealing with 3 Toms at the moment – all about the same age, and am reminded that in his year at school about 1 in 8 boys was called Tom!  A bit more work on the frizzen spring for the Harding.  I’ve got the fixing done and made a new screw (No4 UNF) to hold it in place and filed up the peg to go through the lockplate..  I now have a dilemma – I was planning to make a simple spring that just bears on the heel of the frizzen without a roller, which is the easy way, but when I went through my collection of small pistols I found they all have rollers on the frizzen spring.  That means that a) the end of the frizzen spring with the roller must be in exactly the right place, and b) that I have to do a bit of  blob welding technology to thicken the spring enough to get the roller pivot through it, which will be tricky with my crude welder and welding.  If that doesn’t work I’ll have to start over with a new blank and leave the end thicker….  bother! Annoying because if I’d thought of it in the beginning I could have left a thick bit to finish off.

 

I always leave a ‘handle’ on any small part I’m making until the last minute as it makes holding much easier.

10th June – Summer rushes by!  Wasted a morning trying to get my 3D printer to pause in mid print so I could  change the colour of the filament, only to discover that there is a bug in the software and it doesn’t do what its supposed to.  Oh well, think of something else!   I filed the square in the cock for the Harding pistol – the cock is quite slim and the square on the tumbler is longer than the thickness of the cock, so I have fitted a washer behind the cock to take up the extra space.  the only thin metal I had was copper sheet, so I used that.  The safety catch is one of those that works on the ace of the lock and  slides into a notch on the back of the cock, so that has been cut.   All works fine now – I am now in the middle of filing up the blank for the frizzen spring – I found a bit of 4.5mm thick spring steel, that’s thick enough to make the boss on the spring, so I milled down the rest of the thickness to around 2mm and am filing it into shape – looking OK.   I’ve done quite a lot of work on the wood of the pistol – there were a few pits and a couple of visible cracks so I have put a coat of shellac over the whole pistol, and then put a build-up of layers of shellac over dips and the crack and sanded them off each time – it takes a while for the shellac to harden so its not a fast process, but it is giving a good result and the defects are slowly disappearing. The barrel is starting to brown.   I’ve just finished getting a decent brown on the barrels of the Nock pair and just need to put a final finish on the wood and they will be ready to return to their owner.

The horrible cracks at the back top of the lock have now been replaced by an inserted repair – quite pretty now, just got to brown the barrel….

7th June  Made the harding top jaw and top jaw screw today – about 3 to 4 hours work, but looking OK.  I might have to thin down the top jaw as the cock I have looks very light, and my top jaw may look a bit top heavy.  I was messing about for an hour or two trying my hand at flint knapping having watched a couple of videos.  I sort of got the hang of it and at one point I did maage to knock off a series of flakes that almost looked like proto gun flints!  I took the flakes that looked most likely and trimmed them into rectangles, and got a whole pile of ‘almost’ gun flints.  I guess if I was marooned in a flint rich part of the country with a flintlock and a supply of powder and shot I would be able to make flints that would last a shot or two.

6th June  Cracking on with the Harding overcoat pistol – I got the last wood repair finished off – not too bad!  I’ve started to refinish the stock – a coat of red oil followed by a coat of sanding sealer or two, then polish with 0000 steel wool and more red oil.  Along the way a few strokes with a walnut coloured wood touch up pen to blend things in a bit – hides a multitude of sins!  I hsve managed to get it a fairly light colour, as I didn’t want another dark old pistol!  Did a bit of filing on the replacement cock – it was a Blackley casting that had had the tip of the spur re-welded, difficult to reshape as its mostly a concave surface, but I think it will do – I need to make a top jaw and top jaw screw, and fit the square, then make the frizzen spring……… meanwhile the front hedge cries out to be cut!

5th June Splendid party making Elderflower wine (indoors as it was a bit damp – fortunately not the heavy rain that had been forecast earlier)  It was so nice to meet up with old friends we hadn’t seen for over 2 years – one begins to feel like a member of the human race again.  I’ve done a bit of work on the overcoat pistol – I’m sorting out the woodwork – very carefully sanding it off without rounding off the corners or changing the shape – quite a challenge – the repair I made first is bugging me a bit, so I may just cut it off and do it again – not sure at the moment.  There were a series ofgaps and cracks around the top backof the lock that were not going to be easy to hide – in places the wood was below the proper level.  In circumastances like that its always best to take out a big chunk of the bad area, and replace it with a single piece and reshape that.  I have a fine Japanese saw with a kerf of about 0.3mm that I can cut into the stock with and leaves a very clean edge, so two cuts and chisel out the bad stuff – its always best to make the cut out bit in the form of a wedge so you can push the new bit in tight – now I’ve mislaid the proper wood glue, and I am a bit put off instant glue just at the moment!   Having cleaned off the surface of the rest of the pistol with 400 grit I was left with a number of black stains, mostly along the edge of the steel furniture, particularly the trigger finial.  As its basically an iron stain you can mostly get rid of it with a solution of Oxalic acid in water – a few grains and a thimble full of water will do.  There are a couple of small stains left, but most have gone.  The chequering was a bit dirty so I scrubbed it with a toothbrush and Nitromors paint stripper which did a reasonable job, but some bits werefilled up and I had to go over the chequering with one of my home-made chequering points – now looking OK – its in pretty good condition.  So just the block to glue in now, then apply a finish, (but what?) and re-brown the barrel and fit a new cock and frizzen spring….   It’s getting near the time of year when our big plastic bag has to be errected and filled with 30 tonnes of water to become a swimming pool, so thas a job for next week…………………….

 

It will need major surgery to remove the damaged area!

4th June – A session of lawn mowing called! We are into peak grass – not enough to support a sheep, but the idea is nice – I did once borrow a goat – that was when I discovered that goats don’t eat grass, they eat anything that grows above the grass – including garden flowers, hedges and anyhing else in between.  It took a year for the garden to recover from a day’s goat!  I decided to ‘strike off’ or file down the barrel of the overcoat pistol, which I more or less have don

 

3rd June Anotther gorgeous day – We are going to an outdoor party on Sunday and its forecast to rain heavily, the only day in the next two weeks that won’t be fine! Such is life.  Well, I did put the Rigby to bed with a nice foresight. As I was packing it I realised that the trigge guard tang wasn’t fitting  very well, so that had to be sorted, but its all paid for and ready to post on Monday.  In the background for the last however many days Ive been browning the pair of Nock barrels – still not got where I want to be, but coming along.  I started on the little overcoat pistol – there isn’t any major woodwork damage, but I’ve never seen a stock with as many small cracks and splits – most won’t move but are very slightly open, some can be closed up – anyway Ive been going round with superglue trying to stabilise it, then there are a couple of places that will need a small new piece of wood let in.  I steamed it to get some of the dings out, which has raised the grain – its a sort of dirty brown colour – I’ll have to see if I can clean it up a bit. Also the chequering is filled up with something quite hard in a couple of patches, so I’ll have to work on that.  The lock is  not too bad but needs a new cock – I have one that will fit, more or less – and a new frizzen spring, which will be a fancy bit of construction – either filed from solid or a bit of weld-blob technology, we shall see.   I think the barrel might look good if it was struck up fairly thoroughly – I don’t usually like to do it, but I’ll see when I’ve done the stock what the overall aim needs to be. I’ll start the post on LOcks and Detents while I have the photos to hand.

1st June – Missed a day and didn’t put up the photos I was going to as my access to the website went funny and I couldn’t edit or save any changes and so couldn’t do anything.  I came back to it this evening and it wouldn’t even let me look at the website!  I tried another website and that got the same impenetrable message.  I remembered I’d installed a new VPN and ‘threat protection’ a few days ago, so I deleted them all and I think its now back to normal – I hope!    I finished the Rigby today, or at least I thought I had until sitting on the sofa playing with it I realised I hadn’t put a foresight on it.   I spent a good few hours fixing the half cock bent- I’ll  put a separate post on Locks and Detents and describe it in detail, but in summary I stuck a couple of tiny blobs of weld on the broken ‘top’ to the half cock notch – a really tricky job as I didn’t want to weld up the whole half cock notch and start again, then filed it to shape – it has to be just the right shape as I’ll outline in the post for the detent to work.  The detent consists of a small ‘flag’, the ‘fly’ that pivots through about 10 degrees in a recess on the tumbler and stops the sear from falling into the half cock notch when the gun is fired, but allows it to enter when you want half cock – on a ‘normal’ gun or pistol you pull the trigger hard enough to keep the sear out of the way when you fire the gun, but that doesn’t happpen with guns or pistols set up for very light trigger pressure, or those fitted with a ‘hair trigger’ so you need the ‘fly’ to guide it safely past the half cock bent. Getting the tumbler, sear and fly to work together is about the trickiest job in setting up a lock if you have remade any of the parts.  Anyway that is done and works well, I’m really pleased to say!   I made a new barrel bolt escutcheon out of copper sheet and silver plated it (quite thinly using my little brush plating kit, and also fitted a finishing escutcheon or ramrod pipe, also out of copper, silver plated – its a very small object and I couldn’t think of another simple way of doing it.  The barrel bolt was another job – in the past I have had a job cutting a neat slot in the middle for the pin that stops it being lost – I cracked it this time by marking a line of holes by sliding my centre punch along a straight edge as I tapped the marks – they came out perfectly in a straight line, and my Dremel with a cut-off disk joined them, then a small flat needle fire finished the job.  For the ‘knob’ on the end I used ‘blob technology’ with the welder again and filed it up, then heated it to red heat and sprinkeld on Blackleys case hardening powder and quenched it, then wire brushed it and popped it on the AGA for 10 minutes at about 280 C (I didn’t bother to check the tempreature, but its usually about 280 at that place on the second plate.)

I wAs thinking about why I do some of these jobs – some are obvious – nice things in reasonable nick with a single fault that needs fixing where you can charge a reasonable rate for the job and it is still viable. Others, like this Rigby I do because I don’t like to see a salvagable pistol get discarded – I can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear (although I’m working on it!) but I can make something that is worth hanging on to and will give pleasure to someone.  Even if, as in this case, I take shortcuts and don’t do as thorough job as I could, I end up taking many more hours than I can reasonably expect a client to pay for so I revert to thinking about it as a hobby that earns enough to pay for the tools and materials.  If I were to do a thorough job on the Rigby from start to finish it would  probably run to well over £1500, which is well above what the pistol could ever be worth, and its still only a poor conversion of a nice pistol.

30th May 2022     I’ve had to restart my diary here as I couldn’t get the old one to work – I couldn’t put any more on the blog as it wouldnt let me publish it so I’m guessing that its full.  Now I just have to find out how I make it appear first on the ‘front page’.  Well sort of – bit of a mystery so for the time being this will just sit in front of the other one and I’ll hope I can at least save and publish on this post – who knows!

Probably divine intervention becasuse I missed a few days of the diary!  Actually I had a bit of a problem with the infection I got – my GP surgery didn’t listen when I explained which antibiotics worked, and  so gave me the ‘wrong’ one, by the time I’d  collected the prescription and saw it was wrong, then managed to see a GP in person and get the right meds, the infection had got out of control and I ended up in A&E with intravenous antibiotics for a couple of days – no lasting harm done, I hope,  but not best pleased with the Surgery for not listening to what I said.  So back in full swing, and I hope no more sofa days or half days.  Trying to finish off the Rigby – its more or less done, now put together and looking pretty good compared to what I started with – shame about all the old irreversible repairs or it would be reall good.  I’d welded up the mouth of the cock fairly generously so it took a while to file it to shape and mill the cavity.  The first replacement nipple I put in was too short for the hammer, but I found an old one that was about right, and it will now ‘cap off’ in a satisfactory way.  I’ve put the re-etched barrel back – there is currently no barrel bolt so I made a quick and dirty ramrod out of dowel to hold the barrel in place – works fine.  So there are a few more jobs I could do if the client wishes – there is no ramrod pipe, barrel bolt, one barrel bolt escutcheon and the half cock bent needs welding and filing as its broken out and won’t catch.   All in all its an improvement of several orders of magnitude

26th  Sorry about the missed post yesterday – I have a nasty infection and a mostly sofa bound. I did manage a bit of gun work in the mornings.  The  Rigby is coming on.  I more or less finished the woodwork, and etched the barrel in ferric chloride which seems to be what the damascus knife makers use, then gave it a soak in hot logwood to blacken it.  Now bad!  I welded up the mouth of the cock – just have to file it into shape.  There are still some issues with it -;  no barrel bolt, no foresight ,no ramrod pipe, no ramrod , and the half cock bent is damaged so it won’t hold half cock. I’ve already spent a lot  of time on it so I’ll have to see what the client wants.

24th May  Mix of heavy rain and weak sunshine.  I’m spending more time on the Rigby than its really worth, but its a challenge and I think it will look good when its done.  I had done the basic wood repairs, just needing finishing, but I didn’t like the look of the  top of the projecting saw handle bit – it had a large hole, off centre and filled with plastic wood (remember the stuff?) and just detracted from the look of the pistol as it was the first and most obvious bit you see – I toyed with the idea of renmoving the plastic wood and putting in a wooden plug , but there was also a smaller hole with a plug, so I decided to bite the bullet and cut a slice off the top of the projecting bit and glue on a piece of walnut with a more or less matching and interesting grain.  I’ve oscillated on this job between using instant glue and proper wood glue.  Instant glue is obviously fairly fast, so if you keep a can of activator handy you don’t need elaborate clamps to hold things, but on the other hand if you need to position and clamp the repair, wood glue gives you time to get things right.  Mostly my instant glue gives me a few seconds  to position the pieces, but one bit I stuck on today set instantly before I had even a couple of seconds to move it – luckily it was just OK.  I had a look at refreshing the engraving on the Rigby barrel – its one of their pistols that have the name in Olde English Lettering – I had never done any and I couldn’t quite make out from the worn letters how some were made up – anyway the web came to my rescue and google images produced a pepperpot revolver with the right engraving. I think if I put the barrel in for etching I had better protect the engraving somehow mmmmm- I’ll think about it….

 

 

Good self-amalgamating tape as a tension binder.

 

23rd/24th May Busy with gun jobs – stripped the Rigby and glued a couple of blocks of walnut into neatly reshaped cavities – one more piece to add when I’ve shaped those two.  Someone had been messing about with the pistol fairly recently – there were cracks glued up with a very hard glue – unfortunately they didn’t close up the gaps before the glue set, so I’ve had to try to remove the glue. I’m hoping that it will all go together – I can’t reverse some of the repairs so it wont be perfect.  The barrel needs re-etching – Rigby pistol barrels were  almost always of etched fine damascus, this one could do with a little refreshing of the etching if I can find out what to use ?Copper Sulphate?  Nitric Acid?  I’ll have to do some research…………………. I’ve started to brown the two Nock barrels – lets hope it goes better than the last pair of pistols I browned, which took 14 rustings and were a bit stripy for my liking.

22nd May – Out to lunch with a couple of expert antique firearms friends – they had a very very nice  cased and  minty double 8 bore tubelock wildfowl gun (all of us are tubelock officianados) made in East Anglia in 1845, the second period of tubelock popularity – the first being much earlier when Joseph Manton patented the idea.  This one looked perfect, with a Lancaster style sprung holder for the tubes. Our interest centered around the touchholes – there was a short gap between the tube holder and the face of the barrel and touchhole – maybe 2 mm – that the tube had to bridge as it sat against the face of the touchhole. Our concern was that the face of the touchhole and barrel had only the small hole for ignition – around a mm in diameter or less whereas all the other tubelocks we have encountered have a  recess in the face of the touchhole to take the end of the tube.  Why hasn’t the Marham got a recess, which we thought was necesary to ensure the fire was directed accurately into the touchhole, even if the hammer distorted the tube on firing?  We speculated that the barrels may have come form a flintlock, or the gun originally made as a flintlock and then new locks made, but everthing looked of a piece as the saying goes – and that is always  important when you have some experience, which we all do.  My conclusion was that the maker, or whoever put the ensemble together could easily have recessed the touchholes or fitted new ones ( a standard repair at those times) and the fact that they didn’t suggests that they didn’t know it was the usual way, or didn’t think it was necessary. Anyway an interesting half hour after a splendid lunch in the garden.  Apparently according to my American friend my leaflet perporting to tell  how Joseph Manton made tubes for tubelocks is being circulated – so I think it is time I put it on this website, of course I can ony do that if I don’t believe anyone would be so stupid as to try making tubes…………………………………………  Being out most of the day, and it being a weekend, no gunwork was done!

21st (2) Loads of attempts to hack into the site today – about 500 from ip addresses scattered round the world, each a slightly different attack – either one person using loads of different vpn addresses or a botnet used individually.  I wish whoever it was had better things to do!

21st May – Out shooting clays at CGC all day with the Anglia Muzzle Loaders – I took the double Nock percussion in the end and hit about half the clays – must work on my psycology and I’d do better.  I went with a few friends on a mixed breech loader, percussion and flint round, and we did shoot a few simultaneous pairs – I was shooting my  1955  Berreta 20 bore hammer gun – loads of choke but I can hit a few clays although I do better with the 12G o/u if I want to shoot breech loaders.  I shifted a few cappers and a card dispenser so a small start to paying off my investment!  I’ll now put the rest of the bits and pieces in this websites SHOP and on ebay and see how they go.  It appears that there is a major shortage of percussion caps – maybe due to manufacturers working all out to make cartridges for Ukraine, in which case I don’t mind a bit of inconvenience!  I started to very gently strike up one of the Nock barrels – very gently using a No6 file along the barrel, followed by a small sharpening stone, followed by 1000 grit paper.  I don’t like to go finer than  1000 grit, or to do too much with it – my aim is not to make the barrel shiny – almost all barrels originally had at least some file marks where they were struck up.  It did get rid of most of the staining – I didn’t need to take of much at all and I was careful not to round off the edges of the engraving – indeed I was careful to leave all the arrises as sharp as possible.  I will try to unscrew the foresight when the penetrating oil has had time to work as its easier to brown without it – foresights  always penetrate through to the inside of the barrel as its too thin to tap a blind hole.  I  got another repair job today – the Rigby wreck – such a shame as it was once a fine gun but it obviously had a major break in the butt that has been repaired with  nails or pins and a screw, so one presumes that it was done before strong glues became available  – at least before WWII.  There is also some obviously more recent damage to the woodwork.  The dilemma with such damage is whether to try to undo the repair and redo it better, although in this case I think that approach would leave an even worse result.  The barrel is typical Rigby deeply etched true damascus, but with varying degrees of wear and damage -its a conversion from flint with a new breechblock. I think it will clean up OK but I won’t attmpt a reconversion!

Major break right across the butt and extensive fore end damage

I think with a bit of work it will be much better = I’ll try to sort the barrels, maybe re-etch them – but I’ll derust it all first.

20th May – Bit of gun work today, along with the week’s shopping.  I stripped the other Nock pistol of its barrel – they seemed to have coating of something, but I couldn’t touch it with alcohol or acetone so used Nitromors paint stripper which got off a ginger mess – no ides what the barrel was coated with (over the rust!).  Popped both together into the derusting tank at about 3 Amps for a couple of hours which turned the rust black and let me rub it off with 0000 steel wool and a very fine wire wheel on the grinder – the metal is pretty clean with just a few patches of shallow corrosion, almost just staining.  I’ll very gently rub them down, probably with a piece of sharpening stone so as not to round the corners – we’ll see.   I also stripped the little Parker pistol I bought – it has the usual splits under the barrel, so the first job is to see what can be closed up, and then work isocyanate glue into the cracks and set it off with activator after binding it up gently with self amalgamating tape – I got quite a lot of glue into the cracks so I’m happy that it went in a decent way and should hold it all together. n The metalwork will all go in the derusting tank and get cleaned up.  The basic repair needed is replacement of the cock – I think I probably have a suitable casting.  the mainspring was loose when I got it, I’m sure I put it somewhere!  I usually put all the small bits of guns in zippy plastic bags and label them, even if I only take them off til tthe next day as I’m always afraid of loosing bits of client’s guns – I just got another 1000 small bags (about a tenner!).

Electrolytic derusting and 0000 steel wool and a very fine wire wheel ( avoiding the engraving)

 

19th May (2) – just been checking the statistics that my server keeps of the visits to the site – quite an increase in visitors since I started posting every day again, and a lot of searches on Google and suddenly a lot on Bing too.  The Russians are back – hi Guys! – after disappearing for a while,  My software blocks anyone trying to access bits of the site they are not supposed to, and if its repeated attacks I make the blocks permenant instead of 30 days.  Most of the attacks are from bot nets – computers that have been hacked and had programs installed that relay attacks – the computer user being unaware his computer is being hijacked.  There are a couple of botnets that I can track that target this site, because when they attack they always repeat the attack a fixed number of times from each computer, and it stands out in the blocking statistics – one botnet always tries 21 times, so every day I get a different  IP address (hacked computer)  that tries 21 times to access something it shouldn’t.  I did once track down the IP address of the botnet master and get him stopped by his service provider, but that is unusual and he had a particular pattern of deploying his bots. There must be many hundreds of hacked computers round the world that are banned from this site permenantly.  Its amazing  what you can find out from message statistics without knowing the details, as law enforcement knows well.   I’m reminded that in warfare you can, or at least could, predict enemy action simply by the volume of traffic without being able to read it, presumably that is now avoided by dummy traffic.  My blog has had almost half a million visitors since I started it, and they have made over three and a half million clicks on things!  7 clicks per visit is reckoned good for a website – retailers would be envious!

19th May – Most of the day pottering about outside filling the skip as it was really too nice to be indoors.  I finished off fitting the link – it fits perfectly and when the cock is completely down it leaves the spring about 1 mm above the bottom edge of the lock – identical to the other lock, so I could pack it up for posting and send off a Paypal invoice – I use Paypal for all my invoicing because it allows clients to pay by card online without an account and then lets me buy postage and print an post paid address label and keeps a record of it – seductively handy!   If it fits a post box I can then drop it in, otherwise I have to go to the local P.O. which is 5 minutes drive or 20 minutes walk away.  I do feel guilty about not putting the money through the local office, but it does save fussing about with labels and addresses.   I have now got to finish the job I started on the Nock pistol – I have its mate now and have to de ding  it and then sort out the barrels – the engraving is very sharp but there is some rust – there appears to be a layer of varnish on them too, but it might just be oxidised oil.  When I took the first one out of the woodwork there was a little red rust along the edge under the wood, and a few pits.  I’ll run the barrels through the electrolytic deruster, then see about gently rebrowning them.   I need to think about Fred’s engraving, but I have to be in the mood and at the moment I’m not really there!  I’m also expecting a Rigby pistol in a terribly smashed up condition, only just not a bin job, and only because it has a famous name on it – I took it on as a challenge to see if it was possible to make something of it.  I’m still fidgeting about the possibility of buying a boat to keep in Stornaway for Hebredean cruising when Penny retires, the trouble is that any boat I buy in the South of England is about 3 weeks sailing from where we want it……………….

18th May – Odd job day!  Sorting out a few outside jobs that needed doing in anticipation of summer – clean up the barbeque and garden furniture for example.  My skip arrived so happy days filling it – they always look so big, but somehow they get filled in the week they are on site.   Did my STEM club yesterday – the kids came in having spent the afternoon outside in the sun at a racing stables and hot and excited so it took a while for them to settle, but they got into computing eventually!   I printed up a few more cap dispensing ‘stars’ yesterday – when I came to look at the progress they were still printing but were a mess – not sure what happened but it looked as if the top layers were displaced relative to the bottom.  anyway when I tried again it wouldn’t get the first layer to stick to the printer bed as the extruder nozzle was too high off the bed – not sure how it got that way, but it took me a while to sort it out – in the end I only managed to sort it out by following the handbook exactly – not the sort of thing I normally do!  The Anglian Muzzle loaders have a shoot on Saturday, so I might go – its a double barreled competition, but I could take my single and do my own thing – not sure yet which it will be – I will take a pile of my cappers etc and see if there is any demand –  I will print up some covers with Angla Muzzle Loaders on them!  Then I think I’ll put them on Ebay and on the SHOP on this site.  I got as far as drilling the hole in the link casting, but haven’t separated it from the sprue yet as its easier to handle while attached

17th May  Just typed in a whole lot and lost it!  I got the go-ahead to do the link on the lock that was wrong, and with great good fortune found an old link casting I got from Dick a couple of years ago along with a load of rusting junk and some lock part castings.  I took out the old link, not only was it a bit too long, but the hole for the pin holding it to the tumbler is very worn.  My casting is slightly longer than the link in the OK lock, but with luck will do the job – I’d very much prefer not to have to machine and file up one from solid!  I managed to give away our old trampoline yesterday – a relic of when the boys were at home, and cause of two broken wrists!  I have a skip coming tomorrow – always a cause of excitement, so I’ll see how much rubbish I can dispose of……..

 

TThe mainspring is very strong, I’m surprised the  worn top hole on the old link didn’t break.

15th May  Finished the safety catches after hours of filing – then trial fitted and drilled peg hole, then engraved them and coloured them down – first at red heat with Blackley’s colour hardening powder then clean up and pop on the AGA hotplate at around 260C till the colour looks right, then put it all together – it worked.  The little detent on the spring that pops the safety slider from one position was a bit strong, so I eased it a bit – that aspect now works OK … BUT when I finally put the locks together, including the springs, the spring and link of one hung below the edge of the lock, meaning it would rest on the woodwork if installed. The other was fine.  My initial thought was that I had got some component swapped between the two lock, but that was pretty unlikely as I am always meticulous in keeping all the parts from each gun separate and in zippy plastic bags.  Anyway I figured I might possibly have got the springs swapped, so I swapped them – that seemed to make no difference – the spring of one still gaped – however in the swapped state the cock wouldn’t go to full cock on the ‘gaping’ as the link on the spring was fouling the tumbler  – looking carefully one mainspring is slightly longer than the other.  But that didn’t explain the spring hanging low on one lock. Carefull measurement on each lock showed that the link between spring and  tumbler was very different on the two locks – 9 mm on one lock, 11 on the other, gaping lock.  I assume that the long link was a replacement because the original broke.  It needs fixing if anyone is going to fire off the pistol or it is likely to break out the wood

 

 

Cocks against stop on edge of lock plate – tumblers are in about the same position. Bottom spring overhangs badly.

 

The springs are slightly different lengths.  The different link lengths mean the top lock spring has much greater tension. Both at half cock.

 

14th May – Beautiful day.  Bit of excitement in Waitrose car park – a woman was trying to collect samples of people’s signatures and , I think, credit card details on a bogus petition – She was asking for ‘something that could confirm your signature’ which I think she hoped would be a credit card – I suspect she may have had a micro camera too.  Anyway the Manager and security man and I checked out the car park and saw someone who looked like her from the back getting into a car and driving off – I got a photo of the number plate – police notified, although whether they will follow it up is another matter…..  Anyway the sfety catches are moving on – one is almost complete – I don’t have enough of the broken one to know what the ‘handle’ looks like, although obviously the original wasn’t strong enough as it was very thin where it joins the sliding part and had broken off.  I had a look at a few flintlock pistols and came up with a compromise pattern, see below

20 mm overall length – quite fiddly to make… still a bit  of finishing to do, and the engraving – a couple of lines of running leaf pattern, so small they just look like lines until you look with the microscope.

13th May  Went for my regular visit to my oncologist – his cheering thought for the day was that once you get to 80 it means you are a surviver, and actuarially your risk of dying levels out – all the unhealthy individuals having dropped out already!   I made another card dispenser – slightly modified – its so easy and cheap and prints overnight, so its easier to make another for each improvement, rather than spend a lot of time with the designing.  I  am working on the stock of the Nock pistol – its looking OK so far – now I think the barrel looks a bit sad……….  I started work on the safety sliders for the Parkers – it is a very fiddly job and my milling machine is pretty rickety, plus the digital readouts are prone to jumping, so I don’t dare to get very close to the finished sizes.  The key to making small bits like these is to have a handle to hold the work in a vice, and cut it off when you are almost finished.  In this case I have left a full, deep ‘keel’ that will be cut down to make the tabs that passes through the lock plate  when the external parts of the sliders is finished.  I rang about the other Moody this morning but it was already under offer, having been on the market for only 5 days – clearly they are in demand .  I’ll have to widen my search. Looking through the countries of origin of visitors to this site, I see that it has got a lot more visitors since I have been posting every day – I also saw only one visitor from Russia today – they used to make up around 1/4 of all visitors

I should be able to make both out of this, but not much to spare.

12th May – finished my SATS invigilating and etc.  The only downside is that I ought to write a Governors report on the activities for the Board of Governors -I hate writing these reports!  I did the repair to the butt of the Parker pistol, and now need to take out some dings and dents by steaming it.  In preparation I took the barrel out, probably a mistake (or a good thing depending on your vantage point) as I dicovered a bit of rust around where the barrel and wood meet at the edge.  It looks like at some point the barrel, and probably most of the gun got a thin coat of shellac – the barrel could really do with stripping down and refinishing…. but |I’ll take a rain check on that!  I have finished rendering my overshot card dispenser in plastic and it works just fine.  I did have to resort to gluing two parts to get the slot where the cards come out right as slots don’t print very well, but I am quite pleased with the design.   I found another Moody 36 on the web today, so I’ll try to go and see it ASAP.  They are old boats, made in 1980, but they made them well in those days!  And of course they are much cheaper than a modern boat of the same size.  We shall see….

Needs colouring to match and refinishing

Holds 50 to 100 overshot cards

11th May – I havent been doing much this week as I’ve been in school invigilating the SATS exams, playing at being the Black Knight for the 5 and 6 year olds, and running STEM club.  I do have a 3D printing project on the go – Some time ago I made a fancy dispenser for overshot cards for my 16 bore Nock etc.  It was very fancy – brass, and leather covered, and worked a treat, but too costl to offer for sale ( about £100 each?) so I am working on a 3D printed card dispenser on the same lines – its going OK, I did get one printed but one of the components was a bit thin and broke, so I am beefing it up and also making it suitable for any cards up to about 11 bore.  Watch this space….  I have started a couple of gun jobs – a pistol stock with bit out of the butt – a neat chip off along the grain that will be straightforward, and a couple of safety catches to make as replacements for a pair of pistols by William Parker.  To my amusement, but not surprise, I found that the side nails didn’t fit if you swapped them – I did it as an experiment – and the sliding safety catch was 4.5 mm wide on one and 5.25 on the other , so no chance of quickly making a couple to the same milled dimensions.  Safety catches are always a bit of a fiddle – they are by far the smallest components in a lock, and the pin holding the inner part to the slider is about 1.5 mm long and about 0.4 diameter, so VERY easy to loose.   Replacing the chip shouldn’t be too bad as it broke along a fairly flat bit of grain  – one tip with small repairs like that is to slightly hollow the middle of the area  so you get good contact round the edges – its particularly useful if you are using epoxy adhesive as that ‘likes a certain thickness of glue layer – I I used astandard D3 Gorilla wood glue as it makes a thinner glue line.  I had a bit of a disappointment today – we had decided that we might buy a yacht and keep it in Stornaway.  I’d found a nice 36 foot Moody 36CC only a couple of hours away and was going to view on Friday, being busy in school till them, but alas it sold in the meantime – he who hesitates looses!  So I’ll have to look around – trouble is, its probably a sellers market at the moment.  Oh, and my first capper system is on the SHOP page at the top.  The rest of the system will follow when I get a moment – I’m waiting for boxes at the moment.

 

The grain is quite curved, but the missing bit was sheared along the grain fairly flat – you can never tell if it is going to match til you finish!

Making the new sliders (bottom right) will be very fiddly!  might try welding this one.

7th May – Maybe we are into the warm weather here now – it will be warmer next week.  I got another gun job today, a small piece of wood to put on to repair a butt of a Henry Nock officer’s pistol.  I looked at Freds ebgraving and felt guilty that I hadn’t begun – any hope of doing it next week was out of the door as I will be spending most of the week in school – its the national SATS exams and I’ve been recruited to invigilate, plus doing Tuesday afternoon as a Knight, and later in the STEM club.  I’m hoping to  wrap up the cappers by the end of the week – I have built up a bit of a stock and got the packaging sorted, just need to print up some labels and start selling them – I worked out prices on the basis of printer time for the various parts plus material cost (not much) plus a postage and handling charge – I won’t get rich but it might go some way to paying for the printer!

5th May – Lovely day shooting at CGC – I used my little Nock and hit a few clays that I was really pleased to get, and as usual missed some that looked easy – it was ever thus!   I took my Cablesfarm capper system to show our regular group and immediately sold two full sets, so that was good.  I’d printed one up with Cambridge Gun Club, and I think when I’ve got into production they will sell them – they are quite into muzzle loading and are planning to sell black powder so that would fit.   Pete commented that he’de like a loop on the tub as he likes to hang everything about his person – so I’ll obligue… I’m just in the process of working out how to price them – it reminds me of the school activity that got me involved in primary school STEM activities – I was asked by Suffolk Education Dept if I would be a Dragon for a primary school Dragon’s Den for 7 and 8 year olds.  I offered to help with the run up to the activity and got heavily involved in making things in class,  any way the point of the anecdote is that when we came to judge the event the children had to explain their business plan, including costs and selling price – one lad gave a figure for his unit cost that was higher than his selling price – when asked how he was going to make any money that way, he said he would just sell more!  A lot of people in real businesses seem to think that way too!  I am not one of them….

3rd May – Did my STEM Club at school today – great to be with the kids – they are getting involved in the programming and had fun running around tha school testing out the range of the radios built into the Microbit computers – I reckon they work to at least 100m on the default setting, which is enough for boats and cars, although probably not good enough to use them to control model aircraft!  Next week we will take in the 3D printer to show them and set them to printing name plates – their teacher and the head are both coming along to see the technology at work!  I’ve been playing around with different sortware for ‘slicing’ – making the model shape into instructions for the machine to move and push out plastic in the right places.  One program produces perfect bottoms in contact with the baseplate, but slightly scrappy top surfaces, the other is the opposite – I’m sure that with enough expert tinkering ( there are around 50 or so variables to tweek!) they can both be made near perfect, but fiddling with a lot of variables gives an enormous number of possible options, only a very few of which are what is wanted – how to find them?   My current plan is to put my capper system on this website when I have got it sorted – I’ll start by selling a simple option and add my fancy bits in time.

1st May  – Happy May Day – whatever it is that happens on May Day, possibly the official start of spring?   I made the perspex case to fit round my 3D printer to keep little fingers off the works when I take it into school.  Only problem was I didn’t measure the backward projection of the printer bed when it was in the back position accurately enough and the case is  about 2 mm too short so I’ll have to cut a slot for the bed to go into – not a problem, just a bore!  I’m quietly printing more bits for the capper system and refining bits so they don’t need any tinkering with once they are printed.  Might make a turnscrew tomorrow for fun.  It would be good to have a nipple key too – I’ll have to think about that, the space is a bit limited and it would need to be pretty strong  – still,   as the whole point of the exercise is to have fun doing mechanical design and making things, that isn’t a reason not to have a go!   Might make a titanium one, not sure if I can TIG weld titanium, must have a look – almost certainly involve buying more tools – making things always does! Getting near to engraving Fred’s gun etc – the workshop is nearly warm enough to work in and I can probably find some old floorboards to cut up for the woodburner – need to check that I haven’t inadvertently left any black powder lying about!  And time to order a skip to clear out the muck from renovating the bedroom, and I ought to do a car boot sale soon to clear out the attic  and the lawns are now approaching max growth rate…………  No peace for the wicked – makes me tired just to think about it.

30th April – The frost took out one Courgette plant and two runner bean plants last night – not best pleased!    I finished off the nipple jobs today – I managed to get the total time to make one down to 55 minutes, which, allowing for tea breaks, means I am probably almost on the minimum wage now if you ignore equipment costs!    I did make one improvement over the last few days – I turn up and tap the thread in the lathe first, then screw it into a bit of bar with the correct thread, and put the bar in the lathe to turn the nipple end – I now mill a flat on the bar with a step at the nipple end so I can locate it in the vice in the milling machine and put both flats on accurately and quickly.  I also saved a few minutes by drilling both holes from the nipple end – first the 2.1 mm hole nearly through, and then the 1.2 mm hole through – that way you only  drill the necessary bit of 1.2 mm thread.  The reason I didn’t do it like that before was that it puts the 1.2mm hole as the last operation, so if the drill breaks you have to throw away the whole job!  My 3D printer is still working overtime – making hinges and bits to put a cover on itself.  I should finish the cover tomorrow, then I really need to think about engraving Fred’s locks and furniture – a good deal of practice will be needed…….

29th April Another 3 nipples today – I didn’t screw up any of them this time, but I had a small battle with Pete’s gun, which had had one nipple tapped out to M8 x 1.25 and the other sleeved to 1/4 BSF 28t.p.i.  I happened to have the M8 taps and dies from my previous engineering exploits so that was no problem,  The 1/4 BSF was a bit tight in the insert, and eventually unscrewed it ( it was Araldited in) when I tried to get the nipple out to recut it a bit.  I was able to separate the nipple and the insert with some trepidation and a big pair of pliers*, and glued the insert back in and ran a very sharp carbon steel die down the nipple.  I use carbon steel dies and not HSS.  HSS are about 4 times the price, at least they are from Tracy Tools, and actually don’t cut as well – they are less brittle, and for lathe tools stand much faster cutting speeds, but for hand cutting of threads heat is hardly a problem – as for wear – its much better to buy several and discard them after a dozen nipples of so.  I reckon it takes me about 1 1/2 to 2 hours to from start finish to make a nipple on average, so at the price I charge it would hardly pay the minimum wage, let alone the living wage!  Lucky I don’t depend on it for anything other than paying for the odd tool or material.  My evening project at the moment is fixing a Perspex cover round the 3D printer so I can take it into school and leave it running in class.  Ive designed a set of brackets and hinges to hold the panels and they will print overnight tonight so I can finish the job over the weekend.  I also need to print out several sets of my cappers before I put them on Ebay – each set will take around 12 hours to print so my maximum output is 2 sets a day – I’m not going to get rich at that either! (it might just pay for the materials and wear and wear on the printer). But then when you look at a lot of fast growing businesses they don’t make a profit for years and investers pour millions into them  in the hope that they will hit lucky and one day the company will actually make money – its all about building a brand – Cablesfarm.co.uk  – any investor wishing to pour millions into growing my brand will receive a free set of cappers (maybe).  *One lesson I’ve learnt in this game is that you need to hold things very firmly to avoid damage = half hearted gripping does the most damage.

 

 

28th April – back to being a bit chilly, especially evenings and nights, after the warm spell  in March.  I did do some gun work today – in fact I spent half the day making a couple of nipples – I sometimes wonder why I insist of making them out of titanium as its a real pain – very easy to work harden it if you don’t make continuous cuts – I got the end of the parting tool so hot by not noticing that it was not cutting that it flashed the titanium – fortunately only a quick flash, but a reminder that titanium is quite inflamable when in the form of fine swarf, and mixed with cutting oil is a potent fire risk that water only makes worse. Anyway I trashed two nipples, one by taking too much off by not thinking, and another by busting off the 1.2 mm drill – drilling such fine holes in titanium is really quite tricky as you need to keep up some pressure on the drill to keep it cutting and avoid work hardening, but too much and it breaks – I can guarentee that when I get back to making nipples after a long break, I screw up a couple before I get the hang.  I buy the 1.2 mm drills by the 10, partly because I break them but mainly because they only stay sharp enough for a few nipples.  Mostly I use lathe tools with replaceable carbide tips, but that doesn’t work for the parting tools or for the modified parting tool that I need to undercut the shoulder of the thread.  Beware that taking  very fine cuts is very hit and miss – the metal will either cut or burnish – its particularly true of thread cutting – you have to get it right on the first cut – if you try to run the die a scond time closed down, it invariably burnishes and will be very tight – and when you back it off it will be just as tight as no metal has been removed.  I did a bit more playing with my capper system – I made a box and lid to fit in the housing to carry 50 or 60 spare nipples – mostly to see if I could get the opening and locking right – it works on the third attempt……   I’ll tackle Pete’s nipples tomorrow, if I can remember what the problem was!  I’ve still got a list of outside jobs to finish and the hedges are starting to burst forth, and the lawns to grow rapidly……   Penny is now able to drive again after her hip transplant, so that means I will have the house to myself in the daytime.

 

 

Two new + sample

Really an exercise in design for 3D printing – my printer is working overtime since I bought it!

27th Did my first STEM club at school for 2 years – great to be back with the kids.  On the way out I got clobbered – to bring my suit of armour into the little ones class and play the part of a knight for their history project – promised to be fun – I have a couple of helmets and they all get to try them on (its all repro, probably late Victorian?).  I am busy refining my cappers – its turning into a system – I do enjoy engineering design – Dave, my STEM buddy, said it ought to have a cover – quite right!  And I was going to supply my decappers with it, but redesigned them to fit within the cover – now I’m designing a container to be part of the system for spare caps, then I need to design a nipple pricker.  Only possible because I spent several years gainfully employed doing  CAD design work in Solidworks quite a few years ago!  Tomorrow I start the gun work in ernest – I have quite a queue, so I owe it to my clients to stop playing and get working!

Gets more elaborate by the minute!

25th April – not such a nice day today.  Busy finishing off my STEM project for the school club tomorrow afternoon.  My friend Dave and I have built a model safe with a door opened and closed by a servo motor, all controlled by a microbit computer – a complicated bit of 3D printed engineering and software.  We have now added a remote control to the project!   We have 8 children from years 5 and 6 taking part – basically aged 9 and 10.  We dream up these projects and do our prep and homework, but until we get started with the club we really don’t know how much they will be able to understand or do – so we always end up flying by the seat of our pants!   I just bought a wreck of an overcoat pistol by Harding, the maker of the Post Office pistols I restored –  it has a broken cock and frizzen spring, and need general sorting, but they won’t be too bad when finished, although with a replacement cock and spring they won’t pass as fully original.  The source of supply of good castings for the cocks of small pistols has more or less dried up, but I probably have one that will do at a pinch,  It’s always tricky to put a price on things like this as very few people can source the parts and do the restoration, and overcoat pistols, even originals in fair condition don’t fetch a lot,  I’m not sure why but they are worth  considerably less than larger pistols of comparable quality. A quick look through the auction catalogues indicate estimates of around £250 to £350 for reasonable all original overcoat pistols.  Given that the cost of restoration will be £200  to £250 or more including the parts at my incredibly reasonable rates, it doesn’t leave  a lot to pay for the pistol as is.  On the other hand, I need to feed my blog with restorations occasionally or all my visitors will desert me, and I do have a soft spot for Harding’s utilitarian output!   I figured the estimate at auction would be £80 to £120 – I gave a bit more than that for it as I don’t need to pay myself for the work.  One blog visitor thought that my red cappers I showed yesterday were a bit garish for a basically historic sport – I had the same thought and had ordered a spool of dark green filament – I also have black.  I looked to see if you could buy camo filament, mainly just out of interest – you can, but only carbon reinforced filament that is a bit tricky to print, expensive and unnecesarily strong.  Probably what people in the US use for 3D printing bits of firearms – I’ve never quite understood how much of the pistol you can print, and whether you need any metal tube. I think you can only get a couple of shots before the thing is unusable?   I would go searching the internet for designs in order to get answers, but goodness knows what level of surveilance we are all subject to – and not just from Google.  I use a VPN (Virtual Private Network) portal for connecting to the web but that doesn’t completely isolate you.

24th April  – Enjoyed a pleasant clay shoot on Thursday with the lads – I reverted to using my little Nock single, and convinced everyone, myself included, that I shoot better with that gun than any of my others.  I still need to educate myself to shoot slow clays effectively – the longer I can see them coming the less likely I am to hit them – if I don’t spot them until the last minute I am a much better shot.  Its particularly noticable with the little Nock as its rather too easy to wave it about in the air if the clay is in sight for too long, whereas my big old o/u 12 is a bit steadier for those clays.  The only exception to the long wait/poor result is fo incomers or crows where I don’t shoot them until they are falling fast.  I used to find that I did well at simultaneous pairs, but that is not an option with a single barreled gun!   I’ve been busy getting our tomato and runner bean plants in, and setting up the automatic watering system – I have a small reservoir that is filled from the clock controlled tap control, and then drains into the grow bag via a perforated tube. I needed to make a bung for the resevoir and a couple of mounting brackets – an hour doing the CAD design and it was ready to print on the 3D printer and four hours later they were installed and working.  The technology is really transforming making things.  I more or less finalised the design of my percusssion cap dispensers – I settled on using ‘spiders’ with 8 arms as its handy not to have to keep changing them, and designed a double ended sprung shaft  so you can have loaded ‘spiders at one end, and put the empty ones at the other end, with a disk separating them.  I tried an earlier design on Thursday, but it had nowhere for the empty spiders so I put them in pockets etc and it was not easy to find how many caps I’d used.  A shaft has room for up to 7 spiders, giving you up to 56 shots, which ought to be enough for any muzzle loading session/shoot. +  I used a square shaft as it works out better for printing, and it keeps all the caps in line so they can’t fall out.  I’ll put them in the SHOP on this website and also on ebay when I have worked out a price and made a few more sets.

The ‘frills’ on the top  spider are an optical effect due to the somewhat flourescent plastic

Maybe I should make them in a more sober colour, only these are easily spotted if dropped.

19th April (just)  I had another look at the Manton to see if I could find the reason it double fires once in every hundred shots or so – I put a smear of modelling clay on the wood where the sear arm might touch if it didn’t have enough clearance, but that just showed there was a clearance of 1 mm or more – so still no nearer a solution – I was pretty sure from looking at it that it was OK, before the clay check, but its best to measure these things if possible.   Still busy with the 3D printer – the pile of almost right designs grows by the hour!

17th April  – I remembered I needed to look at a bit of a problem I had with my flintlock at the clay shoot on Thursday – On one occasion I fired the right barrel and the left cock came down and fired immediately – apparently on the recoil.  It had happened once before to Bev trying my gun for the first time, and once to me  out of perhaps 200 shots.  On this occasion I just swapped to firing the left barrel first, but in the past I didn’t bother to do this.  My first thoughts were that the full cock bent on the left lock must be worn so the engagement was poor.  When I stripped the gun to clean it I checked the bents and they looked perfect and identical on both locks, with the sear making a good engagement and as far as I could tell with the lock out of the gun, requiring a definite pull to fire – in fact if anything I would have said that the pull was on the heavy side.  The other potential cause of this problem is that the sear arm is stopped from falling enough to fully engage the sear in the bent  – this can be because the sear arm is stopped by the wood of the stock, or because the trigger plate stays in contact with the sear arm because the trigger can’t move forward enough.  Either of these causes might indicate that the sear arm is bent too far down.   In this case there was definitely still play in the trigger on full cock, and no sign that the sear arm was anywhere near the wood.  So I’m none the wiser – I suppose my finger could have slipped onto the second trigger on recoil but I’m not sure that is very likely, I also wondered if it was possible to cock the gun without engaging the sear fully, but playing with the bare lock, that seemed unlikely .  It’s a good John Manton with the locks in excellent condition inside and no suggestion that anything has been tinkered with on the locks – it even has neat little rollers on the ends of the sears to reduce friction with the trigger plates – I think I replaced the left roller, but its exactly the same diameter as that on the right and I don’t think the sear arm was bent to compensate for a missing roller.  I’m still playing around with the 3D printing, and getting frustrated because the fluorescent filament isn’t as strong as I’d like.  I’m also still nursing my damaged finger, but it seems to be on the mend….  Just checked the statistics for visitors to this website – very interesting!  Almost all the Russian visitors have gone, some of whom were probably trying to hack the site – Russians used to be about the 4th or 5th most frequent visitors.  I did have one visit from Kyiv today, so someone had time to look at a couple of posts – my thoughts are with them in their terrible situation.

Perfect bents and sear – not sure why it all looks so mucky in the photo – its actually pretty clean with a few spots of old discolouration.

15th April  Had a shoot yesterday and distributed 75 Kg of  the shot I bought from Clay and Game – I could have got rid of 200 Kg instead of the 100 I bought.  It was a  pleasant all flintlock morning, not that I hit much!  In the afternoon I had Tom’s Barreta O/U 12 to see if I could still heave it around as I mostly use a light side by side 20 bore now.  I did hit a reasonable number of clays, including a few snap shots that convinced me that I could swing it fast if needed – I got through 50 cartridges with no ill effects, so OK.  I have been using the 3D printer for various bits of the school STEM project, but I decided to print a copy of a plastic star shaped cap dispenser I had seen- I’m not sure where the design came from but its pretty simple to make, I think a chap in Poland sells them.  Anyway I made a 6 armed star, and then decided that an 8 armed star would mean you only needed 5 stars to cover a 40 bird clay shoot so I am printing a peg to store 5 on.  They are currently being printed in flourescent raspberry red, which actually proved its value on our wander round the shooting ground as I dropped one of the prototypes and it was very easily spotted.  Unfortunatel you can’t get the really tough plastic filament in nice colours so the plastic I’m using isnt as strong as I’d like.  I can probably print 10 or 12 stars overnight, including pegs etc.  I’ll put them in my Shop when I’ve sorted the peg etc and worked out a price – next project will be to print an overshot card dispenser. I’ve more or less finished the window, just got a bit of plastering to do and, for fun, reinstall the little rotating prism device with its solar cell that has been faithfully turning when the sun shines for around 20 years – it causes little moving rainbows to project onto the walls.

12th April  Busy finishing and installing the new window – in the course of fitting the pintles into the frame I hit the frame with a 7 lb club hammer and my finger was directly underneath – right across the top of the nail – not nice – fortunately my left hand!  Anyway ithe window is now in, just a bit of sealing round the edge and a couple of plugs to fill the screw fixing holes, and I can get back to guns again – I now have a queue – Fred’s locks and furniture to engrave, a couple of safety catches on a pair of pistols to make and a pair of nipples for a repro with metric threads that I’ll have to buy a die for as its too fiddly to set up the lathe for metric and turn a thread.  The 3D printing is coming on well, it is a pretty amazing tool, and the parts look good and are strong and quite accurate in size, and the way it does holes is fine for tapping threads – which reminds me, I broke off a M2.5 tap in one hole, so when I buy the die I’d better get another 2.5mm 2nd tap.  I was thinking yesterday that it was ages since I’d shot any clays – I’m itching to take the flintlock out again!  Next domestic job is to build a big bin box under the new widow, and then get on with making the frames for the secondary double glazing – I’ve left it too late for any benefit this winter, which does relieve the pressure a bit although every time I see the £2000 pile of Venio vacuum glass I feel I should get on with it.  Oh, and I’m glad to report that the owner of the sea service lock I engraved is very happy with the result.

3rd April – still a bit chilly, especially in the shed where I did manage to finish getting the glass and cames assembled for the second window opening – ready to solder now.  I have been trying to make a video, but its difficult to find a good palce to put the camera to get an interesting view of how to do things.  I finished making the design for my first useful 3D printed model – a part for the next STEM project at school.  I’m mighty impressed by how straightforward the process is, and how good the finished part is.  The printing can be a slow job – this part took about 9 hours to print, and it saves time and plastic by making all the solid areas as a thin shell with a web inside – it is, however extremely rigid and strong – apart from being a bit lighter than you would expect it is not immediately obvious that it isn’t a solid lump of plastic.  The plastic for this 180 x 90mm part was £1.50, so not even very expensive of material -even at retail prices, and of course no wastage.  You can see why it has the potential to be an important process in the future – commercially you need hundreds of printers all wired up to a control system with automatic collection of parts etc, but that is all possible with very little human intervention.

2nd April -Cold weater and a bit of snow strike, just when one thinks that spring is arriving !   Having finished the bedroom I have started on making the new leaded window, but that involves working in the unheated shed, so it has to be done in 2 hour bursts or I would freeze to death.  So time for other things – I got my 3D printer on Friday and assembled it, and printed the demonstration piece that they give you the G Code for – a sort of small vase.  Printing is quite slow as its in layers of 0.2 of a mm, so it takes a lot of layers to get to a sensible size – the little vase is about 75mm or 3 inches high – that is 375 layers – and there is an inner shell and an outer shell and a web of reinforcement between the two – it took 1 1/2 hours to print.   I will get on to something useful when I get a moment.  Giles pointed out to me that one can now get access to Solidworks – a fantastic piece of CAD design software – for an annual subscription of £107 as an amateur ‘maker’ – that compares favourably to the £3450 it costs per year for commercial use!  I used it a lot when I was a consultant engineer – it is by far the best program of its kind, so I subscribed.  I have been really surprised by how easy it is to get going on the 3D printing – the only hurdle is doing the designs in the first place.  I have some projects lined up in conjunction with my STEM club at the school, and I wil probably take it into school and have it running – the children will be fascinated.   To guns;- When my father died 10 years or so back , my brother and I shared his gun collection, which we bought out of the estate.  He managed to bag a pair of Griffin and Tow horse pistols that I didn’t know about, and as he has now died my sister in law wants to sell them – I have got a couple of estimates for them, and will probably buy them from her.  I was expecting them to be worth more than they seem to be, I will get another valuation before I decide.  I had had a good look at them under the microscope, I would have expected the cocks to be engraved but they appeared to be original, and certainly not made from modern castings – the two tumbler/cock screws are  different on the two pistols, both look as if they could be right,  – one resembles those in the book.  I was surprised that the side nails and tang screw/nails had plain domed heads, but checked against Keith-Neil’s book on Griffin and Beale that appeared to be right for his pistols although unusual except in military arms.  I noticed in the book that a number of the pistols had tang screws with the slots not aligned fore and aft – quite unusual in my experience.  When talking to Geoff Walker he pointed out some faint marks on one cock that could be a welding repair – I might be able to check that by taking the cock off – probably worth doing anyway.  One of the pistols has a repaired break right across the wrist that has been glued up (therefore not contemporary with the period of the pistol) but leaving a visible glue line – the pistols have been refinished over the repair – I havent checked if its a shellac or oil finish ( or possibly a modern varnish – heaven forbid!)  so it looks as if they have been restored – so almost anything could have been done to them, but mostly pretty well. Anyway here they are;

31st March:   I don’t know what is happening to this website!  I lost the main post with all the latest blog the other day and couldn’t find any trace of it!  Today I went to edit it and it was all back so I hastily copied most of the recent blog to a new file – then went back to get the rest, but it had diappeared without trace!  So a new header, and the restored latest diary should be on here.  I think I have actually lost about 6 months

25th March  I finished the Sea Service lock engraving using the air graver to get a bit deeper than I usually go with a push engraver.  The lock plate is quite pitted and worn but some of the old engraving could still be seen so I was somewhat constrained in what I could do, but I found a photo on the web (see below) that resembles what I could make out on the lockplate, even down to some assymetry.  When I had finished engraving it all looked a bit raw, so I gave it a quick go over with my fine fibre wheel to round off the edges of the cuts a little.  That did the trick, but left the lock looking a bit patchy and bright, so I gently heated it up with a propane torch until it turned grey, which looked much more comfortable – it can now go back to its owner for putting in the pistol. I can now think about Fred’s gun parts, which I haven’t yet unpacked.  It was a lovely day here- probably all we’ll get for a summer- so I wandered around the garden and realised that I’d intended to replace the last of the old windows last summer, but couldn’t as our superb crop of tomatos was growing in front of it.  So I really need to replace it before this year’s plants go in shortly.  I made the frame about 20 years ago, and got the iron casement made, so I just have to make up the leaded light panels and fix the glazing bars and my security bars and put it all together,  I haven’t done any leaded light making for years, but once I relearn how to cut old glass reliably, I’ll be away.  You can’t really use modern float glass in leaded windows as it looks all wrong  – the options are to buy modern hand made glass at a high cost, or to reuse salvaged window glass from before the invention of float glass (?mid 20th century) by Pilkinsons.  I still have quite a collection left over from my major window building era, although quite a lot of it is almost too flat to use.   Penny had her hip replaced a week ago and is going round on crutches – makes me think of Long John Silver whenever I  hear her moving around.

This example matches most closely the vestigges of the original engraving

24th March –  A bit busy the last week or so with Penny’s hip, but I got the bedroom finished, even as far as putting up a cafe curtain on a nice brass rod, and putting in some furniture – just waiting for a guest to occupy it!  I have now got time for a few gun jobs –  I had a pair of very nice pistols that the owner wanted me to take the furniture off  so he could sort out the finish on the wood.  The screws all came out perfectly without a sign of rust except for on small spot on one screw.  The ‘nails’ were quite stiff to unscrew, all the way, as the grease, or whatever they had been put in with had gone quite stiff over the years (about 180) since they were made.  Being high class pistols the holes for the nails were a pretty exact fit. In the end I didn’t take out the trigger plate and its finial as it didn’t come out easily, there was no obvious way to pull it out straight, and I was afraid that the very fine wood between the bits of the finial might break off if there was any adhesion or rusting on the edges.  It will hve to be masked in situu.  Anyway they are now done and delivered.  The next job was re-engraving an old very worn sea service pistol lock of about 1777 or so – I hadn’t touched a graver for about 3 months, and as well as this job I have all the funiture for one of Fred’s creations waiting to engrave, so time for a bit of concentrated practice.  The Sea Service lock needed to be engraved quite deep, and Fred is concerned that his lock and false breech are deep so that they will still show up if fairly brightly colour case hardened, so I had a few practices, and got out the Gravermax air graver – I can’t get quite as much control over it as I can with push engraving, but I did get good enough to do the Sea Service lock, which is not meant to be fine engraving – the originals were done for twopence each – a few years later Palmer was charging that per letter!  So the Service engraving wasn’t particularly fine!  Anyway I did a few practive engravings on 2″ x 2″ test plates that I bought some time ago, and then did the lock – there was a trace of bits of the original engraving, particularly the little circles ( which I think on the originals were put on with a punch as they are usually a bit eratic )  that I had to keep as they were quite deep, which gave a somewhat different shape from my templates, although a search round the web images did show one or two locks with similar crowns.  I take it that the crown is a representation of what is known as the Imperial State Crown of George 1st made in 1714.  It had more pronounced arches than later crowns, as on this lock.  I realised I still need to add the broad arrow.   Now I’ll get on with designing Fred’s gun engraving.  I have to start work on the plans for the STEM club at school next term – the plan is for the children to build a safe and program a BBC microbit computer to control the opening of the safe, so that it can be coded.  I decided that it would be good if I could make bits for them to use in building their safes (in groups of 3 children) using a 3D printer.  My sons had a couple of 3D printers over the years, and make a few parts for me, but as Giles is now in Canada, and Tom doesn’t have a one, I thought it was time I joined the 21st century and got up to speed!   I do have this idea that it is now possible to take multiple photos all round an object, and get them made into a 3D representation of the object, which in theory at least, you could import into a 3D printer and print in a plastic that can be used for lost wax casting, enabling you to make castings of the original parts.  Along the way you could  scale the model to compensate for shrinkage in the casting process – for the time being this will only exist as a dream as far as I am involved, although I’m sure lots of people are doing it.  Anyway I have a 3D printer on order, and am working on the software and making the part designs.  In case that doesn’t keep me busy, I’ve got a £2000  pile of the special double glazing glass sitting there waiting for me to make secondary glazing frames in oak, which is in the nice dry attic above the kitchen.

 

Bottom one filled in with a Sharpie to check details.

Lock engraved following the remnants of the original engraving, particularly the circles (distinct) and some other clues.

I’ve buffed over the finished engraving to remove the sharp edges – they didn’t look right.

14th March I got the  night store heater wired in, and waited till the Off Peak period to test it – and discovered that instead of the 11 hour off peak tarrif we are paying for, we are only getting the standard 7 hour off peak – I guess it will be next to impossible to contact EON!  Another waste of time and effort!  Ayway I think the bedroom just needs a bit of topcoat painting to finish, then put in some furniture, mostly from Giles’s flat.  Then a day clearing up the mess and piles of tools etc that resulted from the work, and I should be free to think about some gun stuff.  Penny goes into hospital on Friday to have her other hip replaced, so some of my time will be spent being a nursemaid for a couple of weeks or so………………..

12th March  I’ve been desperately trying to finish the bedroom so I can get on with a few gun related jobs,but the finishing stages always take much longer than you think.  Basically I now just have some painting  to finish, and the night store heater to install and connect to the off peak electricity and  I had a few domestic maintenence chores to sort that took a day or so – The Aga was out because I had carelessly let us run out of oil, so I took the opportunity to clean out the burner, and couldn’t get it to relight after the oil delivery – not sure what was the problem but eventually it gave up the fight and lit.  We also had a problem with the thermostat on our heatstore water cylinder – it mixes very hot water from a heat exchange coil with cold water to regulate the hot water suppl and had failed, giving only cold water or scalding water.  I couldn’t get a direct replacement – on 3 months delivery – so got a near replacement that didn’t quite fit, so I had to fiddle about to get it to fit in the too small space left by the old one – quite a lot of water escaped before I finally conquered it – now OK, I hope – I always wrap the compression joints in tissue and go back later to see if the tissue is damp – doesn’t work very well on hot water pipes but OK on cold.  I’m off tomorrow to do a bit more repair work on Tom’s flint wall – he has managed to take out a whole lot of dodgy wall and now has two big holes to fill.     I just remembered that I’m waiting for some No 7 shot from Clay and Game – better ring on Monday and check when I will get it.

7th March Spent Sunday helping Tom repair an old flint wall – something I learnt after buying this house – I had a short structural survey which highlighted the high cost of repairs to the flint walls where the wallplate had moved outward and damaged the top foot or so of the flint facing – it actually turned out to be one of the easiest jobs on the house – replacing most of the windows with traditional oak and iron leaded windows took much longer, but at least I learnt how to make leaded windows and oak frames, although I got a local blacksmith to make the iron casements as I don’t have a forge.  Anyway we filled in a large hole with lime mortar and flints – you can only build about 4 or 5 inches before the weight of the upper layers causes the whole lot to bulge out, so you have to put boards across the front as you build up.  The mortar squeezes out between the flints, and anyway you have to be fairly generous to get a good bond round the edges of the patch, so when you take the boards away later it looks a horrible mess – the aim is to catch it when it is about the consistency of cheese (cheddar , not camembert) and then cut away the surplus with a fine detail trowel and when its a bit drier to brush vigorously to clean any residue off the faces of the flints and expose the coarse sand grains in the mortar.  A lot of the wall had been repaired with hard cement, which is not a good idea, as when it gets too much moisture behind it, it comes off as one great big chunk and probably brings most of the wall with it – its not possible to remove it and replace it with lime mortar as the same thing would happen.     Apart from that I am slowly getting nearer to finishing the bedroom – the lights and sockets are in now, so I just need to connect up the power and insulate the loft above and put another coat of wax on the floor and beam….   I really need to get it done as I am beginning to build up a queue of gun jobs – apart from the Sea Service pistol engraving, and stripping the metalwork from a pair of target pistols, I had a call from Fred in the US saying he had completed another two guns and needed them engraved – I have done a couple for him before, they are on the Blog somewhere!  He gently raised the issue of the depth of my cutting – he sends his locks and furniture to a chap in the states who does pretty spectacular colour case hardening, with the emphasis on colour, and the effect of all the colour is to hide the engraving.  I do know that I tend to engrave light – whether its because I’m not as strong in the wrist as a full time professional I don’t know, but I will try to see if I can go deeper……

Just waiting for the final brushing off.  The sections of wall laid in horizontal courses are not traditional and use cement.

3rd February – The MOT expired on my car  – all sorted now without any problems.  My mechanic tells me that it is recommended that you change the tyres on a vehicle after 5 years irrespective of mileage!  Mine have done 13 years and are still OK – Its a hefty price to replace them so I think they will do for another year!  I got a worn lock for a sea service lock to recut the Crown, GR and etc.  The lock is just soft enough to cut, I think, but whether I can cut as deep as the original I don’t know – I may have to resort to the air graver.  I’ll put some photos on later when I start.  The engravers who did the original locks got paid about 2p per lock – they must have banged them out in minutes!  Making good progress with the bedroom – I put the first coat of wax on – I used a jar of home made wax polish to begin with and didn’t realise that it was intended for polishing guns and had linseed oil in it, which darkened the wood a bit more than I wanted – anyway I made some more polish with just beeswax and turpentine that ia a much paler finish, and managed to lighten the wrong finish a bit with white spirit.  Once the first coat was on and more or less hardened I put on the skirting boards – mostly screwed on where there was something behind to screw onto, otherwise a modern building adhesive that  grabs more or les instantly so no need to hold it.    The elm floorboards look amazing – I didn’t realise you could still get elm – one timber merchant laughed at me when I asked if he had any – so I was really pleased to get these lovely boards – just look at the amazing grain pattern in the photo.

These Elm boards are 300mm wide – just look at the amazing figure in the grain!

28th  February – Annoyingly I got a letter at the end of last week telling me that my direct debit wouldn’t take my Road Fund payment due 28th as my vehicle needed an MOT test, having expired on the 25th.  Unfortunately the earliest I could get a test was next Thursday, so the car will sit in the drive til then – I just hope I don’t suddenly need something from Screwfix!  Also means I can’t make a shooting session  on the 3rd. Shame.   Bedroom going OK – made the Oak shelves ready to finish and fit, and the skirting boards ditto.  The elm floor looks beutiful in its natural pale state, so I’ve been looking to see what finish I can apply that doesn’t make it brighter and darker.  Choices are varnish of one sort or another, Oil finish, Paste wax or liquid wax. I did phone a flooring shop, who said that they all gave about the same result, which looks the same as if you put water on the surface, unless you use a product with white pigment which helps retain the natural finish.  I’m not too keen on that idea, so I tried a few of the products I had to hand on sanded scraps of elm floorboard.  The Osma Polyx oil is definately a bit brighter and darker than commercial beeswax polish, which looks like a good finish, so I’ll go with that.  I usually make up my own with grated beeswax and pure turpentine disolved in a bain marie (jar in a water bath bath) and I have a large supply of beeswax , so just need a bit more turpentine.   I discovered a place on the floor where the boards creak – fortunately not where the bed will go, but the problem is that I didn’t take a photo of where the joists in that section run, and once laid there is little to tell me where I can put in screws to hold them tight – I don’t really want to perforate the floor with screwholes that miss the joists even though I am plugging the holes with elm pellets.  Bit more on the sort of autobiography – its now 1/4 of the maximum size allowed for a Cambridge thesis!

27th February A bit more work to do on the bedroom! The nearer you get to finishing, the slower the jobs seem to proceed – I’d guess 2 weeks, but I bet its nearer 4!   I got a call from an old client who specialises in what are called in the trade ‘ investment quality’  antique pistols.  He has a pair of pistols and wants the locks and furniture removed so he can refinish the woodwork, and doesn’t trust himself with a screwdriver so asked me if I would strip the metalwork from them for him – I am always honoured to be trusted with his stuff, and it always carries a significant stress – to the extent that I have to ‘walk round’ the job for a week or two until the mood takes me and I dive in!  I’ve written about techniques for removing awkward screws several times on the site, but I’m hoping that as these pistols will be in immaculate condition, there won’t be any problems – just need to have perfect turnscrews and hold the pistols firmly without marking them.

24th February – Floor is now all down and fixed!  I am just in the process of cutting the skirting boards to fit – the floor boards all fit together but there are still slopes and gentle curves in the floor that need the skirting boards carefully scribed in and cut.  Once I’ve cut them I’ll put them aside while I sand and seal the floor, then fit them I’m beginning to get a sense that the job might actually get finished – it will have been 5 months by the end of Feb, and there is still at least a couple of weeks of work to do –  fitting the electrical fittings and putting in the loft insualtion and a bit of painting, plus all the jobs I’ve forgotten.  I’m looking forward to a bit of gun work when its finished, before I embark on building all the secondary double glazing oak frames for the pile of super insulated glass that sits in the drawing room.   At last we are able to contemplate starting the STEM club at the school, so Dave and I can get a plan together for after the Easter holiday – we can be a bit more focussed and technical for the next session as it will be limited to children from years 5 and 6 –  9/10/11years old  (ish). Might do something like we did for the Pop Up Workshop last summer.

21st February -Having discovered that the floor board saw  blade wasn’t parallel to the sides of the sole plate, so the guide and the saw blade wern’t aligned , I took it back and changed it for a cordless circular saw,  which does the job properly as well as allowing me to cut slanting overlaps at the joints.   I have to say it was  all very easy at Screwfix even though I bought the saw in October  and don’t have the receipt – I don’t even have to give my name when I go to pick things up now, and my account lists all my past purchases if I want to return anything.   I’ve now sorted all the boards for the floor and by good fortune I was able to do it all with good boards, and am left with three or four boards that are a bit too ‘characterful’ to be used – not sure what I’ll do with them – maybe make a knotty  door for Tom.  Now I need to put down the vermiculate insulation and away we go!

20th February – I got the joists down and started to sort out the floorboards – I think I have enough if I’m careful, but the difficulty is compounded by the different widths, which means that there is a limited choice to make up each width –  the boards are mostly 2.4m long and the room is 4.2m wide  but the joints have to land on a joist – good brain exercise.  I ran into a problem when laying the first half, in that the saw I bought which is specifically designed for cutting floorboards didn’t seem to cut neatly at right angles, so I had a bit of a job neatly butting the boards.  I spent some time today trying to find out what was going wrong, thinking that it was my technique, but I discovered that the blade of the  saw is not parallel to the edges of it’s base plate, so it you try to cut along a guide line it cuts a slightly diverging path – its going back to Screwfix tomorrow!

18th February – The storm came through and cut off the power at 8:30 this morning – I got out the very cheap generator I bought about 10 years ago and have never used, and it just about managed to power enough work lights in the bedroom for me to work, but it struggles with power tools – fortunately I’d prepared all the extra joists so they only needed fixing in place – a slow job as they each have to be levelled at both ends, and there is a slight bow downwards in the middle, about 15mm. At the peak wind after lunch it detached my tarpaulin roof alongside the shed and pulled off half a dozen pantiles and broke some.  Anyway the power did eventually come back on at around 5:30 pm so the generator saved me loosing a day’s work.

17th February – Good day’s work on the floor considering I had to go into Cambridge for a long appointment with my friendly  dentist.  We’re supposed to go to a funeral in Epping in a forest tomorrow but with 70 mile an hour winds forecast to peak at the time we have to be there we are pondering……     You can see photos of the Anglian Muzzle Loaders shoot last Saturday on www.matthewnunn.co.uk under clay shoots – dozens of photos, the has put one of my Manton firing on his display panel.  I look a bit wild as I forgot my shooting cap and it was windy – I haven’t faced up to visiting the barber for a while!

16th February  Got the floor up in the other half of the room and vacuumed up the mess – not as much as the first half = I think this floor hasn’t been messed about with since around 1700 . The joists and floorboards  are deeply embedded in the flint walls, which must have been built over the timber framed shell of the building, and there are  only nail holes in the joists from these old boards – its a shame that the old boards are too bad to re-use.  I found that the space between a couple of pairs of joists was filled with hop petals as an insulation, and I think because they were supposed to keep insects at bay.  I’ve bagged up all the petals, along with quite a lot of dust, and will put them back before I lay the new floor.  I seem to remember that when the National Trust did a restoration at Wimpole Hall they found some similar old insulation, probably chaff, and carefully seived it to remove the dust – I  shall claim the dust is historically important and put it back.  Building conservation is a funny business – I did an evening  course run by three Local Authority conservation officers for a couple of years, so I do understand the issues!   I saw advice somewhere that one should check one’s blood pressure every few years, so I got out my meter and changed the batteries.  I managed to get 3 completely different readings one after the other – the first was 209/115 – almost an ambulance job, but  the other readings were a bit more sensible, but still higher than I expected so I put it on one side and tried again the next day – after a few more strange readings I realised I hadn’t got it on my wrist quite properly so I think it was having to compress my tendons as well as the blood vessel – anyway now seems about what I would expect at my age – around 123/65 so I’ll probably live to finish the floor.   I’m hoping it will all be finished by the end of February – I’d like to get on with something else!  Bit more on the ‘sort of autobiography’ for those not totally bored by it!  Claire just sent me a fantastic photo of my Manton firing – I’ll ask the photographer for permission to put it on here.

The floor does slope, but not that much!  Quite bent and rough  17 century (?) joists

14th February – Happy Valentines Day !  I forgot til just now.   The half of the floor I am working on is now more or less all finally down.  I got a pair of very cheap (£6 each) strap clamps from Screwfix  that let me pull the boards together, and I got some nifty little screws  (Tongue Tite) that go in at an angle through the tongue of the T & G boards and hold the edge down and in.  All very neat _ I just needed to make sure the ends of the boards mated up, and that the edges of the boards were reasonably straight – I had to plane a sliver off a couple.  I’ve just got a few boards to sort and lay in the passage and then I’ll start to remove the old floor from the other half of the room.

12 th February Club shoot today –  windy and cold – not an ideal day for shooting flintlock as the wind made it difficult to keep the fine priming powder in the pan – I use Swiss OB, which is horrendously expensive but you only need a small amount. I didn’t hit many clays. but I was primarily concerned with getting the gun going reliably – I was the only person shooting flint, but had the advice of Bev, who knows most of the tricks, having been shooting flint for years.  Unlike percussion, which is pretty reliable given a reasonable gun, flinters can be a bit fussy as the ignition system is not ‘cast iron’.  You have to get the main powder charge to come up close behind the touch hole – possibly by tapping the barrel or bumping the butt on the ground in some cases, or by putting a wad down the barrel quickly to act as a pump.  Then you need to get the right amount of powder, preferably the right fine priming powder,  in the right place in the pan – not covering the touch hole, with a flint approximately the right length and with a good edge for making sparks.  I had a couple of misfires of the second barrel (left) after shooting at overhead clays with the first barrel that Bev suggested might be caused by left frizzen lifting slightly on recoil and allowing some powder to escape.  I had been being pretty mean with the priming powder, and the problem went away when I was a bit more generous.  I couldn’t decide whether I should  load the barrels with the frizzens open or closed – open you can’t tell if any of the main charge has been ‘pumped through’ as it will fall away.  With the frizzens close my left frizzen has a shutter with a very small hole that is designed to obstruct the touch hole, so that doesn’t show any main charge.  The right frizzen has lost its little shutter, and does show a bit of powder in the pan after loading.  So as you can see, that is a lot of things to go wrong! I did have one shot where the left barrel fired itself immediately the right barrel went off – I was shooting at a tricky clay I had missed several times already, but this time I hit it, although I have no idea which of the shots did the damage!  I assume that the left sear doesn’t always seat in the bent – its only happened twice in 100 or so shots, and I think (maybe) that if I am conscious when I cock that side I can move the cack past the ‘drop in point’ and make sure its firmly engaged.  I’ll try to do a bit more on the sort of autobiograpy post……

11th February  Going to the Anglia Muzzle Loaders club shoot tomorrow – I haven’t been for quite a while so I thought I’d see how I got on with the flintlock, and avoiding Covid!  I have been shooting a number of different guns lately – percussion, flint and .410 and 20 bore, all of which are quite light, particularly the old Webley bolt action single, which waves about in the breeze when trying to shoot, but the funny thing is that I get about the same success rate with all of them, so I thought I’d get out my Berretta o/u 12 bore for the afternoon  and see what happened if I had a moderately heavy gun…. Will report back.  I took up all the boards as in the photo to tidy up the under structure.  I’ve been wondering for some time about the problems of moisture and shrinkage and warping of the boards.  I reckon the floor will be impervious to vapour as the boards are tongued and grooved, so if laid directly above the ceiling the underside will stabilise at the relative humidity of the workshop, which has a brick floor directly on the earth and the upper surface will be at a lower humidity as it is well insulated and may well be heated if its in use. Recipe for the boards to curl up at the edges.  So I’m putting a polythene sheet under the boards so they can stabilise at the moisture content of the room and hopefully over time will stay flat.  I have just started fixing the first boards down – I’m using flooring screws that are meant to go into the tongues at an angle of 30 degrees to the horizontal and hold the boards down,, but the first boards need screwing down on the groove side.  I  found a 6mm plug cutter in my drill box, and so I am quite happy to put the small flooring screws in from the top and plug the holes before sanding it all down – I don’t think they will show, but I’ll try to keep them regular.  The flooring screws through the tongues are suposed to be all that is necessary, but whether  that works for 300 mm wide boards I don’t know.

10th February – Busy sorting the flooring.  My beautiful  Elm 300mm wide boards are proving quite a challenge to sort out and lay – they are all different lengths, although mostly about 8 ft , a few are somewhat longer, and a few are mixed shorter lengths.  About  half are pretty clear of faults, the rest vary from small knots, with a lot having voids or knots going through the boards that will need filling with epoxy resin.  Some have pretty big knots and defects and I think it was a bit of a cheek including them in the order.  Adding to the complication is the fact that the widths vary by more than can be accomodated in the normal gaps between boards – between 300 and 304 mm, so not only do I have to try to match lengths to minimise waste, but I’m restricted to using boards that are within about 1 to 1.5 mm in width for each span.  I’ve done about 1/3rd of the floor with very little waste as I started with lots of boards to choose from.  I’ve managed to avoid short lengths of waste so far by putting in trimmers between joists if I need to join boards where there isn’t a joist – I have some spare boards, but there are quite a few I’d rather not use if possible – The bit of the floor I’ve done so far is the most visible bit – the other main area will be where a large double bed goes so I can get away with less good boards there – we shall see…………………. I’m putting fibre insulation under the boards  as the workshop below is not usually heated – made from recycled plastic bottles and much nicer to handle than glass or mineral wool, I’ve used up my store of it and I’m not sure if it is still available readily locally. Oh, and I got my letter from the tax man, instead of the £160 I thought I was owed, it turned out to be 60p, so for the 3 hours of doing the return its 20p per hour instead of £53  – shame.

Boards cut and trial positioning – not yet tight and fixed. ( the boards on the right side are not part of the scheme)

6th February.  To my brother’s funeral on Friday – it was a jolly occasion, a bit religious  considering he was an atheist, but I suppose its the price to pay for being buried in a beautiful churchyard. The wake was in Rockingham Castle Walker room and half the village turned up so there must have been over a hundred in quite a small space. My patchy knowledge of statistics told me that it was very likely that at least a couple of them will have Covid, in fact quite unlikely there won’t be anyone with it there, so I stayed outside with an old friend from school who I used to build model aircraft with.  Its funny, and nice, now even after more than 60 years and only a couple of contacts since, we drop into a familiar pattern of conversation immediately.   He pointed out that even then I would turn whatever I was doing for myself into an opportunity to sell it to other people.  I’m afraid its true!   I really want to get back to doing some gun stuff – I have two barrels that are crying out for rebrowning, but luckily no client jobs outstanding as the renovation of the bedroom is taking up all my time – I took up half the old floor so I could sort out the levels for the extra joists I will have to put in to straighten it. I can’t make the floor level as that would mean raising the corner where the door is by about 10 cm  (4 inches) and the door, which dates from about 1650 and so must be kept intact, is already very low, as they often were then as people were shorter. I can make sure that the falls are smooth and no bigger than necessary, which means putting in about 8 new joists alongside the old ones where I can.  I got out about 40 Kg of dirt and mess from under about 10 sq m of  the floor I lifted – its mostly compacted dirt and some chaff that was presumably put there for rudimentary insulation – loads of walnut shell with mouse nibblings (there are walnut trees in the garden).  I found one mouse skeleton and one bat skeleton.  The older bits of the floor are probably  almost 300 years old, so the dirt probably is too!

Most of the floor didn’t have this many sticks under it………….

3rd February.  Yesterday I went through all the boards I had picked up and measured them and noted their quality – a number had knots and voids that will need filling with epoxy or similar and they are all slightly different lengths – mostly around 8 ft.   So I have been trying to work out which bits of the floor will be the most conspicuous and which will be hidden under the bed etc.  I had planned to start at the side of the room where the bed will be, but then I changed my mind and decided to start with the visible bits, so I could use the best boards there and see how I get on – I’m not sure how much I will have left – the joists are fairly widely spaced, the room is 14 ft wide, and so using the boards economically requires some thought and planning.  So today I started pulling up the old floorboards at the end I want to lay the best boards.  The floor is very uneven at that end – a 2 meter straight edge has a 3 cm gap in the middle- anyway under the floorboards is a mess – lots of bits of joist, and lots of dirt, and quite worrying, the ‘nibs’ that should stick up between the lathes to hold the plaster on the ceiling are not there, and not much sign they ever were ( OK where I patched it though).  We have my brother’s funeral near Corby tomorrow – poor chap had Parkinsons and rapidly deteriorating health so in a way it was a relief when he died peacefully at home doing what he loved – sorting out his junk….. Anyway in his honour I decided to wash my Land Cruiser as it had been off road recently, but when out this morning I saw a hand car wash – run by Eastern Europeans as usual, and amazing – it has never has such a thorough clean, including under all the wheel arches and round the doors – £20 and it has not been so clean since it came out of the showroom where I bought it second hand about 5 years ago.  I just wished that the inside had been empty so I could have had that done too.  Here is a bit of what was under the bedroom floor;-

I put in some bits when I rebuilt the chimney 20 years ago.

1 Feb – Well I did get my tax done, and it wasn’t as bad as I thought, about 3 hours.  The tax man ends up owing me £160 so that works out at £53 per hour – not bad!  I went to fetch my floorboards today. I’d arranged to borrow a local trailer, but when I had a look at it yesterday I got a bit worried about the state of the tyres – last time I borrowed it I ended up buying one new tyre, this time I wasn’t sure any of the 4 were road legal so rather than risk 3 points of my license for each bad tyre (thats what they dish out) I hired a massive flatbed trailer – a full 20 ft long and brand new for £70 a day – a bit steep but it would have cost £200 to get the wood delivered. So now I have a massive pile of elm boards.  Laying the floor is going to be challenging as the room is 14ft wide, most of the boards are 8 ft +- 2 inches and the joists are spaced about 1m apart, so it looks as if I’m going to have to be a bit creative, and possibly splice some boards together so they butt away from a joist – quite a puzzle.  On my trip to the sawmill, which was in Sotterley, a smallish place in the country not too far from Beccles, I was reminded of a peculiarity of Google Maps routing algorithm that I’d noticed before.  If you ask it to find a route from A to B is will usually find a quick easy way to get on the nearest main road from A, but in the approaches to B it will  start to route you down all sorts of small one way roads – on this occasion I found myself driving my trailer down miles of very narrow roads, hoping that anything that came the other way would be good at reversing ( I can reverse trailers, but hadn’t tried with the hire one).  When you come to route back from B to A, it finds a nice quick way to the nearest main road, not the way you came.  My solution when I think about it is to get somewhere  is to route backwards then reverse it – you’ll probably know the roads around you if it does the silly small road thing so you can do your own thing until you are on the main road.  I’ve named the problem  ‘Google’s symetrical routing algorithm’.

30th january – I managed another day without doing my tax! sorted out a few things and got the week’s shopping in, sorted out how to fix the floorboards when I get them, and had a look at lead shot prices on the internet ( I found a source at £31.70 /Kg.  – I’ll ring them tomorrow), and did a bit more of the autobiograpy post, but have now run out of excuses……………

28th January – Just a quick correction – I got the calculation about the moisture content of wood wrong yesterday – its not as bad as I thought. I got a bit mixed up with air humidity and wood moisture – normal household  relative humidity in the UK is probably in the range 40 to 55% which gives an equilibrium moisture content in wood of  from 8 to 10% which gives a change in across grain dimension of most timber of around 1/2 %, or 1.5 mm across my 300mm boards.  I can just about live with that, but I’ll have to make sure I get it right before I butt the boards tight  against each other.  Looking at the old pine floor today, I realised that not only is it a patchwork of newer and older boards and short bits and repairs, but it actually alters alignment as it crosses the room by a few degrees – so somewhere I’ll have to taper a board.  Oh, for me the bad news is that I have to do my tax return before the 1st of Feb, although there is supposed to be a 1 month Covid extension………

27th January Had a pleasant day’s shoot at Cambridge Gun Club today – as mentioned I took the Manton double flintlock and managed to hit quite e few clays – no worst than with anything else I shoot, which is pretty good for only the third or forth time I’ve used a flintlock.  By the time I’d worked out a few of its little pecadillos with Bev and Pete’s help – both are flintlock experts – I got it going well, and it was shooting relianbly.  One thing tha we realised was that using semolina instead of a wad on top of the powder missed having the piston effect of wooshing the air down the barrel and carrying the powder into the chamber behind the touch hole.  There is the overshot card but maybe that isn’t as effective.  As I didn’t have any wads of 14 bore with me I used a card over the semolina.  How big a pproblem this is/was we were not sure – to begin with I didn’t have any problems with ignition and was using Swiss No 1 as the priming powder – later I had a few occasions where a frizzen sparked but didn’t ignite the powder in the pan, whcih we put down to the priming powder and I changed to the much finer Swiss OB.  I’m always a bit unsure about these changes that one makes, because one tends to stick with them on the basis of pretty unscientific evidence and nere revisits the issues.  Bev said he had a couple of near identical flintlock doubles, one of which went off quickly and the other was quite slow to fire, so he took the breechplugs out of both to see what the difference was – caution, both he and I are very cautious about taking the breechplugs out of doubles in case we separate the barrels so we use various clamping arrangements. anyway both breechblocks had a fairly deep hole down from the face of the plug that forms one pattern of patent breech, but the ‘good’ gun had a hole of about 7mm and the ‘bad’ one more like 3/16th of an inch ( that is how he told me – 3/16 is 4.7 mm ). He drilled the smaller one out to match the good gun and polished it with a Dremel and it was certainly shooting better.  I could never quite work out the relation between the volume of the reduced bore in relation to the total powder charge – I think that only part of the powder goes into the hole, and some sits in what is usually a semicircular depression in the top of the plug – the original idas of the patent, I think, was to start the explosion in a small relatively enclosed space and the flash front would propogate faster that ignition through the powder..  This was certainly the principle of Nock’s patent breech which had a small trnsverse chamber behind the touch hole that communicated with the main chamber via a fairly small hole.  You can tell this breech because it had s screw plug on the opposite side of the breechplug to the touch hole.   Or have I got this all wrong? someone will tell me!   I took my little Webley bolt action .410 (the Rat Gun) for the post lunch breech loading bit of the shoot using 2 1/2 inch cartridges firing 11 gm of shot as against 24 or 28 in the ‘big boy’s’ guns. The Webley has a very tight choke and probably covers well less than half the area that a 12 bore covers on normal cylinder bore . Judging by a shot into the bank at a ‘rabbit, about 1/2 to 2/3 of the diameter, so you need to be that much more accurate in your shooting – anyway I did quite well with it and broke a fair number of clays when I was onto a good run.  Back to the bedroom tomorrow – the limewash is now done so its a major cleanup, then go and get the floorboards and juggle around with the Relative Humidity of the room and the moisture content of the wood – a 5% change in R.H. makes about a 1% change in dimension across the grain in most woods – thats about 3 mm in a 300 mm wide board – so I ought to aim to get it sorted to within a couple of degrees of the highest RH its likely to experience during the year, or the floor will warp!  Probably should have specified narrower  boards – oh well, too late!

26th January The 4th Jab made me feel a bit rough for a while, but I think I have recovered quicker than from the 3rd.  I’m off to CGC tomorrow for a spot of clay shooting. I’m going to try my John Manton flintlock double – when Bev was over here picking up his guns he pressed me to shoot it again, so I’ll give it a try.  Its a nice gun and was a bargain as it has a repair spliced into the fore-end, the only thing I don’t like is that it has ginger browning on the barrels – the real shame is that its done perfectly, so I’m reluctant to get rid of it and try for a better colour.  I’ve now finished the limewashing of the bedroom walls – I ended up putting 4 coats on to get the colour solid, but its pretty quick so not a problem! I now have to get the room finally dried out so I can go and collect the elm floorboards from Sotterley next week – I think laying them is going to be quite a job as the existing floor is all over the place in terms of levels and a bit springy in places – I’ll have to do a lot of firring to level up the joists, which are bits of wood probably put there in 1750 ish and not squared very well, and a ropey in patches… are well, if I will take on these tricky jobs!

24th January Got my 4th Covid Jab tomorrow – I’ll be beginning to feel like a pincushion!  Got two coats of limewash on the walls and ceiling – it is an amazing paint on lime plaster – it just becomes part of the wall and you can’t rub it off without taking the surface of the wall with it. Not sure if I’ll do one or two more coats.  The lime putty and the Buff  Titanium pigment came to about £25 and that would be enough to to the room (40 sq m) with 4 coats  10 times over. bit more on the Sort of Autobiography, which is getting some positive comments.  I plan to do the University stuff and then my own business .

22nd January  At last, the pair of pistols is finished and in a box ready to post!  When Bev had a look at the trouble I was having getting colur onto the steel of the barrels in the browning he suggested  that I try Logwood chips in solution.  I had imagined that they might be a dye, and indeed they are used as a dye to colour fabric deep red, however then used on iron they give a chemical reaction , the Heamatoxylin in the Logwood giving a strong reaction with the iron to colour it shades of black, and leaving a light scum of black particles on the surface of the liquid.  I followed recommendations I found on the web for guns and dipped the barrels in boiling Logwood solution for a couple of minutes and the steel that had refused to colour came out a light grey – a pleasing overall effect.  while hot I poured clean boiling water over the barrels, and when they had cooled a bit, I rubbed beeswax over them and wiped it off again.  The overall job now passes my standards, and I’m happy to return them to their owner.   Having done that I went with Tom to Giles’s flat in Cambridge to clear out the last of his stuff and say goodbye to my three months of work renovating it!

 

 

 

21st January – Went to see my  Oncologist today – he was cheerful as usual – his Christmas skiing break in France had been great, although he had only made it across the French border about 20 minutes before they closed it to Brits.  Life on the edge!  A bit more on my Sort of autobiography…………. – it  had 20 views yesterday!   Mixed up some more limewash – I need to check the colours in daylight tomorrow.

20th January – got a coat of limewash on all the walls and ceilings.  Sorting out a colour is a bit of a pain – there is too much surface area for lime white to be suitable – it would be blinding, and we didn’t want a strong colour.  There is a bitof a puzzle as its an attic room, and a lot of the area is the roof slope and there isn’t a sharp boundary between the slope and the ceiling so it would be difficult to use a different colour on those surfaces.  We thougth a neutral buff shade would do, and I came across ‘buff titanium’ – a different form of titanium oxide, not the stark white that one usually associates with titanium.  I had a bit of acrylic buff titanium in a tube, enogh to make a few samples on white paper, which is a good way to test colours as you can dry them out quickly.  I got a couple ,more tubes from the art shop – enough for the first coat, but its rather pale and needs more pigment.  I found a website that sells the raw pigment as a powder, so I’ve ordered 2 Kg, which should be enough to colour the limewash a bit stronger and put on another 3 or 4 coats.  It is beginning to look like a room – I am keen to get it pained as soon as possible so it can dry thoroughly before I ship in the floorboards – the limewashing will eventually put about 24 litres of water into the room over 4 coats, and that has to be taken out – my dehudifier extracts about 6 or 7 litres a day…..

19th January – Tidying up the bedroom bits that need sorting before the floor goes in – painting the woodwork etc.

18th January – I think I’v got to the end of the plastering, so I’m letting it dry out before giving it a few coats of limewash.  Limewas is a beautiful, tough and very cheap paint – its basically a bit of lime putty and a lot of water, left for a day so the Calcium Hydroxide dissolves into the water, with a bit of colour added using acrylic paints dissolved in clean water and then added to the limewash.  The  Calcium Hysroxide only disolves to a fairly low concentration ( 1.6 gm per litre) but its enough to react with the carbon dioxide in the air to form calcium carbonate – limestone on your wall – a very tough finish and beautiful too.  I am putting a bit on the autobiographical post each day – really just a series of anecdotes as Penny says.

16th January Last week’s extra job was helping Giles emigrate to Canada, at least, getting hin out of his flat, although Tom and I have to go back next weekend to clear out the last few bits.  I’m still plastering – is going so-so. I’m beginning to get fed up with it to be honest, and almost at the point of wishing I’d got someone in to do it!  I now just have to put a very thin coat of skim lime and chalk to level out the surfaces before limewashing it with 4 or 5 coats of homemade limewash of a sutiable muted shade of nothing.  The problem I’m finding is that the setting of the plaster is very uneven – the ceiling and the tops of the walls sets up well before the walls near floor level – I’m pretty certain most of this is caused by the pattern of airflow and heat distribution in the room – I have a dehumidifier running some of the time, and occasionally a heater, but mostly I leave it to its own devices so that the lime has a chance to carbonate before it dries too much.  I hppe, optimisticall, that by the end of next weekend I will have got the plastering and limewash finished……… well, one can but hope!   I have been contemplating putting an account of bits of my working life etc on the site as a sort of autobiograpical post – I enjoy writing, and there might just be someone out there amongst the hundreds of thousands of people who have visited this blog who would find it a handy way of passing an idle moment.  Anyone not interested could always ignore it!

Nice open texture – I don’t always manage to get it this good!

12th January   Plastering going OK, but it is difficult to find the point at which the plaster is right for the surface to be reworked.   This evening’s job was to make some more bread as we have run out – I make most of it, although I’m lazy and buy the odd loaf from the surpermarket when  we’re going shopping.

11th January – Plastering not going well!  I mixed up the lime putty with sand and used half a bag of sand I had to hand, as well as a bag of kiln dried sand I bought – unfortunately the bag I had was one that I’d discarded when I did the kitchen because it had some large grit (2 -3mm) along with the sand – I should have put it in the skip then. Anyway it makes it almost impossible to put on a 2 mm skim coat, so I’ll have to chuck the large tub of plaster I mixed and start again using the fine sand – expletive deleted here.   After yesterday’s shoot Bev accidentally left his guns in my Land Cruiser that he’d been in, so he came over today to pick them up.  While he was shooting his double flinter on the shoot, it split at the wrist on the recoil, pinching a bit of his hand in the crack. The crack goes pretty well all through the wrist and as he uses quite meaty charges it won’t be adequate just to glue it.  We had a good look at the problem – my solution would be to strip the stock of the trigger guard and probably the false breech as well, and mill a deep slot into the recess where the tang of the trigger guard fits, and make a block of wood that is about 1/4 mm narrower than the slot and comes to the right level for the tang to go back onto.  This can then be glued in with epoxy, the clearance allowing a glue line – necessary with epoxy.   The trigger guard is fixed with a screw into wood and then unwinds from a threaded hole in the trigger plate at the front of the trigger guard – if necessry I would drill out the screw  – the new screw will go into the new block, so no need to plug the hole.  I’d be pretty picky about the wood I put in the slot so that the grain didn’t follow the split – I might even use good quality ply.  Thinking about holding it all together while the epoxy sets, I thought the ideal thing would be to bind it all with self amalgamating /self vulcanising tape – its a fantastically useful stuff – rubbery, will stretch to 5 times its length and then slowly shrinks somewhat, and the layers bond together into a solid mass, still rubbery and retaing a lot of tension – one of those magic things like electrolytic derusting!  On another gun issue I was showing him the pistol barrels and lamented that they hadn’t really taken – he thought they were great, and the client would be delighted!  So maybe I need to look at them in a different way………………………………….

10th January – Game shoot today – actually only 25 minutes away on very slippery roads!  I wasn’t on form, and was mostly out of the action, so that left most of the birds for those who were!  Anyway it was good to be out in the countryside and it wasn’t so cold and there was no wind, so all in all an enjoyable day.  I can now do another experiment in gun cleaning……  Back to plastering tomorrow – Tom and Giles came round yesterday for tea and I sneakily got them to take the bags of unused NHL plaster down and bring up the very heavy tubs of lime putty plaster – a tub holds 25 Kg of the lime putty, but when mixed with 2 parts sand ready to go on the walls the tub holds more, even when only half full.  Giles flys to Canada on Friday, so Thursday is reserved for shifting the last things in his flat, which means I only have 3 days work this week.  I am trying to get the wet jobs done as soon as possible so I can get the elm for the floor into the room and laid.  It is supplied planed to 22 mm thick but needs sanding – at the moment I’m not sure whether to sand it before its laid, or after, or some of both – I guess it will be clear when I see it!  the existing floor is very uneven – probably the variation in height is about 3 or 4 inches overall, and includes quite a slope. Should be fun to lay……

9th January – I thought I’d tackle a couple of outstanding jobs today – fixing up wires and pruning the vine that yielded a splendid crop of grapes this year, and finding out why there were a couple of damp spots on the sloping ceiling of  one of the bedrooms came from – turned out to be a valley that was lead dressed in about 1994 – very well done judging by the superb lead welding – turned out that a slate had slid down the roof and made a very small crack/cut, or at least that is where I think the leak was.  I contemplated doing a lead weld myself – I’ve done them in the past but I not an expert and its a difficult job.  In the end I cleaned it all up and used Fix-all.  I had a real gun surprise – as I mentioned earlier, when I finish shooting on Thursday I spray WD 40 down the barrel and planned to clean it next day – well I forgot , and didn’t remember until late yesterday when I was just going to bed, so I gave it another shot of WD 40 and left it.  I finally got round to cleaning it this  evening – boiling water, a few drops of washing up liquid and a scour with a bronze brush, rinse with boiling water and remove nipple, then a few drops of 303 cleaner (emulsifying oil)  and pump vigorously with polyester wadding round a jag.  Leave to dry for a few minutes then one run through with a folded kitchen tissue on a jag to remove water, then a new tissue with WD 40 – repeat a few times…..  Only this time the tissues came out almost completely clean, whereas they are usually dark grey/black for as long as I keep replacing them. Final wipe through with gun oil.  Not sure why it was so clean, but a lot more dirt came out with the wadding clean water than usual – I will certainly repeat the experiment ( delay of 72 hours and 2 sprays of WD 40) – a completely surprise result – I don’t think I’ve had such a clean barrel since I cleaned a newly honed barrel!

 

7th January 2022  – now finished the second coat plaster and mixed up some lime putty plaster to start the final coat – I’ll wait til Tuesday to start that, and hope that my sponged finish is rough enough for the plaster to adhere.  I had a very pleasant clay shoot at CGC yesterday – it was pretty cold, but actually I  kept quite warm, except my right hand – putting caps on is a challenge in cold weather.  I did have my Zippo hand warmer in my pocket, but there isn’t much opportunity to hold it, I had one of the disposable warmers on one shoot – it was actually a foot warmer with a self adhesive pad for sticking in your shoe, but I found it ideal to stick round the wrist of my gun so I was holding it most of the time.  The disposable ones seem to chuck out more heat than the Zippos or the charcoal ones and last at least as long – it always amazes me that they can work just by rusting a few grams of iron powder, but it makes you realise why its a good idea to keep guns oiled!   I’d been vaguely lamenting that I had no more game shoots this year, but was rung up last night and offered a muzzle loading  shoot on Monday as someone had dropped out – its pretty much my favourite shoot and only about 40 minutes away.  I had run out of semolina yesterday, so had to use cous cous – which seemed to work just fine, so I’ll have to add semolina to tomorrows shopping list.  Several of my fellow shooters seem to have adopted the habit of  putting WD 40 liberally in the barrels of their guns (out of the stocks) after use, and leaving them overnight before the usual boiling water wash in the morning.  I’ve been doing this for some time (and not just for lazyness) and it does make them quite noticably easier to clean. I was looking at the visitor statistics for this blog – most visitors are from the US, next is UK then Europe, with lots from China and Russia – not sure what they make of it, or if its all attempted hijacks!   I had an email from a work colleague from about 50 years ago who had come across this website and managed to associate it with me – goodness knows how as he isn’t an antique gun person.

3rd January – Back to plastering all day – the NHL plaster drives me mad, but I’m learning to get the better of it, although the floor is knee deep in blobs of plaster!  I am using my 1 meter long springy edge (plastering spatula) to level the plaster, and then after a decent interval of 4 to 6 hours going over it vigorously with a sponge float to get rid of any lines etc.  Seems to work.  I will go over it all with some decent lime putty plaster as a finisheng coat.  I was reminded that this web site was originally started to post breadmaking information, hence the un-gunlike name.  It had a brief period as a roof restoration story, and then became a gun blog.  I still make almost all the bread as we prefer it to anything ou can buy in the supermarkets, and we don’t have access to a decent baker, Cambridge and it’s several French bakers being too far and too much parking trouble.  I was reminded yesterday of my early days of experimenting when I made a couple of loaves – Giles is emigrating this month and gave us his Kenwood Chef – its a lot better at least in theory, than mine, which was a very cheap version from TKMAX many years ago and has suffered many indignities, including falling off the table while mixing dough and continuing to mix while lying on its side on the floor – several times.  Its now tied on!  Anyway Giles’s has a posh stainless steel bowl, ours has a cheap plastic one  – but when I tried the stainless one it wouldn’t mix dough at my preferred consistency – the dough just spread itself round the outside of the bowl and left a void in the middle in which the blade rotated and I had to intervene several times.  Its all down to the brushed stainless surface which the dough stickes to – its more difficult to clean too – you leave the plastic one and the bits of dough fall off when they dry, not so the metal one.   When made the bread didn’t rise quite as it should – its interesting because it shows how many variables there are in the process…..  As a boring scientist I’m always interested in how domestic appliences etc earn their keep –  if the breadmaker cost £100 and I use it twice a week for ten years, that still adds about 10p to the cost of a loaf.  When we first had the above ground swimming pool I used to note the cost per swim – its now about £2 per person per swim. Makes you think…..  End of Christmas holidays tomorrow, although mine ended a couple of days ago – lets hope for a better 2022……………….

2nd January 2022  Well, I made it into 2022 in one piece!  Given the ever circling Covid and it’s attempt in March 2020 to do for me, that has to be good.  My best wishes for 2022 to all the followers of this blog, and my particular thanks to the kind and thoughtful people who email me from around the world when I don’t post for a while to see if I’m OK.   I started on the second coat plastering yesterday – I got the plaster recommended by the supplier of the wood fibre boards, but I think its not really the right stuff for the job – I think it is meant for external render.  I always use lime plaster as its an old house, and in the past I have always made my plaster using lime putty, sand and chalk, but this time I’m using the recommended bagged lime plaster which is based on Naturally Hydraulic Lime (NHL) which sets by forming silicates as well as combining with carbon dioxide, whereas the lime putty doesn’t form silicates and sets much more slowly.  Anyway the plaster I have for the second coat ( and enough for a final coat) is a real pain to use!  Lime putty plaster is ‘fat’ and workable and spreads easily as its somewhat thixotropic – this stuff is horribly sticky, even when quite soft and begins to stiffen up almost immediately you have mixed it – not at all pleasant to work with, and not really possible to ‘bring it back ‘ to rework the surface when its beginning to harden up – horrid stuff, but I have another 8 bags, so I will probably use it for the second coat and try to level out all the surfaces, then switch to ‘real’ lime putty.   I put the single barreled gun together – its quite a nice single percussion – I had made a lock for it and engraved my name on the lock and barrel and re-browned the barrel, but the rib came off so I had to resolder it and then re-brown it  – I just hope that the relevant authorities can see that its actually made from antique parts and is thus an antique!  I dug out the Westley Richards double percussion that I used to shoot when I was a teenager going out in the evening to shoot pidgeons to feed the ferrets.  ( turns out Pete, one of the Anglia Muzzle Loaders used to shoot the same wood when he lived at Fingringhoe!).  I used it again for a year or so when I started shooting with the Anglian Muzzle loaders but gave up on it as it would bung up and misfire from the 30th shot on any session – clean it thoroughly and it was fine for another 30 shots .  Anyway it looks a bit sad as the barrel is a bit rusted and stained although the bore is good and there is plenty of metal, so I think I’ll have a go at re-browning it – I’m keen to find something that actually browns ‘properly’ rather than these pistol barrels which are still resisting colouring on the steel after 10 brownings,  I might also investigate why it misfired, although I am always reluctant to remove the breech blocks from doubles as its easy to put a force on them that separates the barrels – and that leads to a major, beastly job.

The barrel of the single has a mild but acceptable browning.

My old Westley Richards percussion – I’m hoping the barrels will clean up a bit without taking off too much metal

 I think it looks worse that it is – we shall see!

31st December – Its late, New Year soon!  I didn’t start the plastering today, just sorted a few tools and got the lads to carry 10 bags of plaster upstairs.   I’m still browning the pistol barrels, but maybe they will shortly come good.  I resoldered the rib on a single percussion some time ago and got fed up trying to brown it, so after about a dozen brownings without much colour I propped it up in the workshop and left it (probably for 3 months).  I thought It looked pretty rusty, so I thought I’d better at least clean off the rust and oil it or it would just clutter up the workshop and mean that gun was useless.  I wire brushed it fairly vigorously and it didn’t look too bad – I heated it up on the AGA and poured boiling water over it several times and rubbed it over with a block of beeswax while still hot (my favourite finish) and I have to say it looks quite a decent lightish brown, but certainly within the range of decent shades and with a strong twist figure. Now Ive got to find the breechblock!  Happy New Year in 2 minutes………….

30th December – The percussion lock is now done.  I realised that I couldn’t re harden the tumbler  without disturbing the silver soldered extension, but when I heated it up to I probably didn’t take the bits round the bents up to a high enough temperature to anneal them – anyway it works just fine!  I coloured up the cock a little – I tried to get the area round the square red hot and dumped it in water, but it didn’t harden much.   As I mentioned its a late percussion gun ?1850 ish?  so the mainspring is more like that of a modern sidelock – the early springs often? usually? had a short top arm compared to the acting arm but later on they got more nearly equal lengths.  I had always wondered about the elegant taper of mainsprings, and I read somewhere that the test of a good spring was that when amost fully closed you could just run a 10 thou feeler gauge all the way along the gap between the blades.  The spring in this gun is extremely strong and when the lock is on full cock the blades of the spring are almost closed. I am a bit concerned that the spring is so strong that it will strain my cock-tumbler square!  I’m tempted to anneal it and close it up a bit as there is no need for such a strong spring, although I suppose it might take the odd millisecond off the firing delay.  I’m trying to steel myself for a return to plastering – I was going to buy a new, £60, replacement for my old plastering trowel which was bowed, but I had a look at the new one in Screwfix and decided that they were meant to be like that, so saved that expense! I do have a nice new finishing trowel that is flat, so that will suffice for the final stages.  I’m still trying to brown the barrels of the two pistols and its still not happening – the soft iron is getting well rusted and dark, but the steel is acting like stainless steel and doesn’t take any colour to speak of. I’m half a dozen rustings into the third attempt, lets hope……………….. I  have never seen this problem before! Well, actually see tomorrows entry- I did despair of the single barrel.

Little blob of grease from the cock screw spoils the picture!

As was – I’d already changed the nipple for one of my titanium ones

29th December – 2022 is approaching rapidly!  I tried to drill out the bits in the cock thread, but the thread extractor metal was harder then the rest even after annealing, so the drill just started to wander, so that was a fail.  I Araldited the tumbler in a bit of faced off bar located by the bearing on the back and cut off the square and faced the 3mm stub and put a 4mm end mill into it for about 3.5mm and turned up a short piece of bar to fit to replace the square and silver soldered it in place, then filed a square on it.  Its interesting that there was a de-facto standard amonst percussion gunmakers that defined the alignment of the square on the tumbler shaft so that cocks are often interchangeable.  I tried to use this standard orientaion and filed up the cock to match – As with many gunmakers I didn’t get a perfect square, but I did get a reasonable fit in the correct orientation – I used one of my unused castings for the cock as the original was pretty horrible.  All that remains to do now is to reharden the tumbler and colour up the cock – not sure that it needs hardening – and make the No 4 UNF cock screw.  I had a bit of a problem with my lathe today – a few times recently it hasn’t powered up when I’ve switched the mains on, and I’ve had to feel round the back in the wiring box and reset the circuit breaker (switching off at the mains first!)  This time it was dead whatever I did to the circuit breaker.  It’s a big lathe and weighs over half a ton and the wiring box is at the back and there is only about 4 inches clearance to the wall.  I cursed, and went and got my testmeter and a crowbar – but when I came back it was on so did the job.  Went out later and same thing, came back an hour later and it was on.  I suspect the main circuit breaker may be faulty as the work light isn’t on and that doesn’t have any of the trips and interlocks in its circuit……Have to dig out the crcuit diagram if I can find it…..   Something else to sort out.   I ought to get back to plastering tomorrow – I need to go to Screwfix to pick up a new plastering trowel as my old one is bowed – thats £50!  I forgot when I was having my rant about the building inspectorate failings to include Grenfell.

The 2 punch marks are interesting – possibly to shift the stopping point of the tumbler?

just hope the brazed joint is strong enough over such a small area…..

I used the one on the left to replace the central one.

Getting on for a day’s work…….

28th December  While waiting for the third try at browning the pistol barrels (!) I got out the slip that was waiting in the office and had a look at the next job which I had more or less forgotten about… Its a percussion single – not particularly special, Birmingham and late.  The cock screw had sheared off, and the owner had resourcefully acquired a screw extractor to  try to remove it.  As anyone who has tried that with an old gun will tell you (with hindsight!), that is a recipe for disaster because the extractor, in doing its job expands the stuck piece of thread, which of course means that its stuck even more firmly – the harder you try the harder it is locked in place until, as in this case, the screw extractor also shears off – and that is likely to be even harder metal than the original screw.  Usually with a flintlock or older percussion I would araldite the tumbler to a bar in the lathe and turn off the whole square and drill out the tumbler and silver solder in a new axle and put a new square on the end and tap a new hole – takes a while but is straightforward although it does mean annealing and re-hardening the tumbler.  However, with this late gun the tumbler has a link to the mainspring (no link on older guns), and the link folds into a slot in  the arm on the tumbler, and the slot actually crosses into the tumbler axis so if I made a new axle I’d have to cut a slot through it, and I am not confident my miller will be accurate enough to cut a 1/16 inch slot.  So that solution is not easy, although I could file the slot before fixing the axle in the tumbler.  That leaves softening the tumbler and trying to drill out the broken extractor and bit of screw, and hoping there is enough metal left to tap a thread without weakening the square – maybe I’ll try that and if it doesn’t work I’ll try the new axle.  The cock (hammer) is a bit of a mess, probably a bad a casting, and has had multiple attempts at tightening it on the square.  I can either fit another cock – I do have 2 suitable castings – or drop a milling cutter through the cock and silver solder in a disk and remake the square to fit the tumbler….   I will have to get back to plastering soon, but I might just sneak another day tomorrow – I did manage to do some work on the loft hatch today so at least some work was done……  Oh and I did a little tinkering on the pistol wood repair and it looks even better.

The hammer looks as if its got some terrible skin disease on its nose

27th December  More work on the pistol stock.  I had to cut back quite a chunk to get to good wood – some of the black stained (rust) wood was very weak – anyway I glued in a chunk of walnut with isocyanate – its quick and makes a thin glue line and doesn’t need clamping, just a quick squirt of activator.  I have now cut it back to match the curves and coloured it up – unfortunately there is still some stained wood around that it would not have been sensible to cut out, so I had to stain the patch black to match.  Then a couple of coats of thin shellac and a rub down with 2500 paper and its looking good – I gave the wood a quick polish with my favourite wax polish – its actually a hard mould release wax polish that gives a good finish and doesn’t clog things too much.   I listened to a program on house ventilation this morning that set me thinking – modern building regs call for 0.4 air changes per hour – if you put 10 people in a 30 cu meter room in about an hour with that low level of ventilation they will be be breathing 5% of other people’s breath even if the air mixes perfectly – ideal for transmitting Omicron!  My old house probably runs at more than 5 air changes per hour – if I hold up a sheet of newspaper in a doorway it isn’t vertical.  Much healthier . So once again building regs have got it wrong – in the 1940’s it was cement as strong as brick, so cracks propogate through walls, in the 1970 is was all reinforced concrete now rusting and spalling off.  Now we are burying tons of carbon intensive concrete in massive foundations – a friend got permission for a 3m x 3m extension to his small Victorian cottage – the building inspector insisted on 2m deep foundations, then looked at them and said they needed to go to 3m deep – right up against the cottage with its ?600mm deep foundations!  How stupid can you get – my friend is now waiting for cracks to appear in the cottage while the extension sits rock solid!

I think this pistol must have been lying on a damp surface for years judging by the stains.

 

Final clean up and polish still to do.

26th December  My holiday from plastering continues, so I got a bit more gun stuff done today (about time too, I hear you say!).  I hardened the spring I modified yesterday with the propane torch and polished it and found a nice spot on the less hot plate of the AGA where the temperature was about 310 C, so I put the spring down there and covered it with a pad of fibreglass insulation (the sort used in roofs) and left it for 15 minutes.  When I got it out it was a nice blue colour indicative of about the required temperature for tempering springs – 305 to 310 C according to my book.  I had been quite careful to open the spring to the same extent as the extant spring on the other pistol while it was soft, and was extremely careful to ‘work the spring in’ to let any stress in the metal redistribute itself  before fully compressing it.  I even kept it fairly warm to make sure it didn’t fracture – it works, thank goodness, so that is one more job out of the way. The photo shows the new spring in place and a modern sidelock spring very similar to the one I modified to make it – the critical detail is the distance of the peg on the side of the upper leaf from the ‘elbow’ of the spring, the rest can be sorted in the cutting, bending and welding – the top leg needs a fairly high tab built up on it, or the elbow hangs down below the edge of the lock and the top arm touches the barrel. The stock of one of the pistols has a crack running forward from the rear side nail cup and looks a bit of a mess – its a very  common place for pistols to crack – they tend to crack from the side nail hole right through the stock, often on both sides.  First thing is to investigate the obvious crack – I do this under the microscope as its easier to see what the materials are, picking the crack out with a modelling knife to get to some wood.  In this case I found I was digging in black filler/glue ( not wax as it didn’t melt).  Now there is no point in trying to put a repair on top of an old repair, so its a matter of digging away till you get to some solid wood, in this case taking out quite a lot of the filler. you then need to finish the gap with straight sides, preferably tapering so you can get a good fit.  I think I’m now almost back to wood, so tomorrow I’ll shape a matching piece of walnut with the right grain and glue it in place. It is always better to make sure you cut back to a sound foundation – trying to keep repairs as small as possible often doesn’t quite look right if there is still some damage on either side.

 

 

 

 

New spring and modern sidelock or late percussion  spring very similar to the one modified for the new spring.

 

Still a bit more at the top to come off as there is still some damage to be cut out and the gap needs to be tapered for a good fit.

25th December  –  I can’t believe how long it is since I last posted – I’m sorry, but I guess a lot of my regular readers will have got fed up and deserted – don’t blame them!  My excuse is that I’ve been desperately working on the house restoration, trying to get to the point of finishing the ‘wet trades’ i.e. plastering before Christmas.  I wasn’t sure if I could do the plastering myself, or if I’d need to get a professional in to do it. Well, I did just manage to finish the first coats on everything and so get the bulk of the drying out of the way – I’m quite slow, which is OK with lime plaster as it doesn’t ‘go off’ like gypsom plaster, so it took me around 5 days to do the 50 sq meters of the walls and ceiling, which were mostly wood fibre board (in place of the original laths) and some cork insulation.  It all required a base coat, then pressing in a fibreglass mesh to stabilise it, then going over with another thin coat to hide the mesh. One job I didn’t enjoy was pressing 3 meter lengths of mesh into the wet plaster on the ceiling – until you have got most of it stuck it doesn’t stay up, and once its stuck you can’t move it around to align it, and then it all falls down and you are left standing there draped in mesh partly covered in plaster – not fun.  It went reasonably well and is flat enough for the top coat, although I found that my big posh finishing trowel had got slightly banana shaped somehow so it won’t do for the top coats – fortunately I bought another one earlier.  I hadn’t realised that there was what I call ‘tool porn’ in the plastering trade, where manufacturers try to make functional tools look sexy and posh as well as functioning well,  I also notice that the cool tool colours are now black and yellow- copied from DeWalt tools.   My excuse for not posting is that at my age 7 or 8 hours work, including plastering leaves one completely zonked out ( is that still a word – we used it when I was a child) so I miss my usual active late night slot. Today being Christmas I have a bit more energy – we had a small family Christmas party, but as some of us are vulnerable, including me, we decided to have it outside round the fire pit with hand food, like we did last year – it actually worked pretty well and no-one died of hypothermia, or at least not before they left.   On the gun front I haven’t done much although I will do some over the next few days while I rest from plastering.  I had a clay shoot with a few friends a CGC a coupleof weeks ago and shot the best I have done for years, if not ever – I wonder if having shot very little for the last two years has got rid of some bad habits I had!  The cheering thing was that I shot well with my percussion Nock single ( the only muzzle loader that I shoot nowadays), but also with a 20 bore hammer gun,  I am getting back to the broken spring job, having made one new spring and then broken it, I’ve found another spring that could be modified, and bent, filed and welded it to fit – I now have to harden and temper it and hope that it will not break – I will be very gently and will probably end up with a spring that is on the weak side, but better than another broken one.  I still haven’t managed to get a decent brown on the pistol barrels – I got rather deperessed by my previous attempts, but am steeling myself for attempt no 3.  I also realised there is another job in a gun slip in the office that a friend left to be sorted out – I can’t even remember the exact details, although I think I wanted to find another percussion cock for it, and was going over to see Dick before this latest Covid thing happened – his wife has type 1 diabetes so is vulnerable, and he is on immunosuppressive drugs and so is very vulnerable, so that won’t happen for at least  a few months.   I wish the vaccine refusenics realised the stress they cause, including to the hospital staff I know who have to pick up the pieces of their obstinacy!     Lets all get jabbed and boosted and re boosted and take care so we can get back to something resembling a  normal life again.  The drug companies are doing a great job designing new treatments as well as vaccines so I hope the days are approaching when Covid can be treated the same way as seasonal flu – I got an email form the NHS a  couple of days ago saying I would get one of the new monoclonal antibody drugs if I got Covid so I’m on their radar which is good news…..  Take care,  and I hope you have a good 2022.

11 November – Really good muzzle loading shoot yesterday!  Weather very cloudy and occasional Scotch mist – enough to twart one of the flintlockers for one drive – and not a breath of wind to deflect the birds.  The bag was fairly small – 67,  but the birds were flying well and the drives were good and even, so everyone had a most enjoyable time – proving that numbers are not everything.  I had mostly pegs on the outskirts and wasn’t in line for any big flushes, and I decided that I prefer it that way, especially as I shoot my single barreled percussion gun, so ‘left and rights’ are not possible. I seem to be the only person to shoot a single – someone asked my why I used it – the answer is I shoot better with it than any other gun I have, it is light to carry about all day (5 1/4 lbs), and it saves the dilemma of whether to reload after shooting one barrel or wait til you have shot both.  I was surprised in discussion to learn that other experienced shooters had inadvertently reloaded with a cap still on the live barrel! I  did make a small plastic ‘top hat’ that fits over the nipple and is locked in place by the cock, but I haven’t used it.     All in all a very good day, enhanced by the fact that it was only 25 minutes drive from home.  I seem to have got my left eye under control – I have a vintage pair of big gold round frame glasses of the type the NHS used to issue that have a W bridge instead of nose pads – so they fit closer to my face than normal specs and thus offer better protection from bits of cap.  I put a bit of sellotape over the top quarter of the left lens which is just enough to stop my left eye dominating when my head is down on the stock – I don’t notice it when looking normally.     I’m carrying on the browning of the pistol barrels – I think we are getting somewhere this time – I’m about 6 or 7 rustings in, so hopefully we will be nearly there.    Work on the bedroom continues – still not much visible reconstruction yet, but lots of fiddly framing started, and I’m now putting in conduits to pull the electrics through later.  I need to use conduits as the house seems to have had a severe mouse problem at some time – much to my surprise they seem to be happy burrowing and making nests in the fibreglass insulation – which makes it pretty disgusting – I’m replacing it with wood fibre (Seico Flex 036) and I’ll try to compartmentalise it to keep rodents out.   I did come across one power wire that had the insulation nibbled off – jut not enough to electrocute the perpetrator!  In my last house when I lifted a floorboard there was a 2 meter length of flat cable with all the copper exposed like a railway track!  That was the advantage of the old TRS rubber covered cable – nothing ate it, although it did get brittle.

7th November – I’m sorry for the missed blogs – I got a nasty infection that made me feel rather useless – and it took a while to sort out – I even stopped working on the bedroom restoration and sat on the sofa most of the day.  I did try and do a bit of gun work, but that turned out to be a disaster!  My browning of the pistol barrels got no-where – goodness knows why.  I never managed to touch some of the steel layers – almost as if it was stainless steel, and the rest didn’t get any colour to speak of – a complete mystery – I ran it to about 14 browning and then gave up and decided to start again when I felt a bit more dynamic!  I hardened and tempered the pistol spring, but wasn’t really ‘with it’ and it ended up a bit too open and the ‘hook’ end snapped when I tried to put it in the pistol – I will have to tackle that shortly!  I am now more or less back on track and working on the bedroom again, which is just as well as there is a load of work to do – as I pointed out before, I do tend to get more ruthless as I begin to be able to see the job in hand – so I did a bit more demolition and removed an old built-in cupboard that was built of completely woodwormed uprights.  I  now have a larger room to finish.  I have taken it all back to the rafters I put in in 2002, and will put in lots of insulation before putting on Savolit wood fibre board – its a substitute for lathes and can be diretly plastered over.  There 1s a lot of plastering to do  – 40  or so sq meters at three coats, I’m not very quick at plastereing so I might ‘cheat’ and get a professional in to do it if I can find someone who is good with lime plaster.  We had Giles’s flat  plastered by a pro – a joy to watch and perfectly smooth, but he left one room to his mate, and that was no better than I could have done (but quicker).

25th October  The browning of the two barrels looks a bit more promising – I may have found a clue – I suspect that if you put on the browning too generously it actually takes off the existing oxide layer? sounds improbably I know, but I’m now wiping on a very little browning solution.  I spent the afternoon scrubbing distemper off the gable end wall  (horrid job) so I could dub it out flat ready for attaching the cork.  I rang the floor board chap this morning to confirm their bank details as my bank doesn’t like me using bank details that come from emails – there  are loads of scams called BECS going the rounds, where somehow a scammer intercepts genuine emails from a business and sends an email perporting to come from that business but with the scammer’s own bank details.  It is usually directed at big business and has raked in hundreds of millions of pounds for the scammers.  Penny got scammed out of £500 pounds when having carpets fitted in the cottage in Cornwall, so I take it seriously…….   Anyway the floor board chap (Ben at Sutton Timber if you need floorboards!) pointed out that I’d better get all the ‘wet trades’ finished before fitting the floor or the boards would curl up ( actually curl down is more likely!) so I must push ahead with the plastering, but a lot to do first – like putting in the conduits for the power and lights, and sticking the wood fibre boards up so I have something to plaster onto!

24th October – Well, a bit of a gap again – sorry!  I had a skip delivered so have been trying to fill it to justify 6 cu yds!  Work on the bedroom has been progressing – I have been debating what to do about the floor – its a mix of old and not so old pine boards with lots of patches and gaps – I was going to board it with OSB and have it carpeted but Giles pursuaded me that that wasn’t in keeping with all the other fearures of the room – I did think of getting a few old pine boards and lifting the floor and relaying it, but figured that that would be quite difficult as the nails will surely tear the wood if they are lifted.  Anyway after a discussion and a search on the internet I have opted for new Elm floorboards (I didn’t know you could still get Elm in England!) 300 mm wide – we have other rooms with old Elm floorboards, so its a reasonable choice.  One really surprising thing came to light when I lifted a section of floorboard – the space between the joists was filled with tan coloured loose material that looked like perfect insulation – at first I thought it was coarse sawdust, but careful examination showed it was plant material that I identified as the petals of hops – I got some hops from the garden, and apart from the colour (garden ones are paler) they were identical.  Goodness knows how many hops would be needed to fill around 10 sq meters of floor to a depth of about 7 cm (3 ins) – I wondered if they were a byproduct of brewing or something.  Anyway they are clean and a good insulator (the room underneath was the dairy) and will stay, possibly supplemented with some vermiculite if there are empty joists.  I’ve never heard of hop petals being used as insulation in old buildings – must make some enquiries….  Things happened on the gun front, but slowly – I did about 8 rustings of the two pistol barrels but they haven’t started to brown yet – in despair I rang Dick to see if he would like to have a go, but he said it usually takes him 10 to 12 rustings and I should be a bit more patient!  I have adjusted my technique, being careful to apply browning with an almost dry sponge, and using medium steel wool…. we shall see……….  The pistol’s owner sent me the stocks to make sure things fit and work – I was having problems with the heel of the spring coming below the lock edge, so I welded a longer stud on the top arm that locates on the bolster, that kicked the heel up, but the tumbler end of the spring then got a bit low and was too short – straightening out the bent bit a little fixed the length, and bending it down cured the problem of the low spring – now I just have to reharden it.   Now I just have a little bit of woodwork to do on one stock and finish the browning, then I have another gun to sort out and another client is threatening to visit wih more work….. And I think I have another pistol to do that I’d forgotten about! And the frames to make for the secondary double glazing…… Plus I have to plan and buy stuff for the STEM club that starts after half term next week…………..   Maybe I should retire for the third or fourth  time, but I don’t seem very good at it!

17th October – I got one gun job out of the way this morning – a repaired spur and ‘mouth’ on a percussion cock to engrave – difficult as its all on a steep curve, so I resorted to the GRS – the welds are not altogether even textured so it was not straightforward, but the overall effect is OK.  I coloured it down with my gas-oxy torch, and then made its mate the same – I think it looks good, but I don’t have the gun to check the overall effect.  I photographed the cocks together after I’d engraved the top and  the photo showed that the repaired cock had much less engraving on the high part of the body – its a thing I’ve  noticed before – you think a job is done and you photograph it, and pack it up to go, then later you look at the photo and see a problem.  Anyway I got the cock out again and recut that bit of engraving – the two cocks are subtely different in engraving and surface texture but now look a bit more of a pair. I’ve done two brownings of the pistol barrels – they are beginning to show figure, but there is still a fair amount of metal the browning won’t bite on.  I’ve been taking photos after each browning, but they don’t show up  as much as in actuality – I must see if I can find a photo trick to show the actual effect.  You can distinctly see that the barrel is made of strands of different iron/steel rather than a homogenous material, but as its a pistol barrel the composite bar wasn’t wound round a mandrell in a spiral as it would be in the case of a long gun, but was made into a strip and wrapped round the mandrell and hammer welded into a tube in a series of grooves in an anvil with a lap joint so broadly the pattern runs along the barrel.  I believe most pistols were made this way, as were all (?)  military muskets and rifles. Some fancy pistols did have wound barrels and elaborate patterning, but most didn’t.

After second rusting – there is pattern, but faint, and a lot of untouched metal!

the cock on the left has lost its engraving on the high part

 

 

Recut – original engraving not identical on the two cocks…… (& different lighting)

Here is the bedroom I’m working on – the visible vapour membrane is directly inside the  slates. –

there is 140 mm of wood fibre insulation to go in and 60 mm of cork on the gable end wall.

This beam is probably at least 250 years old – it has a curved  brace at the left end that I’m repairing as its half rotten.

A similar brace at the right end is missing and will be re-instated when I can find a curved bit of wood.

16th October -More work on the bedroom yesterday – got me thinking about the 7 deadly sins of old house restoration and what would be the 7 deadly sins of old gun restoration. My 7 for old buildings are :- 1) Cement, 2) UPVC in any shape or form, 3) MDF board, 4) Plasterboard, 5) Vapour barriers, 6 Struck pointing of brickwork, 7) Float glass.  Not sure I can get to 7 for guns ;- 1) Sandblasting (yes, it has been done!), 2) Brazing of broken parts, 3) Use of woodfiller, 4) Polyurethane or similar varnish, 5) stainless steel, 6) Slotted head woodscrews, 7) Almost all sanding of existing wookwork.   This weekend is devoted to getting some gun jobs done – I’ve prepped the barrels and cleaned them with water and washing up liquid to get rid of any oil, then given them a wash over with chalk and water mixed like thin cream.  When this was allowed to dry you can see some figure showing through as faint rust marks – the beginnings of browning – its now having its first proper browning.  I decided to make a completely new top jaw screw and cut the thread on the lathe since it is set up for a suitable thread pitch – 28 tpi.  I heated up the top of the screw and dipped it in colour case hardening compound not to full read heat – anyway that dulled it down a bit.  I then reverse electrolytically derusted it ( i.e. rusted it rapidly) – in order to slightly dull the surface.  Its actually put some natural looking blobs of the surface too.  Its not a bad match for the original, I’m satisfied.  There is one niggling job that I need to attend to;- the new mainspring I made/converted is very close to the edge of the lock, and probably won’t fit within the lock pocket of the completed pistol (which I don’t have) = There are 2 options, either move the hole in the lockplate that houses the peg on the top leg of the spring, or reshape or remake the spring.  Either way its a great bore and will take a while – the lock plate is hardened so I’d have to anneal it, which won’t improve it, so I’ll proably work on the spring!  I got an email from school a couple of days ago asking if I’d organise/run a project for 2 classes to build their Nativity display models for the local church – I’ll be delighted to do it, I’ve already bought a couple of strings of LED christmas lights to illuminate Bethlehem!  Bit ironic for an atheist to be doing the church display but hey ho, thats life……

 

II can tell them apart ‘in the flesh’ but don’t know which is which from the photo, so must be OK!

14th October – Destruction more or less complete – just waiting to get the last 20 bags of rubble and muck down to the ground using my ‘crane’ – actually just a pulley stuck out on an arm  from the window. It needs two people, one up one down, to operate so I have to wait for Giles to come over tomorrow.  I was just about to finish in time for my 4 p.m. transfer to gun jobs when the materials for rebuilding were delivered on a couple of pallets and dumped outside – that took most of my afternoon gun time to sort out, anyway nearly ready to go, some framing up to do and it will be ready to stick on the sheets of wood fibreboard (Savilit) that will be the base for plastering with lime plaster.  So I had better go and get a few minutes work on outstanding gun jobs.  I’ve got a percussion cock that has been welded to re-engrave – its all curved surfaces which are very difficult to do hand encraving as you can only keep a constant depth of cut by EXACTLY following the curved surfaces, otherwise you almost invariably slip and make horrid cuts.  My solution for this is to use the pneumatic graver (GRS) that operates with almost no push and so doesn’t tend to slip.  I’ll go and start now………

13th October – Still destroying!  Quite mild here – how long will it last?  We have a massive crop of green tomatoes in need of another week’s sun – can’t face that much chutney!  We planted a grape vine about 5 years ago and have never had more than a handful of unripe grapes, but this year it made it from its trelis to the south facing wall of the house and went mad – we must have had enough grapes for a Chateau Cablesfarm vintage – bottles running to two or three figures ( that’s roman numerals).  It won’t happen, as the potential  winemaker ate them all at about a bunch a day for the last month.   I’m still experimenting with striking up the pistol barrels. One of the problems with using a file is that occasionally a speck of metal gets embedded in the file and creates a deeper scratch.  I tend to file wet as this helps avoid the problem – some people use chalk for the same purpose, not sure which is best.  I got good results from using a small  fine diamond sharpener stuck to a plastic handle (EZE-LAP) until the white spirit I was using disolved the adhesive holding the diamond onto the plastic.   My current best guess at a good technique is filing down to No 4, then use a fine slip, then 400 grit and finally 1000 grit. Looking under my x25 microscope there is still plenty for the browning to get a bite on.  I’ve recut the engraving on the barrels a couple of times as I’ve filed so that they still look crisp.  The microscope x25 does reveal that the surface still has multiple small pits, but I think when browned they will not show (they don’t really show to the naked eye) so I think I’m now ready to go!  I have had to divide my day up to get both the bedroom and the guns done – I reckon 6 hours of labouring is enough at my age, so at 4 p.m. I retire to the gun workshop for a bit of filing etc. ( after a cup of tea of course) until 6, then maybe back again after dinner for an hour or two if I feel energetic, then attend to the blog if I have anything to say!

of blog from Jan 2021 to June 2022, but maybe they will reappear!

 Posted by at 6:12 pm
Dec 042023
 
Video link to Ageing Well No1
Video link to I’ve got CLL

I was chatting to my haematologist during my 2 monthly appointment at his clinic and mentioned that I was thinking of putting a YouTube video on something to do with fitness, exercise, food and old age ( or more probably in the reverse order!) and he was very enthusiastic.  He was very keen that I did something about my age and my experience of having CLL because a lot of his patients who have just been diagnosed with CLL are upset and concerned at the prospect of having ‘cancer’ and of a possible deterioration in their general health, and imagine that it will necessarily change their life for the worse.  Since I have fortunately experienced none of those negative consequences he thought that if I told of how it had affected me, or rather how it hadn’t affected me, he would be able to direct them to my YouTube, which would give them some reassurance – he seemed to think it would be ‘A GOOD THING’.  SO I always do as I’m told, especially by people I like and respect – although not always by the other 99.9999…% of the population!

Here is a slightly different version of the information in the video if you came to it via my website rather than directly to YouTube

 

Hi,  I’m 82 and have had CLL – that’s Chronic Lympocytic Leukaemia – for more than 6 years, how much longer I don’t know because it only gradually produced symptoms as my lymph nodes got bigger over several years, but I was a little concerned and my GP referred me to a haematologist who diagnosed CLL in August 2017 – at that time I had no symptoms at all apart from the enlarged lymph nodes, and they weren’t causing me any problems so I  entered the ‘Watch and Wait’ phase. I got Covid quite badly just before the first lockdown and lost 10 Kg but recovered – but that’s another story.  I was in no hurry to begin  CLL treatment as I have a beard and the lymph nodes in my neck were not particularly visible, but eventually it seemed as if they had started to alter my voice slightly due to pressure in my throat so I agreed to start treatment in September 2021 when I’d finished my annual sailing holiday ( got to get my priorities right), that was  just over 2 years ago from when I’m making this video in December 2023.  The enlarged nodes are caused by the build up of cancerous white cells.  I guess the drug I have is the usual drug for CLL –  Acalabrutinib, which is  a kinase inhibitor – it works by blocking one of the metabolic pathways that the cancerous cells use to multiply so gradually reduces the population of bad cells, which get flushed out of the lymph nodes over a few months so your white cell count goes up for a bit.  Since CLL messes with your white cells, which are a major part of the immune system I was  proscribed a propylactic ( i.e early defense ) antibiotic CoTrimoxazole , and an antiviral Aciclovir to reduce the risk of Shingles.    Remarkably none of these pills had or have any side effects whatsoever – I’m still taking them!     So  if you’ve just had CLL diagnosed, or know someone who has, what can I say;- CLL is a common form of bloof cancer – its the most benign form and nothing like as frightning as the other blood cancers and is very well controlled by modern drugs like Acalabrutinib that are taken as tablets twice a day rather than having to be administered in hospital and they are very well tolerated by most of patients.  Has it altered my life at all?  Physically not at all, practically very little – an hour every two months for a visit to the very friendly clinic, a couple of minutes twice  a day to swallow tablets and 15 minutes once a week to load up my daily pill boxes to keep pill taking in order- that’s probably the sum total of the disturbance to my life!  I do take some notice of the fact that my immune system is somewhat  impaired, so I make sure I have all the Covid jabs I can, plus the Flu jab, and I am aware that I may be more liable to getting Sepsis – I was warned that I should take action if I had a fever of 38 degrees C or higher as that presents as a danger of Sepsis.  On one occasion I did ring the clinic emergency number with a high temperature and was advised to go to A&E where I was put on an Amoxycillin drip and kept pumped up with antibiotics for 72 hours – although I didn’t actually feel that bad and certainly didn’t develop Sepsis – better safe than sorry.   Overall, my view is that the world doesn’t owe me a living, or a life, and at about my age I’ve reached my life expectancy in actuarial terms, so its all a bonus from here on in – my response to the question ‘how are you?’ is invariably ‘Alive!’ – with a positive inflection.   Just as the world (universe?) doesn’t owe me a living,  so it’s up to me to make the effort not to be a burden on the rest of it, and  that means making the effort to stay fit and health as long as possible. I am still very fit – I sail in summer and shoot clays and game in season, and pay  attention to muscle mass by lifting weights and getting adequate protein (I’ll put up a separate video on that later) .  On the positive side I think CLL has made me appreciate life and more the realise the incredible progress science and medics have made in my lifetime, or for that matter in the lifetime of my children.    Rather than CLL closing down my horizons, its made me appreciate every moment of life in a positive way – I hope it does for you too.   And the future – research into CLL and its treatment is suggesting that after some years the cancer cells may be in remission to the extent that it isn’t necessry to carry on taking Acalabrutinib – that might almost count as ‘cured’ but studying the effects of doing things for a long time takes a long time – watch this space!  One last thought to leave you with;  if you’ve recently been diagnosed with CLL it will tend to be on your mind a lot of the time in a negative way – I think its still there in my mind some of the time,   its not a threatening thing, it is just part of life.

 

This is the bit of the YouTube where you fess up to being sponsored and thank your sponsors and try to get people to contribute to your ‘channel’ – well unfortunately no-one is sponsoring me and I’m not expecting anyone to ‘subscribe’ – but I must thank Prof George Follows and the staff at the Genesis Healthcare team in Newmarket who are really like my professional family, and BUPA who fund my treatment on the back of 40 years of contributions and almost no claims until CLL!

 Posted by at 4:41 pm
Oct 292023
 

Sailing to Scotland

Tim Owen

8th Aug 2023

Sepsis is a 1986 Moody 37, one of only two made with a lifting keel that takes her draft from 2.3 m to 1.4 m with the aid of a hydraulic ram and an electric or manual pump. She has been in one family since new and spent most of her life either in the south of France or in Greece. When the original owner died she festered in Greece for a number of years until she was sailed back to the UK, or rather motored at slow speed with a furred up engine as there was no wind. She aquired a new Sole Mini44 engine in Gibraltar, together with an autopilot and new chart plotter and was then based at North Fambridge while further work was done. Covid shut that down for a couple of years and I got involved as we all recovered from that trauma. The two generations of the family now looking after her had no great love of East coast sailing and liked the idea of basing her on the West Coast of Scotland where they had had their introduction to sailing in a previous family boat – a Rival 32. A berth was booked in to an Oban Marina for 2023 and the race was on to get her ready to take up. We originally planned to take her up in spring 2023, but she went into Fox’s Marina in Ipswich in October for 3 weeks work dropping the keel and rudder to replace bearings and taking the mast down so we could work on the in-mast reefing. The reefing was an Easy Reef addition to the Selden mast, and the inner spar had somehow got damaged. Easy Reef is no longer in existence but we managed to source some spare lengths from the mizzen mast of a larger yacht that had removed its system. Due to staffing issues at Fox’s the three weeks turned into 5 months and we finally got on with the work at North Fambridge in April 2023 There followed a couple of months while we worked through a number of routine and non routine problems – One unexpected one being the unpredicted demise of the 4.5Kg calor cylinder (since rescinded, but for how long?) that led me to build a separate gas locker on the stern to hold anything up to two 10Kg Gaslite plastic cylinders of propane – ideal for a boat as they are light and can be dragged and banged around without marking the deck. We had trouble starting the engine – that took a bit of detective work – it was only when Penny was down watching the voltmeter as I tried to start the engine that she noticed the chart plotter go blank as the key was turned – since they are on separate circuits that pointed to an earth fault, and indeed on checking, the battery negative connections were very corroded and wired a little strangely – also why the windlass didn’t always run! Another job that was in my view essential for Scotland was to fit a diesel heater, so I fitted a Webasco AirTop Evo 40. One advantage of a do-it yourself fit is that you can spend a long time planning and exploring routes for the ducts and try things using short lengths of pipe without it adding to the bill – we managed to get outlets where we wanted them with minimal compromise . One of my other activities is mechanical design and 3D printing so I was able to print custom duct fittings in carbon fibre reinforced nylon where there wasn’t a suitable fitting available – in fact I printed a number of different things for the boat including a set of mug holders for the binnacle so there was always a safe place to hold everyone’s drinks under way.

By mid July we thought we were about ready to set off, only unfortunately ran over the mooring and had to have a quick lift-out to untangle the prop. Fortunately no damage, and a chance to clean off a small forest of barnacles that had grown in the 3 months or so she had been on a mooring. I had ‘done’ the East Coast trip to Inverness some 40 years ago in the previous family boat, and knew it was a bit of a slog, so I was a bit surprised when my wife Penny thought it would be a good thing to do in her highly constrained 2 week summer break from her job I recruited two of my sons, Rory and Tom. All of us are quite experienced small boat sailors, Rory has owned his own sailing boat and Penny and I have chartered on the West coast of Scotland for many years and we have both worked on research ships in the North Sea at some point, so can’t complain that we didn’t know what to expect!

I had spent a lot of time over the winter thinking about the passage North – Visit MyHarbour.com has lots on harbours etc. but until the publication of ‘Cook’s Country’ by Henry Irving (Imray) in the spring there wasn’t a pilot book for the northern section of the English East Coast . Passage planning for a trip like that from the River Crouch to Inverness has to be very flexible, especially as it involves the North Sea, which can be an unforgiving place – with almost nowhere to seek shelter in a hard blow from the East. I did contemplate doing the trip to Oban westabout, but it is substantially longer and the owners wanted to enjoy the Caledonian canal. When I last did the trip we did everything on paper charts and Dead Reckoning and the Admiralty pilot, plus I think one noon sun sight, but in those days things were much simpler – in particular there were no wind farms getting in the way, and no VTS with traffic highways in and out of the big ports that get agitated if you do the wrong thing, and anyway we didn’t have a VHF radio. The main framework of the passage plan has to be a list of harbours you can get into at any state of the tide, with a secondary list of those with tidal limits, and a tertiary list of anchorages with their limits on wind direction etc. Since we could put up our keel and get into places with only 1.5 m, life was somewhat simplified as most of the published information seems to take this as the ‘standard’ draft. You also need to tabulate H W tide times for all these places, and also rough periods when tidal flow will be in your favour or against, although this I left to be planned as we progressed. Navigation has changed markedly since I taught the RYA Yachtmaster course, although judging from comments I hear, I’m not sure the RYA has yet totally caught up with the gradual disappearance of paper charts! I did have paper charts to cover the area of interest – 3 Imray charts, plus some Admiralty charts that cost a fortune and had most of the detail removed from the areas I wanted it! But in truth I didn’t use them, except when running a pair of dividers to look at possible legs. My preferred charting is the Boating/Navionics App, now from Garmin, that I had running on two tablets – one mounted on the binnacle when sailing, one portable, and on two phones. When the tablets and my phone are on the internet via wifi or a hotspot they share routes etc. Sepiola has an AIS transmitter and receiver, and I have a separate AIS receiver on the stern locker that talks to my Navionics apps via wifi, although the range is poor due to lack of aerial height. The tablets are great – the one on the binnacle is not very easy to see in bright light, and in heavy rain when the screen is covered in droplets the touch screen doesn’t work until you wipe it clear, but its useable at all times, or you can duck under the sprayhood and look at the other tablet. An invaluable feature of the app is that you can click on the tide gauges or tidal arrows on the screen and display the tide height and stream now or at any time in the future.We had a Raymarine plotter running at the chart table with a pretty chunky version of Navionics charts that was really only useful as a way to see the AIS position of ships at sensible ranges – but using it meant going below, which for most of the trip was uncomfortable if not actually sick making or dangerous, and usually got water over the logbook and any charts that were out. In the event Rory often saw ships AIS on the Marine Radar App on his phone, which was useful as they are updated every minute when the ship is in range of a shore station and moving and we have phone coverage (most of the time). The Marine Radar app doesn’t appear to update the fix time of vessels at rest.

Our overall plan was to make a couple of short legs, from the Crouch to the Orwell (Woolverstone)

and from there to Lowestoft. From there its a long leg – if the weather was kind we planned to head for Scarborough with the option to anchor in the mouth of the Humber. From there you get a number of part day legs between all-tide ports until you get to the leg across the the Firth of Forth, which is a bit long for a single day, then another longish leg down the Moray Firth to Inverness, preferrably timing your arrival at the narrows at Chanonry Point for the rising tide, and to go through the bridge in Inverness when the tide isn’t against you, or for that matter, strongly with you. At the end of each leg I put in the detailed route for the next day, and checked over the list of harbours and anchorages and tides etc, plus committing the entry directions for the destination port to memory! In the back of my mind in planning was the crew limitation – I knew Penny and Tom had to be back with a pretty inflexible deadline of two weeks, although I figured that Rory and I could handle things if we had to, or we could call in reinforcements. In the run up to departure it became clear that we were in for a period of relatively unsettled weather as the June high pressure system had moved East and South and it was likely that at some point we might get bad weather – in any event it was likely to be changeable, meaning that detailed planning was not really possible in advance.

We loaded the boat in Fambridge Yacht Station – while loading Rory gashed his finger rather badly trying to save a runaway trolley so after an exploration of first aid kits he was patched up and decided a visit to A & E wasn’t necessary. The Yacht Station has tide limits so we motored down river and anchored at the junction with the Roach overnight to leave at 5 a.m. to get enough water to get over the Swin Spitway and take the tide most of the way to the Felixstowe. The 5 a.m. start works well as it corresponds to first light, giving you maximum daylight so we tended to keep it up for the whole trip. We were unsure about the amount of chain on the anchor, and about its marking when we anchored at the Roach so at Woolverstone Marina we flaked the chain on the pontoon and discovered that there were only 33 meters – OK for the Med where it had been, but not really adequate for the tidal UK, especially N.W. Scotland – we couldn’t source a suitable new chain en route so we added 18m of rope as a rode which just fitted in the anchor locker . We left at 5 the next morning for Lowestoft and had a pleasant sail, ending in a bit of motoring as the wind backed. Penny hadn’t been able to join Sepiola at the start as her father was ill, so came up to Lowestoft the next day and we left at 1500 hrs when she arrived. Rory took the opportunity to ring 101 and go to the small injuries unit to get his finger properly dressed.

Lowestoft to the Humber/Grimsby is quite a slog and the wind was likely to be from the NW so the anchorage just inside Spurn Point was not likely to be comfortable, Reeds, however, suggested one off Tetney on the SW side of the estuary that sounded fine, We did originally think that we might make it to Scarborough and were prepared for both options. We started from Lowestoft with a fair wind on the quarter and as we got round the top of Norfolk the wind increased until we were on a broad reach with full sail in 20 to 24 knots making 8 knots by GPS (our log wasn’t working) The seas didn’t have much fetch so we sailed without too much motion. The wind gradually increased, gusting 25-28 knots so we reefed both sails. I’d been hand steering but as the wind increased and the seas built up as we diverged from the coast it became more and more difficult to steer an accurate course, and more and more tiring As it got dark we reefed again and started the engine to give us some more control and power the auto-pilot as the seas built up, The auto pilot steers a much better and steadier course than I can, and if over pressed in a strong gust lets the boat round up a little to relieve pressure on the sails – it felt very secure. I’d set our route to converge on the small boat track along the edge of the VTS track for outbound ships from the Humber South but didn’t notice that our course was a couple of degrees off and we drifted into the traffic lane and were called up by a ship passing down the lane to alter course to Port, which initially puzzled me til I realised what had happened. Without an AIS transmitter it would have been more difficult to identify the call from the ship. By the time we’d been bumped around during the night it was clear that it wasn’t sensible to go on to Scarborough so we made the Humber estuary around 7:30 a.m. and called up VTS for permission to enter and proceed to Tetney and were warned to keep 500 m clear of the Monobuoy – the oil transfer buoy in the entrance to the Humber. We followed the 3m contour round and anchored near the WWII Haile Sands Fort in calm water.

We left the Tetney anchorage at 5 am the next morning, calling VTS on ch 14 for permission to cross the traffic lanes between buoys Bravo and Charlie and were asked to report at Buoy 2 for clearance to cross, and told to keep clear of the Monobuoy (again). Since we had an AIS transmitter, VTS could track our position. At buoy 2 there were no ship movements in the area so we called and were cleared to cross. We motored all the way to Scarborough, arriving at the rather crowded harbour and were directed to raft up against a couple of small fishing boats against the quay – access on and off the boat not easy! The harbour is heavily used by pleasure craft for holiday makers and is hectic and noisy during the daytime but fortunately very peaceful at night. Another early start and a good sail took us Harlepool where we arrived within the 4 hour window either side of High Water that the lock operates. On the way into Harltlepool as we ran the engine I opened the side cover to check if the stern gland was leaking – it wasn’t, but my head torch illuminated a little jet of water coming out of the seam around the bottom of the stainless exhaust box – A quick sharpening of a matchstick made a temporary partial plug till we got in, although the jet was not enough to do much harm. Once in I cleaned up the bottom seam and identified a small hole – the rest of the seam looked OK and survived probing with a point. A quick call to the owners revealed that there was very old Milliput epoxy putty on board somewhere, but to be safe a crew member was dispatched to Toolstation to get some plastic metal. Rather stiff Milliput found, I did a trial to make sure it was going to set hard, but realised that it was very difficult to mix thoroughly, obviously vital, so spent longer cutting and mixing to ensure the epoxy and hardener were completely mixed before drying the area and cleaning it with acetone and pressing in a fillet around the area of the leak. We topped up fuel and water – Sepiola has a rather small water tank – around 140 litres, and a 130 litre fuel tank, with 40 litres in cans in the lazarette. By morning the Milliput was rock hard and the test lump I had stuck on the top of the exhaust box without cleaning the metal had stuck fast so I figured that the leak was pretty well sealed so we had another 5 a.m. start towards Blyth. We stopped outside the harbour to pump the bilges as the exhaust leak had clearly been running for some time.

A very brisk sail, getting up to 34 knots in the gusts took us to Blyth by 1700 hrs. where we motored in against a 24 knot headwind.

We were getting quite anxious about the weather forecasts which suggested the weather might get bad in the next 48 hours, particularly round the headland into the Moray Firth, and discussed stopping at Eyemouth or making directly for Peterhead, I decided that we would make a decision when we were near Eyemouth depending on how battered we felt. Visibility was very patchy and we were sailing just off my planned route when we were called up by a windfarm guard vessel as we were on course to skim the corner of a windfarm – one of the problems of the Navionics vector charts is that the detail shown varies with the level of zoom, and the way we had it displayed for the longer passages didn’t show the windfarm – Windfarms are not outlined in pecked lines once they are completed so don’t show up at low zooms – something I hadn’t really realised before, and a bit of a problem as the East coast is a forest of wind farms! In the event we had a pretty fair sail to Eyemouth and decided to keep on to Peterhead across the Firth of Forth and up the Aberdeenshire coast, mindful that there were no easy boltholes on the way. As we were off Stonehaven the wind got up – I was below in my bunk resting – it was a bit too bouncy to sleep – I wondered how we were doing, so looked at Navionics on my phone and was surprised to see that we were only making 1.8 knots. Fully dressed in waterproofs and lifejacketed in record time I ventured on deck to find that the wind had got up very quickly and headed us so Rory was just motoring slowly into the wind to see if it carried on and take stock. As it didn’t go down we put the engine up to cruising revs and motored on course for Peterhead, making about 3.5 to 4 knots into the wind for several hours before the wind finally dropped.

Peterhead was a very friendly port and marina. I called the marina, who said it would make life easier if I put the keel up, and the harbourmaster to get clearance to enter – he called us back when we were on the correct approach line – its a small marina but very helpful with good facilities although some way from shops etc. The Marina fuel pump was broken so the Marina harbourmaster took us in his van to refill our fuel cans and get essential supplies. Another 5 a.m. start saw us begin a very pleasant sail with a beam wind round into the Moray Firth and a wind on the quarter as we sailed towards the narrows at the start of the Inverness Firth. On the way we got an unexpected call from a guard vessel warning us we were heading for the 500m exclusion zone around a UXO (Unexploded Ordinance). Rather than take down the coordinates and plot them I asked if a 20 degree course alteration to port would take us clear, which was confirmed, and asked them to call us when we could resume our course – another advantage of an AIS transmitter! We called Inverness Marina by phone to book a place for the night and arrived at the narrows more or less on time to get to the bridge at slack water, which is advisable as the tide runs at up to 6 knots through the bridge, and makes turning into the river to get to the Inverness Marina quite tricky. We found the last space on the hammerhead in the Marina – rather a dreary place surrounded by very high quays, but good enough for overnight. The sea lock into the Caledonian canal only operates about 4 hours either side of high water, so we had to wait until 11:30 a.m. for a slot, but out lines were taken and we were quickly on our way to the swinging bridge and the next lock before the Seaport Marina. Tied up in Seaport, fuel topped up – job done!

What did we learn:-

Although the North Sea coast is not a particularly attractive cruising ground we enjoyed the challenge and never felt out of our comfort zone. Sepiola felt safe and not over pressed although she wasn’t particularly close winded and bounces around more than we are used to in slightly larger charter boats On the West coast of Scotland we usually consider the Inshore Forecasts to be on the pessimistic side, from our experience this time the forecasts were pretty optimistic – we had forecasts of 5 or less and sea state smooth or slight all the time – if only! I’d say that an AIS transmitter is pretty essential in the areas around the busy North Sea ports and windfarms, plus a good VHF at the wheel, and if you are trying to push on an autopilot is pretty much essential – we couldn’t balance the sails well in the waves we experienced and manual steering was exceedingly tiring and inaccurate, whereas the autopilot was happily turning the wheel through 100 degrees on each wave and keeping an arrow-straight course. We had changed the rigging to bring all the mainsail control lines back to the cockpit which was pretty much essential as it turned out, allowing us to reef when it would have been tricky working on deck. We averaged just over 6 knots over the whole journey and ran the engine for around 60% of the time at an average consumption of 3 litres per hour, mostly at 1750 or 1800 revs. We took 11 days from the Crouch to the Caledonian canal – if we had done the Crouch to Lowestoft in one leg, and the Humber to Hartlepool in another we could have done it in less, or if conditions had been more comfortable we could have done more night sailing. I’d highly recommend our second tablet – a reconditioned ruggedised 8 inch tablet supplied with raster charts and purchased through the VisitMyHarbour.com website – the original tablets cost around £500 so at £200 I recon its a decent buy and comes ready to go – just add a SIM card with some data if you want to use it that way. You will need a big back up USB battery pack to run it for more than a few hours.

Would we do it again? Well, perhaps ask in another 40 years!

 Posted by at 10:20 pm
Jul 032022
 

I had to fix a Lewmar Cheek/Deck/Foot Block for a Moody 37 that had spent 35 years in the Med, so the plastic of the sheave had pretty much disintegrated.  I checked out a couple of posts on  websites that gave an idea how to proceed, but didn’t really provide enough details to know exactly how to proceed, so I though a You Tube video was in order.  The basic problem is getting the pivot pin out as its been heavily swaged  underneath – and the key thing is knowing the core diameter of the pivot pin.   Anyway you can find the video at:

  https://youtu.be/rTFfx7-J-7w

Jun 032022
 

The detent on a lock is a means of preventing the sear from catching in the half cock notch as the gun or pistol is fired.  With a gun designed for a robust trigger pull, for instance a shotgun or military rifle, the trigger finger will hold the trigger back long enough for the sear to pass the half cock notch before releasing it and taking it  up again – an involuntary action called the secong pull that was the bane of lock designers when single trigger shotguns were being introduced.  Anyway  if the gun or pistol is designed to have a very light trigger pressure and  be let off with a very gentle pressure, the trigger finger may well not hold the sear away from the half cock bend on firing, and the cock will stop in the half cock position.  A similar problem occurs with a set trigger where the trigger pull releases a sprung loaded  trigger plate that hits the sear arm by inertia – in this case its almost certain that the sear will fall into the half cock notch.  So a detent is required on rifles and target firearms and was frequently used on later duelling pistols.. I don’t have a date for the introduction of detents – I’d guess early to mid 18th century?  Certainly common by the resurgence of English gunmaking around the mid to late 18th century.

I’m not sure how many different designs of detent there are, but here is the most common where a small component called the ‘fly’ pivots in a cutout on the tumbler and has a blunt pointed end that deflects the sear. There are two variations I have come across – in one the fly pivots in a small hole in the tumbler near to the tumbler pivot, and in the other, the fly has a ring on its end that fits over the tumbler pivot and lies in a recess on the tumbler surface. The fly is quite thin, maybe around 0.4mm and moves in a similarly shallow recess. The fly shown here pivots in a hole in the tumbler.

Here is a sequence showing the tumbler and sear in different positions without the fly present;

n.b. its written as if the tumbler is fixed and the sear moves, which of course is not the case, but its how I was thinking about it and it seemed to make the explanation easier?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Full cock, no fly present – you can see how easy it would be for the sear to slip into the half cock bent on firing

(in a lock designed not to have a detent, the half cock notch would not protrude so far, but the principle remains)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Half cock – no fly –  in this position the slide safety can engage with the notch in the tumbler

although here it doesn’t look like it will – it works anyway!”

here its on full cock with the fly in position ready to guard the half cock bent.

 

here the tumbler is rotating and the fly has rotated relative to the tumbler so as to lift the sear over the half cock notch – job done!

From the fired position the sear will drag the fly upwards until it hits the edge of its recess then the sear will climb over it and as the cock is eased a bit , will find the full cock notch.

If you want to put the lock in the half cock position, the sear will drag the fly ahead of it, leaving the half clck notch open.

To go from half cock to full cock the sear will push the fly up until it hits the top of its recess, when it will climb over it and come back to find the full cock notch.

 

All this needs careful setting up , of course.  quite a fiddly job, but once its set up right it should be OK for ever…….

 Posted by at 11:40 pm
Mar 312022
 

Diary

25th March  I finished the Sea Service lock engraving using the air graver to get a bit deeper than I usually go with a push engraver.  The lock plate is quite pitted and worn but some of the old engraving could still be seen so I was somewhat constrained in what I could do, but I found a photo on the web (see below) that resembles what I could make out on the lockplate, even down to some assymetry.  When I had finished engraving it all looked a bit raw, so I gave it a quick go over with my fine fibre wheel to round off the edges of the cuts a little.  That did the trick, but left the lock looking a bit patchy and bright, so I gently heated it up with a propane torch until it turned grey, which looked much more comfortable – it can now go back to its owner for putting in the pistol. I can now think about Fred’s gun parts, which I haven’t yet unpacked.  It was a lovely day here- probably all we’ll get for a summer- so I wandered around the garden and realised that I’d intended to replace the last of the old windows last summer, but couldn’t as our superb crop of tomatos was growing in front of it.  So I really need to replace it before this year’s plants go in shortly.  I made the frame about 20 years ago, and got the iron casement made, so I just have to make up the leaded light panels and fix the glazing bars and my security bars and put it all together,  I haven’t done any leaded light making for years, but once I relearn how to cut old glass reliably, I’ll be away.  You can’t really use modern float glass in leaded windows as it looks all wrong  – the options are to buy modern hand made glass at a high cost, or to reuse salvaged window glass from before the invention of float glass (?mid 20th century) by Pilkinsons.  I still have quite a collection left over from my major window building era, although quite a lot of it is almost too flat to use.   Penny had her hip replaced a week ago and is going round on crutches – makes me think of Long John Silver whenever I  hear her moving around.

This example matches most closely the vestigges of the original engraving

24th March –  A bit busy the last week or so with Penny’s hip, but I got the bedroom finished, even as far as putting up a cafe curtain on a nice brass rod, and putting in some furniture – just waiting for a guest to occupy it!  I have now got time for a few gun jobs –  I had a pair of very nice pistols that the owner wanted me to take the furniture off  so he could sort out the finish on the wood.  The screws all came out perfectly without a sign of rust except for on small spot on one screw.  The ‘nails’ were quite stiff to unscrew, all the way, as the grease, or whatever they had been put in with had gone quite stiff over the years (about 180) since they were made.  Being high class pistols the holes for the nails were a pretty exact fit. In the end I didn’t take out the trigger plate and its finial as it didn’t come out easily, there was no obvious way to pull it out straight, and I was afraid that the very fine wood between the bits of the finial might break off if there was any adhesion or rusting on the edges.  It will hve to be masked in situu.  Anyway they are now done and delivered.  The next job was re-engraving an old very worn sea service pistol lock of about 1777 or so – I hadn’t touched a graver for about 3 months, and as well as this job I have all the funiture for one of Fred’s creations waiting to engrave, so time for a bit of concentrated practice.  The Sea Service lock needed to be engraved quite deep, and Fred is concerned that his lock and false breech are deep so that they will still show up if fairly brightly colour case hardened, so I had a few practices, and got out the Gravermax air graver – I can’t get quite as much control over it as I can with push engraving, but I did get good enough to do the Sea Service lock, which is not meant to be fine engraving – the originals were done for twopence each – a few years later Palmer was charging that per letter!  So the Service engraving wasn’t particularly fine!  Anyway I did a few practive engravings on 2″ x 2″ test plates that I bought some time ago, and then did the lock – there was a trace of bits of the original engraving, particularly the little circles ( which I think on the originals were put on with a punch as they are usually a bit eratic )  that I had to keep as they were quite deep, which gave a somewhat different shape from my templates, although a search round the web images did show one or two locks with similar crowns.  I take it that the crown is a representation of what is known as the Imperial State Crown of George 1st made in 1714.  It had more pronounced arches than later crowns, as on this lock.  I realised I still need to add the broad arrow.   Now I’ll get on with designing Fred’s gun engraving.  I have to start work on the plans for the STEM club at school next term – the plan is for the children to build a safe and program a BBC microbit computer to control the opening of the safe, so that it can be coded.  I decided that it would be good if I could make bits for them to use in building their safes (in groups of 3 children) using a 3D printer.  My sons had a couple of 3D printers over the years, and make a few parts for me, but as Giles is now in Canada, and Tom doesn’t have a one, I thought it was time I joined the 21st century and got up to speed!   I do have this idea that it is now possible to take multiple photos all round an object, and get them made into a 3D representation of the object, which in theory at least, you could import into a 3D printer and print in a plastic that can be used for lost wax casting, enabling you to make castings of the original parts.  Along the way you could  scale the model to compensate for shrinkage in the casting process – for the time being this will only exist as a dream as far as I am involved, although I’m sure lots of people are doing it.  Anyway I have a 3D printer on order, and am working on the software and making the part designs.  In case that doesn’t keep me busy, I’ve got a £2000  pile of the special double glazing glass sitting there waiting for me to make secondary glazing frames in oak, which is in the nice dry attic above the kitchen.

 

Bottom one filled in with a Sharpie to check details.

Lock engraved following the remnants of the original engraving, particularly the circles (distinct) and some other clues.

I’ve buffed over the finished engraving to remove the sharp edges – they didn’t look right.

14th March I got the  night store heater wired in, and waited till the Off Peak period to test it – and discovered that instead of the 11 hour off peak tarrif we are paying for, we are only getting the standard 7 hour off peak – I guess it will be next to impossible to contact EON!  Another waste of time and effort!  Ayway I think the bedroom just needs a bit of topcoat painting to finish, then put in some furniture, mostly from Giles’s flat.  Then a day clearing up the mess and piles of tools etc that resulted from the work, and I should be free to think about some gun stuff.  Penny goes into hospital on Friday to have her other hip replaced, so some of my time will be spent being a nursemaid for a couple of weeks or so………………..

12th March  I’ve been desperately trying to finish the bedroom so I can get on with a few gun related jobs,but the finishing stages always take much longer than you think.  Basically I now just have some painting  to finish, and the night store heater to install and connect to the off peak electricity and  I had a few domestic maintenence chores to sort that took a day or so – The Aga was out because I had carelessly let us run out of oil, so I took the opportunity to clean out the burner, and couldn’t get it to relight after the oil delivery – not sure what was the problem but eventually it gave up the fight and lit.  We also had a problem with the thermostat on our heatstore water cylinder – it mixes very hot water from a heat exchange coil with cold water to regulate the hot water suppl and had failed, giving only cold water or scalding water.  I couldn’t get a direct replacement – on 3 months delivery – so got a near replacement that didn’t quite fit, so I had to fiddle about to get it to fit in the too small space left by the old one – quite a lot of water escaped before I finally conquered it – now OK, I hope – I always wrap the compression joints in tissue and go back later to see if the tissue is damp – doesn’t work very well on hot water pipes but OK on cold.  I’m off tomorrow to do a bit more repair work on Tom’s flint wall – he has managed to take out a whole lot of dodgy wall and now has two big holes to fill.     I just remembered that I’m waiting for some No 7 shot from Clay and Game – better ring on Monday and check when I will get it.

7th March Spent Sunday helping Tom repair an old flint wall – something I learnt after buying this house – I had a short structural survey which highlighted the high cost of repairs to the flint walls where the wallplate had moved outward and damaged the top foot or so of the flint facing – it actually turned out to be one of the easiest jobs on the house – replacing most of the windows with traditional oak and iron leaded windows took much longer, but at least I learnt how to make leaded windows and oak frames, although I got a local blacksmith to make the iron casements as I don’t have a forge.  Anyway we filled in a large hole with lime mortar and flints – you can only build about 4 or 5 inches before the weight of the upper layers causes the whole lot to bulge out, so you have to put boards across the front as you build up.  The mortar squeezes out between the flints, and anyway you have to be fairly generous to get a good bond round the edges of the patch, so when you take the boards away later it looks a horrible mess – the aim is to catch it when it is about the consistency of cheese (cheddar , not camembert) and then cut away the surplus with a fine detail trowel and when its a bit drier to brush vigorously to clean any residue off the faces of the flints and expose the coarse sand grains in the mortar.  A lot of the wall had been repaired with hard cement, which is not a good idea, as when it gets too much moisture behind it, it comes off as one great big chunk and probably brings most of the wall with it – its not possible to remove it and replace it with lime mortar as the same thing would happen.     Apart from that I am slowly getting nearer to finishing the bedroom – the lights and sockets are in now, so I just need to connect up the power and insulate the loft above and put another coat of wax on the floor and beam….   I really need to get it done as I am beginning to build up a queue of gun jobs – apart from the Sea Service pistol engraving, and stripping the metalwork from a pair of target pistols, I had a call from Fred in the US saying he had completed another two guns and needed them engraved – I have done a couple for him before, they are on the Blog somewhere!  He gently raised the issue of the depth of my cutting – he sends his locks and furniture to a chap in the states who does pretty spectacular colour case hardening, with the emphasis on colour, and the effect of all the colour is to hide the engraving.  I do know that I tend to engrave light – whether its because I’m not as strong in the wrist as a full time professional I don’t know, but I will try to see if I can go deeper……

Just waiting for the final brushing off.  The sections of wall laid in horizontal courses are not traditional and use cement.

3rd February – The MOT expired on my car  – all sorted now without any problems.  My mechanic tells me that it is recommended that you change the tyres on a vehicle after 5 years irrespective of mileage!  Mine have done 13 years and are still OK – Its a hefty price to replace them so I think they will do for another year!  I got a worn lock for a sea service lock to recut the Crown, GR and etc.  The lock is just soft enough to cut, I think, but whether I can cut as deep as the original I don’t know – I may have to resort to the air graver.  I’ll put some photos on later when I start.  The engravers who did the original locks got paid about 2p per lock – they must have banged them out in minutes!  Making good progress with the bedroom – I put the first coat of wax on – I used a jar of home made wax polish to begin with and didn’t realise that it was intended for polishing guns and had linseed oil in it, which darkened the wood a bit more than I wanted – anyway I made some more polish with just beeswax and turpentine that ia a much paler finish, and managed to lighten the wrong finish a bit with white spirit.  Once the first coat was on and more or less hardened I put on the skirting boards – mostly screwed on where there was something behind to screw onto, otherwise a modern building adhesive that  grabs more or les instantly so no need to hold it.    The elm floorboards look amazing – I didn’t realise you could still get elm – one timber merchant laughed at me when I asked if he had any – so I was really pleased to get these lovely boards – just look at the amazing grain pattern in the photo.

These Elm boards are 300mm wide – just look at the amazing figure in the grain!

28th  February – Annoyingly I got a letter at the end of last week telling me that my direct debit wouldn’t take my Road Fund payment due 28th as my vehicle needed an MOT test, having expired on the 25th.  Unfortunately the earliest I could get a test was next Thursday, so the car will sit in the drive til then – I just hope I don’t suddenly need something from Screwfix!  Also means I can’t make a shooting session  on the 3rd. Shame.   Bedroom going OK – made the Oak shelves ready to finish and fit, and the skirting boards ditto.  The elm floor looks beutiful in its natural pale state, so I’ve been looking to see what finish I can apply that doesn’t make it brighter and darker.  Choices are varnish of one sort or another, Oil finish, Paste wax or liquid wax. I did phone a flooring shop, who said that they all gave about the same result, which looks the same as if you put water on the surface, unless you use a product with white pigment which helps retain the natural finish.  I’m not too keen on that idea, so I tried a few of the products I had to hand on sanded scraps of elm floorboard.  The Osma Polyx oil is definately a bit brighter and darker than commercial beeswax polish, which looks like a good finish, so I’ll go with that.  I usually make up my own with grated beeswax and pure turpentine disolved in a bain marie (jar in a water bath bath) and I have a large supply of beeswax , so just need a bit more turpentine.   I discovered a place on the floor where the boards creak – fortunately not where the bed will go, but the problem is that I didn’t take a photo of where the joists in that section run, and once laid there is little to tell me where I can put in screws to hold them tight – I don’t really want to perforate the floor with screwholes that miss the joists even though I am plugging the holes with elm pellets.  Bit more on the sort of autobiography – its now 1/4 of the maximum size allowed for a Cambridge thesis!

27th February A bit more work to do on the bedroom! The nearer you get to finishing, the slower the jobs seem to proceed – I’d guess 2 weeks, but I bet its nearer 4!   I got a call from an old client who specialises in what are called in the trade ‘ investment quality’  antique pistols.  He has a pair of pistols and wants the locks and furniture removed so he can refinish the woodwork, and doesn’t trust himself with a screwdriver so asked me if I would strip the metalwork from them for him – I am always honoured to be trusted with his stuff, and it always carries a significant stress – to the extent that I have to ‘walk round’ the job for a week or two until the mood takes me and I dive in!  I’ve written about techniques for removing awkward screws several times on the site, but I’m hoping that as these pistols will be in immaculate condition, there won’t be any problems – just need to have perfect turnscrews and hold the pistols firmly without marking them.

24th February – Floor is now all down and fixed!  I am just in the process of cutting the skirting boards to fit – the floor boards all fit together but there are still slopes and gentle curves in the floor that need the skirting boards carefully scribed in and cut.  Once I’ve cut them I’ll put them aside while I sand and seal the floor, then fit them I’m beginning to get a sense that the job might actually get finished – it will have been 5 months by the end of Feb, and there is still at least a couple of weeks of work to do –  fitting the electrical fittings and putting in the loft insualtion and a bit of painting, plus all the jobs I’ve forgotten.  I’m looking forward to a bit of gun work when its finished, before I embark on building all the secondary double glazing oak frames for the pile of super insulated glass that sits in the drawing room.   At last we are able to contemplate starting the STEM club at the school, so Dave and I can get a plan together for after the Easter holiday – we can be a bit more focussed and technical for the next session as it will be limited to children from years 5 and 6 –  9/10/11years old  (ish). Might do something like we did for the Pop Up Workshop last summer.

21st February -Having discovered that the floor board saw  blade wasn’t parallel to the sides of the sole plate, so the guide and the saw blade wern’t aligned , I took it back and changed it for a cordless circular saw,  which does the job properly as well as allowing me to cut slanting overlaps at the joints.   I have to say it was  all very easy at Screwfix even though I bought the saw in October  and don’t have the receipt – I don’t even have to give my name when I go to pick things up now, and my account lists all my past purchases if I want to return anything.   I’ve now sorted all the boards for the floor and by good fortune I was able to do it all with good boards, and am left with three or four boards that are a bit too ‘characterful’ to be used – not sure what I’ll do with them – maybe make a knotty  door for Tom.  Now I need to put down the vermiculate insulation and away we go!

20th February – I got the joists down and started to sort out the floorboards – I think I have enough if I’m careful, but the difficulty is compounded by the different widths, which means that there is a limited choice to make up each width –  the boards are mostly 2.4m long and the room is 4.2m wide  but the joints have to land on a joist – good brain exercise.  I ran into a problem when laying the first half, in that the saw I bought which is specifically designed for cutting floorboards didn’t seem to cut neatly at right angles, so I had a bit of a job neatly butting the boards.  I spent some time today trying to find out what was going wrong, thinking that it was my technique, but I discovered that the blade of the  saw is not parallel to the edges of it’s base plate, so it you try to cut along a guide line it cuts a slightly diverging path – its going back to Screwfix tomorrow!

18th February – The storm came through and cut off the power at 8:30 this morning – I got out the very cheap generator I bought about 10 years ago and have never used, and it just about managed to power enough work lights in the bedroom for me to work, but it struggles with power tools – fortunately I’d prepared all the extra joists so they only needed fixing in place – a slow job as they each have to be levelled at both ends, and there is a slight bow downwards in the middle, about 15mm. At the peak wind after lunch it detached my tarpaulin roof alongside the shed and pulled off half a dozen pantiles and broke some.  Anyway the power did eventually come back on at around 5:30 pm so the generator saved me loosing a day’s work.

17th February – Good day’s work on the floor considering I had to go into Cambridge for a long appointment with my friendly  dentist.  We’re supposed to go to a funeral in Epping in a forest tomorrow but with 70 mile an hour winds forecast to peak at the time we have to be there we are pondering……     You can see photos of the Anglian Muzzle Loaders shoot last Saturday on www.matthewnunn.co.uk under clay shoots – dozens of photos, the has put one of my Manton firing on his display panel.  I look a bit wild as I forgot my shooting cap and it was windy – I haven’t faced up to visiting the barber for a while!

16th February  Got the floor up in the other half of the room and vacuumed up the mess – not as much as the first half = I think this floor hasn’t been messed about with since around 1700 . The joists and floorboards  are deeply embedded in the flint walls, which must have been built over the timber framed shell of the building, and there are  only nail holes in the joists from these old boards – its a shame that the old boards are too bad to re-use.  I found that the space between a couple of pairs of joists was filled with hop petals as an insulation, and I think because they were supposed to keep insects at bay.  I’ve bagged up all the petals, along with quite a lot of dust, and will put them back before I lay the new floor.  I seem to remember that when the National Trust did a restoration at Wimpole Hall they found some similar old insulation, probably chaff, and carefully seived it to remove the dust – I  shall claim the dust is historically important and put it back.  Building conservation is a funny business – I did an evening  course run by three Local Authority conservation officers for a couple of years, so I do understand the issues!   I saw advice somewhere that one should check one’s blood pressure every few years, so I got out my meter and changed the batteries.  I managed to get 3 completely different readings one after the other – the first was 209/115 – almost an ambulance job, but  the other readings were a bit more sensible, but still higher than I expected so I put it on one side and tried again the next day – after a few more strange readings I realised I hadn’t got it on my wrist quite properly so I think it was having to compress my tendons as well as the blood vessel – anyway now seems about what I would expect at my age – around 123/65 so I’ll probably live to finish the floor.   I’m hoping it will all be finished by the end of February – I’d like to get on with something else!  Bit more on the ‘sort of autobiography’ for those not totally bored by it!  Claire just sent me a fantastic photo of my Manton firing – I’ll ask the photographer for permission to put it on here.

The floor does slope, but not that much!  Quite bent and rough  17 century (?) joists

14th February – Happy Valentines Day !  I forgot til just now.   The half of the floor I am working on is now more or less all finally down.  I got a pair of very cheap (£6 each) strap clamps from Screwfix  that let me pull the boards together, and I got some nifty little screws  (Tongue Tite) that go in at an angle through the tongue of the T & G boards and hold the edge down and in.  All very neat _ I just needed to make sure the ends of the boards mated up, and that the edges of the boards were reasonably straight – I had to plane a sliver off a couple.  I’ve just got a few boards to sort and lay in the passage and then I’ll start to remove the old floor from the other half of the room.

12 th February Club shoot today –  windy and cold – not an ideal day for shooting flintlock as the wind made it difficult to keep the fine priming powder in the pan – I use Swiss OB, which is horrendously expensive but you only need a small amount. I didn’t hit many clays. but I was primarily concerned with getting the gun going reliably – I was the only person shooting flint, but had the advice of Bev, who knows most of the tricks, having been shooting flint for years.  Unlike percussion, which is pretty reliable given a reasonable gun, flinters can be a bit fussy as the ignition system is not ‘cast iron’.  You have to get the main powder charge to come up close behind the touch hole – possibly by tapping the barrel or bumping the butt on the ground in some cases, or by putting a wad down the barrel quickly to act as a pump.  Then you need to get the right amount of powder, preferably the right fine priming powder,  in the right place in the pan – not covering the touch hole, with a flint approximately the right length and with a good edge for making sparks.  I had a couple of misfires of the second barrel (left) after shooting at overhead clays with the first barrel that Bev suggested might be caused by left frizzen lifting slightly on recoil and allowing some powder to escape.  I had been being pretty mean with the priming powder, and the problem went away when I was a bit more generous.  I couldn’t decide whether I should  load the barrels with the frizzens open or closed – open you can’t tell if any of the main charge has been ‘pumped through’ as it will fall away.  With the frizzens close my left frizzen has a shutter with a very small hole that is designed to obstruct the touch hole, so that doesn’t show any main charge.  The right frizzen has lost its little shutter, and does show a bit of powder in the pan after loading.  So as you can see, that is a lot of things to go wrong! I did have one shot where the left barrel fired itself immediately the right barrel went off – I was shooting at a tricky clay I had missed several times already, but this time I hit it, although I have no idea which of the shots did the damage!  I assume that the left sear doesn’t always seat in the bent – its only happened twice in 100 or so shots, and I think (maybe) that if I am conscious when I cock that side I can move the cack past the ‘drop in point’ and make sure its firmly engaged.  I’ll try to do a bit more on the sort of autobiograpy post……

11th February  Going to the Anglia Muzzle Loaders club shoot tomorrow – I haven’t been for quite a while so I thought I’d see how I got on with the flintlock, and avoiding Covid!  I have been shooting a number of different guns lately – percussion, flint and .410 and 20 bore, all of which are quite light, particularly the old Webley bolt action single, which waves about in the breeze when trying to shoot, but the funny thing is that I get about the same success rate with all of them, so I thought I’d get out my Berretta o/u 12 bore for the afternoon  and see what happened if I had a moderately heavy gun…. Will report back.  I took up all the boards as in the photo to tidy up the under structure.  I’ve been wondering for some time about the problems of moisture and shrinkage and warping of the boards.  I reckon the floor will be impervious to vapour as the boards are tongued and grooved, so if laid directly above the ceiling the underside will stabilise at the relative humidity of the workshop, which has a brick floor directly on the earth and the upper surface will be at a lower humidity as it is well insulated and may well be heated if its in use. Recipe for the boards to curl up at the edges.  So I’m putting a polythene sheet under the boards so they can stabilise at the moisture content of the room and hopefully over time will stay flat.  I have just started fixing the first boards down – I’m using flooring screws that are meant to go into the tongues at an angle of 30 degrees to the horizontal and hold the boards down,, but the first boards need screwing down on the groove side.  I  found a 6mm plug cutter in my drill box, and so I am quite happy to put the small flooring screws in from the top and plug the holes before sanding it all down – I don’t think they will show, but I’ll try to keep them regular.  The flooring screws through the tongues are suposed to be all that is necessary, but whether  that works for 300 mm wide boards I don’t know.

10th February – Busy sorting the flooring.  My beautiful  Elm 300mm wide boards are proving quite a challenge to sort out and lay – they are all different lengths, although mostly about 8 ft , a few are somewhat longer, and a few are mixed shorter lengths.  About  half are pretty clear of faults, the rest vary from small knots, with a lot having voids or knots going through the boards that will need filling with epoxy resin.  Some have pretty big knots and defects and I think it was a bit of a cheek including them in the order.  Adding to the complication is the fact that the widths vary by more than can be accomodated in the normal gaps between boards – between 300 and 304 mm, so not only do I have to try to match lengths to minimise waste, but I’m restricted to using boards that are within about 1 to 1.5 mm in width for each span.  I’ve done about 1/3rd of the floor with very little waste as I started with lots of boards to choose from.  I’ve managed to avoid short lengths of waste so far by putting in trimmers between joists if I need to join boards where there isn’t a joist – I have some spare boards, but there are quite a few I’d rather not use if possible – The bit of the floor I’ve done so far is the most visible bit – the other main area will be where a large double bed goes so I can get away with less good boards there – we shall see…………………. I’m putting fibre insulation under the boards  as the workshop below is not usually heated – made from recycled plastic bottles and much nicer to handle than glass or mineral wool, I’ve used up my store of it and I’m not sure if it is still available readily locally. Oh, and I got my letter from the tax man, instead of the £160 I thought I was owed, it turned out to be 60p, so for the 3 hours of doing the return its 20p per hour instead of £53  – shame.

Boards cut and trial positioning – not yet tight and fixed. ( the boards on the right side are not part of the scheme)

6th February.  To my brother’s funeral on Friday – it was a jolly occasion, a bit religious  considering he was an atheist, but I suppose its the price to pay for being buried in a beautiful churchyard. The wake was in Rockingham Castle Walker room and half the village turned up so there must have been over a hundred in quite a small space. My patchy knowledge of statistics told me that it was very likely that at least a couple of them will have Covid, in fact quite unlikely there won’t be anyone with it there, so I stayed outside with an old friend from school who I used to build model aircraft with.  Its funny, and nice, now even after more than 60 years and only a couple of contacts since, we drop into a familiar pattern of conversation immediately.   He pointed out that even then I would turn whatever I was doing for myself into an opportunity to sell it to other people.  I’m afraid its true!   I really want to get back to doing some gun stuff – I have two barrels that are crying out for rebrowning, but luckily no client jobs outstanding as the renovation of the bedroom is taking up all my time – I took up half the old floor so I could sort out the levels for the extra joists I will have to put in to straighten it. I can’t make the floor level as that would mean raising the corner where the door is by about 10 cm  (4 inches) and the door, which dates from about 1650 and so must be kept intact, is already very low, as they often were then as people were shorter. I can make sure that the falls are smooth and no bigger than necessary, which means putting in about 8 new joists alongside the old ones where I can.  I got out about 40 Kg of dirt and mess from under about 10 sq m of  the floor I lifted – its mostly compacted dirt and some chaff that was presumably put there for rudimentary insulation – loads of walnut shell with mouse nibblings (there are walnut trees in the garden).  I found one mouse skeleton and one bat skeleton.  The older bits of the floor are probably  almost 300 years old, so the dirt probably is too!

Most of the floor didn’t have this many sticks under it………….

3rd February.  Yesterday I went through all the boards I had picked up and measured them and noted their quality – a number had knots and voids that will need filling with epoxy or similar and they are all slightly different lengths – mostly around 8 ft.   So I have been trying to work out which bits of the floor will be the most conspicuous and which will be hidden under the bed etc.  I had planned to start at the side of the room where the bed will be, but then I changed my mind and decided to start with the visible bits, so I could use the best boards there and see how I get on – I’m not sure how much I will have left – the joists are fairly widely spaced, the room is 14 ft wide, and so using the boards economically requires some thought and planning.  So today I started pulling up the old floorboards at the end I want to lay the best boards.  The floor is very uneven at that end – a 2 meter straight edge has a 3 cm gap in the middle- anyway under the floorboards is a mess – lots of bits of joist, and lots of dirt, and quite worrying, the ‘nibs’ that should stick up between the lathes to hold the plaster on the ceiling are not there, and not much sign they ever were ( OK where I patched it though).  We have my brother’s funeral near Corby tomorrow – poor chap had Parkinsons and rapidly deteriorating health so in a way it was a relief when he died peacefully at home doing what he loved – sorting out his junk….. Anyway in his honour I decided to wash my Land Cruiser as it had been off road recently, but when out this morning I saw a hand car wash – run by Eastern Europeans as usual, and amazing – it has never has such a thorough clean, including under all the wheel arches and round the doors – £20 and it has not been so clean since it came out of the showroom where I bought it second hand about 5 years ago.  I just wished that the inside had been empty so I could have had that done too.  Here is a bit of what was under the bedroom floor;-

I put in some bits when I rebuilt the chimney 20 years ago.

1 Feb – Well I did get my tax done, and it wasn’t as bad as I thought, about 3 hours.  The tax man ends up owing me £160 so that works out at £53 per hour – not bad!  I went to fetch my floorboards today. I’d arranged to borrow a local trailer, but when I had a look at it yesterday I got a bit worried about the state of the tyres – last time I borrowed it I ended up buying one new tyre, this time I wasn’t sure any of the 4 were road legal so rather than risk 3 points of my license for each bad tyre (thats what they dish out) I hired a massive flatbed trailer – a full 20 ft long and brand new for £70 a day – a bit steep but it would have cost £200 to get the wood delivered. So now I have a massive pile of elm boards.  Laying the floor is going to be challenging as the room is 14ft wide, most of the boards are 8 ft +- 2 inches and the joists are spaced about 1m apart, so it looks as if I’m going to have to be a bit creative, and possibly splice some boards together so they butt away from a joist – quite a puzzle.  On my trip to the sawmill, which was in Sotterley, a smallish place in the country not too far from Beccles, I was reminded of a peculiarity of Google Maps routing algorithm that I’d noticed before.  If you ask it to find a route from A to B is will usually find a quick easy way to get on the nearest main road from A, but in the approaches to B it will  start to route you down all sorts of small one way roads – on this occasion I found myself driving my trailer down miles of very narrow roads, hoping that anything that came the other way would be good at reversing ( I can reverse trailers, but hadn’t tried with the hire one).  When you come to route back from B to A, it finds a nice quick way to the nearest main road, not the way you came.  My solution when I think about it is to get somewhere  is to route backwards then reverse it – you’ll probably know the roads around you if it does the silly small road thing so you can do your own thing until you are on the main road.  I’ve named the problem  ‘Google’s symetrical routing algorithm’.

30th january – I managed another day without doing my tax! sorted out a few things and got the week’s shopping in, sorted out how to fix the floorboards when I get them, and had a look at lead shot prices on the internet ( I found a source at £31.70 /Kg.  – I’ll ring them tomorrow), and did a bit more of the autobiograpy post, but have now run out of excuses……………

28th January – Just a quick correction – I got the calculation about the moisture content of wood wrong yesterday – its not as bad as I thought. I got a bit mixed up with air humidity and wood moisture – normal household  relative humidity in the UK is probably in the range 40 to 55% which gives an equilibrium moisture content in wood of  from 8 to 10% which gives a change in across grain dimension of most timber of around 1/2 %, or 1.5 mm across my 300mm boards.  I can just about live with that, but I’ll have to make sure I get it right before I butt the boards tight  against each other.  Looking at the old pine floor today, I realised that not only is it a patchwork of newer and older boards and short bits and repairs, but it actually alters alignment as it crosses the room by a few degrees – so somewhere I’ll have to taper a board.  Oh, for me the bad news is that I have to do my tax return before the 1st of Feb, although there is supposed to be a 1 month Covid extension………

27th January Had a pleasant day’s shoot at Cambridge Gun Club today – as mentioned I took the Manton double flintlock and managed to hit quite e few clays – no worst than with anything else I shoot, which is pretty good for only the third or forth time I’ve used a flintlock.  By the time I’d worked out a few of its little pecadillos with Bev and Pete’s help – both are flintlock experts – I got it going well, and it was shooting relianbly.  One thing tha we realised was that using semolina instead of a wad on top of the powder missed having the piston effect of wooshing the air down the barrel and carrying the powder into the chamber behind the touch hole.  There is the overshot card but maybe that isn’t as effective.  As I didn’t have any wads of 14 bore with me I used a card over the semolina.  How big a pproblem this is/was we were not sure – to begin with I didn’t have any problems with ignition and was using Swiss No 1 as the priming powder – later I had a few occasions where a frizzen sparked but didn’t ignite the powder in the pan, whcih we put down to the priming powder and I changed to the much finer Swiss OB.  I’m always a bit unsure about these changes that one makes, because one tends to stick with them on the basis of pretty unscientific evidence and nere revisits the issues.  Bev said he had a couple of near identical flintlock doubles, one of which went off quickly and the other was quite slow to fire, so he took the breechplugs out of both to see what the difference was – caution, both he and I are very cautious about taking the breechplugs out of doubles in case we separate the barrels so we use various clamping arrangements. anyway both breechblocks had a fairly deep hole down from the face of the plug that forms one pattern of patent breech, but the ‘good’ gun had a hole of about 7mm and the ‘bad’ one more like 3/16th of an inch ( that is how he told me – 3/16 is 4.7 mm ). He drilled the smaller one out to match the good gun and polished it with a Dremel and it was certainly shooting better.  I could never quite work out the relation between the volume of the reduced bore in relation to the total powder charge – I think that only part of the powder goes into the hole, and some sits in what is usually a semicircular depression in the top of the plug – the original idas of the patent, I think, was to start the explosion in a small relatively enclosed space and the flash front would propogate faster that ignition through the powder..  This was certainly the principle of Nock’s patent breech which had a small trnsverse chamber behind the touch hole that communicated with the main chamber via a fairly small hole.  You can tell this breech because it had s screw plug on the opposite side of the breechplug to the touch hole.   Or have I got this all wrong? someone will tell me!   I took my little Webley bolt action .410 (the Rat Gun) for the post lunch breech loading bit of the shoot using 2 1/2 inch cartridges firing 11 gm of shot as against 24 or 28 in the ‘big boy’s’ guns. The Webley has a very tight choke and probably covers well less than half the area that a 12 bore covers on normal cylinder bore . Judging by a shot into the bank at a ‘rabbit, about 1/2 to 2/3 of the diameter, so you need to be that much more accurate in your shooting – anyway I did quite well with it and broke a fair number of clays when I was onto a good run.  Back to the bedroom tomorrow – the limewash is now done so its a major cleanup, then go and get the floorboards and juggle around with the Relative Humidity of the room and the moisture content of the wood – a 5% change in R.H. makes about a 1% change in dimension across the grain in most woods – thats about 3 mm in a 300 mm wide board – so I ought to aim to get it sorted to within a couple of degrees of the highest RH its likely to experience during the year, or the floor will warp!  Probably should have specified narrower  boards – oh well, too late!

26th January The 4th Jab made me feel a bit rough for a while, but I think I have recovered quicker than from the 3rd.  I’m off to CGC tomorrow for a spot of clay shooting. I’m going to try my John Manton flintlock double – when Bev was over here picking up his guns he pressed me to shoot it again, so I’ll give it a try.  Its a nice gun and was a bargain as it has a repair spliced into the fore-end, the only thing I don’t like is that it has ginger browning on the barrels – the real shame is that its done perfectly, so I’m reluctant to get rid of it and try for a better colour.  I’ve now finished the limewashing of the bedroom walls – I ended up putting 4 coats on to get the colour solid, but its pretty quick so not a problem! I now have to get the room finally dried out so I can go and collect the elm floorboards from Sotterley next week – I think laying them is going to be quite a job as the existing floor is all over the place in terms of levels and a bit springy in places – I’ll have to do a lot of firring to level up the joists, which are bits of wood probably put there in 1750 ish and not squared very well, and a ropey in patches… are well, if I will take on these tricky jobs!

24th January Got my 4th Covid Jab tomorrow – I’ll be beginning to feel like a pincushion!  Got two coats of limewash on the walls and ceiling – it is an amazing paint on lime plaster – it just becomes part of the wall and you can’t rub it off without taking the surface of the wall with it. Not sure if I’ll do one or two more coats.  The lime putty and the Buff  Titanium pigment came to about £25 and that would be enough to to the room (40 sq m) with 4 coats  10 times over. bit more on the Sort of Autobiography, which is getting some positive comments.  I plan to do the University stuff and then my own business .

22nd January  At last, the pair of pistols is finished and in a box ready to post!  When Bev had a look at the trouble I was having getting colur onto the steel of the barrels in the browning he suggested  that I try Logwood chips in solution.  I had imagined that they might be a dye, and indeed they are used as a dye to colour fabric deep red, however then used on iron they give a chemical reaction , the Heamatoxylin in the Logwood giving a strong reaction with the iron to colour it shades of black, and leaving a light scum of black particles on the surface of the liquid.  I followed recommendations I found on the web for guns and dipped the barrels in boiling Logwood solution for a couple of minutes and the steel that had refused to colour came out a light grey – a pleasing overall effect.  while hot I poured clean boiling water over the barrels, and when they had cooled a bit, I rubbed beeswax over them and wiped it off again.  The overall job now passes my standards, and I’m happy to return them to their owner.   Having done that I went with Tom to Giles’s flat in Cambridge to clear out the last of his stuff and say goodbye to my three months of work renovating it!

 

 

 

21st January – Went to see my  Oncologist today – he was cheerful as usual – his Christmas skiing break in France had been great, although he had only made it across the French border about 20 minutes before they closed it to Brits.  Life on the edge!  A bit more on my Sort of autobiography…………. – it  had 20 views yesterday!   Mixed up some more limewash – I need to check the colours in daylight tomorrow.

20th January – got a coat of limewash on all the walls and ceilings.  Sorting out a colour is a bit of a pain – there is too much surface area for lime white to be suitable – it would be blinding, and we didn’t want a strong colour.  There is a bitof a puzzle as its an attic room, and a lot of the area is the roof slope and there isn’t a sharp boundary between the slope and the ceiling so it would be difficult to use a different colour on those surfaces.  We thougth a neutral buff shade would do, and I came across ‘buff titanium’ – a different form of titanium oxide, not the stark white that one usually associates with titanium.  I had a bit of acrylic buff titanium in a tube, enogh to make a few samples on white paper, which is a good way to test colours as you can dry them out quickly.  I got a couple ,more tubes from the art shop – enough for the first coat, but its rather pale and needs more pigment.  I found a website that sells the raw pigment as a powder, so I’ve ordered 2 Kg, which should be enough to colour the limewash a bit stronger and put on another 3 or 4 coats.  It is beginning to look like a room – I am keen to get it pained as soon as possible so it can dry thoroughly before I ship in the floorboards – the limewashing will eventually put about 24 litres of water into the room over 4 coats, and that has to be taken out – my dehudifier extracts about 6 or 7 litres a day…..

19th January – Tidying up the bedroom bits that need sorting before the floor goes in – painting the woodwork etc.

18th January – I think I’v got to the end of the plastering, so I’m letting it dry out before giving it a few coats of limewash.  Limewas is a beautiful, tough and very cheap paint – its basically a bit of lime putty and a lot of water, left for a day so the Calcium Hydroxide dissolves into the water, with a bit of colour added using acrylic paints dissolved in clean water and then added to the limewash.  The  Calcium Hysroxide only disolves to a fairly low concentration ( 1.6 gm per litre) but its enough to react with the carbon dioxide in the air to form calcium carbonate – limestone on your wall – a very tough finish and beautiful too.  I am putting a bit on the autobiographical post each day – really just a series of anecdotes as Penny says.

16th January Last week’s extra job was helping Giles emigrate to Canada, at least, getting hin out of his flat, although Tom and I have to go back next weekend to clear out the last few bits.  I’m still plastering – is going so-so. I’m beginning to get fed up with it to be honest, and almost at the point of wishing I’d got someone in to do it!  I now just have to put a very thin coat of skim lime and chalk to level out the surfaces before limewashing it with 4 or 5 coats of homemade limewash of a sutiable muted shade of nothing.  The problem I’m finding is that the setting of the plaster is very uneven – the ceiling and the tops of the walls sets up well before the walls near floor level – I’m pretty certain most of this is caused by the pattern of airflow and heat distribution in the room – I have a dehumidifier running some of the time, and occasionally a heater, but mostly I leave it to its own devices so that the lime has a chance to carbonate before it dries too much.  I hppe, optimisticall, that by the end of next weekend I will have got the plastering and limewash finished……… well, one can but hope!   I have been contemplating putting an account of bits of my working life etc on the site as a sort of autobiograpical post – I enjoy writing, and there might just be someone out there amongst the hundreds of thousands of people who have visited this blog who would find it a handy way of passing an idle moment.  Anyone not interested could always ignore it!

Nice open texture – I don’t always manage to get it this good!

12th January   Plastering going OK, but it is difficult to find the point at which the plaster is right for the surface to be reworked.   This evening’s job was to make some more bread as we have run out – I make most of it, although I’m lazy and buy the odd loaf from the surpermarket when  we’re going shopping.

11th January – Plastering not going well!  I mixed up the lime putty with sand and used half a bag of sand I had to hand, as well as a bag of kiln dried sand I bought – unfortunately the bag I had was one that I’d discarded when I did the kitchen because it had some large grit (2 -3mm) along with the sand – I should have put it in the skip then. Anyway it makes it almost impossible to put on a 2 mm skim coat, so I’ll have to chuck the large tub of plaster I mixed and start again using the fine sand – expletive deleted here.   After yesterday’s shoot Bev accidentally left his guns in my Land Cruiser that he’d been in, so he came over today to pick them up.  While he was shooting his double flinter on the shoot, it split at the wrist on the recoil, pinching a bit of his hand in the crack. The crack goes pretty well all through the wrist and as he uses quite meaty charges it won’t be adequate just to glue it.  We had a good look at the problem – my solution would be to strip the stock of the trigger guard and probably the false breech as well, and mill a deep slot into the recess where the tang of the trigger guard fits, and make a block of wood that is about 1/4 mm narrower than the slot and comes to the right level for the tang to go back onto.  This can then be glued in with epoxy, the clearance allowing a glue line – necessary with epoxy.   The trigger guard is fixed with a screw into wood and then unwinds from a threaded hole in the trigger plate at the front of the trigger guard – if necessry I would drill out the screw  – the new screw will go into the new block, so no need to plug the hole.  I’d be pretty picky about the wood I put in the slot so that the grain didn’t follow the split – I might even use good quality ply.  Thinking about holding it all together while the epoxy sets, I thought the ideal thing would be to bind it all with self amalgamating /self vulcanising tape – its a fantastically useful stuff – rubbery, will stretch to 5 times its length and then slowly shrinks somewhat, and the layers bond together into a solid mass, still rubbery and retaing a lot of tension – one of those magic things like electrolytic derusting!  On another gun issue I was showing him the pistol barrels and lamented that they hadn’t really taken – he thought they were great, and the client would be delighted!  So maybe I need to look at them in a different way………………………………….

10th January – Game shoot today – actually only 25 minutes away on very slippery roads!  I wasn’t on form, and was mostly out of the action, so that left most of the birds for those who were!  Anyway it was good to be out in the countryside and it wasn’t so cold and there was no wind, so all in all an enjoyable day.  I can now do another experiment in gun cleaning……  Back to plastering tomorrow – Tom and Giles came round yesterday for tea and I sneakily got them to take the bags of unused NHL plaster down and bring up the very heavy tubs of lime putty plaster – a tub holds 25 Kg of the lime putty, but when mixed with 2 parts sand ready to go on the walls the tub holds more, even when only half full.  Giles flys to Canada on Friday, so Thursday is reserved for shifting the last things in his flat, which means I only have 3 days work this week.  I am trying to get the wet jobs done as soon as possible so I can get the elm for the floor into the room and laid.  It is supplied planed to 22 mm thick but needs sanding – at the moment I’m not sure whether to sand it before its laid, or after, or some of both – I guess it will be clear when I see it!  the existing floor is very uneven – probably the variation in height is about 3 or 4 inches overall, and includes quite a slope. Should be fun to lay……

9th January – I thought I’d tackle a couple of outstanding jobs today – fixing up wires and pruning the vine that yielded a splendid crop of grapes this year, and finding out why there were a couple of damp spots on the sloping ceiling of  one of the bedrooms came from – turned out to be a valley that was lead dressed in about 1994 – very well done judging by the superb lead welding – turned out that a slate had slid down the roof and made a very small crack/cut, or at least that is where I think the leak was.  I contemplated doing a lead weld myself – I’ve done them in the past but I not an expert and its a difficult job.  In the end I cleaned it all up and used Fix-all.  I had a real gun surprise – as I mentioned earlier, when I finish shooting on Thursday I spray WD 40 down the barrel and planned to clean it next day – well I forgot , and didn’t remember until late yesterday when I was just going to bed, so I gave it another shot of WD 40 and left it.  I finally got round to cleaning it this  evening – boiling water, a few drops of washing up liquid and a scour with a bronze brush, rinse with boiling water and remove nipple, then a few drops of 303 cleaner (emulsifying oil)  and pump vigorously with polyester wadding round a jag.  Leave to dry for a few minutes then one run through with a folded kitchen tissue on a jag to remove water, then a new tissue with WD 40 – repeat a few times…..  Only this time the tissues came out almost completely clean, whereas they are usually dark grey/black for as long as I keep replacing them. Final wipe through with gun oil.  Not sure why it was so clean, but a lot more dirt came out with the wadding clean water than usual – I will certainly repeat the experiment ( delay of 72 hours and 2 sprays of WD 40) – a completely surprise result – I don’t think I’ve had such a clean barrel since I cleaned a newly honed barrel!

 

7th January 2022  – now finished the second coat plaster and mixed up some lime putty plaster to start the final coat – I’ll wait til Tuesday to start that, and hope that my sponged finish is rough enough for the plaster to adhere.  I had a very pleasant clay shoot at CGC yesterday – it was pretty cold, but actually I  kept quite warm, except my right hand – putting caps on is a challenge in cold weather.  I did have my Zippo hand warmer in my pocket, but there isn’t much opportunity to hold it, I had one of the disposable warmers on one shoot – it was actually a foot warmer with a self adhesive pad for sticking in your shoe, but I found it ideal to stick round the wrist of my gun so I was holding it most of the time.  The disposable ones seem to chuck out more heat than the Zippos or the charcoal ones and last at least as long – it always amazes me that they can work just by rusting a few grams of iron powder, but it makes you realise why its a good idea to keep guns oiled!   I’d been vaguely lamenting that I had no more game shoots this year, but was rung up last night and offered a muzzle loading  shoot on Monday as someone had dropped out – its pretty much my favourite shoot and only about 40 minutes away.  I had run out of semolina yesterday, so had to use cous cous – which seemed to work just fine, so I’ll have to add semolina to tomorrows shopping list.  Several of my fellow shooters seem to have adopted the habit of  putting WD 40 liberally in the barrels of their guns (out of the stocks) after use, and leaving them overnight before the usual boiling water wash in the morning.  I’ve been doing this for some time (and not just for lazyness) and it does make them quite noticably easier to clean. I was looking at the visitor statistics for this blog – most visitors are from the US, next is UK then Europe, with lots from China and Russia – not sure what they make of it, or if its all attempted hijacks!   I had an email from a work colleague from about 50 years ago who had come across this website and managed to associate it with me – goodness knows how as he isn’t an antique gun person.

3rd January – Back to plastering all day – the NHL plaster drives me mad, but I’m learning to get the better of it, although the floor is knee deep in blobs of plaster!  I am using my 1 meter long springy edge (plastering spatula) to level the plaster, and then after a decent interval of 4 to 6 hours going over it vigorously with a sponge float to get rid of any lines etc.  Seems to work.  I will go over it all with some decent lime putty plaster as a finisheng coat.  I was reminded that this web site was originally started to post breadmaking information, hence the un-gunlike name.  It had a brief period as a roof restoration story, and then became a gun blog.  I still make almost all the bread as we prefer it to anything ou can buy in the supermarkets, and we don’t have access to a decent baker, Cambridge and it’s several French bakers being too far and too much parking trouble.  I was reminded yesterday of my early days of experimenting when I made a couple of loaves – Giles is emigrating this month and gave us his Kenwood Chef – its a lot better at least in theory, than mine, which was a very cheap version from TKMAX many years ago and has suffered many indignities, including falling off the table while mixing dough and continuing to mix while lying on its side on the floor – several times.  Its now tied on!  Anyway Giles’s has a posh stainless steel bowl, ours has a cheap plastic one  – but when I tried the stainless one it wouldn’t mix dough at my preferred consistency – the dough just spread itself round the outside of the bowl and left a void in the middle in which the blade rotated and I had to intervene several times.  Its all down to the brushed stainless surface which the dough stickes to – its more difficult to clean too – you leave the plastic one and the bits of dough fall off when they dry, not so the metal one.   When made the bread didn’t rise quite as it should – its interesting because it shows how many variables there are in the process…..  As a boring scientist I’m always interested in how domestic appliences etc earn their keep –  if the breadmaker cost £100 and I use it twice a week for ten years, that still adds about 10p to the cost of a loaf.  When we first had the above ground swimming pool I used to note the cost per swim – its now about £2 per person per swim. Makes you think…..  End of Christmas holidays tomorrow, although mine ended a couple of days ago – lets hope for a better 2022……………….

2nd January 2022  Well, I made it into 2022 in one piece!  Given the ever circling Covid and it’s attempt in March 2020 to do for me, that has to be good.  My best wishes for 2022 to all the followers of this blog, and my particular thanks to the kind and thoughtful people who email me from around the world when I don’t post for a while to see if I’m OK.   I started on the second coat plastering yesterday – I got the plaster recommended by the supplier of the wood fibre boards, but I think its not really the right stuff for the job – I think it is meant for external render.  I always use lime plaster as its an old house, and in the past I have always made my plaster using lime putty, sand and chalk, but this time I’m using the recommended bagged lime plaster which is based on Naturally Hydraulic Lime (NHL) which sets by forming silicates as well as combining with carbon dioxide, whereas the lime putty doesn’t form silicates and sets much more slowly.  Anyway the plaster I have for the second coat ( and enough for a final coat) is a real pain to use!  Lime putty plaster is ‘fat’ and workable and spreads easily as its somewhat thixotropic – this stuff is horribly sticky, even when quite soft and begins to stiffen up almost immediately you have mixed it – not at all pleasant to work with, and not really possible to ‘bring it back ‘ to rework the surface when its beginning to harden up – horrid stuff, but I have another 8 bags, so I will probably use it for the second coat and try to level out all the surfaces, then switch to ‘real’ lime putty.   I put the single barreled gun together – its quite a nice single percussion – I had made a lock for it and engraved my name on the lock and barrel and re-browned the barrel, but the rib came off so I had to resolder it and then re-brown it  – I just hope that the relevant authorities can see that its actually made from antique parts and is thus an antique!  I dug out the Westley Richards double percussion that I used to shoot when I was a teenager going out in the evening to shoot pidgeons to feed the ferrets.  ( turns out Pete, one of the Anglia Muzzle Loaders used to shoot the same wood when he lived at Fingringhoe!).  I used it again for a year or so when I started shooting with the Anglian Muzzle loaders but gave up on it as it would bung up and misfire from the 30th shot on any session – clean it thoroughly and it was fine for another 30 shots .  Anyway it looks a bit sad as the barrel is a bit rusted and stained although the bore is good and there is plenty of metal, so I think I’ll have a go at re-browning it – I’m keen to find something that actually browns ‘properly’ rather than these pistol barrels which are still resisting colouring on the steel after 10 brownings,  I might also investigate why it misfired, although I am always reluctant to remove the breech blocks from doubles as its easy to put a force on them that separates the barrels – and that leads to a major, beastly job.

The barrel of the single has a mild but acceptable browning.

My old Westley Richards percussion – I’m hoping the barrels will clean up a bit without taking off too much metal

 I think it looks worse that it is – we shall see!

31st December – Its late, New Year soon!  I didn’t start the plastering today, just sorted a few tools and got the lads to carry 10 bags of plaster upstairs.   I’m still browning the pistol barrels, but maybe they will shortly come good.  I resoldered the rib on a single percussion some time ago and got fed up trying to brown it, so after about a dozen brownings without much colour I propped it up in the workshop and left it (probably for 3 months).  I thought It looked pretty rusty, so I thought I’d better at least clean off the rust and oil it or it would just clutter up the workshop and mean that gun was useless.  I wire brushed it fairly vigorously and it didn’t look too bad – I heated it up on the AGA and poured boiling water over it several times and rubbed it over with a block of beeswax while still hot (my favourite finish) and I have to say it looks quite a decent lightish brown, but certainly within the range of decent shades and with a strong twist figure. Now Ive got to find the breechblock!  Happy New Year in 2 minutes………….

30th December – The percussion lock is now done.  I realised that I couldn’t re harden the tumbler  without disturbing the silver soldered extension, but when I heated it up to I probably didn’t take the bits round the bents up to a high enough temperature to anneal them – anyway it works just fine!  I coloured up the cock a little – I tried to get the area round the square red hot and dumped it in water, but it didn’t harden much.   As I mentioned its a late percussion gun ?1850 ish?  so the mainspring is more like that of a modern sidelock – the early springs often? usually? had a short top arm compared to the acting arm but later on they got more nearly equal lengths.  I had always wondered about the elegant taper of mainsprings, and I read somewhere that the test of a good spring was that when amost fully closed you could just run a 10 thou feeler gauge all the way along the gap between the blades.  The spring in this gun is extremely strong and when the lock is on full cock the blades of the spring are almost closed. I am a bit concerned that the spring is so strong that it will strain my cock-tumbler square!  I’m tempted to anneal it and close it up a bit as there is no need for such a strong spring, although I suppose it might take the odd millisecond off the firing delay.  I’m trying to steel myself for a return to plastering – I was going to buy a new, £60, replacement for my old plastering trowel which was bowed, but I had a look at the new one in Screwfix and decided that they were meant to be like that, so saved that expense! I do have a nice new finishing trowel that is flat, so that will suffice for the final stages.  I’m still trying to brown the barrels of the two pistols and its still not happening – the soft iron is getting well rusted and dark, but the steel is acting like stainless steel and doesn’t take any colour to speak of. I’m half a dozen rustings into the third attempt, lets hope……………….. I  have never seen this problem before! Well, actually see tomorrows entry- I did despair of the single barrel.

Little blob of grease from the cock screw spoils the picture!

As was – I’d already changed the nipple for one of my titanium ones

29th December – 2022 is approaching rapidly!  I tried to drill out the bits in the cock thread, but the thread extractor metal was harder then the rest even after annealing, so the drill just started to wander, so that was a fail.  I Araldited the tumbler in a bit of faced off bar located by the bearing on the back and cut off the square and faced the 3mm stub and put a 4mm end mill into it for about 3.5mm and turned up a short piece of bar to fit to replace the square and silver soldered it in place, then filed a square on it.  Its interesting that there was a de-facto standard amonst percussion gunmakers that defined the alignment of the square on the tumbler shaft so that cocks are often interchangeable.  I tried to use this standard orientaion and filed up the cock to match – As with many gunmakers I didn’t get a perfect square, but I did get a reasonable fit in the correct orientation – I used one of my unused castings for the cock as the original was pretty horrible.  All that remains to do now is to reharden the tumbler and colour up the cock – not sure that it needs hardening – and make the No 4 UNF cock screw.  I had a bit of a problem with my lathe today – a few times recently it hasn’t powered up when I’ve switched the mains on, and I’ve had to feel round the back in the wiring box and reset the circuit breaker (switching off at the mains first!)  This time it was dead whatever I did to the circuit breaker.  It’s a big lathe and weighs over half a ton and the wiring box is at the back and there is only about 4 inches clearance to the wall.  I cursed, and went and got my testmeter and a crowbar – but when I came back it was on so did the job.  Went out later and same thing, came back an hour later and it was on.  I suspect the main circuit breaker may be faulty as the work light isn’t on and that doesn’t have any of the trips and interlocks in its circuit……Have to dig out the crcuit diagram if I can find it…..   Something else to sort out.   I ought to get back to plastering tomorrow – I need to go to Screwfix to pick up a new plastering trowel as my old one is bowed – thats £50!  I forgot when I was having my rant about the building inspectorate failings to include Grenfell.

The 2 punch marks are interesting – possibly to shift the stopping point of the tumbler?

just hope the brazed joint is strong enough over such a small area…..

I used the one on the left to replace the central one.

Getting on for a day’s work…….

28th December  While waiting for the third try at browning the pistol barrels (!) I got out the slip that was waiting in the office and had a look at the next job which I had more or less forgotten about… Its a percussion single – not particularly special, Birmingham and late.  The cock screw had sheared off, and the owner had resourcefully acquired a screw extractor to  try to remove it.  As anyone who has tried that with an old gun will tell you (with hindsight!), that is a recipe for disaster because the extractor, in doing its job expands the stuck piece of thread, which of course means that its stuck even more firmly – the harder you try the harder it is locked in place until, as in this case, the screw extractor also shears off – and that is likely to be even harder metal than the original screw.  Usually with a flintlock or older percussion I would araldite the tumbler to a bar in the lathe and turn off the whole square and drill out the tumbler and silver solder in a new axle and put a new square on the end and tap a new hole – takes a while but is straightforward although it does mean annealing and re-hardening the tumbler.  However, with this late gun the tumbler has a link to the mainspring (no link on older guns), and the link folds into a slot in  the arm on the tumbler, and the slot actually crosses into the tumbler axis so if I made a new axle I’d have to cut a slot through it, and I am not confident my miller will be accurate enough to cut a 1/16 inch slot.  So that solution is not easy, although I could file the slot before fixing the axle in the tumbler.  That leaves softening the tumbler and trying to drill out the broken extractor and bit of screw, and hoping there is enough metal left to tap a thread without weakening the square – maybe I’ll try that and if it doesn’t work I’ll try the new axle.  The cock (hammer) is a bit of a mess, probably a bad a casting, and has had multiple attempts at tightening it on the square.  I can either fit another cock – I do have 2 suitable castings – or drop a milling cutter through the cock and silver solder in a disk and remake the square to fit the tumbler….   I will have to get back to plastering soon, but I might just sneak another day tomorrow – I did manage to do some work on the loft hatch today so at least some work was done……  Oh and I did a little tinkering on the pistol wood repair and it looks even better.

The hammer looks as if its got some terrible skin disease on its nose

27th December  More work on the pistol stock.  I had to cut back quite a chunk to get to good wood – some of the black stained (rust) wood was very weak – anyway I glued in a chunk of walnut with isocyanate – its quick and makes a thin glue line and doesn’t need clamping, just a quick squirt of activator.  I have now cut it back to match the curves and coloured it up – unfortunately there is still some stained wood around that it would not have been sensible to cut out, so I had to stain the patch black to match.  Then a couple of coats of thin shellac and a rub down with 2500 paper and its looking good – I gave the wood a quick polish with my favourite wax polish – its actually a hard mould release wax polish that gives a good finish and doesn’t clog things too much.   I listened to a program on house ventilation this morning that set me thinking – modern building regs call for 0.4 air changes per hour – if you put 10 people in a 30 cu meter room in about an hour with that low level of ventilation they will be be breathing 5% of other people’s breath even if the air mixes perfectly – ideal for transmitting Omicron!  My old house probably runs at more than 5 air changes per hour – if I hold up a sheet of newspaper in a doorway it isn’t vertical.  Much healthier . So once again building regs have got it wrong – in the 1940’s it was cement as strong as brick, so cracks propogate through walls, in the 1970 is was all reinforced concrete now rusting and spalling off.  Now we are burying tons of carbon intensive concrete in massive foundations – a friend got permission for a 3m x 3m extension to his small Victorian cottage – the building inspector insisted on 2m deep foundations, then looked at them and said they needed to go to 3m deep – right up against the cottage with its ?600mm deep foundations!  How stupid can you get – my friend is now waiting for cracks to appear in the cottage while the extension sits rock solid!

I think this pistol must have been lying on a damp surface for years judging by the stains.

 

Final clean up and polish still to do.

26th December  My holiday from plastering continues, so I got a bit more gun stuff done today (about time too, I hear you say!).  I hardened the spring I modified yesterday with the propane torch and polished it and found a nice spot on the less hot plate of the AGA where the temperature was about 310 C, so I put the spring down there and covered it with a pad of fibreglass insulation (the sort used in roofs) and left it for 15 minutes.  When I got it out it was a nice blue colour indicative of about the required temperature for tempering springs – 305 to 310 C according to my book.  I had been quite careful to open the spring to the same extent as the extant spring on the other pistol while it was soft, and was extremely careful to ‘work the spring in’ to let any stress in the metal redistribute itself  before fully compressing it.  I even kept it fairly warm to make sure it didn’t fracture – it works, thank goodness, so that is one more job out of the way. The photo shows the new spring in place and a modern sidelock spring very similar to the one I modified to make it – the critical detail is the distance of the peg on the side of the upper leaf from the ‘elbow’ of the spring, the rest can be sorted in the cutting, bending and welding – the top leg needs a fairly high tab built up on it, or the elbow hangs down below the edge of the lock and the top arm touches the barrel. The stock of one of the pistols has a crack running forward from the rear side nail cup and looks a bit of a mess – its a very  common place for pistols to crack – they tend to crack from the side nail hole right through the stock, often on both sides.  First thing is to investigate the obvious crack – I do this under the microscope as its easier to see what the materials are, picking the crack out with a modelling knife to get to some wood.  In this case I found I was digging in black filler/glue ( not wax as it didn’t melt).  Now there is no point in trying to put a repair on top of an old repair, so its a matter of digging away till you get to some solid wood, in this case taking out quite a lot of the filler. you then need to finish the gap with straight sides, preferably tapering so you can get a good fit.  I think I’m now almost back to wood, so tomorrow I’ll shape a matching piece of walnut with the right grain and glue it in place. It is always better to make sure you cut back to a sound foundation – trying to keep repairs as small as possible often doesn’t quite look right if there is still some damage on either side.

 

 

 

 

New spring and modern sidelock or late percussion  spring very similar to the one modified for the new spring.

 

Still a bit more at the top to come off as there is still some damage to be cut out and the gap needs to be tapered for a good fit.

25th December  –  I can’t believe how long it is since I last posted – I’m sorry, but I guess a lot of my regular readers will have got fed up and deserted – don’t blame them!  My excuse is that I’ve been desperately working on the house restoration, trying to get to the point of finishing the ‘wet trades’ i.e. plastering before Christmas.  I wasn’t sure if I could do the plastering myself, or if I’d need to get a professional in to do it. Well, I did just manage to finish the first coats on everything and so get the bulk of the drying out of the way – I’m quite slow, which is OK with lime plaster as it doesn’t ‘go off’ like gypsom plaster, so it took me around 5 days to do the 50 sq meters of the walls and ceiling, which were mostly wood fibre board (in place of the original laths) and some cork insulation.  It all required a base coat, then pressing in a fibreglass mesh to stabilise it, then going over with another thin coat to hide the mesh. One job I didn’t enjoy was pressing 3 meter lengths of mesh into the wet plaster on the ceiling – until you have got most of it stuck it doesn’t stay up, and once its stuck you can’t move it around to align it, and then it all falls down and you are left standing there draped in mesh partly covered in plaster – not fun.  It went reasonably well and is flat enough for the top coat, although I found that my big posh finishing trowel had got slightly banana shaped somehow so it won’t do for the top coats – fortunately I bought another one earlier.  I hadn’t realised that there was what I call ‘tool porn’ in the plastering trade, where manufacturers try to make functional tools look sexy and posh as well as functioning well,  I also notice that the cool tool colours are now black and yellow- copied from DeWalt tools.   My excuse for not posting is that at my age 7 or 8 hours work, including plastering leaves one completely zonked out ( is that still a word – we used it when I was a child) so I miss my usual active late night slot. Today being Christmas I have a bit more energy – we had a small family Christmas party, but as some of us are vulnerable, including me, we decided to have it outside round the fire pit with hand food, like we did last year – it actually worked pretty well and no-one died of hypothermia, or at least not before they left.   On the gun front I haven’t done much although I will do some over the next few days while I rest from plastering.  I had a clay shoot with a few friends a CGC a coupleof weeks ago and shot the best I have done for years, if not ever – I wonder if having shot very little for the last two years has got rid of some bad habits I had!  The cheering thing was that I shot well with my percussion Nock single ( the only muzzle loader that I shoot nowadays), but also with a 20 bore hammer gun,  I am getting back to the broken spring job, having made one new spring and then broken it, I’ve found another spring that could be modified, and bent, filed and welded it to fit – I now have to harden and temper it and hope that it will not break – I will be very gently and will probably end up with a spring that is on the weak side, but better than another broken one.  I still haven’t managed to get a decent brown on the pistol barrels – I got rather deperessed by my previous attempts, but am steeling myself for attempt no 3.  I also realised there is another job in a gun slip in the office that a friend left to be sorted out – I can’t even remember the exact details, although I think I wanted to find another percussion cock for it, and was going over to see Dick before this latest Covid thing happened – his wife has type 1 diabetes so is vulnerable, and he is on immunosuppressive drugs and so is very vulnerable, so that won’t happen for at least  a few months.   I wish the vaccine refusenics realised the stress they cause, including to the hospital staff I know who have to pick up the pieces of their obstinacy!     Lets all get jabbed and boosted and re boosted and take care so we can get back to something resembling a  normal life again.  The drug companies are doing a great job designing new treatments as well as vaccines so I hope the days are approaching when Covid can be treated the same way as seasonal flu – I got an email form the NHS a  couple of days ago saying I would get one of the new monoclonal antibody drugs if I got Covid so I’m on their radar which is good news…..  Take care,  and I hope you have a good 2022.

11 November – Really good muzzle loading shoot yesterday!  Weather very cloudy and occasional Scotch mist – enough to twart one of the flintlockers for one drive – and not a breath of wind to deflect the birds.  The bag was fairly small – 67,  but the birds were flying well and the drives were good and even, so everyone had a most enjoyable time – proving that numbers are not everything.  I had mostly pegs on the outskirts and wasn’t in line for any big flushes, and I decided that I prefer it that way, especially as I shoot my single barreled percussion gun, so ‘left and rights’ are not possible. I seem to be the only person to shoot a single – someone asked my why I used it – the answer is I shoot better with it than any other gun I have, it is light to carry about all day (5 1/4 lbs), and it saves the dilemma of whether to reload after shooting one barrel or wait til you have shot both.  I was surprised in discussion to learn that other experienced shooters had inadvertently reloaded with a cap still on the live barrel! I  did make a small plastic ‘top hat’ that fits over the nipple and is locked in place by the cock, but I haven’t used it.     All in all a very good day, enhanced by the fact that it was only 25 minutes drive from home.  I seem to have got my left eye under control – I have a vintage pair of big gold round frame glasses of the type the NHS used to issue that have a W bridge instead of nose pads – so they fit closer to my face than normal specs and thus offer better protection from bits of cap.  I put a bit of sellotape over the top quarter of the left lens which is just enough to stop my left eye dominating when my head is down on the stock – I don’t notice it when looking normally.     I’m carrying on the browning of the pistol barrels – I think we are getting somewhere this time – I’m about 6 or 7 rustings in, so hopefully we will be nearly there.    Work on the bedroom continues – still not much visible reconstruction yet, but lots of fiddly framing started, and I’m now putting in conduits to pull the electrics through later.  I need to use conduits as the house seems to have had a severe mouse problem at some time – much to my surprise they seem to be happy burrowing and making nests in the fibreglass insulation – which makes it pretty disgusting – I’m replacing it with wood fibre (Seico Flex 036) and I’ll try to compartmentalise it to keep rodents out.   I did come across one power wire that had the insulation nibbled off – jut not enough to electrocute the perpetrator!  In my last house when I lifted a floorboard there was a 2 meter length of flat cable with all the copper exposed like a railway track!  That was the advantage of the old TRS rubber covered cable – nothing ate it, although it did get brittle.

7th November – I’m sorry for the missed blogs – I got a nasty infection that made me feel rather useless – and it took a while to sort out – I even stopped working on the bedroom restoration and sat on the sofa most of the day.  I did try and do a bit of gun work, but that turned out to be a disaster!  My browning of the pistol barrels got no-where – goodness knows why.  I never managed to touch some of the steel layers – almost as if it was stainless steel, and the rest didn’t get any colour to speak of – a complete mystery – I ran it to about 14 browning and then gave up and decided to start again when I felt a bit more dynamic!  I hardened and tempered the pistol spring, but wasn’t really ‘with it’ and it ended up a bit too open and the ‘hook’ end snapped when I tried to put it in the pistol – I will have to tackle that shortly!  I am now more or less back on track and working on the bedroom again, which is just as well as there is a load of work to do – as I pointed out before, I do tend to get more ruthless as I begin to be able to see the job in hand – so I did a bit more demolition and removed an old built-in cupboard that was built of completely woodwormed uprights.  I  now have a larger room to finish.  I have taken it all back to the rafters I put in in 2002, and will put in lots of insulation before putting on Savolit wood fibre board – its a substitute for lathes and can be diretly plastered over.  There 1s a lot of plastering to do  – 40  or so sq meters at three coats, I’m not very quick at plastereing so I might ‘cheat’ and get a professional in to do it if I can find someone who is good with lime plaster.  We had Giles’s flat  plastered by a pro – a joy to watch and perfectly smooth, but he left one room to his mate, and that was no better than I could have done (but quicker).

25th October  The browning of the two barrels looks a bit more promising – I may have found a clue – I suspect that if you put on the browning too generously it actually takes off the existing oxide layer? sounds improbably I know, but I’m now wiping on a very little browning solution.  I spent the afternoon scrubbing distemper off the gable end wall  (horrid job) so I could dub it out flat ready for attaching the cork.  I rang the floor board chap this morning to confirm their bank details as my bank doesn’t like me using bank details that come from emails – there  are loads of scams called BECS going the rounds, where somehow a scammer intercepts genuine emails from a business and sends an email perporting to come from that business but with the scammer’s own bank details.  It is usually directed at big business and has raked in hundreds of millions of pounds for the scammers.  Penny got scammed out of £500 pounds when having carpets fitted in the cottage in Cornwall, so I take it seriously…….   Anyway the floor board chap (Ben at Sutton Timber if you need floorboards!) pointed out that I’d better get all the ‘wet trades’ finished before fitting the floor or the boards would curl up ( actually curl down is more likely!) so I must push ahead with the plastering, but a lot to do first – like putting in the conduits for the power and lights, and sticking the wood fibre boards up so I have something to plaster onto!

24th October – Well, a bit of a gap again – sorry!  I had a skip delivered so have been trying to fill it to justify 6 cu yds!  Work on the bedroom has been progressing – I have been debating what to do about the floor – its a mix of old and not so old pine boards with lots of patches and gaps – I was going to board it with OSB and have it carpeted but Giles pursuaded me that that wasn’t in keeping with all the other fearures of the room – I did think of getting a few old pine boards and lifting the floor and relaying it, but figured that that would be quite difficult as the nails will surely tear the wood if they are lifted.  Anyway after a discussion and a search on the internet I have opted for new Elm floorboards (I didn’t know you could still get Elm in England!) 300 mm wide – we have other rooms with old Elm floorboards, so its a reasonable choice.  One really surprising thing came to light when I lifted a section of floorboard – the space between the joists was filled with tan coloured loose material that looked like perfect insulation – at first I thought it was coarse sawdust, but careful examination showed it was plant material that I identified as the petals of hops – I got some hops from the garden, and apart from the colour (garden ones are paler) they were identical.  Goodness knows how many hops would be needed to fill around 10 sq meters of floor to a depth of about 7 cm (3 ins) – I wondered if they were a byproduct of brewing or something.  Anyway they are clean and a good insulator (the room underneath was the dairy) and will stay, possibly supplemented with some vermiculite if there are empty joists.  I’ve never heard of hop petals being used as insulation in old buildings – must make some enquiries….  Things happened on the gun front, but slowly – I did about 8 rustings of the two pistol barrels but they haven’t started to brown yet – in despair I rang Dick to see if he would like to have a go, but he said it usually takes him 10 to 12 rustings and I should be a bit more patient!  I have adjusted my technique, being careful to apply browning with an almost dry sponge, and using medium steel wool…. we shall see……….  The pistol’s owner sent me the stocks to make sure things fit and work – I was having problems with the heel of the spring coming below the lock edge, so I welded a longer stud on the top arm that locates on the bolster, that kicked the heel up, but the tumbler end of the spring then got a bit low and was too short – straightening out the bent bit a little fixed the length, and bending it down cured the problem of the low spring – now I just have to reharden it.   Now I just have a little bit of woodwork to do on one stock and finish the browning, then I have another gun to sort out and another client is threatening to visit wih more work….. And I think I have another pistol to do that I’d forgotten about! And the frames to make for the secondary double glazing…… Plus I have to plan and buy stuff for the STEM club that starts after half term next week…………..   Maybe I should retire for the third or fourth  time, but I don’t seem very good at it!

17th October – I got one gun job out of the way this morning – a repaired spur and ‘mouth’ on a percussion cock to engrave – difficult as its all on a steep curve, so I resorted to the GRS – the welds are not altogether even textured so it was not straightforward, but the overall effect is OK.  I coloured it down with my gas-oxy torch, and then made its mate the same – I think it looks good, but I don’t have the gun to check the overall effect.  I photographed the cocks together after I’d engraved the top and  the photo showed that the repaired cock had much less engraving on the high part of the body – its a thing I’ve  noticed before – you think a job is done and you photograph it, and pack it up to go, then later you look at the photo and see a problem.  Anyway I got the cock out again and recut that bit of engraving – the two cocks are subtely different in engraving and surface texture but now look a bit more of a pair. I’ve done two brownings of the pistol barrels – they are beginning to show figure, but there is still a fair amount of metal the browning won’t bite on.  I’ve been taking photos after each browning, but they don’t show up  as much as in actuality – I must see if I can find a photo trick to show the actual effect.  You can distinctly see that the barrel is made of strands of different iron/steel rather than a homogenous material, but as its a pistol barrel the composite bar wasn’t wound round a mandrell in a spiral as it would be in the case of a long gun, but was made into a strip and wrapped round the mandrell and hammer welded into a tube in a series of grooves in an anvil with a lap joint so broadly the pattern runs along the barrel.  I believe most pistols were made this way, as were all (?)  military muskets and rifles. Some fancy pistols did have wound barrels and elaborate patterning, but most didn’t.

After second rusting – there is pattern, but faint, and a lot of untouched metal!

the cock on the left has lost its engraving on the high part

 

 

Recut – original engraving not identical on the two cocks…… (& different lighting)

Here is the bedroom I’m working on – the visible vapour membrane is directly inside the  slates. –

there is 140 mm of wood fibre insulation to go in and 60 mm of cork on the gable end wall.

This beam is probably at least 250 years old – it has a curved  brace at the left end that I’m repairing as its half rotten.

A similar brace at the right end is missing and will be re-instated when I can find a curved bit of wood.

16th October -More work on the bedroom yesterday – got me thinking about the 7 deadly sins of old house restoration and what would be the 7 deadly sins of old gun restoration. My 7 for old buildings are :- 1) Cement, 2) UPVC in any shape or form, 3) MDF board, 4) Plasterboard, 5) Vapour barriers, 6 Struck pointing of brickwork, 7) Float glass.  Not sure I can get to 7 for guns ;- 1) Sandblasting (yes, it has been done!), 2) Brazing of broken parts, 3) Use of woodfiller, 4) Polyurethane or similar varnish, 5) stainless steel, 6) Slotted head woodscrews, 7) Almost all sanding of existing wookwork.   This weekend is devoted to getting some gun jobs done – I’ve prepped the barrels and cleaned them with water and washing up liquid to get rid of any oil, then given them a wash over with chalk and water mixed like thin cream.  When this was allowed to dry you can see some figure showing through as faint rust marks – the beginnings of browning – its now having its first proper browning.  I decided to make a completely new top jaw screw and cut the thread on the lathe since it is set up for a suitable thread pitch – 28 tpi.  I heated up the top of the screw and dipped it in colour case hardening compound not to full read heat – anyway that dulled it down a bit.  I then reverse electrolytically derusted it ( i.e. rusted it rapidly) – in order to slightly dull the surface.  Its actually put some natural looking blobs of the surface too.  Its not a bad match for the original, I’m satisfied.  There is one niggling job that I need to attend to;- the new mainspring I made/converted is very close to the edge of the lock, and probably won’t fit within the lock pocket of the completed pistol (which I don’t have) = There are 2 options, either move the hole in the lockplate that houses the peg on the top leg of the spring, or reshape or remake the spring.  Either way its a great bore and will take a while – the lock plate is hardened so I’d have to anneal it, which won’t improve it, so I’ll proably work on the spring!  I got an email from school a couple of days ago asking if I’d organise/run a project for 2 classes to build their Nativity display models for the local church – I’ll be delighted to do it, I’ve already bought a couple of strings of LED christmas lights to illuminate Bethlehem!  Bit ironic for an atheist to be doing the church display but hey ho, thats life……

 

II can tell them apart ‘in the flesh’ but don’t know which is which from the photo, so must be OK!

14th October – Destruction more or less complete – just waiting to get the last 20 bags of rubble and muck down to the ground using my ‘crane’ – actually just a pulley stuck out on an arm  from the window. It needs two people, one up one down, to operate so I have to wait for Giles to come over tomorrow.  I was just about to finish in time for my 4 p.m. transfer to gun jobs when the materials for rebuilding were delivered on a couple of pallets and dumped outside – that took most of my afternoon gun time to sort out, anyway nearly ready to go, some framing up to do and it will be ready to stick on the sheets of wood fibreboard (Savilit) that will be the base for plastering with lime plaster.  So I had better go and get a few minutes work on outstanding gun jobs.  I’ve got a percussion cock that has been welded to re-engrave – its all curved surfaces which are very difficult to do hand encraving as you can only keep a constant depth of cut by EXACTLY following the curved surfaces, otherwise you almost invariably slip and make horrid cuts.  My solution for this is to use the pneumatic graver (GRS) that operates with almost no push and so doesn’t tend to slip.  I’ll go and start now………

13th October – Still destroying!  Quite mild here – how long will it last?  We have a massive crop of green tomatoes in need of another week’s sun – can’t face that much chutney!  We planted a grape vine about 5 years ago and have never had more than a handful of unripe grapes, but this year it made it from its trelis to the south facing wall of the house and went mad – we must have had enough grapes for a Chateau Cablesfarm vintage – bottles running to two or three figures ( that’s roman numerals).  It won’t happen, as the potential  winemaker ate them all at about a bunch a day for the last month.   I’m still experimenting with striking up the pistol barrels. One of the problems with using a file is that occasionally a speck of metal gets embedded in the file and creates a deeper scratch.  I tend to file wet as this helps avoid the problem – some people use chalk for the same purpose, not sure which is best.  I got good results from using a small  fine diamond sharpener stuck to a plastic handle (EZE-LAP) until the white spirit I was using disolved the adhesive holding the diamond onto the plastic.   My current best guess at a good technique is filing down to No 4, then use a fine slip, then 400 grit and finally 1000 grit. Looking under my x25 microscope there is still plenty for the browning to get a bite on.  I’ve recut the engraving on the barrels a couple of times as I’ve filed so that they still look crisp.  The microscope x25 does reveal that the surface still has multiple small pits, but I think when browned they will not show (they don’t really show to the naked eye) so I think I’m now ready to go!  I have had to divide my day up to get both the bedroom and the guns done – I reckon 6 hours of labouring is enough at my age, so at 4 p.m. I retire to the gun workshop for a bit of filing etc. ( after a cup of tea of course) until 6, then maybe back again after dinner for an hour or two if I feel energetic, then attend to the blog if I have anything to say!

Photo a month ago  – a few of the many bunches – almost all eaten now!

12th October – Mostly busy on the bedroom renovation – still in the destruction phase. I went out today to buy some 12 mm OSB sheets for some ‘undersheets’ and to make the floor fit for a carpet, but it turns out that OSB is now in very short supply and is almost impossible to get. Shame as there are no really good substitutes.   I spent a bit of time on Sunday and this evening striking off the two pistol barrels.  Nick, a fellow antique firearms collector sent me a link to a facebook page re my post about the difficulty of browning barrels if you burnish them too well.  The link said that the correspondent never went any finer than 360 grit paper, so the browning had something to bite on.  I wouldn’t be as catagorical as that, some very high class pistols had very highly polished barrels under the browning, but it does make the point.  I rang Dick, who has done many more barrels than I have – he basically works up through the paper grades to 1500.  His browning is good.  I feel it is ‘horses for courses’ as usual – looking at a number of guns you can see distinct longitudinal marks (scratches) along the barrel in guns that have never been re-browned, so they were quite coarsely finished when made.  The pistol barrels I’m doing are fairly badly rusted in places, so there is no chance of  striking them off to get rid of all the pits, so I figure it would be better not to have a highly  polished brown.   For pistols with Octagonal barrels my current technique is to strike off the flats with a good No. 3 file used lubricated with thin oil or white spirit (could use water with a drop of detergent but you can’t leave the work in progress or it will rust) either used as in draw filing with the file at right angles to the barrel, or if the barrel faces are flat along the barrel ( these ones are) then you can use the file parallel to the barrel.  Follow this up with a No 4 file used similarly. then a N0 6.   I then have a small slip stone that gets rid of most of the file marks.  The advantage of using files and the slip is that they are completely flat surfaces and therefore keep the flats flat.  In fact, often the flats are not flat but very slightly convex, so you can allow for that as you file.  I really don’t like using abrasive paper  any more than I have to, as I think it is always liable to round the corners off, but after I have filed and stoned, I’ll work through a couple of grades of paper wrapped round a flat surface narrower than the flat of the barrel.  If you have engraving you want to preserve, be careful if you use paper as it invariably rounds the edges of the lettering.  I did try to get the breechplugs out of these barrels, but failed, and it wasn’t essential so I left them in.

If you click on the images you’ll see the rust pitting – it won’t be too conspicuous when done, but its too much to be filed off completely

Top one is at 800 grit stage, buottom one is at slip-stone stage.

8th October – Still hoping to get down to some decent gun work – I have 2 pistol barrels to strike off and brown, but the last two I have done have been a bit of a pain as it took more rustings than usual to get the browning to bite on the steel component of the iron/steel mix in the twist barrels.  I suspect that I may be rubbing the rust off too well between rustings and burnishing the metal to a surface that resisted the rust?  I have been using 0000 steel wool,  while conventional advice is to use a wire brush, but I didn’t have anything except a very coarse brush that I thought would scratch the metal. Anyway I had to do something to put things right, so a search on the web brought up ‘The Wire Brush company’or something like that, and I was able to buy a couple of brushes that were (probably) more suitable – one with .015 mm diameter wire and one with .035 diameter.  I think the website was the one where I found my very fine Vertex wire wheel recently.  I will be interested to see how the next two barrels turn out.  The stripping out of the bedroom is progressing well – as usual the more I do the more drastic my stripping becomes!  Having taken the plaster off the lathes, it was clear the lathes were going to be problematic to retain, and also I needed to improve the insulation between the rafters (its an attic bedroom), so all the lathes are coming out and after I have put in the new insulation (140 mm of wood fibre) I will put on a 15mm  board made of  bonded long wood fibres that can be plastered on.  We started to remove the plaster from one of the slopes, only to discover that it was plastered onto reeds, and so is probably a considerably older generation of work than the lathe and plaster – anyway its interesting enough that I decided to retain it – it has 150mm of fibreglass inulation behind it, so not too bad.  The gable end wall can’t be insulated on the outside ( its a flint wall and it would be desecration) so I’ll add a layer of insulation inside. Unfortunately there isn’t a lot of space due to the shape of the room – too thick a wall and there wouldn’t be room for a double bed, so I will have to make do with 50 mm of cork insulation and the plaster applied to that.  I’ve been having fun calculating U values and juggling things!  Insulation Rebellion would be proud if only they were really interested in getting people on-side instead of just driving diesel cars and living in uninsulated houses and alienating people !

6th October  – Excellent day’s shooting yesterday – after fretting all week at the dire weather forecast we had only 5 minutes of light rain the whole day, and any moisture had evaporated in ten minutes!  It took me a while to get my eye in – there was quite a breeze and  I had a couple of stands at the beginning that were at the downwind end of the line so the birds were motoring.  I thought I was better at partridges, but in fact I had a better hit rate at pheasants.  Anyway good fun, and it was nice to see a group of friends who I hadn’t seen for almost two years.  The world is coming back to life again, and I’ve gone from having no restoration work coming in for the last couple of years to having 3 or 4 jobs drop on me in the last month.  I had a visit from the ‘magic’ double glazing chap this morning, and Dave and I had a look at the sample – It is rather impressive – two sheets of glass about 3.8 mm thick with a 0.1 mm gap in the middle which is a vacuum, giving a toal thickness of 7.8 mm.  Normal double glazing has a 20 mm gap filled with argon or krypton that transmits heat by convection – around 70% of the total  heat transferred. Triple glazing is a way to overcome this but then you end up with very thick & heavy units.  The magic units give a thermal performance better than good triple glazing!  They are also pretty good at sound insulation as sound doesn’t travel in a vacuum.  The secret of how the relatively thin glass doesn’t bend inward under the vacuum is a series of 0.5 mm diameter pillars on a grid of about 25 mm that you just don’t see when its in a window – if you place the unit on a sheet of white paper you can see them but they are not particularly obvious.  So I decided to do a couple more windows and replace the glass in the back door.  It is expensive – its very complex to make – but we all have to do what we can to fight global warming, and insulating homes is (probably) one of the best ways. Oh, and the units are fully recyclable – I’m beginning to feel virtuous……  I do get a bit fed up with most of the discussions of what we need to do to get to carbon neutral – a very necessary aim in itself – because we seem blind to the enormous amount of energy that will go into manufacturing all the electric cars, trucks, houses, boilers, heat pumps, nuclear power plants and even wind farms themselves –  That will probably balance out any benefits from the use of these fossil fuel saving systems for years to come, and we won’t have low carbon technologies on line to make these low carbon technologies.  On the other hand we have to start somewhere!

 

4th October.  work has started on the bedroom- I found a newspaper I had put there when I first did a preliminary rebuild in prparation for the full works – the newspaper was dated 2002!  How time flies….  I spent a happy hour starting on a new cock screw.  I couldn’t find a suitable thread to use on the new one, so I have turned up a head and plan to weld it onto the old screw – I’ve done it before with side nails and it does work although its a bit fiddly getting the two bits lined up and getting electrical connection for the welder too.  I’ve jigged them up in a piece of brass channel in the hope that that will work.  I use modelling clay to hold the bits while I make the initial tack as it lasts long enough, just.  Shooting tomorrow so no chance of any gun work – I’m still pondering the welder – I put a current sensing resistor in the celectrode cable, so I will do some esperiments to see what current I want to work at.  The weather for the shoot tomorrow looks a little better than it did, but not too brilliant!

 

Not sure about that – might have another go – its not rounded enough!

3rd October  managed to fit in a bit of work on the pistol sear – mainly ‘tuning’ it to give the right position of half and full cock – its sensitive to the length of the nose of the sear, as you would expect, so you need to file the nose down with extreme caution to avoid taking too much off and having to start over again.  Anyway it now works and I straightened out the sear arm as I hope it no longer needs to be cranked, then hardened it and tempered it a bit in a fine flame, avoiding directly heating the sear nose, just letting the colour run down and dunking it in water when it had gone straw coloured.  I annealed the sear arm, holding the body of the sear in the vice to keep it cool, as it may need to be bent to fit – I haven’t got the stocks of the pistols so I hope it fits, otherwise the owner will have to try bending it!   The welding on the underside of the sear is not perfect – I was struggling a bit as I mentioned before – I went on the web looking for advice on low current welding but it seems that there may be a number of issues with welders, particularly cheap ones, that mitigate against very fine welding – I understand that welders give a short pulse of quite a significant current to start the arc – maybe as much as 50 amps so my quest for a very controllable low current welder may be pushing me up out of my price range – thats what usually happens when I try to be particular about what I  want!  If I can’t find a suitable welder at a reasonable price I will program up a microcomputer to give me short pulses as in a more expensive welder. I spent a couple of hours building a crane to stick out of the bedroom window to lower the old plaster and get the new stuff up as we don’t really want it trecked through the house and over the Persian carpet in the living room!   A major triumph – I did a sortie after diesel – my car is OK but Penny’s is quite low, so I took a 10 litre can and did a reccy and found the local Tescos had diesel so a quick call got Penny out to fill up.  It really is quite difficult round here – it seems to be pretty easy to get petrol but not diesel.  If we hadn’t got some for Penny’s car I was going to borrow a petrol car for a while!    I’m shooting on Tuesday, which is the only day in the next fortnight that is forecast to have heavy rain!  We are to bring a breechloader in case its too wet for muzzle loaders.  I’m not too sure how game reacts to heavy rain but I would be surprised if they can be persuaded to leave cover!  I’ll take my 1950s Bereta  20 bore hammer gun – it has a very tight choke on both barrels so will be a challenge to hit anything, assuming there is anything to hit!  I would take my bolt action .410 ( the rat gun!) as a challenge, only I don’t have enough 2 1/2 inch cartridges to be worth it. But it will be nice to get out!

1 October – I’ve had to spend time prepping the work area for next week and finishing the prototype secondary glazing frame so I can work out the exact sizes of the super insulating glass to order – its on 8 weeks delivery so I wan to get the order in ASAP.  My gun workshop is now getting cold so I have to get the woodburning stove going, which inhibits me from short expeditions to work on guns.  We did manage to fill up the Land Cruiser with fuel and put 10 litres from a can into Penny’s car, but that won’t last long…………

28th September -I’ve spent some time getting ready to start work on the spare bedroom – plaster to be stripped, insulation put on the external wall and all replastered with lime plaster – my grand-daughter starts work on it next Monday – she is used to working on building sites and has done some demolition work so should be well suited!  I’ve also been preparing the wood for one of the secondary glazing frames as a trial.  In the gun line, I’ve made a new spring for one of the Richards pistols out of a modern mainspring – I welded a ‘flag’ on to space it off the bolster – my welder wasn’t set up very well so its not visually perfect, but it is sound and it all works well.  I can’t get that abrupt right angle that the old springs had at the start of the ‘hook’ that engages with the tumbler, but never mind, this one works very well. ( I think I don’t have a hot enough flame).  I’m now working on the sear – you can see from the photo what the difference in the sear shape is for the two pistols.  I tuned up the welder so it started at a lower current, but now it doesn’t really have enough electrode current to strike a proper arc when you just turn it on with the pedal, but does start the high voltage discharge that is supposed to initiate the arc – the high voltage discharge is a bit fierce and seems to blow the tip off the electrode.  I’ll have to have another go at adjusting it, or I might just put in another potentiometer to allow me to adjust the start current.  Nothing is straighforward – I suppose I should have bought a proper TIG welder with a pedal control and pulse drive instead of modifying a cheap one!   Anyway, be that as it may, I did manage a bit of blob welding on the sear without destroying any vital bits, and am now filing it to shape – its a slow process as I must avoid taking too much off!  I think there is a problem with the contact point for the sear spring which means that I may have to file down that area to get it to work.   I had a meeting with the head of ‘my’ school yesterday about restarting my STEM club after half term, and what we would be doing.  There is a bit of a problem as the school has moved over to Chromebooks instead of laptop PCs, and the they run an operating system based on linux but not standard linux, so only a few programs can run on them – unfortunately our favourite Python front end  (Mu python) is one that won’t run for the  BBC microbits, and its an essential part of our plans!  We’re suffering a bit due to the ‘petrol’crisis as Penny’s car is almost empty and so my Land Cruiser is getting a lot of use!  I did try to syphon the diesel out of mine as her car does about twice the mileage that mine does, but mine has a crafty anti-syphon block at or near the tank and I can’t manage to get a pipe into the fuel, even quite a thin one…………………. Oh and I just spotted what I think is my first visitor from the Falkland Islands on this website – welcome!

 

The one on the left is the ‘wrong’ one – its too short so the cock doesn’t clear the frizzen at half cock – also you can see the bends in it.

25th September – I spent the afternoon sawing and planing up the oak for the first secondary glazing frame for the kitchen window – I just had enough oak in stock to complete the job with oak that was a reasonable match to iteslf, although it’s very light compared to the existing frames, which were quite dark to start with and have darkened in the last 20 odd years.  I got round to some work on the bits of the Richards pistols I have to restore – the locks were a little pitted in places and I scraped off a bit of rust from the insides and stripped the works to check everything was OK and wire brushed the whole lot with my 3 thou wire brush to even up the finish.  The No 1 pistol needs a new mainspring – I think I have a modern one that can be cut down and modified to fit – I have annealed it and begun the work – I need to weld the pillar that engages in the slot in the bolster on the short leg, and shape the hook on the long arm.  Cleaning and checking the No 2 pistol I found when I tried to put a flint in it, that at half cock the top jaw collides with the frizzen.  I also found that it was very hard to move the sear.  You can also see that several attempts have been made to bend the sear arm, and you can also see that the angle the sear spring makes with the top of the sear is too steep so there is too much friction when you try to lift the sear.  All this can be put down to a replacement sear that is too short in the nose where it engages with the bents – it needs the nose extended by some 1 1/2 to 2 mm to work properly, or a new sear made.  In all probability the sear was a poor working life replacement, as was (probably) the top jaw screw on No 2, which is just not quite right.   What to do about the sear?  The pistol is not a shooter, so it doesn’t really affect it directly, but its up to the client – I’ll email and see what he wants me to do.

Half cock – note frizzen isn’t quite closed, sear arm is too low, sear spring angle is wrong  and sear arm is bent slightly.  Sear nose is too short!

 

22nd September – In keeping with the spirit of the age I’m preparing to double glaze the leaded windows in the kitchen, living room, library and one bedroom.  I made the frames and leaded windows around 20 years ago – each is slightly different as the openings were not identical, having been originally made around 1800 when the old 17/18th century house was given a makeover.  I plan to make additional internal frames for secondary glazing. I was looking on the web at prices and performance for toughened glass, perspex or polycarbonate when I came across a strange product that is a very thin sealed glass unit claiming a performance better than most double glazing.  Its intended for replacing the glass in wooden window frames as its not much thicker (6.7mm) than normal window glass, but gives you an insulation performance better than 20 mm thick sealed units.  Yes, I was sceptical too!  It does this using very thin glass (3mm) and a .7mm vacuum gap with glass micro pillars keeping the two sides apart.  It is of course quite expensive at about £280 per square meter, but I’m intrigued.  I’ve talked to the UK agent ( its made in Belgium) and am waiting for a sample.  The snag is an 8 week delivery delay.  My plan is to use this glass in the secondary glazing, which should give a very good insulation –  I’ll keep you posted on progress – if I get a sample I’ll run my own insulation test!  I got the gun with the sheared off tumbler bolt and ratty looking hammer to fix, so that is a job in the queue.  I also have a couple of business card sized plates to engrave to go on presentations, so I ordered a couple of bits of 0.8mm sterling silver from Cooksongold.  When I took the protective film off them the surfaces were strongly marked with striations all over.  I put one surface on the buffing wheel but that just made the surface look worse. Obviously a major cock-up somewhere at Cooksongold.  I phoned and they asked for photos, which I sent and I’ve been trying to ring them all day but there seems to be something wrong with their phone…… Off tomorrow for a quiet shoot at Cambridge to see if I can hit anything – I’ll use the little Nock  16 Bore single again, I am so comfortable with that gun – and its light to lug about (5 1/4 lbs) – I shoot 2 1/2 drams of Czech powder and 1 oz of shot.  I guess it kicks a bit, but fortunately I am not particularly sensitive to it – I have noticed a strange phenomenon – I can shoot that load at clays or game all day without noticing it, but if at the end of a game shoot I need to clear the gun by firing it into the air with a normal hold, it kicks like hell….. others have noticed the effect too. Must remember to take the taped glasses!

This was supposed to be polished silver!

19th September – Most enjoyable shoot on Saturday.  I put a bit of clear sellotape over the top of the left lens of my spare glasses – I only use that bit of the lens when shooting (the glasses have big round lenses) so I can see normally the rest of the time.  The sellotape just fuzzes the view enough to make the brain switch dominance to the right eye but not enough to make one conscious of it.  Anyway it worked and I had a sucessful day – I was back to my ususal habit of shooting really well for the first couple of stands, and then not quite so well – the same happens in competitions at clays.  Using a single barreled gun is bit limiting on a game shoot, but I am very quick at reloading as I am using semolina in place of wads – very few of the ‘gang’ who tried semolina still use it, although as far as I can discover the reasons are not related to shooting performance.  I reckon I can reload in less than half the time it takes wad users to load a double.   It was a beautiful warm day with mostly gentle breezes – absolutely lovely to be out in the country – it has really boosted my mood and I’m feeling dynamic – just as well in view of my pile of work in hand.  Nick sent me a couple of photos of a very small flint pocket pistol in a pretty poor condition that he’de found in a flea market and asking my advice on whether to buy it – I thought it would make a good project, and as it was pretty cheap it might be a good opportunity to give it a more thorough makeover than I would if a pistol had more intrinsic value.  Final decision will wait ’til its in my hands……. Among the jobs in hand is possibly replacing some of the silver inlay in the pocket pistol.  I had hoped that I could draw silver wire flat, but it doesn’t really work – there is no substitute for a set of rolls, which I don’t have – so I either have to get some rolls, make some, or get someone who does have jeweller’s roll to flatten the wire for me.

17th September – Shoot tomorrow – I  am a bit concerned about my ability to hit anything after my last outing at clays as I still have a left eye dominance problem so I am reverting to my most reliable percussion, my little Henry Nock single.  In previous posts I described converting it to flint, and it worked well, but I’m not confident to use it on a game shoot as a flintlock so I have swapped it back. I converted it by making a new lock plate etc and just  used the mainspring, tumbler, bridle, sear and sear spring from the old lock ( I made new screws as I couldn’t match the threads of the old lockplate)  Anyway it was the work of half an hour to swap the touch hole for the drum and nipple and swap the bits over to the old lockplate.   I got used to shooting a single barreled gun and I do find it more pointable – which is why under and over breech loaders have more or less completely taken over from side by side guns.  Using a single has the disadvantage, of course, that you can never get a nice left and right, and you do miss having a second barrel at times, but on the other hand it saves that terrible dilemma with a muzzle loader – whether to reload after one shot if there is a lull, or hang on a shoot both barrels before reloading.  Reloading one barrel is a pain as you have to remove the cap from the ‘live’ barrel, which is always a fiddle, even with my design of decapper. I saw my Oncologist today and asked about my level of immunity to a second dose of Covid – answer, more or less, is my guess is as good as his but probably not great – its a good excuse to avoid what I don’t particularly want to do but not enough to totally avoid what I do want to do! Simple really.

15th September – I seem to have a couple of restoration jobs about to come in – both with a bit of a story behind them!   One is a fairly basic Birmingham Percussion single that has a replacement cock/hammer that doesn’t fit very well.  The owner went to unscrew the cock screw that holds it onto the tumbler and the head came off ‘ in his hand’ without any great force.  I was able to reassure him that we had all been there several times before!  There are two possible causes – either the screw is fractured or corroded and so has very little strength left, or that has already happened to the last owner and he stuck it on with glue.! I’ve had both. In this case my friend tried a thread extractor in a drilled hole in the remains of the screw, and broke off the extractor.  I have to say that I have only used a thread extractor once on a gun as far as I can remember, and that wasn’t very sucessful either!  The basic problem is that the screw/stud/thread extractor forces its way into the remains of the screw and in doing so expands the screw to ensure its an even tighter fit in the threads – the harder you screw in the extractor, the tighter the screw gets…. obvious really!  There are in my view a very limited set of circumstances in which an extractor is any use – its a fine balance in keeping the hole for the extractor fairly small compared with the screw root diameter so there is enough metal in the remains of the screw to resist the radial expansion, while at the same time getting a big enough extractor that it won’t break.  Maybe some people have better luck with them on car engines etc.   Given the existing situation there are a couple of possible solutions – 1)  heat the tumbler shaft up and anneal it to soften the bit of the extractor and try to drill it all out and retap the hole, or  mount a bit of bar in the chuck of the lathe, drill a hole for the back bearing of the tumbler and araldite the tumbler to the block, then cut off the squared bit of the tumbler shaft and drill the tumbler out, then turn up a new shaft and silver solder it in, taking care to get the orientation right when you file on the square ( although you can always heat it up and try again!  The second job involves a mainspring that broke due to mild thermal shock – again I’ve had a mainspring break because I looked at it, or at least that is how it felt at the time.  I also put a mainspring in my derusting tank and came back 10 minutes later to find it in 3 pieces in the bottom of the tank – when I looked at it there were loads of laminar cracks in the spring – the odd thing is that I’m sure it worked before I took it out of the lock!    I do know about hydrogen embritlement but that is only supposed to happen quite slowly as hydrogen diffuses into the metal and then only on high strength steels…..  I finished the browning of the single barrel as the surface was getting slightly rough – I probably left it too long, but my patience was stretched!  If it was a proper job I’d have paid a bit more attention, but its a rough old gun anyway!  The onset of Autumn brought the usual plague of small rodents entering the house (heaven knows where they get in) – I got 7 in 3 days which give me a short lull to go round and find any ways for them to move between rooms – the standard test is that a mouse can get through any crack you can push a pencil into – obviously there has to be some width….

13th September – Following my comment about cateracts I had a very helpful email from a regular viewer of this website – he recommended that when I have my discussion with the opthalmologist I mention that I shoot, as it is possible to specify different lenses for different applications.  Driving lenses are apparently designed to limit dazzle but lenses suitable for shooting are brighter.  I will definately have that conversation.  One of the tricky aspects of this blog is deciding just how much personal stuff to include – like cateracts.  I am sure some regulars would prefer that the site was exclusively about antique firearms, while I believe others do enjoy a more rounded view of what I do!  Talking of which, I am gearing up to renovate a bedroom – move a wall, insulate the outside aslls, redo the floor and redo the lath and plaster ceiling and walls, and at the moment its rather full of furniture that ought to go to the saleroom, although none of it is worth much.  Anyway one nice item is an oak roll-top desk that we have had for some time – the tambour (the roll bit) came apart in me hands, honest guv, so after a quick check on the web I took the desk apart and retrieved the tambour, which had clearly been patched up half a dozen times already – that left me with a choice – do I take all the canvas off the back and start over again or patch the worst bits – in the end I opted for patching – I’m not sure it was the right decision but it should work well enough.  If the renovation sounds like a big job, it is!  I re-roofed that part of the house about 20 years ago – its basically an attic with sloping walls – and left the old roof timbers holding up the plaster while I planted a new roof and new wall plate on top.  We didn’t need the room then so its still as I left it after the re-roofing…. should be loads of fun!     I’m still browning the barrel of my single gun – I didn’t give it a dunk in copper sulphate, which I should have done, so it took around 12 rustings before it would put any colour on the lighter bits of the metal, and even then only if I steamed it after each rusting…. I think its getting there now but I haven’t checked the last rusting.  I started off using Blackley’s Slow Brown, then moved to my ex printed circuit solution and then tried Dyson’s slow brown – but as I was using the same bit of sponge to put it on with, and didn’t wash it out between rustings I was clearly using a mix of all three for all the latter rustings… better go and have a look at it.  And I’ve got some bread rising too.   I had a long conversation with a shooting friend who had been very ill and lost a lot of weight, as I did with Covid – Like me, he had to carry a cushion around as he couldn’t sit on a hard chair, but he is now recovered enough to be shooting and playing golf again.  We are both a bit surprised at how even at our age you can ‘re-inflate’ muscle if you eat enough – maybe we should try extreme bodybuilding to see if it works for us!

9th Septemeber – Shooting today at Cambridge Gun Club – hopeless!  I did a lot worse than I did at the helice (which wasn’t particularly good but it is develish hard)  and just couldn’t get on the clays.. When I got home I think I found the problem – I have cateracts in both eyes – not bad enough to get them done on the NHS, but progressive, and my left eye seems to be taking over.  I have used glasses with a piece of sellotape across the left lense to supress the left eye in the past when it has been a problem, but I didn’t think of it this time as I didn’t identify the problem – stupid really!  Anyway I think on general grounds I am going to have to get them done, even if I have to pay the 2.5K each eye will cost – have to sell some of my best guns!  I guess I’ll have to wait until I can find a several weeks when I don’t need to drive.  I may need to slip off to CGC for a private check before the game shoot – with sellotaped glasses!   On the plus side I found my box of card/wad punches right in plain view….. Definately time to get my eyes done!

8th September  Disaster – I’m shooting (clays) tomorrow for a warm-up for the next game shoot and I’ve mislaid my box of card punches and I’m not sure I have enough overshot cards.  I know I have seen them fairly recently, which makes it all the more maddening!   I was thinking I might shoot my 11 bore Westley Richards for game shoots, but I got it out of the cabinet but  found it much too heavy although last time I’d handled it I thought it would be OK – probably my arms/shoulders were a bit tired from swimming – it does weigh 8 lbs which is a bit much for swinging about after partridges!  I had an email from a chap in Canada with some photos of a pistol by H W Mortimer and Son that he had bought at auction asking about restoration.  It got me thinking about what is a good candidate for restoration and what is not, at least from my perspective.  In most cases if something is missing, broken or not working then, provided its viable from a cost perspective or has some personal significance, then it’s reasonable to fix it.  Similarly its obviously valid to clean active rust and remove dirt from metal and wood, but one needs to exercise care if that destroys the original finish or a patina that has developed with time.  Beyond that, its a matter of judgement – for instance, one often finds a pistol with the barrel in a worse state than the lock and furniture – the barrel being soft and the rest hard or semi hard – if the barrel has deep rust it can be a mistake to try and refinish it – you may end up making the rust stand out, but if a light striking off refreshes the surface rebrowning may well enhance the result.  I don’t belong to the school of thought that likes to see antiques restored to the condition they left the maker,  patina and the odd dings are part of the gun’s history, but each situation needs careful thought – sorry there is no easy answer!    I spent this morning doing silverwork – my sister in law had 3 napkin rings that she wanted worked on, one to remove the badge of the Clacton on Sea Bowls Association and the other two to cover the inscription/name with a silver plate so I could engrave the names of her grandchildren.  I had just enough .7mm thick silver to make plaques, and some ‘easy’ silver solder paste – it melts at 680C, well below the melting point of the silver., so now I just have to engrave the names on them.  I’ll do a few test engravings in copper to get my hand in – its harder than the silver but near enough.  We are having a few days of late summer – I have managed a swim on the last 3 days, the water in the pool is gradually rising from about 19C last week and its now about 22C  – the surface gets a bit hotter after mid-day – I think tomorrow will be the last hot day.

5th September – Family birthday party today – outside in lovely weather for a change!  Lots of fun for my grand daughter of 11 playing with the boat we made at school on our pool, joined by adults too.  On my birthday I started a course of drugs for my CLL (Chronic Lymphocytic Leukeamia) – I currently don’t have any effects from the CLL but my specialist thinks I soon will so is keen to get me popping Acalbrutinib.  So far no side effects, touch wood.   I’m still undecided whether my first partridge shoot should be flint of percussion, but I am moving towards a percussion as my good flint is only single barreled and that is a bit of a disadvantage.  I resoldered the rib on my ‘Tim Owen’ single percussion as it came off recently – I think its on OK, although not the most elegant job.  I really hate resoldering barrels as its so difficult to clean up the metal to get it to tin properly,  Now I have to re-brown the barrel, – it has a nice damascus pattern (I think) so I am wondering whether to ‘flash’ it in copper sulphate to etch the surface a bit and bring out the pattern.  I still have the Venebles to re-do, I soldered the barrels but it subsequently sprung the rib (its a double so double trouble!) so I’ve to do it over again. I do get asked from time to time if I do restorations for clients – the answer is I do, I’m careful about what I can offer to achieve, and prefer not to do work that doesn’t ‘earn its keep’ by adding to the value of the gun.  I won’t do deliberate faking – like changing the maker’s name etc,  and I prefer work I can put on this blog, even if sometimes I hide the maker’s name.  I don’t do work on licensed breech loading firearms or modern repros, and I ask anyone sending me an antique to remove it from their certificate to ensure that it is a Sect. 58/2 firearm (an antique that can be held without a license) as I am not a registered firearms dealer.

2nd Sept – my birthday today!  So I can be allowed a rant!  The latest report of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sex Abuse was published yesterday and makes pretty sickening reading – almost all  of the major religions in the UK have significant failings in parts, for instance some don’t accept some reports of child sex abuse ( one requires 2 witnesses, would you believe it !) or try to cover them up, so the remarks I wrote yesterday before I saw it do look uncomfortably near the truth. Rant over! ………………………………. Apart from tidying up the garden for a party on Sunday , I did manage to nickel plate the trigger of the cigar cutter- it seemed to lay a thin coat of nickel, then a thicker coat that didn’t properly attach to the thinner coat and peeled off if scratched with a finger nail…. not sure what happened, but it looks about OK against the abraded plating on the rest of the pistol, so I’ll leave it.

You can download the full ‘child sex abuse in religious organisations’  report  here;-

https://www.iicsa.org.uk/document/child-protection-religious-organisations-and-settings-investigation-report-september-2021

1st September – bit of a pause as I had to go down to Wales to set a memorial stone on mum in laws grave in a field, then it was the bank holiday.  I have been playing around with silver wire, and built a little adjustable jig for flattening silver wire – works quite nicely – I can get 0.4 mm wire down to strip about .16 thick which should be OK for the superimposed pistol butt.  I have also been doing some preliminary experiments with nickel plating.  You can use an electolyte made by mixing spirit viengar (basically aceatic acid) with a bit of salt and passing a current through a couple of nickel electrodes ’til the vinegar turns nicely green.  I did an experimental plate which seemed to work, but the finish was not perfect – I shall use a lower voltage and colder solution and see how it comes out.  I’ve been reading an account of Cook’s voyages by William Kingston, published in about 1880 by the the Religious Track Society.  I find it mindblowing how arrogant the author was in regard to ‘converting the heathen’  , and  his objection to Cook’s complete omission of any ‘missionary’ activities.  Although the book is now 150 years old  I guess we still unfortunately see that sort of blinkered religious belief in parts of the world – and sometimes close to home…… One of the  (6) leaders of a  religious group present in the UK  ( I won’t name it!) is reported in today’s Times as saying that it was an offense under their religious law to report  child sexual abuse unless the victim was under 12 or 13!

25th August – a fun day filling a skip with rubbish!  I managed to get the cigar cutter trigger to work after silver soldering a couple of bits to it – I looked at ‘cigar cutter pistols’ on ebay – one for £185 and one for over £400. Probably  somewhat better than mine, but it does justify the time spent making a new trigger!  Perhaps I’ll sell it when its finished….

 

 

The bad joint is OK on the other side – just a bit wonky – quick job…

24th August – did a bit of work on a trigger for the cigar cutter – think I have filed off too much, may have to hard solder a bit back on!   I was looking at an antiques website that hosts sales from dealers across all sectors – the site claims to have done over 100 million pounds of business this year. Anyway I was looking at a pair of duelling pistols at some fairly high price, I can’t remember the details or the maker but that doesn’t matter as I’m not trying to shame anyone.  As always I was looking at the biggest photo I could get of the pair, and idly scanning for hints that the pistols had been restored – now dealers have one of three approaches to work done on antique firearms – be open about it, keep it quiet or not look too carefully! Or of course they may not have the experience to tell.  These pistols looked pretty genuine, and then I started looking in detail…………….  Its very common for top jaws and top jaw screws to be replaced – but its actually quite tricky to make a really authentic looking top jaw screw! – I had fun making one for the superimposed pistol below because the shape is quite critical to the eye – a few thou here and there can make all the difference.  Anyway this pair of pistols had top jaw screws that were subtly different in the washer bit that bears on the top jaw.  One had a fairly narrow collar that was slightly tapered, the other had a deeper collar that wasn’t tapered – my eye immediately called the second one into question – didn’t look right.  I don’t know if that was the replacement, but no decent gunmaker would sell a pair with that much difference.  Still its a common repair and not that important…. but you need to keep looking …. so then the rollers on the frizzen springs were different sizes – very noticably so.  Again no gunmaker would put out a pair with that difference.  This is a more serious sign as other bits must have been replaced for it to need the roller replaced, so you don’t know where it will end!  So these pistols have been ‘worked on’ – maybe even a reconversion to flint – maybe the dealer knows this, maybe not – but now you know and can walk away……………………………. happy hunting!

23rd August – Bit of garden tidying today!   The following is for UK viewers!  ………….. Browsing the web for something or other I came across a circular on the Antique Firearms Regulations 2021 – this is the regulation that for the first time defined ‘antique’ in terms of firearms.  Most public comment in the gun business as about the removal of half a dozen cartidges from the list of Obselete Calibres, meaning that a number of interesting early revolvers  jump from being antiques to be prohibited weapons under Section 5 of the Firearms Act.  As a sweetener 41 cartridges are added to the Obselete Calibre list – mostly for long guns.  The argument for this is that these revolvers were occasionally used in crime by obtaining ammunition.  In truth that much was to be expected, if  a bit of an over-reaction since possessing the ammunition is itself an offence.  One small paragraph at the end did however cause me some alarm –  stuck on the end of the regulations was the extension of Section 126(3)  para 19 and 20 of the 1968 Firearms Act to include antique firearms – this is important to everyone who owns or handles any antique firearms for it means that under 19 it is now a criminal offence to have any antique firearm in a public place without a reasonable excuse despite it being perfectly legal to own, display, buy and sell ( but not to anyone with a crim. record!) them – another opportunity for the police to bother us if they are so minded.  Under  20 its now also a criminal offence to trespass with an antique, although its not a criminal offence to trespass in itself.

I also had a look at the Firearms Security Handbook 2020 – its quite interesting in the way its framed, implying that the details of security are up to the owner, but then piling on the suggested regulations, while leaving a lot of room for individual firearms officers to interpret them as they see fit. It does however suggest that all licensed muzzle loading firearms may be excluded from any counting exercise used to determine the security level demanded…   n.b any muzzle loading firearm made after Sept 1939 is NOT an antique and must be on either a Shotgun license or a Firearms certificate.

The transition period for getting rid of newly declared Sect 5 pistols etc under the Antique Firearms Regulations 2021 end on 21st Sept 2021, so not long.

They can be found here;-

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/circular-0012021-antique-firearms/circular-0012021-antique-firearms-regulations-2021-and-the-policing-and-crime-act-2017-commencement-no11-and-transitional-provisions-regulations          or just Google search for ;- circular 001/2021 Antique Firearms

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/firearms-security-handbook  

Happy collecting – while we still can…………………………………

22nd August  – The little Rooke pistol I made a new trigger for was occasionally refusing to drop the trigger and cock, so I stripped it (again!) and found that the trigger was maybe 10 thou too short on the lumps that the cock moved to drop the trigger, and was jamming.  I had to weld  tiny blobs onto the tips of the trigger arms which are only about 1 mm x 1 1/2 mm – I managed it by switching my modified TIG welder on and off with the foot pedal for maybe 1/2 a second or less and wearing 2 pairs of specs, and managed to fettle it all up so it works – no room for error – I’d love a better welder!  Anyway that job seems to be done satisfactorily. I welded using piano wire as a filler rod  and the resultant blobs were so hard I could only shape them on the diamond hone – a file wouldn’t touch them.  Phew…   Reading ‘The Handgun’ by Geoffrey Boothroyd this evening I discoverd, re my earlier discussion about cock positions that allowd a cap to sit on the nipple without falling off, that Irish percussion pistols, particularly those made by Rigby, often had 3 bents in the tumbler for that purpose.  Always something new to learn………….

21st August I found a box that might do for the pair of pistols by Rooke if I don’t make one.  It had in it the parts of a small nickel plated ‘pistol’ that turned out to be a cigar cutter, rather badly bashed about.  I straigtened it out as best I could and put it back together – its missing a trigger, but otherwise seems to be OK and more or less works.  It is a rather fun thing, so I think I’ll restore for a bit of light amusement, which will involve making a trigger.  I assume from the chequering on the hammer and its shape that it was single action thumb cocked, so I’ll try to remove the hammer so I can check dimensions etc.  Another little distraction – I used to do nickel plating when I was a kid, but I didn’t keep the chemicals and can’t remember what salt to use – time to check the web!  I’ll file the trigger up out of brass – I have a suitable bar, just need to mill it down to the right thickness and maybe rough it out……  You put the mouth end of the cigar in the funnel shaped opening on top of the cylinder and the hammer cuts a V shaped notch in it.  I’ve posted a new Post on pocket pistols – not finished but some photos – I’ll do more as I get round to doing the video….

Little cigar cutter – the (fixed) ‘cylinder’ has ratchets for 5 chambers, but the face has 6 holes!

20th August I finished the trigger detent spring and hardened and tempered it and put the mechanical parts of the pistol together and it worked perfectly – the full and half cock were even it the right places!  I did a bit of patching on the butt where it joins the metal, and sorted the plate in the butt that carries the screw from the top strap – its a common weakness in these little pistols  -they have a small steel plate let in under the top of the butt that is tapped to take the screw and it isn’t visible from outside and never gets oiled or protected so it rusts.  As its usually let into a tight fitting recess in the wood, when it rusts it expands and forces the sides of the front of the butt apart, causing a split. One of the Rooke pistols had one, and this superimposed pistol does too, see photo.  I took the metal plate out – its held by a small woodscrew that sheared off, and cleaned up the metal plate and put it back with a drop of instant glue – it only needs to be held in place until the top strap is screwed on.  I clamped the split up as best I could and flooded the inside with more instant glue.  I’m now looking at doing some work on the silver inlay.  I have ordered some silver wire of 0.3 and 0.4 diameter and will experiment with making a draw plate to pull it through to flatten it. I also ordered some low viscosity instant glue to fix the inlay as I had run out.   I realised that I have repaired and restored a number of these little pistols and that I ought to do a video on how to take them apart and repair them – they are tricky little pistols, quite difficult to work on because they mostly haven’t had any attention and the screws tend to rust in and, being small are tricky to undo and prone to shearing off if  not treated carefully.  It’s a knack to take them apart and put them together again – I think it used to take me ages – and still does if the screws won’t obligue.  I only had one difficult screw on the superimposed pistol, one of the ones holding the top plate on and it eventually came out using the following treatment:  The secret of removing obstinate screws is a) clean any rust around the screw head carefully with a modelling knife and clean out the slot  b) soak them in penetrating oil for a couple of days – c) if you can get any movement in the parts that it holds together, move them. d) apply penetrating oil/acetone mix as it penetrates better.  e) Only use a perfectly fitting screwdriver – if necessary grind/sharpen it so its blade is sharp. f) work the screw in both directions – if it unscrews a bit and is tight, just keep working it back and forth, going a little further each time and making sure you have plenty of penetrating oil around. g) don’t over force it, even a minute amount of movement if  ‘worked’ should eventually get it out.  Heat may help, but too much can damage the finish, – it works better on screws that go into wood.  If those don’t help you are down to filing off the head/drilling it out and all the fuss that follows! …….. Oh, and another thing I realised about this pistol – the tap has a depression for a pan of its own, so if you prime it generously with the tap open to the bottom barrel and then close it, you trap a priming charge in the tap barrel, then when you have fired the front charge using the remains of the priming in the main pan, you open the tap and its ready primed for the breech end charge  …. crafty.

 

Looking much better! The inlay is odd – may be German silver and I can’t make out what the outlines are/were filled with, apart from muck = bit of a mystery!

T

These inserts are a pain – they rust and crack the butts!

19th August – I cleaned up the bits of the superimposed pistol and made a blank for the top jaw and filed it up, and made a top jaw screw.  I case hardened these parts, then decided to temper the top jaw to add a bit of colour, but not having the AGA I used a torch, and it came out a brilliant peacock blue, which isn’t quite authentic!  took it off with 0000 steel wool and  used a bit of slow brown, plus steam and it looks good.  I’ve now just got to make the little spring that retracts the folding trigger, and put it all together – I don’t even think I need to make any new screws, pins or nails for a change!  I had a look at the silver inlay on the butt – the strip that was used was about .15 mm thick  x 1.5 (?) mm and I can only get .3 mm thick x 3 mm – the right way to do it would be to get some wire of about .3 mm and run it through jewellers rolls, but I don’t have any – I could either make some, borrow some or try flattening wire in a press – to be decided!  first I need to get the wire – but I do have a draw plate.   In the photo of the top jaw you can see how I rough  sketch the parts I need on a card so I can take it into the machine shop – I keep the cards in case I need to refer back.  I have quite a pile!  Much of the shaping is done by eye in the end……

 

Jaw blank milled to rough thickness and card template glued on. Once the outline is filed, it will be cut off and glued to a block.

18th August – I’ve now stripped the current pistol and had a good look at how it works –  the barrel comes unscrewed in two places, the part next to the breech is removed using a ‘normal’ ring spanner with a notch to fit over a lump on the barrel, and the muzzle end is unscrewed using a star wrench into the bore.  SO obvioulsy you remove both bits, put powder in the breech, drop the ball in and put back the breech end barrel, then load that and put on the remaining bit of barrel – simple as!  I also realised that the touch hole going to the front charge (which must go through the removable breech section of barrel) is always open, the tap merely shuts off the touch hole to the rear charge.  Still seems to be nothing to stop you firing both barrels together – would be interesting to see what happened if you did (NO, I’m not going to fire it!).  Stripping the action revealed that indeed the head of the sear had broken off, and also the spring that acts to close the trigger had broken, leaving only a small part and the retaining screw.  I spent most of the day on the stripping and machined a blank for the sear and  new top jaw and filing the sear to fit – as I explained for the Rooke pistol, the trigger and sear have so many functions that need to be adjusted that it takes ages to fettle them to work. Anyway I think I have got the sear right so I hardened it – the sear edge is quite fragile as it has to fit tiny bents in the hammer.  I was a bit worried about heating it to red heat to harden it as the edge could overheat, but once coated in Blackleys colour case hardening powder it was somewhat protected – I had better temper it or it will break, which is tricky as the AGA is not on.

For scale, hole is 2 m.m. diameter

17th August  – I’ve now finished the Rooke pistols, and very nice they look too, although whether the impovement really justifies almost 6 days work is a mute point! Luckily I don’t have to pay myself….  I may get the urge to put them in a case – not because they would originally have been cased, but because it makes them easier to store, and I enjoy casemaking!  Below is a before and after.  I’m now starting on another job in the queue – even more unusual than the ‘cap guard’ (aka top  hat – not a good name) pistols. It is a flintlock pocket pistol, somewhat larger and has a tap action.  What makes it unusual is that there is only one (turnoff) barrel, so what does the tap do if it isn’t switching between two barrels – the answer is that its a superimposed load pistol – you load the barrel with one charge and ball, then put another charge and ball in front of it.  The tap controls two touch hole paths, one to the first charge loaded, and the other to the front, superimposed charge.  I haven’t stripped it down yet, but there doesn’t seem to be any mechanical means to stop the back charge being fired while the front charge is unfired, which would appear to be a bit of a defect!  I do have a French superimposed pistol of large bore by le Page, but that is percussion and does have separate cocks for each load and the trigger is cunningly controlled to make sure the front charge fires first.  I guess this smaller flint pocket pistol  only fires a small charge, so perhaps it isn’t such an issue if you fire the back charge and push out its ball plus the front load?  Still I guess it gives the firer a bit of a jolt, and can’t have much range – plus if the powder from the front charge ignites in the barrel or as it leaves it will be quite a firework! Anyway this little pistol has a broken action (I think the sear is broken – a very fiddly job to replace) and the top jaw is missing and the top jaw screw is broken off and rusted solid. Probably a couple of days work – maybe more if I try to replace the silver inlay in the butt.  I’ll strip it down and probably electolytically derust any screws etc that are badly rusted.  The rest will clean up with a fine Vertex  wire wheel on the grinder.  I have a problem with the wire wheel from time to time – they are very soft and so don’t hurt if you use your fingers to hold small parts, but are still effective at cleaning the parts of loose rust and reducing sharp burrs. My problem is that from time to time the wheel gets a grip on the part and takes it out of my fingers and it ping onto the floor and it takes ages to find.  I’ve now made a catcher to sit under the wheel and hopefully stop the part bouncing onto the floor.  It may still allow the parts to bounce out, in which case I’ll have to fill it with water!  At least having sorted the Rookes I’m up to speed on the mechanics of these posket pistols – they are all very similar inside and out….. and all very fiddly!  Its a bit of an art stripping them and assembling them, so I might do a video………………

 

 

 

 

16th August 2021  – you learn something new every day!  At the helice we were looking at an Egg single conversion from flint  and I noticed a screw head under the butt half way between the butt plate and the trigger guard that I hadn’t noticed before – I said it looked as if there had been a sling swivel there as for a rifle, but the friend viewing it with me said that it was more likely to be a spare side nail, and that a few guns had this.  Indeed when I got it home and had a well fitting turnscrew to hand it was a spare side nail, and fortunately not rusted except for round the head. There you are – another piece of gun lore from the blog!  On the subject of information my correpondent who is researching ‘cap guard’ pistols commented that I correctly hadn’t assumed that the Rooke pair were conversions from flint.  I have to admit that I hadn’t really examined one before, and the flip-up cap guard gave me a moments pause, although it soon became clear that they had been made as percussions for two reasons;  first, there was no trace of a pan ever having existed, and second that the whole pistol was ‘of a piece’ as antique experts might say.  He has identified 220 of these little ‘cap guard’ pistols by various makers – all were originally made as percussion.   My restoration continued… Ithe first pistol has enough of a nipple to fit a cap on and fire, but the second had a mashed up nipple, so I decided it deserved a new one. By design there seems to be nothing to get a wrench on, or any othere way of turning the nipple, and a thread extractor did nothing so I drilled it out, trying not to cut into the brass.  The resultant hole looked OK for a 1/4 inch tap and I was going to use the standard 1/4 BSF x26 t.p.i tap, but thought in the brass a finer thread would be better, so I opted for 1/4 BSEF x 32 t.p.i. which worked well and seemed to be the same as the original thread (?) (actually, to be honest, I couldn’t find a 1/4 BSF plug tap but did have a BSEF  – Extra Fine !).  So a new nipple was made and fitted.  I have now made the pivots and put the mechanical bits together, and finished repairing the butt.  Now just got to sort out the screws for the butt cap and to fix the body to the butt, and its done…  Another friend at the Helice was telling me he had double gun by Forsyth dated to 1822 (he was sure about that date) that had been made for percussion caps, not pellet lock conversion.  I was sceptical, as the earliest date for caps is generally taken to be 1823 and I didn’t expect Forsyth to be the first to use them.  Indeed D.H.L.Back’s book on Forsythe puts the earliest caplock made by Forsyth as about No 3327  in 1826.  Which make my friendd’s gun very important, or the date or details wrong. Sometimes a really good conversion done by the original maker not too long after manufacture will effectively be a rebuild with a new beech plug and a new lock and will be very hard to distinguish – and  may well have kept the original number.   There is seldom any absolute certainty in such cases – one of the attractions of the hobby is the detective work that collecting involves.

Spare side nail in stock of single barreled percussion converted from flint Durs Egg.

 

15th August  Helice yesterday at the Rugby ground sandwiched between the M1 and a windfarm.   I was shooting a gun I hadn’t really ever shot in ernest but I did hit 4 out of 20 – in case you think that is bad, half a dozen of the 25 odd  shooters did worse – I was reasonably satisfied!  Tom hadn’t handled a gun since 2018, and hadn’t shot that gun for 8 years and had only shot Helice once before but managed to hit 8 including a some of the very difficult ground hugging ones – he’s pretty quick, age on his side!  Anyway only half a dozen or so shot better than he did, so he was rightly pretty happy.  Anyway a good day was had by all.  I finished the escutcheon of the first little pistol – left me wondering what, if anything, I should engrave on it ?  I started to repair the butt of the other pistol – a bit of the wood had broken off rather messily.  I was going to try gluing it back on – which I know from past experience only works (sometimes) if the break is recent, new and clean, which this wasn’t – but I was saved the dilemma as I couldn’t find the piece anyway.  I found a bit of dark walnut from my scrap drawer and cut and glued it on with superglue and shaved and filed it to an approximate fit – it’s much better job and the wood matches pretty exactly.  I just have to finish the final shaping and recut the chequering onto the new piece, then make the screws and pivots for that pistol and put it together.  I thought someone might like to see what’s on my workbench when I’m working on the guns so I’ve included a photo.  There are a selection of tools including half a dozen screwdrivers (mostly watchmakers for such small pistols) and a couple of dozen files plus chisels and modelling knives etc.  Drills and machines and gas torches are elsewhere, I just use this bench for ‘fettling’ by hand – taps and dies are in the tray to go to the machine workshop.  Plastic trays from packaging get a second lease of life in the workshop!

 

Last job on the first pistol;- I need to fill the crack – I can’t close it without removing metal inserts inside.

Second pistol;- The two very faint red lines show where the joint is – the colour match is very good, not yet finally shaped.

I shudder to think how much I spent on the finer files – they can be up to £35 each.

13th August  Visit to the dentist to have  a tooth extracted – not too bad – I’m shooting the Helice at the Rugby Clay ground tomorrow with Tom, so I hope it has settled down by then!   I started to make the silver escutcheon for the completed Rooke pistol – I decided that it didn’t merit all the fuss of casting as I had a piece of silver sheet and am happy to epoxy glue it in place, so I made a former and am peining it into shape.  As I have only got a piece of silver just  big enough its difficult to shape it, so I will probably have to make the female part of the former to get it curved enough.     I made the replacement screws and filed the heads to profile – its quite tricky as you can’t file them in situu without damaging the  brass body of the pistol, and also because the slots have to end up fore and aft.  I then case hardened them and heated them to colour them a bit.  So the first one is all together and working – just waiting for the escutcheon.   I’m taking some of my spare pecussion doubles with me tomorrow on the offchance someone is in the market  –  they have all been restored and Ive tried them all – I’ll put them on the page on this site when I get a mo.

11th August  Still working on the little pistols.  I coloured up the top hat of No 1 and finished the hammer pivot and the top hat pivot.  I tried to make  a No 2 UNF screw ( 2.2 mm OD) to hold the spring on the top hat, but the metal I was using just would not let me cut such a fine thread – I ended up finding an old steel 10 BA pan head screw and  using that.  When I came to make the pivot for the top hat I found a short length of bar that had been a part of something or other that turned and threaded much better – I will keep it safe for small threads!  anyway that pistol is now mechanically complete and functional – it just needs the butt restored.  The screw holding the but cap was securely rusted in place, and the screw on the under tang had been beheaded but was still firmly embedded.  I  filed and drilled the butt cap screw to get the head off, then made a small coring drill 5.5 mm O.D. with a 4 mm hole in the middle and filed some teeth in the end and cored out the remains of the screws so that I can plug the holes for new screws – I had to take the butt cap off as it had loads of the white powder (brass polish??) under the edge so it didn’t fit flush.   Now got to sort out the chequering (very fine) and make some new screws – it really doesn’t work to use ordinary woodscrews, even old Nettlefolds slot headed screws, on guns, they never look right, for a start the slots are always too wide.  I usually turn up a short untapered screw  and cut a UNC or Whitworth thread on it and put a point on the end, which is how most gun screws were made anyway.  I am still prevaricating about the extent of any recutting of engraving to do.  I will touch im amy damaged engraving, and very gently go over the light lines that have disappeared – i.e. some of the serifs, so that the lettering can still be read.  Anything more will stand out unless I cut it deep and then polish it down, which will likely loose some of the original stuff  – you then get of a cycle of more recutting, polishing, more recutting etc… better not to start!

Arrows point to new bits-  mostly pivots and screws plus the ‘cap guard’ upstand.

9th August – Another day fixing up the little pistols, with a break for an eye test ( result – I need my cateracts done sometime – optician can’t quite understand why I can see as well as I can! ).  So back to the W & S Rooke pistols…… If I add up all the time I will have spent restoring them it will, in the end, come to at least five days, so its hardly a bargain.  Of course, profit  is not my motive, but a better return would be good!  The main time consuming part has been a replacement trigger – in these little folding trigger pistols it has a lot of interacting surfaces that have to do their job,  The trigger spindle also carries the sear that engages the bent in the hammer.  it has a stop against the trigger to lift the sear out of the bents when the trigger is pulled.  The hammer has a projection that has to hit the back of the trigger  when the pistol is cocked with the trigger retracted to open it, but the trigger must clear the hammer once it is extended.  The stud on the side of the trigger head engages with a small  spring that acts over-centre to retract the trigger into its recess and to spring it open – All quite complex on account of the whole firing mechanism only having 3 parts and 3 springs, and of course all the bits have to be quite accurately fitted.  Although the pistols are clearly a pair and match I was surprised to discover that there was a 2mm difference in the length of the triggers so it isn’t safe just to copy parts from one to the other.  Anyway the replacement trigger is now made and in so far as I can test it, works.  I’ve also made new hammer pivots.  Both pistols had the hammer pivots sheared inside on the left side of the hammer (Note that the hammer pivots and the knockout pins like the trigger pivot all go in from the left side as is usual on guns) – this meant that I had no means of extracting the bit through the hammer , and no way to strip it down further because almost the first step is to remove the hammer.  So the pivot had to be drilled out very accurately to avoid damaging the hole in the hammer or the right side of the body….. All very time consuming as I’m not familiar enough with the works of these pistols to sort things without a bit of messing about!      One little triumph today ;-  Dick and I both use very fine wire brushes on our grinders to clean up light rust and polish up steel parts without removing the patina – they are so soft that you can hold parts in your fingers without any problems.  When I moved my workshop back in January I couldn’t find the wheel, and worse, couldn’t find anything similar in the UK.  As I wanted to use one for this job I had another hunt on the web and found a company – I think called The Polishing Co or something similar, that sold exactly similar wheels – they go by the name of Vertex wheels and have wooden hubs and wires of 0.1 or 0.08 mm diameter ( 4 or 3 thou)  and cost around £25 and fit on taper screws – I got two and am now a happy bunny!   I feel the need to make another video soon – I was going to do one on restoring the little pistols, which would be interesting but doesn’t lend itself to  short films as its mostly tinkering.  I have a couple of unusual percussion shotguns with totally enclosed mechanisms – one by J R Cooper that I believe is the only example known, and one a Jones Patent – they would make a good youtube video.  Also the Satorius might make a video…  We shall see.   I was thinking about all the toools and machines I use, and wondering if I should do a post of suggestions for someone setting up to do the odd restoration – one constraint is that the most common job in any restoration is making screws, which really involves at least a small metalwork lathe of reasonable quality.  I am lucky in that I did quite a lot of prototype building as part of my instrument development company before I took to the restoration racket, and it funded all of my metal and wood working machine tools – there is no way restoration as a hobby would justify a £5000 lathe ( a fairly big Axminster Chinese lathe with digital readouts, not the smoothest but adequate!).

 

 

The arrow points to the sear that pivots independently on the trigger pivot (the long temporary rod)  Each of the surfaces on the trigger and sear has a precise function!

 

8th August – One of the nicest parts of running this website (when I have time!) are the contacts I make with other collectors and antique gun owners around the world.  Many contacts are requests for information or owners wanting restoration work or advice, but a number are from collectors adding information on guns I have featured,  often from people who have specialised in that particular class of antique and know much more about them than I do, which is always welcome.  I had a couple of those recently, one relating to my Satorius Carbine from a US collector who is making an inventory of all the Satorius patent guns he can find.  He has amassed quite a list – most are sporting guns not putative military weapons like mine.  The odd thing is that the serial numbers of the military types are spread over the complete distribution of numbers, implying that they were not produced as a batch for a single customer as I had assumed.  I’ll add the additional information to the Satorius post in due course when I have his consent.  Another email concerned the pair of percussion pistols I am currently working on.  He points out that the makers are W & S Rooke, not H & S as I misread it.  Blackmore says they were active in Birmingham from 1820 to 1837 and marked their guns London, but my old book by Merwyn Casey gives ” W & S Rooke [1770 to 1820] Under Royal Government contract made flintlock holster pistols with swivel ramrods, also cased flintlock coach pistols. Shop in London”  Obviously the little percussion pistols were made well after 1820 so I incline to believe Blackmore, but Casey is very specific, and Google images has a pair of fine flintlock duelling pistols (probably early 1800s) and a blunderbuss (attributed to the late 1770s) – looks like both could be more or less right although its doubtful if the same people ran the business for 67 years. De Witt Bailley and Nye don’t mention him among Birmingham gunmakers but Nigel Brown says “est 1810 Gun & Rifle makers Whitall St B’ham 1820 -21, Bath St 1822 – 1836, Samuel only 1837 – 392”  You pays your money and you takes your choice as the saying goes…….  My correspondent points out that the flipping bit that surrounds the nipple is meant to be down when the pistol is fired to stop shards of cap escaping, and it therefore doesn’t allow the pistol to be carried capped with the hammer resting on the ‘flipper.  He thinks that ‘cap guard’ is a better name for the hinged part, rather than the common ‘top hat’ and I agree – it is a much better description.  Anyway if he consents I’ll put all his information on the blog.   It is surprising that there are not more common ways of making a pistol safe to carry with a cap in place given the fiddle involved in capping it – if the half cock position is close enough to the nipple to stop the cap falling off it would be too close to allow the cap to be put on, and anyway it would still be unsafe as half cock can fail if the hammer is hit.  The only safe system I have come across is that on the Hanovarian conversions of the New Land Pistols taken back after the Napoleonic wars when the Austrian troops returned.  They use a bolt through the breech that intercepts the hammer just above the nipple – a very substantial stop (see the Post on this pistol on this website.  I did a bit more work on the little pistols – I’ve started to freshen up the wood and get rid of the remnants of brass polish that are all over the place, and am planning to make new escutcheons in silver – I’ll probably cast them, either in lost wax, which is a long and tedious job as it atakes all day to make the investment, or maybe in cuttlefish bone and clean them up afterwards – it will probably be a lot quicker, I just need a brass pattern !   I’ve started to make a new trigger for the second pistol – quite tricky!  I’ve got a chunk of steel in the milling machine so I can make a blank…

7 August – back at last!  Its been a busy month and I am sorry that the blog got left at the bottom of the queue!   The Pop-up Workshop went very well and the kids enjoyed it and we made a great boat – we built the boat – making most of the parts in the tent with my small CNC machine, and used the radio control systems I had programmed up to control it, Dave had programmed up a voice syntesizer so that the childern could write messages for broadcasting from the boat, and it happily sailed around my swimming pool making a string of announcements and siren noises.  Great fun and fortunately it worked first (and only) time they had to try it.  I (mis) spent a week afterwards trying to get the Microbits to work with a GPS module, but couldn’t get it to work well as there is not enough memory .  It was then time for our annual sailing holiday in Scotland, so off we all went to Oban to take over Pollyanna,  a Dufor 425, for 10 days or so.  The weather had been quite settled and we had hopes of making it to St Kilda as the trip 40 miles out into the Atlantic needs settled weather, but no sooner had we got out of the marina than things changed and it wasn’t clear what the weather was going to do.  In fact we had mostly very light winds and quite a bit of sun , which meant that we didn’t get much exciting sailing, but had several lazy, sunny sail/drift days.  We didn’t get as far North as usual, but went over to Eriskay and up South and North Uist as far as Loch Maddy, then across to the West coast of Skye and back via the Small Isles and the West coast of Mull.  All in all a good time was had!  Now I’m back and determined to get catch up on the gun restoration!  I had an email for John O’Sullivan (author of the Wogdon book)  saying nice things about my reconstructed Wogdon, and asking for some hi res photos, which I will send.   Anyway the first job on the list is to restore the pair of brass pistols (see diary for 2nd June).  I had got as far as to remove the butt of one and discover that the pivot screw for the flipping nipple guard was broken somewhere along its length and wouldn’t come out.  So after fiddling for half an hour to be certain I couldn’t get it out, I set the pistol in the machine vice of my milling machine using hardboard packing and gripping it tightly and very carefully lined up a small centre drill – I’d filed what was left of the screwhead flat so I could drill it more easily.  Using the mill is much better than using a drill press as the traverses let you line it up exactly. Just don’t try starting with a normal drill or it will surely wander – use a small  centre drill to start. Anyway I then drilled a 2mm hole through the shaft about 3/4 of the way through and then opened it up to 2.4 mm which allowed me to break the flipper out.  I decided that I wasn’t going to be able to put a drill right through as I didn’t think I could line it up well enough, so I have left a bit of the old screw in the far end, and I’ll screw a shorter screw into the head end = a bit of a fudge, but it should be OK.  The flipping nipple guard on that pistol had lost  the mock ‘steel’ bit that acts as a lever for opening the flip, so next job was to weld a new  bit to be filed into the right shape.  That went reasonably well, except that the battery on my welding mask was dead.  I changed it for a new one but it seemed far too dark and the mask has no adjustment –  I shaped the bit but I can’t finish that part of the job as  I need  some smaller taps and dies, so I ordered some UNF 2 and UNF 3 taps and dies from Tracy Tools – I guess I had not made such small screws before – I don’t even have metric taps and dies that small although I think somewhere I have a 10 B.A.  tap…..  I’ve stripped and cleaned that pistol and checked that things should work when it all goes together – I still have the stock to sort out.  The other pistol of the pair has a broken folding trigger with most of it missing so I’m going to have to make a new one.  That will be very fiddly as there is quite a lot of critical shaping – the top of the trigger has a slot into which pivots the sear, and a pin sticking out of the side that the trigger retaing spring bears on.  It also has an edge that presses on the sear to lift it from the cock to fire the pistol……………….. Not particularly easy to fabricate!    Here are some photos of last month;-

 

Hulls made from blue foam painted with Farrow and Ball emulsion in a tasteful shade, cabin cut from 1/16 ply on the cnc machine.

Here is my ‘patent’ motor mount for easy alignment – just pushed onto the 8mm diameter prop shaft tube, with a tension spring for a flexible coupling.

On a mooring in Loch Scressort, Rum.  Mostly we anchored – this was not a particularly comfortable place to be – a bit rolly at times

despite the fact that there was almost no wind – I should have anchored nearer the shore out of the fetch.

Bits ready to clean etc. The long rod in the centre is the drilled out pivot.

4th July – another month gone by and the weather pretty unsummery – our plastic bag swimming pool is not getting used as its pretty cold in there!  I have been working flat out getting my school project ready – its now called ‘The Fantastic Pop-up Workshop’ and today Marin and Claire came down and kindly brought me their 3m x 4m magic tent that they use for the MLAGB shoots at country fairs etc.  Looks fantastic and just right – its the first time they have put the sides on, its usually just a shelter.  I was going to have two tents but when I saw how big that was I decided we didn’t need the second on,  My fellow engineer Dave and I have been working away at getting the project sorted – I think I have now written all the G-Code for cutting out the hull interiors and the decks, hatches and cabin sides and windows, and built and programmed the control systems for motors and rudder.  I made a neat motor mount that clamps on the propeller tube and keeps it all lined up, and my own take on a flexible coupling using a section of compression spring filled with set silicone compound – hope it works, its very flexible!  Dave has written the draft code for the audio link – a second controller will send phrases to a speaker on the boat, and operate a blue flashing light and siren.  In all a fairly major task given my state of knowledge when I began. Anyway tomorrow is the start of the Pop Up Workshop, and the back of my Landcruiser is filled with boxes of materials and tools, my CNC milling machine, computers etc.  so we will see how the kids enjoy it.  I was talking to Martin about upcoming shoots – I really enjoy the Helice shoot in Rugby and Tom is keen to come.  My only problem is that I sort of decided only to shoot flintlock from now onwards (apart from the odd fun breech loader shoot – i.e. at clays with a bolt action .410 with 2 1/2 inch cartridges.  So I’m undecided whether to do the Helice with a flintlock or give up on my intentions and revert to percussion – very few people have done the helice with a flintlock – it requires quick shooting, but I’m usually not that good that it will make much difference!  Besides my favourite percussion gun (the H Nock) is now converted to flint. Thinking back over my comments on shooting clays and live quarry in the last post, I realised that you can break clays at much greater range than you can kill live quarry because 1 pellet can chip a clay and count as a kill, whereas one pellet is unlikely to drop a pheasant, so you need  to hit with, probably 4 or more pellits to stand a chance of a live quarry drop. Also the pellet energy (mass x velocity) and momentum (mass x velocity squared) are much less with a blackpowder gun that a with modern cartridges and you need more energy to penetrate the body of a pheasant than to break a normal clay.

24th June – A long time without posting here – I apologise!  I have been getting ready for a week long project at ‘my’ primary school where I have volunteered to run a project for a group of year 6 ( age 10) children who are not going on a course at the British Racing School involving ponies and riding, so have to be given an equivalent value activity at school! There are only 4 children involved so it can be quite intensive, and my STEM club partner Dave will be helping so we can be ambitious. My plan is to build a working model boat with radio control – the boat will largely be constructed on site by the children using parts that they will make on my small CNC milling machine out of XPS foam or 1.6mm ply (I have written the cutting programs in advance).  The radio control will be using BBC microbit computers that are programmed in Python to control the boat from a hand held microbit transmitter.  The children will help wire it all together and be involved in loading the program and putting together the final stages of the software from modules I have written, plus they will program a second radio system to operate lights and sound on the boat, and possibly get feedback from the boat.   So I’ve been writing the programs for cutting out the hulls and deck and cabin etc in ‘G’ Code, as well as learning to program in Python and writing all the control modules.  Since its about 15 years since I last wrote any computer code ( in ‘C’) it has been a steep learning curve!  Anyway I’ve made good progress, and I’ve arranged to borrow a couple of big tents to house it all in from Martin Crix, plus some tables so it is coming together – so I haven’t been wasting my time  – at least in my view!   I did go shooting with Bev and Pete today at CGC – I wanted to prove the Nock flint conversion, and in particular the re-welded frizzen that failed on my initial tests.  The three of us had a very enjoyable morning, and I managed to fire off 50 shots with only 4 or so misfires due to the flint being so worn it was not sparking at all and none that were ‘a flash in the pan’.  You can usually get away a couple of times re-working the edge of the flint in situ by tapping with a 1/2 inch brass rod, but eventually the edge of the flint gets too steep an angle on it and cannot be pursuaded to slice slivers of white hot metal from the frizzen.  I did  hit a few clays including a couple that evaded Bev and Pete on their first attempts,  Bev brought a range finder with him and we checked the ranges of some of the fixed points around the place to get an idea of the ranges to the clays. Our conclusion was that many (most?) of them were in excess of 40 yards, some we thought up to 60 or so yards.   Given that we were all shooting flintlock guns of over 200 years old it is amazing that the others managed to break most of the clays! I have said before that I think the shooting grounds have upped the difficulty of clays since I started some 8 to 10 years ago – I’m sure there were lots of clays that more or less landed in your lap! I’m not sure why that would be, maybe our shooting grounds are hosting more and better competitions and so need to compete at a higher level?   We agreed, I think, that we would not attempt to shoot game at some of the ranges that the clays were persented at – it being generally held to be unsporting to shoot at live quarry at much more than 40 yards with a cylinder bored barrel. Today certainly made me much more confident shooting my flintlock – although its easy with a couple of experts in attendance!  Oh, and my ebay selling of bits and pieces from the loft is going well – old (vintage!) computers go well but I have also got rid of a few bits and pieces left over from my electronics business – so far I’ve made enough to pay for a basic percussion gun, not that I need another! And anyway I’m spending the money, or some of it, on the school project…….. As an afterthought its sad to report that visits to this blog both direct and via search engines almost halve if I don’t post for this long – serves me right!

4th June More views on this blog than for a while – up from about 150 to 200 per day – must be because I’ve started a restoration project!  I did some more on the Rooke pistol I am working on – its quite a challenge!  The cock pivot that I mentioned had broken leaves behind half its length so you can’t remove the cock, and the bit left in is of course threaded into the brass – can’t be knocked out with a pin punch, don’t know what I was thinking yesterday!  I shifted my attention to the flipping top hat – the screw for the pivot turned about 30 degrees easily but is also broken somewhere along its length and the head section will not come out despite it turning its 30 degrees freely back and forth- not sure why at the moment.  So not a very productive day!  I can’t find my can of acetone – I’m now a firm believer in parallel universes – there must be one in which all the items from my workshop that I can’t find since using it as a temporary kitchen have migrated – some are key things like my very fine wire brush that can’t be bought anywhere on the internet in the UK!  I had to use model aircraft engine fuel as a penetrating oil but its not really up to much… I shall need to have a strategy for sorting out the broken / stuck screws – the key issue is not to damage the brass body of the pistol, the screws themselves are (fairly!) easily replaced – even if they come out, the heads are often messed up.  If the flip top hat didn’t need welding I’d not bother to take it apart, but clean it in situ, but I will need to remove it from the pistol and take off the spring before it can be welded  so as not to damage things. I’m reluctant to use heat here because I don’t want to have to retemper the spring  I’ll post some pics tomorrow……   Harking back a year to my Covid, I had a CT scan for other issues, but the radiologist reported that I had  lung damage consistent with Covid-19 – my consultant said maybe I was lucky to have survived  – I’m pretty glad I managed to sort out oxygen and so avoid hospital in the very early days of the pandemic – I think there is a story to be told there, but I guess it has been/will be buried.

3rd June – I couldn’t resist starting on one of the Rooke pistols below.  The finish on much of the steel is the original bluing, worn in places and with patches of rust, but still quite distinct from the finish you get from electrolytic derusting, which basically removes all oxides, including those responsible for the bluing.  So that means basically the rust has to be removed by hand in a way that only affects the rust patches.  My technique is to scrape the rust patches gently with the back edge of fine modelling knife held at shallow angle to the surface.  To make sure that I don’t put any scratches on the surrounding blued finish I hone the back edge of the blade on a static ceramic wheel with 0.5 micron diamond paste, and gently round off the corners slightly to reduce the risk of scratching. It is a surprisingly effective if laborious technique, it works because the bluing is basically harder than the rust.  It is a good idea to apply WD 40 or AC 90 as a lubricant.   I am working on one pistol first, I’ll do the second later, first step was to remove the wooden butt – as usual it is held by two screws, one at the top through the back strap, and one below through the tail of the bottom tang.  First step is to clean out the slots with the modelling knife – which gave me a warning – the slots are very deep and narrow, and go down as far as the shank of the screw.  The top screw came out easily enough with an accurately fitting screwdriver (it is tapped into a steel plate in the butt) but the bottom screw wouldn’t shift ( its a wood screw) even with a bit of low viscosity fluid with a drop of oil ( I had cellulose thinners to hand).  Before I could put any real force on it, the two sides of the head had started to open out, and one broke off leaving half a head.  Its not possible to get hold of the remaining half, so I ground it down a bit with the Dremel (equivalent) with a dental burr until I could get the remains of the head through the hole.  It came out but I’ll have to unscrew the bit of screw left in the butt before I can refix it.  Having got the wood out of the way I gave the metalwork a good spray with WD40 and left it for a few hours – much to my amazement the pistol cocked and fired without any more work – the only fault is that the hidden trigger doesn’t come out unaided when the gun is cocked – it’s a bit stiff and needs a hand.  I tried to remove the cock pivot but although half of it came out easily, half of it is stuck in the brass body on the right side of the pistol – it will probably come out with a light tap from a pin punch. I’ll finish stripping the lock and cleaning up the parts with my modelling knife, or possibly in the electrolytic tank if they are bad,  On this pistol the frizzen like protrusion on the ‘flip top hat’ that gives you something to use to open it with is broken, so I’ll have to make a replacement part and weld it on, or have a more expert welder do it, which would be a better idea as it is very fiddly.  The engraving is pretty worn so I have the usual dilemma – should I recut it or leave it?  My instinct is always to do the minimum in the way of intervention, so for the moment I’ll leave it.  The wood will take a fair bit of work to patch the missing corners, and I’ll probably freshen up the chequering a bit (not too much) as I’ll have to blend in the repairs anyway.  All in all my impression is that the pistols are really in good shape under a bit of rust and a build-up of brass polish, and won’t take too long to get back into good order

2nd June – Oh dear, quite a gap in the diary!  I have been trying to get my head round programming the BBC microbit in Python and building servo and motor drive circuits, as well as taking advantage of the hot weather to attack the fallen walnut tree with a 20 inch chain saw.   Hopefully that will change over the next few weeks as I had a visit from a friend and fellow collector.  I’d fixed a little double barreled pistol for him and he had found and bought a little pair of pistols that need A LOT of work – he bought them to pass on to me, so I could put the work on this blog, and kindly sold them to me for what he paid for them.  They were a decent and pretty pair of brass percussion muff or small ‘turn off’ pocket pistols signed H & S Rooke and engraved ‘London’ on the other side.  H & S Rooke were Birmingham gunmakers in business from 1810 to 1836 who were known to mark their pistols ‘London’ to increase their appeal (and value).  They have the flipping ‘top hat’ covers that hinge down to allow the pistols to be carried safely with caps in place and be ready for firing by cocking them and flipping the cover.  It  is a similar mechanism to the frizzens of little flintlocks and I suppose might lead one to believe they were conversions of flintlock pistols – I don’t believe these are, but as everything is seized solid with rust and gunk I can’t be certain.  Obviously they have been seriously neglected rather than heavily used, as where the rust hasn’t got at the barrels you can see a nicely blued surface.  The escutcheons on the butts have been picked out, so presumably they were gold.  It will be interesting to see how to go about the restoration – at the moment I haven’t really formed any plans – were they all steel I would remove the wood and chuck the whole lot in the electrolytic derusting tank so I could strip it down but I’m not sure how the brass would react to the process – maybe have to experiment first. They are also pretty bunged up with the residue of brass polish, including the chequering and there is some damage to the wood too….Obviously first job is the separate the wood from the metal!  My friend also bought an unusual pocket pistol, a bit larger – it looks like a typical bog standard flintlock pocket pistol with a turn-off barrel, until you notice the tap on the side and look in the pan. Its a superimposed load pistol, where you unscrew the barrel and load the breech end twice.  The tap diverts the flame to the charge nearest the muzzle first, then you operate the tap to feed the flame to the rear charge,  The rotating part beneath the pan allows a priming charge to be rotated with the tap and stored while the first charge is fired with the priming in the ‘open’ pan (closed by the frizzen).  These pistols normally used tiny charges, which is just as well because there doesn’t appear to be any interlock to prevent the back charge being fired first. ( for another example of a superimposed load pistol see the post on this blog) .The pistol is pretty much OK, but needs a top jaw and top jaw screw.  If I feel really daring, there is a bit of the silver inlay missing on the butt (I’ll post photos and a better description of this pistol later).   I think I will make a few videos of the restoration of the little brass  pistols on YouTube – I get quite a few views and subscribers – people who wouldn’t find cablesfarm.co.uk, and there are very few videos of work on real muzzle loading antiques – besides, I quite enjoy making them…..

The top pistol is missing the tab on the ‘flipping’ cover that look like a minature frizzen and is needed to flip it.

I think one cock may have a crack – mostly hidden.  Crack and some missing wood on the butt of the upper pistol.

 

one trigger is broken off and missing

 Posted by at 9:18 am
Jan 162022
 

My (younger) brother died recently, and when I visited him a few weeks earlier he had been rambling about how there should be an APP that would encapsulate someone’s life – I think like a lot of old people he felt that when he died – he wasn’t expected to die soon although he had a progressive illness – he would like to leave a detailed account of his life.  Fortunately or unfortunately very few people do!  I’m not sure that anyone would be interested in my autobiography – but I think I would enjoy writing some of it down, so that I could relive the good bits when my mind starts to go – lets assume it hasn’t already gone too far.  I thought this blog was a good place to put it, because its stored off site, and it is accessible, and I conceitedly hope that there might be someone amongst the many thousands of people around the world who visit this site over the years who would be bored enough to find it more interesting than watching endless Youtube videos – well one can hope! Plus it’s  decent editor and I won’t loose it an an obscure folder on my computer.  It also has the possibility that it will be saved for posterity on ‘ The Wayback Machine’  – an online archive that stores copies of all websites at intervals and can be publically accessed.   I had cause to use it to prove that information I’d stored on a website in 1994 pre-dated someone’s later  patent claim.  Anyway, I’ll see how far I get in the coming months/years,  At least to begin with it will be about my technical/professional life, rather than strictly personal details, although I probably need to say that I was born during early WWII.

My first memory of any ‘technology’ was an experiment I did at the age of about  5 or 6 that involved connecting a torch bulb to a 240 V A.C. power socket with a couple of short pieces of rigid wire –  at the time power sockets in the UK were the unshuttered round pin sort – my mother never discovered why the fuses blew, and I never found the bulb – but I was completely unharmed – strange.   My next relevant technical memory was building a model aircraft at the age of 10 – a KeilKraft balsa  kit of a Fairy Gannet powered by a rubber band, perhaps the most unsuitable plane in the whole kit range for a beginner. I managed to build it but the tissue covering was all soggy with too much tissue paste when I tried to launch it, and it just fell to the ground in a heap of bits.  I can remember that we had a Hobbies fretsaw and fretsaw table that used to be clamped to the edge of the rather nice Queen Anne drop leaf table in the evenings for hobbies – at Christmas we used to produce plywood profiles of Scottie dogs that were painted in poster paints and had a calendar stuck on them as presents.  I am, with hindsight, sure that my mother’s encouragement to make things and total acceptance of all the mess and fuss were the main source of my lifelong urge to design and create – good old mum, Rest in peace.

At secondary school (more about that later!) I spent most of my spare time making and flying model aircraft – mostly control line models and 1/72nd scratch built  scale models, with one or two sidelines;- I used to make bits like model aircraft fuel tanks and sell them to my friends, I had a session of using a home made lathe to turn out ashtrays (haven’t seen one for ages) in commercial quantities, making explosives and firing cannon and killing all the grass on the lawn (again my poor longsuffering mother had no idea why a stripe of grass had died).  I had long periods off school with illness, during which time I never had any schoolwork, but my model making skills flourished.  I brewed a large quantity of rhubarb wine, but as I didn’t really drink and it was anyway pretty revolting I decided that it would be good to distill it, so I built a still out of Nescafe tins and a bit of copper pipe – it worked rather well and I ended up with a large bottle of rhubarb gin.  I couldn’t think what to do with it, until it occured to me that my mother had a bottle of Gordon’s gin in the sideboard that she occasionally sampled after we had gone to bed, and I found that topping it up from time to time went un-noticed.  In the end she must have been drinking almost neat rhubarb gin with just the scent of juniper (no, she didn’t go blind, the methyl alcohol scare is more or less a myth to deter people from running stills).  I did a bit of rather hairy electrics/electronics – I modified an old wind-up alarm clock to turn on my big valve radio beside the bed by sticking an open switch in the way of the alarm winder – the only downside was that when I reached up to silence the alarm I would get a 240V shock – but a quick way to really wake up.  As I got to be a  teenager I became aware of pop music and thought I should have a record player so that I could play records.  I had bought a few copies of Practical Wireless and one had a design for a record player that I built – I made a case for it out of 1/2 inch chipboard and covered it in Rexine – very smart – so I bought a record to supplement the household copy of Teddy Bear’s Picnic and Colonel Bogy – I got a Lonnie Donegan record (By the Light of the Silvery Moon)!  Well, I played it a couple of times but it didn’t do much for me, so I sold the record player and kept the now useless record.  I can remember watching the young chap who bought it for £15(?)  struggling down the road with it – it weighted a ton. I came across a design for a tape recorder that used a record deck as a tape transport, so I got a cheap deck and made a recording/playback head out of a bit of copper water pipe, a couple of transformer stampings and a length of fine wire and recorded The Archers from a socket on the back of the family radio – by sticking my ear right up against the speaker I was just able to replay it through the hum!  Ok, so that worked, move on….. A friend and I acquired a Red Panther 350 motor cycle – it had a broken selector fork in the gearbox that my friend got welded, but the magneto didn’t work so we set out to push it to a garage about 3 miles away – on the way we were coasting down a hill when a policeman stopped us for not having a license and being too young to ride a motorbike – our offer to accept the telling off if he could just start it to prove it was a motor bike got us nowhere.  We never collected the bike, so maybe its still in the garage.

My father, who I visited with my brother every holiday, was a firearms collector and used to shoot all his guns,  On a couple of occasions we had a major session casting bullets and took all the guns down to the Army  range at Tidworth where his friend was the Armourer – I think I fired all of them – from flintlock duelling pistols to Lugers and Mausers and Sten guns.  I can remember when Myxomatosis was infecting the many rabbits on the downs nearby I used to wander around with father with a .22 self loading pistol each, dispatching blind and dying rabbits.  Completely separately from him, pistols were quite easy to come by, and at one time I had a couple of .32 self loading pistols – a Savage and an FN.  I once travelled by train with them in a box on my lap, with a police officer sitting opposite, which made me a little nervous – I disposed of the pistols many years ago to my father who had them destroyed. Many summer days were spent wandering round the Wiltshire downs with a ferret snuggly in my anorak and a few rabbit nets and half a dozen snares – that’s how a childhood should be spent!

My Grammar School more or less kicked me out before the 6th form and I went to live with my father in Essex and went to the North East Essex technical College and School of Art – a fantastic establishment where I used to have loads of free time and virtually no rules – I spent a lot of the summers fruit and vegetable picking on nearby farms and loosing my earnings at poker –  I made up for it at parties when I took a bottle of gin and drank water, and from about 1 a.m. I could usually clean up – without cheating. Every Wednesday was Hitchhiking  Day when I and a female friend would meet in the morning at college with a shilling and a bar of chocolate and think of a place name, then hitchhike there and back in the day – I can remember Cantebury and Saxmundham as being good sounding names. I can remember we hitched to Alnick and back in 24 hours once – I used to travel that way often, it was a completely acceptable means for young people (mostly boys) to get around.  Between college and University I hitched all round France and Spain for 6 weeks – I think it cost me less than £50 all in.  Father used to keep and breed Ferrets and always had a menagerie of other animals – foxes, a mongoose, owls etc. all of which needed feeding, and I used to go out in the evenings when I got back from college and shoot pigeons out of the trees in a nearby wood with a Westley Richards Muzzle loading percussion gun ( the logic behind this was that at the time that was cheaper than using the 12 bore breech loader – sadly no longer true by quite a margin!)

Three years living with my father was quite enough for anyone, so going to University was a logical step – my primary selection tools for which to apply to were a map and a ruler – just get as far from him as possible!  I picked Manchester College of Science and Technology and did their  somewhat unusual physics degree.  As well as the usual physics subjects, with a heavy emphasis on Xray crystalography, we did a quick course in engineering drawing and machine shop practice and our practicals all involved thinking of a problem and making an apparatus to study it. As I was a bit older than the average student and much more practical, I ended up designing a lot of the other students apparatus.  I can remember one student’s experiment, – a wind tunnel to study airflow – we needed something to inject into the air to visualise the flow, and came up with a machine that smoked 4 cigarettes at a time to generate the necessary smoke  in the airstream.  The cigarettes lasted about a minute, so in the course of a term we got through rather a lot at the department’s expense, and of course quite a few didn’t make it to the machine.   I was there as transistors began to take over from valves for many purposes – they were all germanium transistors with rather poor radio frequency performance, although it ws just becoming possible to buy transistors that would work for FM radio – they were still very expensive so I used an ex radar acorn valve when I built a FM radio – it picked up the taxi radios too.  We had a visit to the GEC transistor factory at Stockport(?) and were given a handful of transistors to play with.  I bought a couple of complementary output transistors and built an audio amplifier of 3 Watts power – it had a massive chassis cum heat sink made of copper that must have weighted a kilogram.  I guess we got up to all the things students did in those days, but I still made things – I painstakingly ground a 4 inch concave telescope mirror, but couldn’t get the figure right – I still have it somewhere!   During term time one year the people in my hovel drove a minicab in shifts – it was an old Mini with the entire boot filled with a big valve radio for getting our jobs – the only problem was that the battery was not man enough for the radio, and if you stalled there was no power to restart, which made driving great fun and meant we had to refuel with the engine running and change drivers without stopping the engine.  None of us had a clue about the whereabouts of anywhere, but we had a map and the controller knew every street and  seemingly every door and bell in Manchester if we got too stuck, although there was a price to pay in battery power and you had to keep your foot on the gas while on the radio  or the engine died,   In the vacs I always worked as my father didn’t pay his share of my fees – the summers were the best – I started out as a bus conductor in Colchester, but as soon as I was 21 I worked a couple of summers as a bus driver in Clacton.  The company used to train a group of students in about 10 days, we would then take our Public Servise Vehicle exams in a double decker bus and off we went.  In training we had 6 of us and an instructor and spent all day driving the bus around Clacton learning all sorts of useful tricks like driving without using the clutch – the buses had crash gearboxes, but the engines were very slow running and had massive torque so you could start off by just touching the gears together and listenng to the click click and then slipping them in and the bus would move smoothly off. One of my party tricks was to turn a corner while making a hand signal and changing gear by wrappping my foot round the gear lever and  doing a clutchless gear change.  My first time on a service run found me in the only up to date bus in the fleet – I climbed up into the totally unfamiliar cab and looked for the key or starter switch – after an age of abortive searching I had to climb down and find a regular driver to ask – ‘oh, you just lift the accelerator pedal to start it,’ he said…..  The bus was a bit longer than all the others and had air brakes, which I wasn’t used to, so at the first stop the bus came to a very sudden stop and the passenges who were standing up all fell in a heap. I sat there waiting for them to sort themselves out and get off, but no one got off – a banging on the cab window gave me a clue – the bus had a pnumatic door, unlike all the other rear platform busses and I was in control of it.  When I got back to the depot I mentioned my trials and tribulations to a regular driver who informed me that all the regulars had had a half day induction course on the new bus as it was so different….  I could fill several pages with adventures as a but driver, I didn’t have any accidents – briefly held the speed record for a double decker bus on the Clacton Bypass and almost, but not quite, took the top deck off on a low bridge at Manningtree . Some of my fellow students were not so lucky – one managed to uproot a tree outside the Girl’s Grammar School, drove over a bank into a corn field, reversed out and carried on – back in the garage someone noticed water leaking from the radiator, and the front wheels were no longer pointing in the same direction . He wasn’t fired until, third time lucky, he put a single decker into a ditch and the passengers had to get out ot the emergency exit. One thing that I noticed – several of the regular conductors would sit in the canteen and empty their takings onto the table and divide them in two, pocketing one half – they managed this by damaging their ticket machines so they couldn’t issue tickets – the Inspectors were mostly having to drive so there were no checks!  That sort of petty crime was quite common in those days.

As the end of our 3 years at University approached we would all do the ‘milk round’ of suitable employers, and employers would come and make a pitch to the science and technology students.  Its difficult to believe how different things were then, with a massive shortage of technical and scientific graduates for the booming  industrial sector.  We would typically go for half a dozen interviews with major employers and would expect to get several offers – if you only got one or two you knew you were doing something wrong!  If you had a reasonable reference you could expect to get one or two rejections and be left with 4 or 5 choices. I remember going for interview at STC in Harlow and having to do a psycometric test with 30 0r 40 questions which I thought was a bit of an imposition! anyway I answered the first 5  rather crossly, and the sixth question appeared to me to be a rehash of the first question in a different form, similarly the seventh question seemed like a rehash of Q2, a quick check showed that Q11 was a rehash of Q1 & 6. I guessed that the same thing happened throughout so I just copied my first 5 selections repeatedly until I got to the end.  I then had an interview with the industrial psycologist, who started to tell me my character and failings – when I questioned some of his statements he looked at my results and said they must be right because I had an incredible score for the consistency check – in fact he had never seen one so high. I tossed up in my mind whether to confess, but decided against it! Anyway I got a job offer from them, which I didn’t take up.  I had an interview at Bracknell for a job working on the Blue Streak missile – then a hot development topic – I quite liked the idea, particularly as I had a family by then and it came with the offer of a council house in the new town.  I had an interview in Cambridge with Unicam Instruments – I took an instant dislike to the personnel manager who was a terrible snob – I had to turn my one experience of playing rugby into a love of the game to please him, and he told me that it just wasn’t done to live on the East side of the river Cam (which was where all the affordable houses were). They offered me a job at £800 p.a. –  £50 more than the Blue Streak job but it wasn’t enough to pursuade me so I wrote a nice letter saying that much as the job attracted me (which apart from him it did), there was no way I could afford to live on the West side of town on the salary they were offering.  I was bit taken aback when he rang me a couple of days later and offered a 35% increase – that was more than I could resist, so off to Cambridge I went.  Actually I had originally hoped to do a Physics PhD, and had a place at the new University of Essex at Colchester, but couldn’t make the sums add up.

So pack up the family in a hired van and off to a flat in Cambridge (E of the river!).  Unicam Instruments was the major British manufacturer of spectreophotometers used in chemical analysis – the other player was Perkin Elmer in the US.  My first task – a sort of trial I guess, was to modify their largest instrument so that it was calibrated in wavelength rather than the less useful wavenumber (the reciprocal of wavelength).  The spectrophotometers worked by passing light of a particular wavelength through a liquid sample in solution – they generated the monochrome light using a light source, a prism and a slit, and scanned the wavelength by rotating the prism using an arm following a cam – basically pretty simple.  My main task  involved calculating the shape of a new cam to rotate the prism using fairly simple trigonometry – the downside was that I had to calculate a new radius to a precison of 1/10th of a thou for each 1/10th of a degree of rotation of the cam.  Now it would take a few minutes of a P.C.  – then it took me about a month cranking away on a mechanical calculator using values from 6 figure trigonometric tables… and the another two weeks to verify the results.  Having passed my trial I was given a proper project with a technician and my own bay in the lab to design the next generation of U.V. spectrometer, the SP 1800.  We had a very good model shop that made the bits I designed, and as the design got to resemble an instrument, I had a draughtsman assigned to my project and we made good progress, producing a design that was easier to make and looked a lot more modern that anything else in the range – I’m still quite pleased with what I achieved fresh out of college!  One of the complications of these spectrophotometers was that the detectors measured the amount of light transmitted, but the user really wanted to know the absorbance of the sample, which is the logarithm of the transmission – various fudges were used to do the conversion – potentiometers with weird responses that were expensive and difficult to make and had limited range, or  shaped shutters that slid in and out of the beam.  I thought there must be a better way and invented an simple electronic log converter and built a prototype that worked much better than the fudges and was easier to make – I showed my immediate boss the result which impressed him and he disappeared with it and circuit diagrams.  I never heard any more about it, until after I left the company I discovered that they had patented it – in those days there was no legal requirement to name the inventor on patents.  I was anyway  rather disolutioned with the way in which my ideas would disappear ‘upstairs’ with no feedback, and when my father sent me a cutting form a Cambridge paper with a job advert In the Department of Geodesy and Geophysics I  wrote off for particulars, but decided that I wasn’t qualified as it mentioned a PhD so didn’t bother to apply.  So I was surprised a a month later to be invited to interview, which I nearly didn’t make as I was stopped by the Police in a roadside check , they found my handbrake to be ineffective and initially refused to let me drive on – I did manage to get away, and did make the interview, and got offered the job of Technical Officer.  When I told my Unicam boss he was very keen to raise my salary, but I’d had enough and said I was going… Actually he couldn’t have raised my salary as it was in the middle of Harold Wilson’s pay freeze, as he later admitted, and anyway the University was paying quite a bit more, surprisingly.  An incedent while at Unicam sparked my interst in sailing – my draughtsman and I were discussing details of the instrument when a colleague came by and offered us a fibreglass dinghy for £50 – my draughtsman  and I looked at each other and said we could build one for less – so we did, at least I built the boat and he built the rudder!  It was the most awful little sailing dingy imaginable – called the Goblin. Made of ply, the hull was shaped by placing a sheet of ply on the four legs of an upturned table and using  props down from the roof to bend it into something vaguely resembling a hull. We finished it and got sails and I used to sail it on the river Cam – it was a pig!*  in any wind at all it would tilt slightly and water would pour in over the gunwhale and it would sail serenely on getting lower and lower in the water until it was totally submerged.  Still it taught me a lot, trying to tack up a narrow river in a boat that doesn’t sail properly is good training. Oh, and I didn’t ever speak to the Personal Manager, but he did try to block my car in one day because he thought I was parking in his space – I extricated the car, and the next day returned the favour, only more effectively – I was not to be pushed around!

(* I may be being a tiny bit unfair to Percy Blanford who designed the Goblin – there is a website saying how good it was/is by people who think its great – my problems were probably partly down to my build – the hull was horribly ‘hogged’ (hollowed upward in the middle) although I still think a well built one would fill with water in a breeze unless one was very careful always to sail upright).

On my first day at G+G as it was affectionately known, I arrived at 9 a.m. as one might think was the thing to do, only to find the door locked – when someone arrived a few minutes later I mentioned that it had taken me a long time to get to work in the traffic (even then).  The reply was ‘ well, why don’t you just come later when the traffic is less bad?’ – Welcome to University logic!  My role was to take on the running of the electronics lab at the department, and would have normally included being in charge of the mechanical shop as well, but the chief tecnician Lesley Flavill was a mechanical genius and had been doing the job since the war, so we worked together, until his untimely death a few years after I jointed  when I took over running both workshops.  The normal way we worked was that the research students – studying for a PhD – would have a project for their 3 or more years.  About half of the projects involved some new geophysical measurement or other in the UK, abroad or at sea. These were pioneering days, and very little commercial euipment was available for the sort of work we were doing – so the students would come up with a project, design and build a piece of equipment, go out and do the experiment and spend a year analysing the results and writing their thesis.  Our (the workshop staff and I) role was to facilitate this by providing design help and advice, assistance with building apparatus and support in the field.

As soon as I got started I  the department took delivery of a new radio sonobuoy system – one of the few commercial systems we ever bought.  Sonobuoys were then a vital tool in investigating the deep structure of the sea floor – the buoys would be put out at sea in a line and the ship would steam away and drop explosive charges into the water at intervals up to 40 or 50 miles in total.  The sonobuoys would record the sound waves travelling through the water and through the rock layers underlying the sea, and the times various waves took to arrive could be used to estimate the depths of the layers and the speed of sound in them, which relates to the rock type – it was, and more or less still is in one form or another how we explore the sub-sea geology, and how we find oil and natural gas – the science is called seismology and this particular technique is called Refraction Seismics, because the sound waves are refracted in the rock layers..  Anyway the new Sonobuoys had radios that transmitted the waves they received back to the ship, where they were recorded, like some of our older ones, but hopefully much better.  So I had to get the darn things working, despite having no knowledge of radio transmitters to speak of.  A French oil exploration company were interested in the buoys and offered us the use of their ship for a trial  in the English Channel – so within a few weeks of arriving I went off to sea on a ship, my first work voyage and a radio virgin!  I struggled to get the buoys to work – we just could not get any sensible radio range from them. Whenever I worked on them I would be surrounded by a semi-circle of Frenchmen all asking what was wrong – I hadn’t a clue, but that wasn’t something I wanted to confess.  When I wasn’t working things were better – lunch took about 2 hours minimum and involved wine (I didn’t touch a drop as alcohol and any kind of meaningful activity don’t mix for me) and I had a cabin with a real  bath – the first and only time I’ve seen one on a ship – it was quite an experience lying in a bath while the ship rolled and pitched – decidedly sea-sick making.  We had another instrument for a student to to test as well as the sonobuoys, a seismic recorder that dropped to the seabed and released after a hopefully predicatable interval when a magnesium link fizzed away.  It released, as might be  expected, at an unpredicted time and we couldn’t find it.  The ship was eventually contacted by a French fishing boat that had found it floating on the surface.  Score;-  work 0/10  food 9/10.  We later found that the makers of the buoys had most carefully insulated the electronics from the seawater, so there was no sea connection for an earth plane  for the radio antenna – a bit of a cock-up on their part, but had I known a bit more about radio transmitters I might have spotted it in time for the trial. I still don’t really understand radio transmitters!

In the early days at G+G I was closely involved in a number of different projects, mostly to do with seismics, but also Earth Strain – expansions and contractions of the earth’s crust due to tectonic movement, ultimately driven by the motion of the Earth’s plates.  At that time it was thought that measuring  Earth strain in earthquake prone areas might let you detect the build-up of tension in the crust that could be a predictor of a future earthquake, or could indicate areas along a fault between two plates where ‘aseismic slip occured – that is, the fault slipped smoothly instead of storing up its energy in deformation around it, and then suddenly releasing it when the stress became too much for the rocks. * We had a project to build a laser interferometer for very sensitive measurements of ground movement, which was built in the disused Queensbury railway tunnel – one of the longest tunnels in the UK – I worked there occasionally, and it was a spooky place.  Old railway tunnels are completely dark away from the entrances because the soot from the steam engines lines everything and is absolutely dead black and a very porous surface. The investigator decided that it would be a good idea to lighten the 20m. section we used as a base in the middle of the tunnel by firing a detonator in a 5 gallon can of white paint – the paint disappeared with absolutely no change in the overall blackness, just a small patch of  grey on the ground.  The laser was highly sensitive and showed the daily expansion and contraction of the Earth caused by the pull of the moon and sun – just like the tides move the seas – so the Earth itself moves, but obviously much less – about 1 part in 1000000000 or so.  We also developed a simple instrument with much less sensitivity using a stretched wire, but it would still detect the buildup or release of tectonic stress.  We had a project to place these in Eastern Iran after the 1968(?) Das’t a Bayaz earthquake.  In ancient times the Iranians, and other middle eastern societies built complex irrigation system by piping water from the areas adjacent to mountains out into the surrounding desert to irrigate crops and for domestic water through a system of underground tunnels called Qanats which were dug and maintained by specialists among the villagers. These underground tunnels ran for tens of kilometers and sometimes when a earthquake occured the fault would cut the Qanat and the villagers would dig a bypass – so there were dead sections of tunnel left near active faults – ideal places to look for ground movement, and for a number of years we ran an array of wire strainmeters in these redundant tunnels, with the help of the local miners.  The instruments were meant to run for a year without attention and get an annual visit – I took part in a number of expeditions to install, check and service the instruments. On one such visit the local miner took us to a disused section of Qanat about 10 meters deep.  As usual we asked him to descent and check for bad air etc. he returned to the surface and said there was a red and green snake at the bottem of the shaft leading down to the tunnel.  Our student interpreter said that there were no red and green snakes in Iran, and the miner must be making it up to get more money. After a bit of a discussion I volunteered to go and have a look, so I climbed down the ladder with a very dim carbide miner’s lamp on my head – the ladder didn’t reach the bottom of the shaft by about 4 feet, so I got as far down as I could and had a good look round – nothing, so I thought I’d better drop off the end of the ladder to have a better look around  – I was just shouting up that I couldn’t see anything when I spotted a coiled snake about 2ft from my face – my shout tailed off about 2 octaves higher and I made a leap for the ladder and exited fairly briskly. There followed a long discussion – we had never encounterd snakes in the tunnels before and we couldn’t think how to get rid of this one from an otherwise useful site.  In the end we decided that for our future wellbeing we should find out what sort of snake it was likely to be, and what we should do if we encountered one, so we set off for the nearest Hospital, which involved back tracking across the tracks and river beds to the nearest road – about 3 hours, and a road journey of an hour.  At the hospital we found a French doctor and in schoolboy French explained our quest.  I was able to sketch the pattern of the snake on the back of a cigarette packet – ‘Ah’  he said ‘that is a horned viper – if you are bitten by that snake you have 20 minutes to inject 80 ml of antivenum serum or you are dead!’  He gave us a couple of vials of serum and said ‘keep them in a fridge’ – some hope!  Anyway we found another section of unused Qanat without snake.  I went back a couple of years later on my own with just a driver who didn’t speak any English, and I only had a few words of  Farsi, mostly to do with food, so going alone down the Qanats was probably foolish, but I’m not easily put off.  Anyway if you were bitten down in a Qanat it would be very difficult for someone, even a colleague, to get down and inject you, even if the serum was still good after being in the Iranian heat for a week or two. That whole experiment ended with the Iranian revolution and was abandoned – there are probably rotting strainmeters down  Qanats to this day.

* It turned out that single measurements often only sample a small and unrepresentative motion, and that predicting earthquakes is more difficult than we thought at the time – plate and local motions are now mostly done using GPS.

Following on from the sonobuoy tests, I did several test ‘cruises’ as we called any voyage on a ship.  Several were day trips on an old fishing boat of about 50ft. from Lowestoft, The Meggies.  – like all old fishing boats it smelt of fish and diesel and I used to get seasick at the sight of it.  We also did a coupleof test cruised on  Sarcia – the Plymouth Marine Labs old trawler.  All I remember is that it had bags of coal stowed on the aft deck for the galley range for cooking and my cabin.  Sarcia was typical old trawler and rolled like a pig in any kind of seaway – Unfortunately I had a bunk that ran athwartships – that is from side to side of the ship so first my head would crash into one end of the bunk, then my feet into the other, and so on – I ended up sleeping  curled up on floor, freeezing.  It wasn’t too long after joining that NERC, the funding body Natural Environmental Research Council acquired a modern trawler from the Whitefish Authority who, for reasons that will become clear, didn’t want it.  The ship spent the best part of a year in refit to convert to a small research ship, and the officers were on standby on shore for months while it was completed.  Sea trials had to be abandoned because it failed fire safety inspection, so our sheduled trip out into the English channel from Plymouth was the first trip the ship had made under NERC ownership, and the first time the officers had been to sea for months.  The ‘fun’ started as we left millbay docks – it rapidly transpired that the ship’s variable pitch propeller had not been serviced, and the ship could not go from ahead to astern by this usual method – the alternative was to stop the main engine and engage a manual gear.  Doing this while going astern rapidly into Drake’s Island had eveyone in a panic, but we survived, although when the main engine was stopped the power dropped out and all the lights with it.  As we were leaving Plymouth Harbour the captain realised that there was something that they had forgotten to put on board (reputedly the duty free cigarettes) so decided to anchor. With the booty on board it was time to raise the anchor.  The first attempt failed because there wasn’t enough room in the chain locker for all the chain, so it had to be paid out again and a man bribed to go down into the chain locker and manually stow the chain as it came in – a truly horrid job, only he never had to finish it because the anchor snagged on something on the seabed – probably an old mooring chain – and couldn’t be freed, so was  cut and buoyed off and the spare anchor put on what remained of the chain.  Off we set, only for the engine to fail some time later – a couple of hours wallowing around managed to find a bit of old rag left in the fuel pipe!  I don’t know if anyone had bothered to check the weather forcast, but it blew up to force 10 as we neared Ushant.  I mentioned that none of the officers had been to sea for months, so they were all pretty seasick – I had always suffered from seasickness up to that point and was determined that I would drug myself up with Dramamine and not be sick – it did work ( I was never significantly seasick at sea again) but the drug itself makes you feel less that perfect! Anyway I was up and about to watch the  pandemonium. The captain was slumped in a chair on the bridge wanting to die and the bosun was driving the ship – the VHF was constantly giving out distress calls for cargo ships with shifted cargoes etc and it was pretty hairy.  We had brought some chunks of railway line to act as ballast for the seabed experiment we were supposed to be doing, but at the height of the storm they came loose on the aft deck and just crashed from side to side with the rolls – I was a bit concerned at the damage they might cause, but it was far too dangerous to venture on deck – apart from the motion, the rails would have taken one’s leg off. We eventually made it to the entrance to Brest  and called the pilot to come out and bring the ship in as is normal. The pilot cutter came alongside but to loose speed the ship had to stop the engine and put it in astern, which dropped out all the lights, which must have puzzled the pilot!  Anyway we made it to anchor off Brest and all fell into our bunks and slept.   The ship, The John Murray, was about the most uncomfortable sea keeping boat any of the crew had encountered – hence the Whitefish Authority wisely flogging it to a gullible NERC…..

I went to sea regularly during my time at G+G and later when it became the Bullard Laboratories of the Earth Sciences Department after the amalgamation of the three departments of  Geodesy and Geophysics, Geology and Mineralogy and Petrology – it was quite usual for me to spend more than two months at sea a year on various research ships, mostly those belonging to NERC but sometimes on  research ships of other countries on joint cruises.  NERC had a number of vessels over the years, all bigger than John Murray.  All the NERC ships were designated RRS – Royal Research Ship – and had official status as being an arm of the British government.  NERC ships were all run in a similar fashion with a similarly configured crew.  The crew consisted of the regular ship’s company and the scientific party made up of the University team or teams plus one or two technicians from the NERC marine base who maintained and ran the ship’s scientific systems like compressors, or ran the firing of explosive charges for seismics. On the larges research ships, like RRS Discovery, RRS Shackleton and later RRS Charles Darwin the total number of people on board might be from 40 to 50.  Life on board NERC ships was quite formal and well regulated – The Deck Officers – Captain, 1st, 2nd and 3rd mates, and  the Chief Engineer, Radio Officer if there was one and occasionally when on board, the ship’s Doctor constituted the ship’s officers and  the Scientific party were all counted as officers and ate in the officer’s mess in a formal setting with service at the tables in the older ships – there was always a white cloth on the tables, in moderately rough weather it was wetted so that things didn’t slide, and in rough weather fiddles (wooden fences) were put up round the tables to stop things falling off if they did slide.  Officers and Scientists was expected to attend meals at the specified times and to be wearing clean clothes rather than dirty work gear – the Ship’s officers always  wore clean white chirts etc. There was a small Dirty Mess on most ships for scientists who were in the middle of dirty jobs or were rushed.  The rest of the ship’s crew were ‘the crew’ consisting of the Bosun who ran the deck jobs, and the ABs – short for Able Bodied Seamen – who did the deck work and the maintanance work, the stewards and catering staff .  The Catering officer lived in no-mans land and was often an alcoholic!  There was a pretty strict defacto division between officers and crew – officers had a bar where beer and spirits could be bought – spirits were incredibly cheap – cheaper than the mixers, and the bar was usually comfortable and well funrnished whereas the crew were not permitted spirits and had a limited beer ration per day and had a much less nice mess and bar. All these distinctions were taken as normal, and things usually ran very smoothly.  Officers had their own cabins, and the Chief Scientist  had a larger cabin with desk etc as did the captain and Chief engineer.  On some ships scientists shared double cabins, but in later ships the cabins were singles.  In the early days on RRS John Murray one would be woken up by the steward with a cup of tea if one was in onr of the two single cabins on main deck level.  This wasn’t quite the treat you might be thinking – you would be asleep, there would be a knock on the door, the steward would enter without waiting for a response and thrust a large and brimming mug of scalding tea made with tinned milk into your hand, and there was no-where to put it down – that was guarenteed to get you to your senses in double quick time – wake up – struggle out of bed and decant half of the tea down the basin – the other half would be pretty revolting on account of the tinned milk.  The other two double cabins were in the depths of the ship with no portholes, one was right against the generator engine and was very noisy. Both had a bottom and a top bunk – the top bunk was close under the deckhead and had an air conditioning duct running across it so there wasn’t room to sit up – it was the most claustrophobic place I’ve ever slept.  I got to know the John Murray very well in the early days at G+G – at one point I had spent more time on her than any other scientist and knew most of the crews that manned her – not always the same crew.  Each of the NERC ships had a different character, and each of the ship’s Captains had a different attitude to the science that they were there to facilitate – most were, as one would hope and expect, fully committed to supporting the Chief Scientist and getting the work done, but occationall one or two could be a little difficult – since they were in absolute charge of the ship there was not much one could do except complain.  I remeber one cruise where we lost instruments because the captian refused to pick up equipment from the sea in conditions that we knew from past experience were safe to work in – the Chief Scientist  put in a formal complaint afterwards, but the captain is god and if he says the conditions are too bad then by definition they are!

Fairly early on in my time at G+G we were involved in developing and using equipment for seismic reflection profiling – this technique was complementary to the Refraction Seismics, at that time using sonobuoys. Whereas the refraction technique had the explosive source and the receiving buoy separated by distances that were long compared to the water depth – which might typically be 4 km, the reflection technique had a source and receiver, or multiple receivers much closer together and relied on waves reflected from the layers rather than travelling alon within them.  Because the ranges were much shorter explosive charges wee not needed, and an ‘air gun’ that discharged a  bubble of high pressure air beneath the sea surface provided the sound source.  The receiver was a ‘streamer’  a 20m long tube with sound detectors (hydrophones) spaced along it.  Before I joined the lab, it had developed a small air gun of 30 cubic inches capacity – microscopic by modern standards, but still the same principle, and was experimenting with streamers before eventually buying some from IFREMER,  a French Institute. The streamer would be towed behind the ship at a steady 5 or 6 knots ( it got too noisy at normal ship speeds of say 10 to 14 knots) and the air gun would be run from a compressor and fired about every 30 seconds to 1 minute. The signal from the streamer was displayed on a paper chart by a scanning system that syncronised with the firing of the air gun, thus generating a very clear raster picture of the section through the seabed down to a few kilometers beneath the ocean floor (later systems gave much greater penetration.  One of the ships we used for reflection seismic surveys in the Mediteranean was MV Researcher, a converted Norwegian ferry that had been used in and out of the fjiords on the coast of Norway – it was chartered to NERC by Gardline, who ran the ship and provided the crew. On my first cruise on this ship, we left from, I think, Plymouth where at the time the NERC base was situated at that time, and headed to Gibralter, and then on to Naples, doing surverys at points on the way.  Researcher had a rounded stern, and the aft cabin area had been the day passenger space but was now the laboratory area where our equipment was located and where we worked.  The ship had a big old engine turning a single propeller and at certain engine speeds would vibrate so badly that the screws in our equipment undid themselves – on later cruises we put sheets of   thick ply on inflated wheelbarrow inner tubes as worktops to partially cure the problem.  The crew, including the officers had been recruited in the Orkneys or somewhere similar, and the Captain, as well as being somewhat deaf, was really only used to his local accent.  The ship’s equipment was more or less as it had been in Norway – there was no autopilot so someone had to steer the ship the whole time, and communication between lab and bridge was via old fashioned speaking tube.  One of the problems was trying to stop the ship from running the engine at 220 revs per minute, which was a critical resonance, so we would constantly be calling up the bridge and asking them to run the engine at some other speed, say 240 r.p.m. – the problem was getting the captain to understand, and on more than one occasion he turned the ship onto a course of 240 degrees in the middle of a survey line in response to our call.  This was before the general availability of satelite navigation and the ship had no radio navigation aids and was dependent on sextant sights by the captain.  We had an Omega long radio navigation  system we had hired as part of our scientific equipment so we could inddependently keep our track plots up to date, and ever day just before noon the captain would get the 1st mate to set his sextant at the approximate angle the captain thought would be the sun’s altitude, and  then the captain would take the noon sight.  At about half past noon, when he had spent half an our calculating our position from his sextant sight, he would come down to the lab with the back of a cigarrette packet ( amazing how often these appeared it those days !) held secretively in his had and say to the scientist keeping the plot ‘what do you make our position?’  On being told, he would invariably nod and say ‘yes, I got the same’ – I did try to get the scientist to give him a position near the North pole to see what he said, but they were far too responsible, so I have no idea whether he could use a sextant or not.  I think the crew had rarely if ever sailed out of  home waters – a belief confirmed for two of the crew when we docked in Naples and they didn’t have passports or Seamen’s Discharge Books, the universal marine document – they were not allowed ashore but had to paint the hull, but unfortunately were so drunk that they fell into Naples Harbour, which is almost like a cesspit .  One very pleasant feature occured after we docked in Gibraltar  – there was a drama getting in, as the only VHF radio wasn’t working and one of the scientific crew had to signal to the Naval Port Authority in morse using an Aldis lamp.  The Steward/cook had been disgrunteled as he thought the provisioning of the ship in the UK was inadequate, so he went ashore to get supples with a small army of helpers.  I was standing with the Chief Scientists at the rail when the army returned carrying food –  a couple were carrying long frozen fillets of beef over their shoulders like guns and the Chief Scientist muttered to me ‘ I’ll be paying for this, I know I will’ in a doomed sort of voice.  Later in the cruise I found a frozen fillet being used to prop open the fridge door.  Anyway the up side was that if you wanted a snack of an evening you could go and cut off a steak and cook it on the top of the old range in the galley – 2 minutes per side max. – perfect. There was a young lad acting as galley hand, and one of his jobs was to make toast at breakfast in a domestic toaster – inevitably one day the toast caught fire and he just stared at the machine – the Steward,  rightly being aware of the danger of fire in ships, shouted at him ‘put it out’ whereupon he opened a porthole and threw the toaster out – end of breakfast toast.  Several of us scientists got our steering tickets as we were used, when not otherwise engaged, in steering the ship  to give the bridge a rest.   Drama aside, I enjoyed life on Researcher – I don’t know what she would have been like in rough weather, but I don’t remember ever having an uncomfortable time on her.

Another of the early NERC ships was the RRS Shackleton,  like John Murray a ‘repurposed’ vessel, but quite comfortable in roughish weather.  All ships of the size of our research ships roll and pitch when the seas get up, and even if its not possible to work on deck, life in the labs goes on.  There are almost always a series of measurements that are made continuously while the ship is in the survey area, even if the seismic work is not taking place.  The basic underway instruments would likely include a towed proton magnetometer, a deep water echosounder and often a gravimeter, plus keeing a log of ship’s position, usually every 5 or ten minutes. There would also be equipment to be got ready for launching, or being serviced or repaired, and occasionally being finished if there wasn’t time in the lab before the cruise!  These activities took place whatever the weather, unless the ship hove too in a gale.  It was often challenging to work when the ship was rolling – in rough weather she would roll 20 to 30 degrees each way, and on one occasion I saw a tall stool flip over 180 degrees on one roll and back again on the opposite roll.  The magnetometer was an important tool – it was towed behind the ship to get it out of the ship’s magnetic field, and measured the total field – the magnetic signature that was recorded as the ship proceeded was due to the magnetisation of the rock layers under the seabed – The Earth’s magnetic field has reversed every few hundred thousand  years (but not regularly) and when magma spills out of volcanos on the ocean ridges it takes on the current magnisation direction as it cools.  If you record the magnetic field across the ridge you will see peaks and troughs corresponding to the changing magnetisation of the earth’s crust generated as the sea floor spreads over time from the ridge.   Its really just like a giant tape recorder, and its how we were able to prove conclusively that the oceanic plates spread outwards from the ocean ridges – a discovery that was made at G+G  shortly before I joined.  I did many voyages on Shackleton, for a few years we would take her to the Eastern Mediteranean to do reflection profiling and refraction seismics – it was a difficult area to use these techniques as the Mediteranean has a layer of ‘evaporites’, basically salts, that were deposited  millions of years ago when the Med was a closed sea and it dried up periodically – the evaporites have a lower seismic velocity than the rocks on top which messes up the propogation of seismic waves and makes it very difficult to get refractions beneathe the evaporite layer.  One year I did a spell as Chief Scientist on Shackleton with a Captain who liked his drink, and who thought my job was to drink with him through the night – I am usually pretty abstemious on board ship as there is always work to be done, and I was often the only person who could fix bits of kit. I learned a whole lot of ways to avoid drinking without appearing rude.  One of the chores abourd was keeping the 30 cu. inch air gun running when we were using it for seismic profiling – it was a somewhat complicated beast, but basically it was pumped up to about a hundred atmosspheres pressure, and then triggered so a shuttle slammed open and released the bubble of air, it fired about once every minute, and sometime around 30  hours the PTFE seal on the shuttle would fail and it would stop.  The scientific watchkeeper would eventually notice it, then call out the AB who was on watch to work the winch, and me to fix the gun – by the time the gun was back in the water we would have lost at least half an hour’s record.  I had a real job to pursuade the Chief Scientist that if we did planned maintainance at 24 hourly intervals we could have everything ready, stop the gun, service it and have it back in the water in ten minuutes – I did eventually prevail – it meant that I no longer got woken up at night to fix that particular job.

Around 1980 (?) NERC commissioned a new research ship RRS Charles Darwin to replace Shackleton.  They canvassed all the Chief Scientists who had used their ships and staged a massive consultation to finesse the design of the ship. While a lot of details could be sorted out that way, it really wasn’t a particularly good way of sorting out lab space as many disciplines with very different requirements used the NERC ships. One thing that seemed to get general approval from these scientists was to position a large scientific plot (working office for watchkeeping and underway instrument readouts) directly behind the bridge on the upper deck to allow good communications between scientists and the bridge – never mind that it was two decks up and several doors away from where the rest of the scientists would be working.  Despite the fact that the Darwin was equipped with a form of water stabilisation – a tank of on either side of the ship passed water back and forth as the ship rolled, but slowed so that in theory it opposed the roll to some extent, Darwin  rolled quite badly, and each end of the roll ended in a little flick back. This wasn’t too bad in the cabins which were below the main deck, or on the main deck where the labs were, but up in the wonderful scientific plot it was horrendous due to the height above the hull.  I guess the bridge crew got used to it if they were at sea for long periods, but the scas reducing the stability slows the roll)ientists didn’t, and the plot was rarely used.  I think after a couple of years someone discovered that one of the baffles between the two stabiliasing tanks was missing, and they also  added more weight  above decks as reducing the stability slows the roll, and it was said to be better. I did a number of trips on Darwin –  I guess it was the best ship I worked on for science facilities

I did a few trips on non NERC ships – one on MV Theta from Halifax, Nova Scotia that was the firing ship for a 2 ship seismic experiment – she was loaded with around 50 tons of Ammonium Nitrate in big cans like oil barrels, fired with a 1/2 lb high explosive primer charge, which was fired by a normal detonator.  The Captain was from Newfoundland and objected to my long hair – as I was on the bridge every day doing radio communications with the other ship I stopped shaving just to annoy him – I’ve kept the beard ever since.  I got pretty used to being on ships with a lot of explosives, and didn’t worry too much as the shot firers were always pretty well  trained and safe, although we did have one scare on Charles Darwin – the big charges of Geophex (Gelignite mixed with rice husks to stabilise it) were made by banding together a number of smaller charges in cardboard tubes – this was done on a tipping table over the stern.  Two detonators with slow burning fuses were then inserted into two of the tubes, the fuses lit with an electrical hot wire, and the table tipped up so the charge gently slipped off the table and into the water.  Only on one occasion the shot firers made a mistake and banded the charges to the table, inserted the dets and fuses and lit them and then tipped the table – but the charge didn’t move and the fuse continued to burn…………………!   As a precaution they always had a knife handy, and cut the slow burning fuse – panic over, but a bit of a tense moment.  My job on shot firing days was often to sit on the after deck with a radio and count down the charges so that a recorder in the lab could be started to record the precise instant of the shot.  W normally had tons of explosive on board, so it didn’t matter how near the explosives you were, because the whole ship would have gone up in one big bang.

The longest time I spent at sea without a port stop was on a cruise on the US ship Maurice Ewing with Scripps Institute of Oceanography scientists to the East Pacific Rise – a sea floor spreading centre in the Eastern Pacific which lasted ( I think ) 37 days.  We were doing a combined reflection and refraction seismic survey around the spreading ridge towing very long seismic streamers with multiple hydrophones (underwater microphones) and  a set of sea bed seismic recorders that I had designed and was responsible for, plus a set provided by Scripps.  rather than use explosives as the source of the sound waves, we were using a number of very big air guns towed close behind the ship.  My instruments hadn’t been used in that form before, so it was a bit nerve wracking to have to deploy them for about 3 weeks without knowing if they were working – it was always thus with our marine instruments – it was as complex and expensive to do a proper test as to go and get some scientific results, so we always did the latter!   You find out pretty quickly if the instruments have worked when you recover them  – on this occasion the first two recovered didn’t work and then it was time for our shift to end and the Scripps team to take over, so I remember going to bed feeling a little aprehensive to say the least.  By unlucky chance those two were the only instruments that didn’t work, so just as well I didn’t jump overboard in the night.  Had they not worked our entire participation would have been negated and I would have felt a bit bad about it. Both Scripps and Cambridge had teams of scientists on board who assisted with the instruments, and while the instruments were on the seabed they did the scientific watchkeeping and kept things running, including frequently changing the tapes that recorded the output of the streamers.  I was excused watchkeeping, partly because I am a lousy watchkeeper as they all knew – my mind always gets distracted into working out how the whole activity could be streamlined and automated – I start out with the best of intentions to do the 5 minute checks and write very neatly in the log book etc, but then after about half an hour I realise that I was miles away and just missed a set of readings and it goes downhill from there.   Anyway on this cruise I spent the working time designing a new recording circuit for Scripps with their engineer – I afterwards discovered that they paid their design engineer $2000 per day – so I felt they had about $40,000’s worth of my time.  Life on board the Ewing was very different from the ships I was used to – and not just because they were ‘dry’ – no alcohol…. The officers and crew all messed together, including a lot of the crew in work gear, so the mess had the furnishings and feel of a large 1950s English transport cafe that I used to frequent when hitchhiking up the A1 road.  There were no bars or lounges, although there was a large room where truly awful films were played back to back. So there was no-where to go to relax or socialise except a bit of deck behind the bridge when the weather was being kind (not often) , when you could sometimes find a group of Cambridge people with large tea mugs drinking what looked like rather pale tea without milk, but in smaller quantities.  I had prepared for something like this by buying a ship model kit of a 16th century sailing ship and taking all the tools necessry.  As the hull was planked with individual planks and everything was similarly detailed it filled most of my spare time for the whole cruise, and I still didn’t manage to finish the rigging – its still sits on the overmantle in the drawing room in the same state today – I WILL finish it one day.

The instruments we built to work on the seabed were mostly intended to work in the deep ocean, which can be anywhere from about 3000 to (exceptioanlly in ocean trenches) 9000 meters deep, although in general we built instruments to work down to   6000 meters, which is as deep as the normal ocean floor gets – in fact I think most of our deployments were at or less than about 4000m.  At that sort of depth the pressure is enormous, and a very strong pressure vessel/ container is necessary to put electronics and batteries in.  In addition, the pressure will find any leaks and flood your instrument – even a small scratch across a sealing surface can be sufficient to allow a very sloe leak.  However, with careful design you can make seals etc so that the pressure actually compresses the seals and for the most part eliminates the risk of leaks.  One of the strange things about the seabed pressure housings is that it was not uncommon for the instrument to return to the surface with about an eggcup full of (salt) water inside, irrespective of how long it had been deployed for. which would splash about inside the container as it was handled in recovery from the surface of the ocean, causing damage to electonics.  Our solution to this problem, having failed to find a universal solution to the leak problem, was to put a baby’s disposable nappy (diaper) in the bottom of the instrument to absorb the water – problem solved!  We pretty quickly surmised that the leaks were occuring as the instrument fell and rose through the near surface layers, before the pressure was sufficient to press sealing surfaces together firmly enough to seal – hence the leaks were a more or less constant volume.  The pressure at 6000m is such that design and choice of materials is quite limited – a spherical shell is the most efficient shape as the stress is shared equally in all directions of the shell, whereas a cylindrical shell (tube) needs to be twice as thick to take the same stress.  Surprisingly the strongest material we had available was glass – its stronger that steel or titanium when its in uniform compression, as it is in a spherical shell, and this means that you can make a pressure vessel thin enough that it floats in water, whereas the pressure vessels we made out of high strength aluminium tube had to have glass spheres attached to provide the buoyancy to let them float to the surface after they had been commanded to drop their anchor weights.

Away from marine seismics, another G+G activity I got involved with was the Earthquake Aftershock Study group – this was a small group of G+G / Bullard academics and students who were set up to go immediately to regions were there had been a major earthquake with a set of  seismic recorders to record the aftershock waves at locations around the site of the earthquake.  There were two reasons for doing this, firstly because the location of the major shock was by the international network of seismic observatories and was not very precise, so recording aftershocks locally as well as on the international network would retrospectivey calibrate the crustal structure round the area and allow refinement of the original location, and secondly because it would allow the mapping of residual stress left after the main shock as it was subsequently relieved in minor quakes.  I only did one of these aftershock expeditions, to Georgia, wheich involved flying to Moscow and then going by Soviet military plane to Tiblisi and then to a field camp run by the Russian military.  We put out our stations in or near villages, having a Russian military jeep and driver as transport.  The camp was pretty dire, and the food terrible!  I used to wander out into the town and the Georgians were fantastically hospitable – I would be invited into houses and be plied with food and wine despite not having a single word in common, unfortunately when the Russians got wind of my fraternising with the locals we were all banned form venturing out – there being no love lost between the two nations. One of the perils of this trip was that the villagers were also hospitable when we went to check our instruments and as we returned to our jeep would ambush us with a tray of Georgian vodka and glasses and engage in a toasting match which usually resulted in us returning to the camp somewhat the worse for wear = I have to say that the  good thing about the Russian drivers was that they never touched a drop of alcohol, I think it must have been an instant dismissal offense.  We did one trip in a Russian military helicopter – I wish I hadn’t looked in the cockpit and seen the wires hanging out of one of the instrument boxes – or for that matter looked out of the window and seen the other helicopter upside down in a nearby valley!  But we did get back safely, so it was an interesting trip…  I had taken a large wad of cash in USD with me in case I had to evacuate the team in an emergency, and on one occasion I was sitting at a table with a Russian professor, with my cash in my moneybelt, when he told me what his salary was – discovering that I could have paid his salary for more than 5 years made me rather jumpy about carrying the money about!  Because we were on a Royal Society/ Russian Acadamy joint project the Russians paid us a daily allowance, just as the Royal Society did to visiting Russians. We were handed a fistful of Roubles while we were in Moscow waiting to return to the UK, and Russian student who had been interpreting for us took us round Moscow, ostensibly to spend our Roubles.  The only problem was that there was absolutely nothing to spend it on, all the shops wanted US dollars only – I did manage to buy a small wooden bird decoration, and my colleague managed to buy a second hand tennis racket that needed restringing, and a pair of worn jeans.  Our interpreter saw a shop with some shoes in the window and went running across in great excitement, but came back looking crestfallen, because they only had size 13s, a whole shopfull!  He said sometimes they had his size, but the last time it had only been right shoes*, not pairs.  I desperately wanted a drink and asked him if there was anywhere we could get something to eat and drink – he looked puzzled as if such places didn’t exist, but asked a shopkeeper who when pressed directed us to a small cafe selling tea that appeared to be exclusively for the shopkeepers in the arcade. I tried to give away my Roubles to him at the airport as there was a big notice saying, in effect, you would be shot if you tried to take Roubles out of the country, but he would not take them – in the end I pursuaded him that if I put them in the rubbish bin he was to take them out, which he did – it was probably a couple of months living for him so no wonder he was embarrassed!  Goodbye Russia – and it was true what they used to say – if you stay in a Russian hotel, take your own bathplug……

* or it might have been left shoes, I can’t remember exactly.

I had a project running in California for several years in connection with our work on Earth Strain – one of the PhD students had designed and built a very simple and clever instrument for measuring tectionic tilt – the microscopic tilts that occur in tectonically active areas in response to movements of  faults. It consisted of a 1 kilometer pipe with a pot of liquid at each end, and a very sensitive diaphram in the centre that moved as liquid levels in the two ends changed, and its position was measured with great accuracy and recorded on a paper chart recorder.  He had built the instrument at an observatory site called Pinion Flats in the mountains above Palm Desert, East of Los Angeles, funded by the US Geological Survey – I took over the project as the USGS wanted it to continue, and I had a friend who was just taking up a Post Doctoral job for a year in UCLA (University of Calafornia in Los Angeles) and this provided a paid excuse to visit her a couple of times a year.  Running the instrument was pretty straightforward so I had plenty of time for other things.  On one occasion I drove up the inland route to San Fransisco up Owen’s valley – in the evening as it got near to time to stop I found all the motels were full, but one off the main road had vacancies so I drove up to it, it seemed a bit run down and scruffy but I got a room which turned out to have an old iron bedstead and mice running around – by the morning I realised that I’d checked into a low end brothel…. I survived intact.  On another occasion I flew into San Fransisco with another friend to drive down Highway 1 to L.A.  At the car rental desk I asked for a one way to L.A. and they were delighted that I could take a ‘really nice limo’ back to L.A. for them – knowing what was in store for it on the dirt roads of the Pinion Flat site I tried my best to disuade them, and to get them to give me a compact  but to no avail.  The limo was one of those massive aspirational cars – all mouth and no trousers as they say. Instead of having a wheel at each corner like any self respecting car, it had massive overhangs front and back, so over any  kind of bump, and there were a lot in the mountains and at Pinion Flat, it pitched violently until the front (almost?) touched the dirt.  Part of servicing the instrument required repeatedly going from end to end of the 1 km. instrument as quickly as possible  – I usually found the little cars I normally hired occasionally took off , but this one was impossible – besides, for some reason the inside was lined with fur – presumably fake – but not improved by carting equipment back and forth and the perpetual sand and dust.  I did my best to clean it out before taking it back, but boy, I felt bad about it!  Each year I had to submit an application for the nest year’s funding, and my applications got briefer and briefer as I could see that, really, the measurements coming out of our instrument were not going to answer any great questions – it was again a case of not knowing how representative that 1 km was of any tilt on a wider scale.  But it was a good experience – even the flights were occasionally fun – unbelievably in those days it was possible to chat up the cabin staff and ask to go on the flight deck, they would ask the Captain and I would usually be invited up on the flight deck – imagine that now!  On one occasion flying back from L.A. I was on the flight deck chatting to the Captain and he asked if I’d like to see the recently erupted Mt. St Helen, and diverted his route for me to look at the smoke rising from the vent.  To my global warming shame, I once flew to L.A. for the weekend – I probably did at least three or four overseas trips a year, and usually managed to fit in a bit of tourism at the end of the cruise or work – I can think of less than half a dozen occasions in my life when I’ve paid for a flight out of my own pocket.  Teddy ( Sir Edward Bullard FRS, Head of the G+G  in my early days there) used to boast that he had never even travelled out of Cambridge unless someone else was paying.   I miss the travel, but one thing I’ve learnt is that it is much more satisfying to be in a foreign country when you have a purpose to be there, than when you are a mere tourist – it gives you a much better connection to the local population and you get much more respect.

Another cruise I did was on an Italian research ship that had been an American WWII tug and had been given to the Italians after the war.  Like all tug type boats it was grossly overpowered for normal sailing, but this enabled the crew to drive it like a Ferrari, complete with the marine equivalent of wheel spin.  We were deploying a number of sea bed seismometers as, I think, the only activity of the cruise apart from the normal data recording.  The deep water echo sounder, operating at around 10KHz rather than the 50KHz of the normal shallow water ones, required a rather large transmitter to send the acoustic signal and receive the reflection, and the ship didn’t have a built in hull transducer, so a ‘fish’ containing the transducer had to be towed from the side of the ship, but not too close to the hull or there was too much noise generated by the water passing over the ship’s hull. The crew decided to tow the transducer from a fixed  boom about 10 meters long over the side of the ship.  There was a very excited discussion on deck as to how to rig the fish, with quite a lot of arm waving involving most of the crew. Not speaking any Italian I wasn’t a party to the eventual deployment method, but I wasn’t at all surprised to see a similar ‘discussion’ when it came to time to take the fish back on board as the end of the experiment, because it rapidly became obvious that recovery hadn’t been part of the plan –  I watched in horror as a seaman attempted to crawl out along the round pole over the sea (without a lifejacket) – recovery was eventually effected after much shouting.  Everything on board happened in the same chaotic way.  At one point we had all 8 of our instruments out on the sea bed and were about to begin recovery when the Captain decided that he would prefer to leave the instruments and go into port.  I had discovered that every ‘discussion’ had to be accompanied by lots of arm waving and shouting – so I put up a very theatrical defense of the original plan, made more difficult because the Captain wore large mirror sun glasses and all I could see was my reflection – but it worked and we did get the instruments back.  For all the histrionics, the food was the best of any ship I’ve been on – whenever the ship stopped for even a few minutes the crew would come on deck in their slippers with fishing rods and catch supper.  Dinner began with a pile of half a dozen plates in front of each person, which were filled in turn with fantastic food – brilliant.

There were plenty more cruises with stories to tell, but perhaps its time to say something about what we got up in the lab  when not at sea or on land expeditions, which was generally about three quarters of our time.  When I joined the Departmentin 1966  all the technical work was done in a separate building named  ‘Pendulum House’ because one of the principal activities of the lab was operating pendulum gravity meters – at that time the only  portable  instrument with which  the earth’s gravitational field could be accurately measured.  The instrument consisted of a pair of pendula of very precise construction and very stable length independently of temperature that swung in a vacuum and were timed by light beams that reflected off mirrors attached to the pendula against radio time signals.  They were relative instruments, in that you needed to calibrate them at a base station  before you tookl them to wherever you wanted to measure gravity, and then you would set that place up as a sub base station etc.  Gravity measurements were important because they tell you the density of rocks deep in the earth and allow you to find deep geplogical features, and when I joined there was a burst of interest in the measurements because they were vital for calculating the orbits of the emerging sattelites.  Pendulum House was our own base station from which many measurements were made around the world, including on submarines at sea.  Pendulum House was mainly a mechanical workshop with Leslie and two technicians – Roger and Klem.  Roger had been in the workshop for a few years – he was a quiet man and made very precise mechanical bits and pieces, although at times he got the dimensions very percisely wrong, and there would be a pile of tell tale  bits in the bin.

An interuption – one more cruise springs to mind that was, in its way, as odd as the Italian cruise.  I and a student were asked to provide some seabed seismic instruments for a survey line the British Geological Survey  (BGS) wanted to shoot from offshore in the Tyne area and onto land.  The plan was to fire a total of 2 tons of explosives.  We had two ships, both were Navy salvage ships run by civilian crews – they were used for recovering aircraft that had ditched in the North Sea, or any other heavy lifting which they did in an ingenious was – they had a couple of big horns sticking out from the bows with a large pulley between them for  the cable and a winch.  The winch wasn’t powerful enough for the strain of freeing things from the suction of the mud, so they had a very large water tank at the bows and stern, pumped water into the front tank and tightened the cable, then pumped the water to the stern tank which generated the necessary lift.  Our seabed instruments were, on this occasion, moored to large doughnut buoys with a tripod on top for an antenna and light.  When deploying the buoys the crew, working without hard hats or safety boots, used a steel pin weighting about 5Kg as a slip pin to release the buoy after lifting it on the crane overside.  On a couple of occasions the pin fell from about 10 ft high onto the deck, narrowly missing a crewman, who seemed unconcerned and carried on as before, replacing the pin at height… On recovery they brought the ship alongside the buoy and a seaman climbed down the side of the ship onto the doughnut  which was dancing around and banging on the ship’s side, in order to hook the crane onto the buoy – all without a lifejacket in sight!  I’d been careful in my original agreement to make sure that I wasn’t on the ship with explosives, a view that was reinforced by watching these examples of stupid and unsafe working, so when the chief scientist announced that they were going to transfer the explosives to our ship, I insisted that we be put ashore beforehand, citing the agreement.  Luckily it didn’t come to that as they reinstated the original plan, but I will always remember  my horror as seeing crew acting like that.    I did another cruise in the same area on an Oil Rig guard boat – all I can remember about that cruise is that I had to stay in contact with the lab and so hired a very early mobile phone. which was the size of two bricks and cost about £100 to hire for a week or so – but being relatively low frequency, its range was out to about 30 miles offshore, probably better than a modern mobile!

So, back to the Pendulum House – I was principally appointed to provide electronics expertise, and the lab had just appointed an electronics technician, who was having a detached retina sorted when I arrived, but on his return we set up an electronics lab in a separate building -The Crombie Lab – which had been built as a seismic observatory for training operators for stations to monitor possible Russian nuclear tests, with a pleasant recording room with lots of windows, and an underground vault for the  seismometers.  It was a shame that the site for the observatory was about as bad as could be found anywhere for recording seismics as it sat on a deep bed of gravel that attenuated any signals and rendered it totally unfit for purpose, so it was never really used.  It made a fine laboratory for Mel and I, and we did the necessary modifications to suit ourselves and started to equip our electronics laboratory.  We were not the first to do electronics design and building at G+G as Leslie and others had built radio equipment for seismics, and also proton magnetometers.  The proton magnetormeter that was designed by Teddy Bullard was a clever design – it measured the total magnetic field by measuring the frequency with which  molecules of a hydrocarbon precessed when they were first aligned in a strong magnetic field which was then switched off to allow them to precess in the earth’s field.  The clever bit was in the coil used to provide the strong field that had to be very uniform – Teddy designed a spherical coil with the right properties that the lab turned up out of the newly discovered Araldite.  He always said that the idea for the spherical coils came from a suggestion in a letter  sent to him by a schoolgirl.

I think the first thing we built  with a student was a set of amplifiers for land seismics – we were by now in the world of transistors, and integrated circuits were just becoming usable for simple applications like amplifiers and simple logic chips. In some instruments we were still using the logic functions were realised on printed circuit boards housed in plastic moxes with a modular plug in system – a box contining a decade counter, for example would be housed in a box about the size of a couple of matchboxes.  I had played around with making printed circuits at Unicam – very crude – by painting the patterns on the copper and then etching it, and we did the first circuit boards a G+G in the sme way, although we quickly set up a darkroom and did simple contact printing of circuits cut out of red film by hand and etched in ferric chloride.  This terribly impressed Teddy, who would tell visitors proudly that ‘we makeour own printed circuit boards’ while Mel and I cringed.  We helped a lot of research students with their projects, and developed a set of modular boards in a standard format so that they could quickly make up instruments.  Shortly after I started the department appointed an academic who more or less moved into my electonics lab and tried to take over, which didn’t please us, particularly as he chain smoked in the lab.   I had a quick chat with Teddy Bullard, who had a great sense of fairness, who resolved the issue promptly, and we got on in our own way setting up the lab.  In those days we didn’t seem to have much difficulty in getting money for projects or for basic lab equipment – for many years it was the proud boast of the head of the Marine Group, Drum Matthews, that he had never had a grant application rejected, and he had a number of rolling grants.  Sadly that all came to an end towards the end of my time in the lab.  I remember one one occasion we were informed that the government was promoting the British machine tool industry by giving large grants to Universities to buy machines – we were told that we could have more or less anything we wanted but we had to order it within a couple of days as the other departments hadn’t responded – we didn’t have a lot of space in the workshop for more machines, but we manage to fit in a massive new lathe – used a lot, a horizontal milling machine that I think was only ever used a couple of times and just took up space, and a number of smaller machines. That reminds me of a story that Teddy told of when he was Director of the National Physical Laboratory before coming to Cambridge – the accountant came to him on the morning of the last day of the financial year and said he had discovered a significant sum of money that had to be spent by noon – Teddy signed a blank order and sent his workshop head out to buy something useful that came to the available amount, and he duly arrived back at 5 minutes to 12 driving a large and shiny fork lift truck.  It wasn’t just equipment – in 1967 (? – I’m not good on dates) the Woolfson  Foundation (money source: Great Universal Stores) gave the Department money to build a new lab building, and I spent a fair bit of time over two years with the architects/builders fiddling with the design of the building and its fittings, and then equipping it with furniture.   I had almost weekly meetings with the builders – it was a fixed price design and build contract – at which each week they would come in and say how much money they needed to save, and we would argue about just how many power points each lab needed (at the level of individual sockets!), or whether we needed 2 sets of drawers under this or that lab bench.  It was a reasonable space and we got an adequate number of usable labs and workshops, but it was all pretty utilitarian – the internal walls were all block walls just sprayed with some speckeldy paint and of course, it being then, glazed with large single glazed windows.  The building had a flat roof  of precast beams overlaid with some form of sparse insulation and then a bituminous layer all within a parapet.  Almost immediatley bituminous stained water began to drip from the beams above the suspended ceiling and cause brown stains – for a long time the builders maintained that this was water that had been in the insulation when it was laid, and there ‘couldn’t possibly be any leaks in that construction’!   When it became clear that rather more water had come through than the total volume of insulation they grudgingly admitted that there was a leak problem ( I think via the parapet walls) and came up with an ingenious solution  – a series of ‘draining boards’ under the ceiling beams all plumbed into the rainwater drain that ran down the middle of the ceiling cavity to catch the leaks.  This sort of worked, except that at some point we had prolonged torrrential rain and the drains backed up, causing the draining boards to act as a source of water rather than a sink – it was all quite spectacular as there was an 8 ft fountain of water  from a 4 inch pipe by the back door and water pouring through the ceilings.  I didn’t like flat roofs then, and I still don’t.  Anyway Mel and I set up our nice new electronics workshop in the Woolfson Building, and quite soon found we had chosen too small a space, and moved to a bigger space with adjoining labs where a number of students could work on their projects.

One of the really nice features of my early life at G+G, and one that now seems distinctly unusual, was the seamless boundary between work,  our own projects and home life for the research students and the younger staff. Visits to the Churchill College bar were just as often taken up with discussing work as philosophy or politics, and there seemed to be similar gatherings in peoples rooms, flats or houses. The workshops and labs usually had one or two people working in them over the weekends, again either for urgent work or some hobby and in the early days there was nothing to stop students using some of the machines in the workshop at weekends.  Cars were  frequent  projects for us  – One student rebuilt a complete sports coupe from an old car and a new body shell, and I had a small fleet of derelict BMW 1600 and 2000s that used to get canibalised to keep my main 1600 going – in the end I sold it to a fellow employee and it  finally gave up the ghost with 250000 miles on the clock.  The workshops included a space for a woodwork shop, although we didn’t have much in the way of machinery, and no-one used it, so it was taken over as a car parts workshop and saw several engine and gearbox jobs.  Several cars got resprayed at the lab, and I welded up a lot of boat fittings when I was converting a Reedling hull into a small cruiser, and also welded up a trailer for it with metal from a scrapyard and wheels and suspension units that were salvaged from old 3 wheel invalid carriages.  It was all done perfectly openly, and Teddy Bullard used to take a pride in our extramural activities – what a fantastic leader.   A lot of the relaxed atmosphere resulted from the fact that most of us spent time doing fieldwork or on ships together, where of course you were cheek by jowl with your fellows for most of the time, and often even shared a two berth cabin.

I wrote my first computer for a mainframe computer in around 1968, when an IBM XXX was installed in the Institute of Astronomy, another Woolfson funded building, just 50 yards down the drive from the labs. In those days you typed your Fortran program onto punched cards in a card punch, each card holding one line of the program.  Even a small program would result in a pile of cards several inches high, and a large program  might run to several feet of cards.  The unfortunate feature of this system was that the pile of cards wasn’t indexed, so to get the program to run properly the cards, and hence the instructions, had to be in the right order,  If you dropped the pile of cards you had effectively lost your program.  My program was a very simple one for calculating how a weight on the end of a wire would tow behind the ship at various speeds.  This was important because we needed to get the airgun to a particular depth to get the best signal. I was amazed when I left the department around 2000 I looked at the much changed and upgraded towing programs then in use and discovered that the arbitrary names I’d given to important variables were still there, although almost everything else had changed except my basic algorith.   Computers gradually  became a  bigger and bigger part of a student’s work in getting a PhD, so the time they had in their 3 years for building instruments was reduced, and in consequence more and more was done by the lab staff, until the students effectively became operators of them.

Most of my work over all the years I was at the lab were connected one way or another with seismics, mostly marine seismics and latterly sea bed seismics, where I made something of a speciality of looking at the coupling of the geophone sensors to the sea bed – its a quite complex problem, and important for interpreting the sound waves ( = vibrations) that arrive a the sensor.  The deep sea bottom is almost everywhere fairly soft mud like material – the accumulation of millions of years of fine sediment falling to the bottom, its only rocky where there have been recent undersea earthquakes or where fast sea bed currents have scoured the bottom.  The seismic waves travel in the deep rock layers and propogate  upwards as the go, arriving at the sensor at an almost vertical angle.  There are actually two distinct kinds of wave that travel in solids – one where the particles within the solid are displaced backwards and forwards in the direction the wave is going – the p wave, and one where the particles move at right angles to the direction the wave is going – the s wave.  The problem is that the sensor has to be quite heavy in order to sit securely on the sea bed, but the soft mud acts as a springy mattress would and so the sensor is not moved as the mud would if the sensor was not there – any way, that will give you a brief idea of the problem – we’ll come back to it later….

Another area I was involved with was measuring the heat flow out through the earth’s crust.  The earth’s  core is still hot from the time of its formation roughly 4 1/2 billion years ago, and also the decay of radioactive material in the core and mantle produces heat that has to escape through the earth’s crust.  These two sources are about equal  and drive the convection in the mantle, which is then responsible for the movement of the lithospheric plates and the transport of heat to the underside of the plates.  These plates acts as a blanket, but also to some extent have there own internal radioactivity, so the amount of heat coming out of the surface of the earth at any point tells you quite a lot about  how thick the blanket is and the rocks.  The ocean plates are thin – typically around 5 km as they are all pretty young aand have very little rinternal radioactivity – maybe 2% of their heatflow, being continuously created and subducted, whereas the contintal plate are the accumulation of  thousands of millions of ‘scum’ and are typically around 30 km thick, although mountains have much deeper roots – up to 100km deep – they do have more radioactivity, so there is not as much difference in the heat flow as you would expect from the thickness.  So its an important tool for studying the crustal thickness.  It’s quite a small amount of heat that comes through the surface, typically around 400 Wattts per hectare so not a useful amount – almost all the surface temperature comes from solar radiation – heat flow contributes around .03% to global warming!  Teddy Bullard did the first heat flow recordings well before I joined the lab, and Leslie built a beautiful mechanical recording heat flow meter, but in the late 1970’s a student decided he wanted to do heat flow measurements in various bits of the ocean, so we set out to build a new digital instrument, and it was going to use a micro-computer.  All the instruments we built in the lab were for use in the field, and almost always had very limited power available, so the  early  micro processors like the Intel 8080 and the associated memory chips  as used in the ZX80 from sinclair etc were not usable because they needed too much power for the available batteries to provide – batteries were also much less efficient then so the power issues were actually a dominant constrain right through my time in the lab.  The breakthrough came with the RCA1802, a very low powered CMOS microprocessor that fitted our power budget, and a few memory chips that also didn’t need large amounts of power.  The Heat Flow we built using the RCA 1802 looks unbelievable when seen from the 21st  century – it stored its program in a tiny memory of just 256 bytes that had to be loaded each time it was used and had to be written in machine code and entered manually via a simple programmer – a similar program nowadays might run to about between 1000 and 10000 times bigger – that program did all the measurements of 16 sensors and recorded them to a digital tape recorder as well as timing the measurement and  controlling a heater.   The heater was an essential part of the measurement – to go back to the blanket, if we want to calculate how thick the blanket (crust)  was from the amount of heat escaping, we also need to know how insulating the blanket was – it could be thin but a very effective insulator, or thick and a poor insulator, so in order to measure its insulation properties we give the probe a quick burst of an exact amount of heat, and measured how long it took to cool down – the probe, by the way, was a 3 meter long steel bar with a thin tube stretched alongside it containing the 16 sensors and the heater.  The steel bar had to be incredibly strong because you couldn’t guarentee that the ship would be directly above the probe when you pulled it out, so it might have to stand a very strong sideways pull.  So the proceedure was to lower the probe on a steel wire of perhaps 1.5cm diameter until it was 10 meters above the seabed, then let it fall suddenly so it sticks in deep, leave it there for maybe 5 minutes to let the frictional heat dissipate and the actual crustal temperature to stabilise, then fire off the heater for about 30 seconds and record the following temperature decay, then pull it all back up again.  In order to get the probe to penetrate 3 meters into the seabed the whole apparatus had to weigh around half a ton, but that was a ‘normal’ sort of weight for a bit of marine gear and could be handled on board a large research ship without difficulty. The thin tube containing the sensors and heater was about 7mm diameter, and the construction of the string of sensors to put into  the tube was a work of art – fortunately the student involved was an expert fly tier with lots of experience fly fishing in Scotland – I would probably not have had the patience to make such a beautiful job. One of the parameters that we had to record along with the temperatures was the angle that the probe ended up in the bottom – If it was too far from vertical the measurement was not going to be any use, and if it was off by more than a few degrees the measurementss needed to be corrected to take acount of the angle.  We had very limited capacity for data storage, and  needed a sensor that gave an output that could be used to determine the tilt from the vertical. I couldn’t find any small, low powered commercial tiltmeters, so designed a cylindrical  cell with a separate conductive  top and bottom with an insulated layer between and a central cconducting cylinder, filled up to the level of the inulator with a dense flourocarbon (MFL18) that turned the cell into a capacitance bridge – it worked rather well, and I used the design in a number of seabed devices.

I did a few research cruises with the heat flow equipment, and one non cruise – the student and I, plus the rest of our marine party flew out to Rio Janero for a mixed heat flow and seismic cruise,  then flew on to Belem to join the ship.  We had a couple of days in Belem before the ship sailed, and came across a Portugese guide who  offered to take us round the locality to see some Voodoo ‘services’ – an opportunity not to be missed, so the student and I plus two hefty rugger playing technicians squeezed into the guide’s VW Beetle and set off for the seamier areas of Belem – it soon became obvious that the guide was quite nervous about being in those areas, and on a couple of occasions he did a very quick about turn and exited smartly, sweating heavily.  We then found a ‘session’ going on, so the guide went in and asked if they minded us watching – the hall had a strange mixture of pagan and catholic icons, and the ‘priest’ sat in a large chair smoking, with an acolite on either side , one giving him a  cigarette every time he finished one, and the other lighting it for him.  Meanwhile members of the congregation were engaged in Dervish dances and speaking in voices and becoming trance like – quite impressive, and we just quietly observed.  After that one, we drove on and found another -church’ (I’m sure I’ve got the names wrong, and perhaps at the time I knew what they were called) = the guide went in and came out again and said there was no service going on, but the ‘priest/witch doctor’ would be delighted to meet us, so we went upstairs to a very large and, for the locality, plush office with the witch doctor sitting behind an enormous desk watching a gigantic television, at least at the time it seemed enormous to us, I guess now it would be quite modest.  Through the guide he greeted us and we explained briefly what we were about to do, after which he offered to ‘read the bones’ for each of us.  After looking at one of us he shook a large basket containing bones, feathers and other odds and ends and studied the result, then repeated for the rest.  He then gave a summary of our individual characters which had us all gobsmacked – we were all pretty smart cookies, and well used to the idea of  generalised predictions, but we could have clearly recognised each other by his analysis.  Our scientific training precludes a belief in the occult, so we were left with his ability to read character in a few minutes across a cultural gap of almost half the world – I still think of it as the cleverest bit of people reading I’ve ever come across.   Anyway after a trip up the river Belem, a tributary of the Amazon to see cocoa pods being gathered in the forest (probably a regular tourist activity!), we were ready to sail – having lunch in the Officers’ mess,  when there was a loud bang – five minutes later the Chief Engineer came in and said that one of the generators had blown up, and that would mean we couldn’t use the main winch (for the heat flow).  The student and I looked at each other and said as one ‘ no point in us staying then’, and caught the next flight back to Rio and then home – my shortest ever time on board a research ship.

Another heat flow cruise was on a Dutch research ship Snelius, a converted cattle carrier with all the labs in containers on the dack.  The deck below was where the cattle were carried – it must have been  thousands of them, because the whole deck was completely open.  We sailed from Ambon in Indonesia and it was a pretty dreary cruise – hot and humid in our container and the food didn’t really inspire us although the Dutch scientists seemed to think it was wonderful.  The only saving grace was that the crew rigged up a small ‘swimming’ pool using old pallets and a big rubber sheet that was regularly refilled from the sea, so if things got too fetid one could cool off.  There must have been a few other heat flow cruises – but I don’t remember them!  Our heat flow design was highly sucessful, and we eventually made several for our use and one for a Canadian group. I still think of those heat flow electronics as No 3 in my best efforts – it combined a number of inovative elements and worked well.

Fairly early on in my time at the lab we hired another electronics technician, Mike, who was fairly untrained in electronics but very good at coming up with crafty, if somewhat complex circuits – probably his ultimate triumph was the Seismic  Jet Pen – I had been working on the design of a recorder that would produce a raster type display to record the repeated traces from the seismic reflections  from the airgun – each time the gun fired the pen would traverse actross the chart drawing a trace corresponding to the incoming reflections, then fly back in time for the next gun pulse so that the reflections from layers under the seabed lined up on the recorder and formed a view as if it was a slice through the seabed.  At the time all the commercial recorders had limitations, and we needed a high quality record.  The recorder was based on a very igenious commercial unit – the Jet Pen – very simple in concept, it had a very fine glass tube  with a magnet round it, bent at right angles at the end. a coil round the magnet caused the tube to twist back and forth when a signal was applied, thus pointing the bent bit from side to side. A high pressure pump sent ink through the tube, which the drew a line that wiggled from side to side with the signal – the incredible thing about the device was that it would do this up  to 10000 times a second!    Our recorder moved the Jet Pen back and forth across the paper in syncronisation with the firing of the gun to produce a raster display (like an old TV picture).  Our design problem was that the pen was quite heavy and we had to accelerate it rapidly, move it  at an exact speed across the paper, stop it quickly, and get it back to the beginning again at exactly the same rate every time.  Now one could program the whole thing into a microcomputer in a day, then Mike spend months designing acceleration and decceleration  circuits using logic chips, and all the control logic and option controls – a tour de force of electronic design and a very sucessful recorder – the best display by far at that time – we made a couple for other groups.  I’m sure Mike wouldn’t mind me telling a couple of good stories about him!  He had lost a leg in an accident as a young man, but you would never have known – in fact we really never did know until one day on board ship a very heavy weight fell on his foot and he didn’t flinch!  On another occasion on board the Charles Darwin we were discussing our cabins and how to get into the top bunks in a lively sea, and Mike said, quite calmly, that it often took him three or four goes to throw himself up there.  Going through customs in, I think, Rio, he was asked to open his suitcase – to reveal his lifelike spare leg – I’ve never seen a customs officer shut a case so fast!  I was next, and had some lollipops in my top pocket – the customs officer asked what they were, so I said I’d give her one if she didn’t open my case – she took the lolly.  Customs officers are strange beasts – going into the Canaries I had a very heavy case with a large bit of equipment that only just fitted in the case, around which I had packed my few clothes.  The porter signalled to the Customs Officer that the case was heavy, so he asked what was in it – I couldn’t think of an inoccent answer, so he suggested books – OK! He then proceeded to do what I can only describe as a mock search – he went all round the case, and appeared to be searching but carefully never lifted the shirt on top that would have revealed the equipment!  I did get done over fairly thoroughly leaving Cyprus on a ferry for Turkey once – to the extent of squeezing my toothpaste tube, opening match boxes and wanting to know what was under my shirt – I started to take it off but they thought that wasn’t on in the public hall. I was made to wait while they went to the office and checked files for an age and obviously thought that I was engaged in smuggling antiquities out of Cyprus, to the extent that they had someone follow me on the ferry  and watch me on the way across – must have been a case of mistaken identity.

Like all organisations there was always some politics going on somewhere, and shortly after I joined there was a move by the Professor of Geology, Harry Whittington, to investigate the possibility of amalgamating the three departments of Geology, Geodesy and Geophysics and Mineralogy so he set up a series of meetings of all the  academic staff of the three departments to discuss the possibility.  This was many years before the amalcgamation actually took place without such  democratic concern!  I went to the first meeting in a lecture theatre in Geology, but because I’d never set foot in the place it took me a while to find the theatre, so I came in late, Prof Whittington was chairing the crowded meeting, saw me looking for a seat and pointed to a space next to him, which I took.  He then needed to appoint a secretary to the meeting, and picked me as I was sitting next to him – thus I became the secretary of the Amalgamation Meeting.  Afterwards he asked me what College I belonged to – as I wasn’t a Cambridge graduate and didn’t have a fellowship, I said none – to which he replied that ‘We must do something about that’, and subsequently got me dining rights in Churchill, which I very much enjoyed throughout my working life as it meant that I had the company of many bright people every lunchtime, and there was always someone who knew the answers to obscure questions of science, history, politics or finance.  The Amalgamation Meetings didn’t get anywhere as there wasn’t a consensus, although there was a general feeling that somehow it ought to be a good idea.  The experience points out an interesting feature of  some of the old grandees of the academic world like Harry and Teddy, that they had a strong view of the importance of the young and junior staff  compared to more recent holders of those posts.  It used to be said of Teddy that if he was talking to a senior academic and a student knocked on his door he would  ask the academic to wait while he dealt with the student – he certainly always made junior staff feel important.

I had another political involvement in University life fairly early on –  I’d had casual commercial enterprises from time to time before I joined the University as I’ll explain later, but at some point the General Board of the University decided that Technical Officers, which is what I was, would have to ask permission of the General Board before they could earn any money in addition to their salaries.  This was completely unworkable requirement as the General Board was the top management for the whole University, and anyway it was totally discriminatory since many other academics had lucrative consultancies, and no University medic could survive without his private patients.   But there were not many Technical Officers – a hundred or so  – so it was quite possible that it would pass unopposed . So I had to learn how to navigate the University systems in double quick time.  The first thing I had to do was to call for a Discussion in the Senate House by submitting a ‘fly sheet’ to be circulated in the University Reporter, which I seem to think required a few signatures – I began to circulate all the other Technical Officers to get them to respond, and we did get a Discussion in the Senate House, at which as well as the general issues, I asked the General Board if they really wished to be involved if I offered to cut my neighbour’s lawn for a pound.  Going downstairs after the discussion I heard a couple of the GB members say to each other ‘who do these people think they are’! of me and the Technical Officers in general.  Anyway following the discussion the GB revised the proposed requirement and removed themselves from the permissioning and passing it to heads of Departments, so my point had been taken. The next step was a vote by the Regent House – that is all the academic staff of the University – in order to vote you had to go in person to the Senate House wearing your academic gown!   I continued to lobby and in the end the proposal was rejected by several hundred to 13,  by coincidence the exact number of academics on the General Board!  That was fortunately my only brush with the Universitiy’s arcane democracy, and the issue never surfaced again except occasionally in an informal,  half hearted way at Department level.

As I alluded to above, I have always been driven to commercialise my interests in a gentle way, not I think from any great desire to make money, for I’ve never had that as a prime objective, but because it validates what I do by giving it an external use.  I think it was encouraged when I was young, I can remember at about 14 having a Wolf Cub electric drill with a faceplate and making a stand for it and turning up dozens of wooden ashtrays and selling them at a Girl Guide bazaar – I remember because it burnt out the drill, and the money I made just covered the cost of the replacement! I guess that probably set the pattern of just about covering my costs with my enterprises!  I think the first real commerical enterprise when I was an adult involved a friend who had just set up on his own making and selling temperature measuring devices – his first was a nifty device for vets – a thermistor that you could put near/up an anaesthatised animal’s nose and converted the temperature of their breath to varying tones, so the vet was able to monitor their respiration without loosing attention from an operation.  He rang me one day and said that he had just signed an agreement to manufacture and sell a device for measuring transpiration from plant leaves in situu – a potentially important agricultural research measurement, and would I cast my eye over the prototype that the academic who developed it  had made and that he was going to produce.  I did, and I had to tell him that there was no way the digital circuits and display using the then power hungry devices could be field portable – worn hanging on the chest as he envisaged it – as at the very least you would have to lug a large car battery around with you.  I offered to ‘have a look’ at the problem – he had no money left for paying me so I offered to do it for a 5% royalty.  I threw out all the digital electronics and the electronic digital display and came up with a simple analogue circuit – I got round the digital display problem with what was then called a ‘Post Office Counter’ – an electric click counter with a display like a car odometer, and which ony used power when it was actually counting or resetting.  The whole circuit was very economical of power, worked at least as well as the original and could be powered off a rechargeable battery and worn on a neck strap – a very neat piece of retro design, even if I say it myself.  The device, called a porometer, really set his business up, and sold very well, so the extent that after a few years we both got embarrased at the royalty cheques (he was a friend, remember) so I halved the royalty.  Eventually he hired an electronic engineer for his business and by that time digital electronics was less power hungry so a MK II version made mine obselete.- end of royalties.

When I joined G+G we built several bits of kit for ourselves that other groups wanted, so I used to copy it for them – with the encouragement of Teddy Bullard – and so started my electronics manufacturing  business that I ran as a sideline throughout my working life and as a full time consultancy when I retired from the lab in 2001.  One of the early jobs was indirectly for the Gentral Electricity Generating Board – a sub contractor had received a regular order for banks of amplifiers to condition the signals from vibration sensors on turbine generators.  The specification had been based on a commercially available integrated circuit, but the CEGB had pushed the specifications up so that the integrated circuit would no longer pass inspection, which I was told was rigorous.  I designed and built a number of units that all passes their tests, but it turned out that in fact the equipment was no longer in use and the units were just tested and then put on a shelf and had been for almost all the contract- nevertheless I got paid!  Actually in the life of my business I did several jobs that came to nothing, because the client hadn’t thought through what they were about, and overall spent many months on such red herrings – I always got paid, except once when I had to fight for it with one of the largest civil engineering companies in the country.  There was a time when there were a number of occurences of subsidence in the midlands due to the collapse of old underground limestone workings, and the company was trying to get a contract to measure ground tilt as a pre-cursor to subsistence.  We at that time had some highly precise tilt measurement techniques so they approached me to come up with an urgent design for a unit that they could present to the appropriate government ministry for funding for a major survey.  I did some work on a possible design and a couple of executives came up to my office and looked over my design – I could see that they didn’t like it, and when pressed said that they had already presented a preliminary document and that my design didn’t match the presentation they had submitted!   I was a little amused that they thought they knew more about the design that I did, but ever helpful I said I would come up with a design that matched their visualisation, on the principle that it pays to act as if the client knows best.  So I bought a large steel box section for the tiltmeter, and was about to make the prototype when I got a phone call saying that the project was cancelled, so I stopped, and sent in an invoice for my time and the box section – about a  thousand pounds or so in all.  I got a snotty letter from the finance officer saying that I’d been working on spec and had no order for the work, so no money. Its true that I hadn’t had an order but had been told by a senior executive that it was urgent and an order would follow, but not to wait.  I couldn’t shift the finance officer, and me against one of the biggest civil engineering firms in the World seemed a bit one sided, but I don’t give up easily!  I had been engaged with a number of senior engineers in the company during the project, and knew they wouldn’t approve, so I rang each one’s P.A. and found out when they were in the UK and when they were abroad – it wasn’t difficult to extract the information, so I wrote to the finance officer and proposed we  had a meeting with the engineers on a particular date when they were all in the UK, detailing where they were beforehand etc.  The cheque arrived two days later.  The large steel box section followed me round for ten or twenty  years and I built it in as an RSJ when I rebuilt a chimney in this house 20 years ago – waste nothing, and thanks Ove Arup and Partners for that!

One of the annoying difficulties with my very small enterprise was that quite a lot of the jobs that came my way were via a subcontractor to the main customer, which meant that I could never interact with the end user as the sub contractor wasn’t about to let on that he had sublet the job.  It was particularly annoying on one job – the main customer wanted to monitor the oxygen content of the outflow from the Wash in Lincolnshire using  half a dozen measuring stations spaced along the channel. The sub contractor had previously had someone design a remote recording system, and they had got as far as to build the mechanical bits for the proposed design which didn’t leave me much scope for redesign.  The problem was that I could see that the systems weren’t going to achieve the results, however well I finished them.  The basic idea was to place an instrument in a cylindrical housing on the bottom of the channel and every hour a pair of ‘petals’ would open and admit water to the sensor for a reading to be made, then the petals would close again and squirt a dose of  disinfectant into the closed volume to stop things growing on the sensors.  Then every couple of days someone would go out in a boat and pull up the instrument and take it back to the lab and recover the data and clean and recharge it.  They also planned to build a gantry with a winch for one sensor position.  My thoughts were that this was a very complex system for a limited data set, with a pretty high chance of failure, given the mud and silt it would be sitting in.  I didn’t have the chance to view the proposed deployment sites, but my feeling was that as the experiment was only intended to run for a couple of months there were probably easier ways to get samples of the river water – for some of the sites I thought that a weighted hose with a pump on shore that could be visited periodically would be possible.  Anyway I kept to my contract and developed the electronic control and recording system for the instruments, and I had finished the prototype when I got the message that the project had been called off because it was too complex and they didn’t think it would work –  my response to this was that I’d stop work there and then and give them a 5% discount, or carry on and finish them.  I was relived that they accepted the 5% discount as its disheartening making things that you know won’t be used, and it probably saved me 50% of the work and cost

Without wishing to sound as if all my jobs were aborted – in fact I think only 3 were, here is last one as its quite amusing:-   Some years ago there was an earthquake – not a big one on the world scale, but it was felt over quite an area, so significant by British standards  ( there has only been one recorded death in an earthquake in the UK – in Wivenhoe in the 19th century).  Anyway the  significance of this quake was that it occured on a fault that ran through the site of a  nuclear power station. Although not in that part, it excited the operators as it raised the possiblity that there could be an earthquake near the site – there concern was heightened by the fact that the construction of the reactor building was not properly documented, so it was impossible to do a full analysis of the effect of a local earthquake of similar magnitude.  Their solution was to set up a monitoring network of seismic sensors around the site to see how much activity there was normally, and look for unusual activity.  They gave the task to a sub contractor, who approached me to build the seismic instruments, transmission system and recording system, which was to be a large paper drum recorder as was often used for seismic monitoring.  The network was to be connected by dedicated telephone lines around 10 km long  on poles back to the lab site on the site.  The seimis sensors and electronics were to be situated in manholes at the base of the last telephone pole and fed by power over the lines as is normal with telephones (at least until about 2025 when power will be withdrawn).  Because it was using telephone lines and going via normal telephone circuits the electronics had to pass the Post Office specifications, which are pretty stringent, and gave me a lot of satisfaction to design the transmission system and go to the Post Office lab and have them tested and to pass.  I’d got all the electronics designed and  prototypes built, and was looking at the skeleton of the massive recorder I’d had made, and wondering how on earth I was going to get it to work.  I decided that at this stage before I built the actual equiment I needed to go  and look at all the seismic sites and get an idea of where it was all going.  When I asked, the sub contractor stalled repeatedly, and I pressed as I know that it is important to get an overall impression before proceeding.  Eventually I was told that one of the farmers on whose land one seismic station was to be sited was insisting that we needed planning permission to build a manhole and put up a telephone pole. This of course presented the powers that be with a problem, because in applying for planning permission they would have to reveal what they were doing, and hence that there was a risk to the power station from an earthquake – so instead of finding another station they called off the whole project.  Another 5% discount job, which was quite a relief because I could forget about the recorder, and not have to build all the equipment – I did though, have to give them all the expensive seismometers I’d purchased for the job, but I suppose that was fair!

Just in case you get the impression that everything I did was aborted, I made a lot of systems for the Scott Pilar research Institute in Cambridge for use in measuring Ice properties  – we made a number of short, 1m long strainmeters to bolt to the ice to measure strain in glaciers in Antarctica, and at one point on a large floating iceberg.  These of course had to work down to pretty cold tempreatures.  I built a series for BP to instrument an artificial island they were constructing in the Arctic to house a drilling rig, for which the spec was that the electronics had to work down to -18 C.  This presented a bit of a problem as commercial chips and transistors are not specified at those temperatures, and even  military spec devices I could get only go down to about -10C.  I realised that they were all basically the same devices, so the difference was just the  mil. spec ones were tested at low temperature so I bought a supply of the commercial ones and built a simple test rig and put them in an environmental test chamber that I had access to, and checked ;them at -20C  They all worked – although some were a bit low in gain so I discarded those, and built the equipment from the ones that were OK – when I tested the equipment it all worked at -20, just as well I did as the first thing BP did was to test them at low temperatures.  Several of the devices I built for use on the Ice had data loggers, and for some years I developed a range of very low powered data loggers baded on the RCA 1805 microprocessor – the sucessor to the 1802 that I had first used in the heat flow equipment.

At about the time I retired from the labs I got involved with the Geotechnics section of the Engineering Department at Cambridge, who were needing some better data loggers to run on their experimental centrifuges………………..

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Posted by at 6:46 pm
Aug 212021
 

One class of antique firearms misses out on attention – little pocket pistols!  Apart from the ‘Queen Anne’ pistols, which were mostly not pocket sized, the bog standard boxlock flintlock and percussion socket pistols are held in scant regard by most collectors, and I’ve yet to find a book dedicated to them.  They were, however, probably among the most widely produced and owned firarms of the period – if not the most used.  They evolved from the Queen Anne pistol, which had a turn-off barrel screwed onto a breech which was made integral with the lock plate on the right hand side and the floor plate, making a three sided box , with the cock and frizzen spring on the outside of the lock plate side and the trigger pivoting in the floor plate.  This arrangement meant that there was still the need for a tumbler on the inside of the lock plate.    The box lock came about when it was realised that by moving the cock inside to the centre line, the tumbler could be dispensed with, thus simplifying the design.  To support the pivot for the cock another side could be added on the left, and then a slotted top plate to cover the mechanism When used with a conventional trigger, the sear could become part of the trigger, and the bents could be cut in the cock breast, thus reducing the basic lock parts count to cock, trigger, trigger spring and mainspring.  the pan had of course moved to the top of the barrel and the frizzen could be mounted directly over the breech.   The butt at the back completed the sixth side of the box and enclosed the mainspring. A safety catch was added to anything but the very cheapest boxlocks, either by a sliding trigger guard that locked the trigger(?) or a slider on top of the top plate that both intersected the mainspring and inserted a pin through into the pan cover to prevent it opening. These pistols probably made their appearance around the middle of the 18th century or a bit later. They gained in popularity in cities where street violence was fairly common, including large parts of London during the last quarter of the 18th and first quarter of the 19th centuries.  For the most part they were a utilitarian pistol and would have  been cheap to make and cheap to buy – almost certainly the vast majority of the more utilitarian – bog standard- pistols would have been turned out in their hundreds by Birmingham gunmakers and engraved, probably as part of the manufacture, with the names of the eventual retailer.  It is as unusual to see on engraved ‘Birmingham’ as it is to find one engraved ‘London’ that was actually made in London! Even those that were made in London were probably made from rough forgings made in Birmingham.  You will find the names of famous gunmakers engraved on these basic little pistols – some may have been retailed by those makers or given away with their expensive guns,  but more often it was just put on by the maker to sell more, mostly when the named maker had left the trade..   Here its important to note the way that the Birmingham gunmaking trade was organised as a whole raft of separate independent craftsmen, each making one or two parts of the pistol and nothing else – the ‘gunmaker was the name given to the organiser of the enterprise who may or may not have had a role in physically making the pistol, but probably not. As a result of the volumes produced, the raw forgings and manufactured parts from Birmingham were usually much cheaper than could be produced in London.

There were variations on the boxlock pocket pistol design, and they came in a variety of sizes and qualities , including some good quality ones that may have been fitted up by good gunmakers, and a few presentation pieces or quality items sold as a cased graniture with other pistols.  One early variation was the folding trigger, which reduced the bulk of the pistol considerably and made it more suitable to carry in a pocket or purse at the expense of adding two more parts – a sear that shared the pivot with the trigger, and a spring that acted to close the trigger into the recess in the bottom.  Functional variations included ways of adding additional barrels to give better defence capabilities – the most common variety being double barreled pocket pistols with vertically stacked barrels and a tap action to shut off ignition to the bottom barrel while the top barrel was being fired.  Extending the number of barrels to three or four by various ingenious means again increase the defensive capability.  A further variation combined the tap action with a superimposed charge in a single barrel – the barrel was made in two parts corresponding to the double charge, see below.

 

Basic functional flintlock turnoff flintlock with the name ‘H Nock’ on the side – Birmingham proof marks. Butt wood a fancy replacement

Superimposed load tap action pistol

Neat decent quality small pocket pistols of the ‘cap guard’ variety, sometimes called ‘top hat pistols – W & S Rooke

 

About as basic as it gets!

Still pretty basic but omewhat better quality – probably typical of the bulk of Birmingham’s output of pocket pistols. by(?)  John Bates

 

A bit bigger,  and a bit better quality too – ( retailed) by Boby of Newmarket

 

Probably a bit big for a pocket, they have a belt clip, so count as belt pistols – but nice quality by Salmond of Perth

 Posted by at 11:14 pm
Mar 072021
 

23rd Jan.  Just had a delivery of logs, so I’ll be OK in the workshop for a while!   Here is the method of checking the strike angle of flints on frizzens, taken from an old copy of Muzzle Blasts.  It clearly assumes that the cock is right for your lock so that the flint hits the frizzen somewhere near the top – usually between about 3/4 of the way up although the  article doesn’t cover that aspect.  You can either do the drawing on a  good photo of your flintlock, or on a blank piece of paper  – to do a paper drawing you need a school compass – draw a line and mark point A, measure of the distance between the cock screw and the frizzen pivot using the compass and mark on your line as point B. Use your compass to measure from the top of the frizzen face to the frizzen pivot and draw a bit of a circle on your diagram.  repeat from the centre of the cock screw. where the circles cross is the position of the top of the frizzen – label that point C.  Do the same for the base of the frizzen face – label the crossing point D.  You now have all the information relating to your gun that you need.  You will need a protractor or a 60 degree and 30 degree template, which you can make easily by cutting the corner off a square piece of card such that one side is 60 mm long and the other is 104 mm long.  ( Tan-1 of 104/60 being 60 degrees). Now you can do the rest of the construction following the instructions on the photo.  If you have lost your school compasses (careless, you’ll get a detention!)) then first draw in the 60 degree line, then mark along it a distance equal to the distance AD using a scrap of paper – that’s E.  Job done…. ( detention: copy out one of the posts on this website in longhand, hand it in by Wednesday)

19th Jan   Had a few days of going through the last year’s papers and trying to make sense of my tax return!  Each day I reward myself if I make it to 16oo hrs with a cup of tea and an hour or so in the workshop.  My project was to make a tool for unscrewing the Nock touch-hole – basically two tungsten pins in an EN 8 steel tool, mounted in a wooden ( Indian Ebony) handle with a brass ferrule.  I made the first attempt, but the cheap digital readout on my little milling machine played up and I got the spacing of the pins wrong, so I had to make it again.  I did find one other problem with the first one – I wanted to put the pins in with epoxy glue, but there was no way for the air in the holes to escape, so the pins kept coming out until I put it in a vice.  So on the second try I was very careful to set the spacing of the holes right, and I drilled a small hole through the side joining the bottoms of the holes to let the air out.  The shaft, brass ferrule and handle were of a classic 19th century design, but held together with a modern epoxy glue.  Job done – I’ll put a few coats of Osma Top Oil on the finished wood – its a rather good oil finish that I used for all the worktops in the kitchen – it goes on as 3 or 4 very thin coats and dries as hard as iron ( well, nearly).

14th Jan  Almost done all I can to the Nock until I can get out and shoot it – I hardened the steel, as the upright part of the frizzen is, or was, called but I still can’t get a spark – I will have to dig out a better flint.  I may yet have to put a face on the steel.  I made a touch hole today – I really only meant to do a trial run as I’m not very confident about screwcutting on my lathe and the thread isn’t anything you can buy a die for, being 9 mm diameter and 22 t.p.i – both pretty precisely.  Anyway I fiddled about with the gearbox and gears and sorted out directions of travel etc. and chucked a piece of 10 mm titanium rod and did a test pass of a 55 degree tool – OK – it is 22 t.p.i, which is a good start!   I started off  putting a taper on the internal face with a centre drill, and drilling a 4 mm hole about 6 mm deep followed by a 1.7 mm drill in excess of the required length of the touch hole.   Fortunately the thread I have to cut doesn’t have a shoulder so I didn’t have to start the thread abruptly, making it much easier  as I could keep the leadscrew engaged all the time.  I did a few passes cutting a bit deeper each time until it looked about right.  If I had a collet set I could take the rod out of the lathe to test the fit and be sure to get it back exactly, but my chuck is not fantastic, so I took a chance and stopped the cutting.  The thread was a tight fit in the barrel, but as the breech block was dead hard I didn’t mind using a bit of force to screw it in, and it seemed to go as far as the drum it was replacing had gone.  Once I’d got it well in, I filed it off flush with the breech block and drilled a couple of 1.7 mm holes for pins to screw and unscrew it.  I hope it works – the good news is that the touchhole finished up with the 4 mm drill ending about 1 1/5 mm back from the face – pretty well ideal.  It fits the gun well, perhaps 1/2 a mm high in relation to the pan, but I hope nothing serious….  I guess a titanium touch hole is good?  I’ve never had problems with titanium nipples so it should be OK, and I do love working with titanium!   I now have to make a tool for unscrewing and screwing the touchhole – at the moment I’m using 2 TIG welding electrodes of tungsten – 1.6 mm diameter held in a pair of pliers!

It looks as if the peaks of the thread were the tight bit – old threads were much more rounded in thread profile.

11 th Jan – One of those days when things don’t go to plan!    I found I had to move the hole for the sear pivot in the lockplate by about .75 mm as I couldn’t get things to work. moving a tapped  hole by a small amount is tricky, so I dropped a 5 mm end mill onto the new position and made a tight fitting plug with a slight taper and tapped it in from the outside and filed it flush on the inside so I could run a weld round the joint.  My welder has a home made pedal controller on the current and it chose that moment for the potentiometer to go open circit and deliver 130 Amps when I touched the pedal with pretty dramatic consequences to both sides of the lock tail!  I swapped back to the internal control and recovered the mess with a judicious bit of welding and a file!   The I managed to break off a No 4 UNF tap in a hole – luckily I was able to extract the end of it!  Then I drilled the hole for the peg on the mainspring and got it in the wrong place so had to plug it, weld over the back and drill a new hole.   Last job of the day was to file the square in the cock – its a tricky job because there is not much tolerance on the angle of the square, or you get the cock positions in the wrong place, or the mainspring hangs below the edge of the lockplate when the cock is on its stop – there are fudges to put things right ( see other posts) but its nice to get it right first  time.  Its also tricky to get a good fit on the tumbler square and takes a lot of careful work with a square file. Anyway for once the square in the cock is dead right!   If its a straightforward fitting of a cock onto a tumbler then I usually get it near and press fit them in a vice to form a tight fit, but in this case I want the tumbler to be usable with the percussion lock parts, so don’t want to deform it.  I did have one other annoying problem in putting it together – I had very carefully marked the positions of the bridle, tumbler, sear pivot and sear spring using a steel jig but when I came to fit the sear spring I found that the lower spring blade was too long and hit the radius part round the pivot – I did grind a bit off on the grounds that it would still work with the percussion parts!    I still have a little tidying up to do as the tail of the lockplate doesn’t fit snugly into the wood – the lockplate is a bit bent in the wrong way – not sure how I’ll tackle that as any bending of the lockplate will throw all the alignments off, but we’ll see..  I also have to make the touch hole – I’ll turn it out of titanium with a 22 t.p.i thread  – I don’t think I can put any sort of head on it as I can’t/don’t want to touch the breech block (Its dead hard, and fits the nipple barrel for the percussion use).  Anyway the lock fires well, the cock hits the frizzen and the frizzen flies open – I don’t get any sparks as the frizzen doesn’t have a hard enough surface and the flint is no good, but there is no reason why it shouldn’t spark well – there is lots of snap in the mainspring, and the frizzen flip point is just right…. we shall see…  Altogether it has been an interesting project – given that I was just copying an existing percussion lock and using the internals you would think that it would all go together easily if you just copied the positions of the holes exactly – but for some reason, perhaps due to minor discrepancies or slight curvature of the plate, it was a real pig to get things to work! ( Of course the pan and frizzen and frizzen spring were items from the ‘spares ‘ box)

Half cock.

Full cock.

9th Jan  – Started on the ‘works’ for the lock – I decided to begin by trasferring the parts from the original lock to my lockplate – I can replace them with new later.   I made a spring steel jig from the original lock by making bits of steel rod into punches that exactly fitted the screw holes in the lock and marking and drilling the holes, then transferring the plate to the new lock and marking and drilling the holes in the lock plate.  Unfortunately there is not a handy thread size to match the original screws – they are 3.05 diameter and 40 t.p.i. – between UNF 4 and 5, so I settled on 4 (2.85 OD) as it has to pass through 3.05 mm. holes – bit of a fiddle as the shanks are now slightly bigger than the threads so another diameter to turn…  Anyway I made the 4 screws necessary and it all fits together – I probably need to remake the sear pivot screw as the shank is a bit slack, but that can wait. One of the things I find really tricky is getting the slots in the heads of screws exactly in the centre – I put the slots in by hand using a bit of hacksaw blade ground down to a tapered edge – I have a number of different degrees of grinding for different slot widths.   Now I have to make the hole in the lockplate for the tumbler.  Despite my very careful jig making I am not absolutely certain that the pilot hole in the lockplate aligns perfectly with the back bearing in the bridle – I realise I should not have put in a pilot hole, but left it til the bridle was in place and then drilled the lockplate through the bridle, but I’ll sort it – I may have to do a bit of adjustment of the hole position as I enlarge it to 7 mm for the tumbler ( I think it can only be 1/4 of a mm out.).  Still its getting there!  I will need to find my knife gravers to make the slot for the tab on the sear spring – everything got spread around when I vacated my workshop to be the kitchen!

Jig is clamped and held by running instant glue round the edge.

I was quite pleased with the slots in the heads, I don’t usually get them that central! They are a bit too fine.

 

8th Jan – I retraced my screw making steps of yesterday!  I managed to remove the bit of screw from the outboard frizzen pivot support by heating it with a tiny flame and cutting a minute slot and unscrewing it. I made the new frizzen spring fixing screw bigger, UNF 5 as the boss was big enough to accomodate it and it does take a lot of strain.  Frizzen springs are attached at the lock plate face, but the force on them is where the frizzen heel touches the roller – i.e. outboard, so there is a force rotating the frizzen spring away from the lock – you often see it on flintlocks, not usually bad enough to worry.  Anyway its all working nicely now.  The spring closes almost completely when the pan opens – if I were making the lock again with the bebefit of hindsight I would have tilted the pan casting up  at the front of the lock so as to leave a bit more room, but it seems to work.  I’m still puzzled as to how the screws got to be so hard!  I tempered the bit of the frizzen pivot up to 300C for a good 15 minutes but it still snapped when I tried to bend it. at a rather low level of force.  I didn’t harden or temper the new screws!  I ordered a selection of EN8 round bar so I have a stock of known material in future.  I tried silver steel but its a pig to get a good finish when turning so I used the previous material.  I reckon I can just get away with the cock in the same place as in the original lock – that will mean that I can copy all the internals ( or I suppose, use them interchangably between the two locks if I’m feeling lazy).  Looking at the photos I’d say the cock was a bit big for the lock, but its not so obvious when looking at the real thing – I often see things when I come to put photos on the website that I miss in the flesh.  Its good to have the photos on the blog – so often one (I) takes dozens of photos and never looks at them.  Reminds me of the joke about some foreigh visitors – husband says “look at this fantastic view'”, wife says “just take a photo and I’ll look when we are back home”.

The frizzen spring doesn’t have a lot of room, but is just OK!

 

Initial contact may be a little high, we’ll see how it works when finished.

7th Jan. – Its getting near to the time when I have to do my Tax for the year – but for the moment I can afford to play!  Todays jobs went OK .  I drilled and tapped the frizzen pivot hole and turned a pin with a UNF4 thread tapped into the outboard support. The inside hole was very close to the edge of the ‘bolster’ so it has a minimal head.  I fettled up the frizzen spring and centered and drilled the hole through the boss and turned up a UNF4 pin with a countersink head to fit the outside of the frizzen spring boss ( an unusual arrangement) and turned up a small roller to bear on the toe of the frizzen pivot.  The Frizzen pivot is quite low down on the lock plate and by the time the spring has a roller mounted there is not a lot of room for the spring to open and close.  I closed the spring up in the vice so that its natural opening was a bit bigger than it would be with the frizzen open, but not excessively so – a bit of a guess!  I  heated the spring up to red heat with my oxy-gas torch (the one that supplied my Covid oxygen!) as my regular butane torch wasn’t hot enough when I brought it in from the freezing shed to properly vaporise the gas and dumped it in water, then polished it on the buffing wheel and found a spot on the AGA hotplate that was about 305 degrees (using a radiation thermometer) and put the spring down, covered with 3 layers of aluminium foil and closed the lid for 10 minutes to temper it.  The screws and the roller were hardened using Blackleys colour case hardening powder  – I stupidly tried the frizzen pivot screw without tempering it and broke off a bit of the threaded end in the hole – fortunately leaving enough to work, although it may give trouble in use.  I just didn’t appreciate how hard/brittle EN8 could be!  The tricky part was getting the holes to mount the frizzen spring in the right place so the bump on teh frizzen pivot goes through the null point at about 30 degrees opening and thereafter throws the frizzen back covincingly – I did manage to get that right although the spring might benefit from opening a bit to give a bit more snap – we’ll see when it sll together and we have the cock and mainspring etc working.  Bother – I was sitting there opening and closing the frizzen when the frizen fixing screw  sheared off – even after I had tempered it to 280 degrees, not sure what is going on – will sort out tomorrow and get some photos!

 

6th Jan  Since we are now in lockdown I couldn’t go and get Jason our expert welder to weld in the pan, so I did it myself – it made a bit of a mess of the lockplate but it has cleaned up reasonably well given that the pan section didn’t have much of a margin and was thinner than the lockplate.  It will work…  Next job was to sort the frizzen – the nearest casting I had didn’t quite fit – it was either right for the pivot hole and wrong for the pan, or vice versa.  I araldited the frizzen into the correct place for the pivot and drilled a 2.4 mm hole for a pin – just as I started to drill I saw that it wasn’t quite right, so had to pop the lock in the AGA to soften the araldite and start again. Having got a good pivot hole in the lock and frizzen, I cut the frizzen halfway between the pivot and the pan and filed the joint so that I could glue the pivot and the pan in place and tack weld the frizzen back together – that worked rather well, and even cleaned up reasonably – my only doubt is whether it will be strong enough in use.  I filed up a rather large top jaw casting to fit – although why I didn’t just start from a bit of 6 mm plate as I usually do, is a mystery… Anyway that is done so I set up the cock and ran an end mill down the back of the top to clear the cock screw and tapped it No 12 UNC – I’d have preferred UNF but I don’t have a die for that size. I turned a matching top jawscrew from a scrap of EN8 16 mm round bar.   With a bit of judicious filing on the back of the frizzen it now fits perfectly and holds a flint nicely, although I need to raise a few spikes on the gripping surfaces.   Now I can see how the flint hits the frizzen and decide where to put the tumbler hole.  I had a look at the lock of my John Manton double flint gun which has a similar shaped pan but a cock with a ‘spur’ – semi French ? –  I have a very similar cock that I was thinking of using, but the spur cock would need the tumbler nearer the flash shield so it could act as a stop.  I did some measuring – the arm on tumblers that carries the link to the mainspring defines the leverage and tends to be more or less the same length on all similar sized locks.  This arm has to clear the ‘bolster, whose rearward extent is fixed by the poition of the side nail – this means that the distance between the side nail and the tumbler axis  needs to be more or less constant.  In my Manton the side nail is quite a lot closer to the touch hole than on my Nock lock, so the tumbler axis can be nearer the pan, hence the spur cock will fit.  If you didn’t follow that, never mind, its another example of the inter-relationship between all the different bits of the lock – its no wonder that the designs stayed the same for long periods.  With the frizzen in place if I put the cock on the original tumbler position the flint strikes the frizzen a little near the top, although I think it would work OK ( I seem too remember about 2/3 to 3/4 of the way up is usual – however, I’ve just had a look at the Manton and it strikes at exactly the same place on the frizzen as mine, so I won’t worry and will keep the same tumbler centre.   Next job is to make the proper frizzen screw  –  The screw obviously passes through the frizzen as a plain shaft but can either be tapped into the outboard end of the frizzen support, or into the lockplate end.  The Manton has the screw head on the outside and the thread in the lock plate, but I think its more usual to have the screwhead on the inside of the lock and the tapped thread on the support arm.  I think I’ve also seen the scewhead on the inside of the lock, and a tapped larger thread in the lockplate so the end in the support arm is plain. I will probably copy the Manton.  The screw that holds the frizzen spring  can similarly either be tapped into the spring itself with the screwhead on the inside ( the more common arrangement ) or screwed in from the outside with the head visible.  I have little choice as the spring casting I’ve got is intended to have the screwhead outside and I’m not sure there is enough metal to file it into the other pattern..  After that its the inside ‘works’.

I did a bit more filing before welding  but you get the idea….!

Cock is in the position is in the original Nock lock  – I think it is OK…

I rather wanted to use this spurred cock as on the John Manton but it won’t fit!

4th Jan   I bit the bullet and engraved the name on the lock – more or less OK!  I made the hook on the toe of the lock to go under the screwhead that retains the front of the lock – the lock plate is slightly curved so that the lock can be fed under the screw – I hadn’t noticed that before.  My technique for the hook is to build up a pile of weld, then file it to shape  – it ended up with a curved back as that is what the weld did – it works perfectly!   I tacked the pan into the lock plate – it was a bit of a mess as I made a few mistakes that I had to weld over, but it turned out OK in the end – I have just left the critical joint under the pan on the front of the lock – I’ll need to be feeling confident to do that – my TIG welding is not very expert and I’m a bit out of practice.  It all looks as if it is coming together – I need to make a top jaw and top jaw screw so that I can see exactly how the cock falls on the frizzen before I drill the tumbler hole, and put in the pivot for the frizzen.  I’m not sure if there is enough metal in the frizzen in the right place for the pivot.  I’ll araldite the frizzen to the pan and drill a small hole through the support bracket, frizzen and lockplate to see how they align.  I’ll need to do a bit of sorting on the tail of the frizzen to get the lump that engages the frizzen spring to go through the slot cut in the pan support – another complication……  Makes you realise how complex and inter related all  these bits are!  And that still leaves all the internals and the frizzen spring……….

 

Photos not up to my usual standard, not sure what happened – sorry!

3rd Jan  Still quite a lot of messing around finding all the bits of my old workshop that got moved out when it was a temporary kitchen, and putting them back.  I had tmy engraving microscope, but not the hone that I need by it for sharpening gravers.  I put the TIG welder and Argon back but then had to find the rinder to sharpen electrodes, and so it goes on!  I filed the bevel/chamfer on the lock plate – more or less Ok, and did a bit of practice engraving on EN 8 to make sure I could cut the border lines well enough – I decided I could, so they are on the lockplate too.  I cleaned up the cock so I could see how it fitted – I want to keep the same tumbler position as in the original Nock lock as it enables me to copy the shapes of all the internal components.  I can’t, for instance, move the tumbler towards the pan as that would not leave room for the arm on the tumbler that carries the link to the mainspring, and shortening the arm would call for a stronger spring…. Its all interconnected!  if I were just making a flint lock for display or a an ‘antique’ it probably wouldn’t matter too much, but my aim is to make a gun that shoots, and that has implications for the internal mechanism etc.  The main issue for me is that some flintlocks fire really fast and are good to shoot, while others don’t seem t obe amenable to tuning for fast ignition – and it would seem that this is more art than science – indeed a black art!

2nd Jan – Dry fitted the pan into the lock plate, which took a lot of filing and trying – Its important to get the pan positioned correctly in relation to the touch hole – which is a little tricky as the touch hole itself hasn’t been made yet and the hole for it is 9 mm diameter.  Its important that the touch hole is slightly above the pan because for fast ignition its the flash from the burning powder that ignites the main charge via the touch hole – the flash travels much faster than the burn rate through powder, so if you pile up powder over the touch hole you may get more reliable ignition but it will be slower than flashed ignition.  my double Manton has little ‘shutters’ on the frizzens that cover the touch holes and push any priming powder  away from the touch hole.  The shutters have a small hole to allow air to escape but will (probably) keep any powder from the main charge from entering the pan.  It was a Manton patent but never caught on.  Anyway the pan is now ready to weld, but I think before I do that I’ll file the chamfers on the lock.  I did try a cut with a graver on the lock material, but the EN8 seems harder than I remember, or else its so long since I engraved anything that I’ve forgotten what it feels like! (I probably need to anneal it! what a pain)  I’ll probably put my name on the lock if I can cut it as I am not trying to pass it off as the work of Henry Nock!

 

 

1st Jan. 2021 – HAppy New Year – lets hope it improves rapidly, although the signs are not particularly good at the moment.  Just hoping we don’t all go the way of Essex!   I spent a few more hours filing and fettling on the Nock Lock – first core was to take a blank of 8 mm x 50 mm EN 8 steel ( this is moderately hardenable – ? about 1/2% carbon)  and mill out the lock plate 3.5 mm thick leaving the bolster, then cut it out with an angle grinder and 1 mm disk.  I clamped it on the bed of the milling machine and nibbled away some of the edges, then filed it to fit – have to be careful to work slowly and avoid damaging the edges of the lock pocket with burrs thrown up on the metal.  Once profiled I put it back on the miller and thinned the tail down to about 1.6 mm and filed a concave step to match the original (its a common feature).  So we now have a fitting lock plate with stepped tail and bolster in the correct place to receive the pan.  At this stage its worth marking a centre punch for the side nail, as that will fix the plate relative to the gun – an easy way to do this accurately is to grind the blank end of a drill that just fits the hole in the stock and use it as a centre punch – it will not make a particularly good mark as its probably too soft, but you can see it clearly.  At this point I could see that the bolster plus plate is the correct thickness and is  touching the breech block – the breech block is slightly domed around the tapped hole for the barrel  so I may need to recess the bolster to match as I can’t touch the breech block its – too hard.  I eventually selected a pan casting that had already been cut down, and I’ve go a couple of frizzens that will probably fit, plus a couple of cocks.  The net step will be to cut the lock plate to receive the pan casting – I may need to juggle the bolster and casting in the region of the  frizzen pivot to make sure the pin is secure and works properly – the casting has been cut a bit close to the hole..   Having cut the plate for the casting I’ll clean up the plate properly and put a chamfer round the edge and do any engraving that is needed – its easier to do that before the pan is fixed in – I hate trying to engrave/re-engrave complete flintlocks as the pans always get in the way.  Once the pan is welded in, or at least tack welded, I can finally sort out the frizzen, and then I’ll be in a position to select a cock – I have two possible ones, I think one is a little on the small size and the other may be a smidgin too big, but once the pan and frizzen are installed it will be easier to choose.  It may be possible to open up the small one.  Then I’ll be able to see where to put the tumbler hole – I have marked the original location from my card template but it can be altered slightly, although it can’t be pushed too far towards the tail of the lock or there isn’t room for the sear spring.  There are so many variables to be sorted, and with a limited range of parts  at my disposal, and  only having made a couple of flint locks before it is a challenge – still that is why one does these things!

Possible parts – when the pan is in it should be easier to choose to best fit.

30th December – OK, its the new flint lock for my little Henry Nock – the pistols can wait!  I got out my drawers of bits and pieces and had a rummage – I have 4 or 5 pan castings that Blackleys make for reconverting percussion back to flint from full lock sets, and several frizzens and cocks.  Its a matter of sorting out which are most suitable period wise, and which are near enough in dimensions to fit – The original lock on the Nock looks as if it had a semi rainproof pan, not one of the very tiny pans that went with French cocks – I do have a set of castings for a late Mc Knight double with tiny pans and French cocks ( I don’t want to break up the set) – the cocks are tiny compared to earlier ones. I also have a pan section taken from the same lock and a somewhat larger flintcock with a spur that might do with the Mc Knight pan, and a frizzen that can be made to fit.  Since I want the gun to be interchangeable between the new flintlock and the percussion lock, I dont want to modify the lock pocket or any of the woodwork, certainly not the opening.  This means that the main defining dimension of a pan section is the overall thickness, as the pan needs to touch the breech accurately to avoid sparks getting iside the lock, while the outside of the pan casting lock face needs to be flush with the level of the existing lock face.  I also have a pan casting that has been cut down ready to weld into a lock, but I’m not sure about it as the cut is quite close to the pan etc and I’m not sure if I can weld it neatly enough – I suppose I could get Jason in Haverhill to do it, but I’m trying to stay away form people while the pandemic rages!  I guess that as I want the flintlock to shoot and am not trying to fake it back to flint, function is more important than looks!

 

Strightforward drum and nipple conversion so not too difficult to make it into a flintlock that I can shoot.

These are the parts I picked out that might work for the Nock.

 Posted by at 12:25 am
Mar 062021
 

10th Jan  – made another nose for the Smiths cock, and another titanium nipple.  I have a problem with turning the nipples themselves in titanium as the depth of cut gets quite unpredicatable when you try to take very shallow cuts as you converge on the correct fit for the cap.  Sometimes even a sharp tool takes nothing off just pushes metal out of the way, and then another pass will take off more than you wanted – I think my lathe is pretty rigid, its a big heavy machine and will make accurate cuts in steel.  Some gun restorers do the final fit with a file, but that doesn’t work particularly well in titanium. Net result it that the nipple I made today has a very slightly loose fit for the cap – OK for the right hand barrel but it would probably jump off the left barrel when the right was fired.   I was sorting out my growing collection of taps and dies, so I revised my table of drill sizes etc and put a new pdf download on the USEFUL DATA page. No need for more photos of the nose and nipple – they look remarkably similar to the ones I put on yesterday – I ground up a profile tool for the nose.  Both noses were coloured on the second hotplate of the AGA to a sand colour – just placed on the middle of the hotplate (it’s around 300C) and covered with a scrap of aluminium foil and taken off when the right colour and cooled on a block of beeswax.  I probably need to replace the loose nipple, but I will move on to a bit of engraving for Bev.  I must do my income tax some time – at the moment I’m looking for any excuse to avoid doing it!

9thJanuary – A bit of real work – I got a tap to make a jig to hold the nipple threads for the Smiths Imperial conversion nipples and shaped the top of the titanium nipple I’d started to make before I went to Wales.  I also got a  tap to make a jig for the replacement cock nose so I could bore that out, and finished both of those parts.  They fit ( the cock noses after a bit of judicious filing of my thread) so I have a prototype made.  The nipple is about 1 mm shorter than a conventional nipple, and I could probably cut it down by another half mm, at the same time boring the nose out another half mm  – that will bring the nose down perpendicular to the nipple, which would be better – but anyway I’m reasonably happy with the look of it all, and I know I can fit to the threads pretty well.  I have ordered another 1/4 UNF x 28 die so I have a spare if I open the one I’m using too far, or it gets blunt. I seem to have had a string of orders to Tracy Tools for taps and dies recently and I’m building up a stock of odd sizes along with my sets of B.A., Metric and UN-F & UN-C, plus many old B.S.F and Whitworth (all in smaller sizes – up to 9/32 etc).  I just bought half a dozen No 60 drills for the fine holes in nipples – they are about 1 m.m. and 1/3 the price of the metric equivalent!  Drilling into the titanium nipples with such a small drill is dodgy – I have a collection of almost finished nipples with a bit of drill sheared off in the end.  Having got my prototype nipple and cock nose made, I now have to refine the design slightly and then produce two for Geoff to shoot shortly, and another 4 for the other guns in the trio.  I have a bar if 12 m.m titanium on order – an offcut from making bolts, bought on Ebay.  I find that lathe tools with carbide tips are not very good for cutting titanium, so I use HSS tools ground with a bit of top rake and kept sharp on a very fine diamond hone – the finish you get on titanium is almost always very good – its much easier to get a smooth finish than on steel.  I also got a knurling tool from  China – a holder plus 6 wheels for about £8 including postage – the holder was too big to fit my 250-210 tooling so I had to machine the top down, but otherwise it looks OK – I needed one with a fine straight knurl as that is what is used on old gun parts  and tools. I do feel slightly guilty about buying cheap tools from China, but it would cost about £50 for a ‘proper’ one, and I couldn’t justify the expense for a few small jobs.

The cap should probably be a bit looser on the nipple, it is not quite down.

The cock nose is almost perpendicular to the nipple –  if I loose another 1/2 mm somewhere it should be perfect.

8th January – I’ve been down in Wales helping Penny sort out moving her 90 year old father from the family home to something more suitable – we managed to sort out a suitable house for him (subject to agreeing a price) and got an agent lined up to sell the family house, plus took two loads of stuff to the dump  ( a gesture in view of the amount of junk there!) and brought back a load of books and nick-nacs to sort out for charity shops. Among the stuff in the loft were a couple of boxes of ‘O’ gauge clockwork railway ‘stuff’ – I bought it back to see if it could find a good home.  I have put it on a POST on this site – ‘Model Trains’ so I can link it  to a forum to get information – the locos are not Hornby, and I can’t identify them – if you can, please let me know.  The locos were originally  standard tinplate models ( maker unidentified) but have been ‘customised’ and have parts missing or broken.  There are a lot of goods wagons that mostly appear scratch built or from kits, and similarly a lot of coaches, some of which are clearly from kits as they have printed sheets on the sides.  Any information would be gratefully received, and if you want an additional hobby, there is great potential repairing and sorting this lot – oh, and there is an oval of Hornby track and a RH point – and a pile of bits, wheel, bogies etc….

2nd January 2020 –  Clearing up from our New Year’s Party yesterday – around 70 guests!  I did get a trip to the shed to make a prototype nipple for the Smith’s Imperial gun.  The thread is a bit larger diameter than 1/4 inch and the thread is 28 t.p.i , but its not as big as   9/32nd – around 6.46mm diameter over threads with quite a shallow, rounded profile.  I turned up a die holder to fit the tailstock chuck with a bigger internal diameter than normal to allow me to spread the 1/4 inch UNF die – I made a test nipple out of silver steel but the thread didn’t cut well and I made the nipple just too small to grip the cap.  I wanted to make it similar to the Imperial nipples, so I made the base 8.6 mm diameter and 4 mm thick and put a 2.6mm hole in the side.  I fixed my nipple extraction tool by replacing the 2.5 mm peg.  Playing around with the fit of the new nipple and the Imperial ones with both the original Smith’s tool and mine I found there was a problem with clearance around the base of the nipple – the flash guards are so close to the base of the nipple that you can only reliably fit the peg on either tool into the hole in the nipple if the hole is aligned with the outside of the barrel where there isn’t a fixed flash guard.  A quick check showed that the nipples are not made with the thread aligned with the hole in the nipple base – depending which original nipple I put in which side, I could end up with the hole effectively blanked by the flash guard so that the Smith’s tool couldn’t open enough to get the peg in the hole, and mine had the same problem….   I don’t know if the gun I’m dealing with had a different tool, or what the solution was. It is a problem even when the barrels are out of the gun – in fact I did most of the trials with the barrels out. The solution for my requirements is straightforward as I don’t need a flat top to the base as the cap doesn’t sit on it – I can either drill a couple of holes for a vertical tool, or better still, just file a couple of flats onto the top of the base for a normal nipple key.   As I commented a few days ago, nothing connected with old guns is ever straightforward…………………….

Loose fit die holder – if I need to open it a bit more I’ll probably have to soften the die opposite the screw by running the welder quickly over it or grind it a bit thinner?  The grinding on the surface is to let the die cut nearer the shoulder of the nipple.

Looking for patterns to engrave the other day I came across a couple of illustrations that show the basics of a Stand of Arms and are older than the Hogarth illustration I used in the Post on Stand of Arms – I’m interested in the origins of the classic engraving – I don’t think it appeared on guns until the last quarter of the 18th century but I’m sure it goes back a long way;-

This as an illustration from about 1714

This is a memorial of about 1704

31st December – I took out the other Imperial nipple – I had to grind down the end of the tool a bit to get it to fit right down round the base of the nipple, but it shifted it without any problems, except that when I removed the tool, the peg appeared to be still in the hole in the nipple – it hadn’t come out of the tool, it had neatly sheared off.  I guess that the steel rod I’d used for the peg was actually a fairy high carbon steel, and when I cooled the tool in water after silver soldering it, I must have left the peg dead hard – certainly the tool itself wasn’t hard. It was a clean fracture straight across the undistorted rod.  Anyway the tool basically works well, and the silver solder seemed to be strong enough, so I’ll silver solder in a new peg and make sure that I temper it (to straw colour?) after any possible hardening…… I am now convinced that the tool is superior to  Smith’s original tool for removing recalcitrant nipples without damaging the gun or nipples.  I now have to make some substitute nipples for ordinary No 1075 caps on a fat .25 inch diameter and 28 t.p.i. thread.

30th December – Yesterday broke the record for the greatest number of visitors to the site – over 400.   Gave myself a treat today and just pottered around engraving for fun – I went through a few books looking for something different to copy – I’m gradually regressing to earlier and earlier stuff, so I hit on some Griffin pistols around 1760 that had the name on the lock in a fancy banner – each one was different.  Anyway a couple of hours was frittered away playing t engraving, along with tidying up the workshop a bit for our New Year’s Party – there are always some guests who want to penetrate to the core of the house!  Anyway here are a couple of the Griffin banners – I only had not very good photos to copy so I had to improvise most of the shading – I wish I could get hold of some originals  to photograph – perhaps I ought to try Holts or Bonhams archives……  I’d need to do a few more before I’d dare to put one on a lock!

A few runouts – I get lazy about changing tools when I’m just playing, so end up using tools that I should have discarded!

28th December – Family party for 17 for lunch today so not much gun play!  The browning of the d/b pistol barrel has not been a success!  Some time ago I  sent a shotgun barrel to Paul Stevens – who is reputed to be the best barrel browner in the UK  – after several months I rang him to check progress and he explained that the first attempt had not worked and he had started again.  At the time I couldn’t really understand what could go wrong except possibly the end colour.  However I couldn’t get the bright parts of the twist pattern of the pistol to ‘bite’ – even after 14 brownings, and when I used my browning solution for several goes I just about got the colour right, but at the expense of a lot of roughness on the surface which shouldn’t be the result – The last barrel I did also had the same problem of getting the bright parts of the twist to ‘bite’ even after 10 rustings, although that barrel had started out with considerable surface structure and I judged it OK to have some surface texture at the end.  I am not really sure why these barrels are being difficult – I never had those problems before – I usually got an acceptable finish in 8 to 10 rustings.  It may be that I’m finishing the barrel too well pre-browning and effectively burnishing the surface, making it difficult for the solution to attack the steel.  Or maybe rubbing the rust off with 0000 grade steel wool is a bad idea?  I’m going to have to refinish the d/b barrel with 1200 grade paper and possibly 2500, but I think I will give it a couple of minutes in copper sulphate solution to etch the surface slightly and give the browning a chance.  What a monumental bore…………………………………………

 

27th December – lest you should think I have devoted all of Christmas to eating, drinking and making merry, here is the tool for Imperial caps I made yesterday;-   The ‘original Smiths tool (see a couple of dys ago) didn’t grip the cap well enough as the side hole in the nipples was a little worn, and I didn’t want to damage the rather weak joint between the metal and wood of the tool.  I designed a ‘foolproof’ tool that I reckoned would allow me to put much more force on the recalcitrant caps and was ‘more or less’ guaranteed not to disengage in the process.  The principle is that the cup for the base of the cap is a good fit over the cap, but the shaft and end is split so that it can be opened and closed to allow a fixed peg on the inside of the cup  to slip into the hole in the cap, after which the cup is closed to grip the cap by sliding a tapered collar down the tapered shaft of  the tool.   I drilled a 2.5 mm hole through the cup and used a piece of hardened steel rod to engage the hole in the nipple – one nipple had the hole facing outward so I could leave the rod sticking out for a trial – it worked, although the thread was pretty stiff even after it had started to turn – too stiff for the original tool to work without holding the sprung loaded catch.  I have now silver soldered the peg into the cup and quenched it to harden it all up, and I’ll try the finished tool on the other nipple.  The thread on the nipple I have removed seems  to be   .253 O.D. and as near as I can judge 28 t.p.i. with a very shallow rounded thread as is common on old guns.  As far as I can see the best fit would be an oversize  1/4 inch U.N.F thread (28t.p.i.) rather than the 1/4 inch B.S.F thread (26 t.p.i.)  I was expecting.  I will cut some test threds – I have a UNF die, and if its opened up to the maximum it will probably cut a big enough thread.  If not I’ll open out a die holder and run a flame down one side of the die to soften it and open it some more………………………………………………………… nothing to do with old guns is straightforward!

I ought to have put a nipple pricker in one of the arms – …….. next time?

I cut the slot with a hacksaw, hence the wobble – I don’t have a suitable slitting saw.  It works!

There is still a bit of silver solder round the pin, it has now been removed.

24th December – a certain amount of feverish activity in the house!  I got the Imperial cap tool in the post this morning , so immediately went and tried to remove the caps – I was keen to see what thread they had.  I tried as hard as I dared with the tool, but as its like the old nipple keys, the handle is ebony and the ‘blade’ is presumably squared and just pushed into the wooden handle so there is a limit to how much force it will stand before being damaged.  Neither nipple would budge at what I deemed to be safe force, so at the moment I’m soaking the nipples in Napier cleaner for a bit.  I will see it I can make a tool that will work with the barrels out of the gun, and if that doesn’t work I may try a bit of heat on the nipple.  The tool is, as I thought, quite complex – the turned end of the tool has a slot cut in it about 2.5mm wide, into which fits a lever with the peg to engage the hole in the nipple at the bottom, and a push button at the top, with a spring underneath.  The nipple pricker is unusual – its handle is bifurcated and sprung so it grips in the unlined hole in the wood of the handle.

 

23rd – still browning the d/b pistol barrel, which is going very slowly – as on the last one I did, there are areas of steel that are not touched after 10 rustings – in desperation I used my copper rich ferric chloride mix (ex pcb etching solution) and put it on wet, rather than almost wiped dry, which did seem to rust over all the surface – see below;-   We’ll see how it rubs off with 0000 grade steel wool…….. It looked ok, there was some colour on what had been bright steel pattern areas – mostly grey – I’ve  now put on a slightly more generous coat of Blackley’s than usual to see where that takes us………….  I think next time before I start the browning I’ll try putting the barrel in copper sulphate for a minute or two to etch the steel areas…..

 

 

21st December – I did the flame test on couscous today and added it to the video and got rid of some glitches, so its now uploading….

 

20th December – Getting more difficult to steal time from the growing domestic panic occasioned by the rapidly approaching festivities – I’m sure you are all aware of the phenomenon. I can see that the number of visitors to this site, both directly and via Google, has reached record levels, so lots of people are busy seeking dispacement activities!  All I could manage today was a few visits to the cellar for further rounds of browning of the little d/b pistol.  I got to three without much impact so I did a couple of my ex pcb solution and that got it going so I went back to Blackley’s Slow Brown and its going fine – probably three or four more and it will be ready for the boiling water treatment and a light coat of beeswax.  I got the taps and die from Tracy Tools today – life is so easy with the internet now – I guess there are still some big tool shops around – I can think of one about 20 miles away but I bet they don’t have the odd sized taps and dies I needed.  Oh and I did manage to collect together all the stuff on Imperial caps and put it in a separate post.

19th December – I finished the Couscous video and its uploaded.  It looks as if the couscous is working fine, but I do have slight misgivings about the ability of the flame to penetrate the grains.  Tomorrow I’ll try a pile of couscous with the blowtorch as I did for the semolina.  I got a straight 1mm knurling tool from Amazon today, but I really need a 0.5 mm wheel and they come from ebay/China so I’ll order one and wait patiently for it to come!  I spent today throwing out piles of old papers – I came across about  20 unopened letters that hadn’t looked very interesting at the time they arrived – sometimes I get lucky and find a cheque that is still in date………………..but not this time.

17th December – I did another video of using wheat in various forms instead of wads – this time couscous, which one of the AML shooters swears by.  Its certainly easier to handle and from the way the shot dropped into it, I guess its just as good – in fact I think you don’t need quite as much volume in order to keep the shot away from the powder – my only concern would be that the flame can find a way through the grains on firing – I’ll edit the video and upload it later.   My client has been offered an original key for unscrewing the Imperial nipples of the S & C Smiths, so that is one thing I don’t need to make- it was promising to be tricky to get the spring loaded peg to function properly.  When we get it I’ll take out the nipples and see what the best way to use modern caps is.  I am pretty sure I wouldn’t fire the gun using the original Imperial cock noses with ‘ordinary’  nipples as  I don’t like being spattered with shards of red hot percussion cap, so I intend to make new ones in the style of the originals, but bored out to accommodate the caps.  Anyway I got a special 12 UNEF x 32 die from my friends at Tracy Tools and had a go at making a new nose blank –  I finished the outside but will chuck it and bore out the bottom when I have a better idea about nipples.  It looks pretty good – I will need to grind up a tool to shape the outsides when I make a batch, and my knurling tool is a lot coarser than the original, and cuts slanting knurls, but that helps to distinguish my noses, so I’m happy with that. Anyway the 12UNEF x32 fitted perfectly ( 12 UN is 7/32th).   I now have an original multitool that has lost its pricker to find a thread for that ( 3/16 x 26?) – back to Tracy Tools ( no, I don’t get a commission!  they are just good and cheap and quick and have almost any thread in stock) – while I’m about it I will get a 12UNEF x 32 tap so I can mount the blank noses in the lathe without Araldite!  I did a bit of editing and split this post in two to get the load time down – so 2/3 is in a separate post now.

Original nose for Imperial caps.

 

New nose for ‘normal’ caps ( – right cock only, to be bored out when I make the nipples)

16th December – bit of trouble uploading stuff so I lost the bit I’d put in this morning!   I did a bit on the d/b pistol – silver soldered the inserts and filed up the square holes – the l/h one was  a pain as the square on the tumbler wasn’t square and the sides were rounded – and there wasn’t enough metal to file it up properly – anyway I made the best job I could – it wouldn’t do if the gun was intended to shoot, but it isn’t!  The cocks didn’t quite line up so I melted the silver solder and adjusted the l/h insert slightly – probably 3 or 4 degrees.  I welded up the nick in the l/h cock and tidied up the engraving and bent the l/h cock into line with the nipple and finally coloured up both cocks with the gas torch and case hardened the cock screws and its all together – in fact it looks so nice I decided it needed the barrel re-browning, so that is ongoing – its showing a nice twist on the first application of Blackley’s Slow Brown, so things are looking good………

Not sure what happened to the colour balance here!

14th December – Good shoot at the Valley Shoot in Heydon – very professional beating, which for muzzle loaders is a tricky job as there are gaps while we reload that need to be reflected in the progress of the beaters.  Anyway a really good shoot and lots of sporting shooting.   Chasing information about the Imperial caps I’m trying to change, I emailed a friend for photos of the tool for removing them and he has a spare he is willing to sell, so that may save a job – it is a fiddly tool to make as it has a spring loaded peg going into the side of the Imperial nipple that takes the torque of unscrewing – so it needs to be accurately made.   He says that all the ones he has changed  use standard nipples and don’t have modified noses on the cocks – but I still think I might make special ones for fun!  ( basically I enjoy the engineering!)  … now I guess its time to file up the squares on the cocks of the d/b pistol………….

12th December – Silver soldered the inserts into the cocks of the d/b pistol and filed off the surplus so now ready to put in the squares – although it is possible to rotate the inserts later, it is much better to get it right in the first place.  Here is my technique;-  cut a square hole in a piece of thin card to fit over the square on the lock with the lock on half cock. Mark a cross on the card centered on the square aligned with the sides of the square and glue or tape it to the lock in the correct alignment.  Black the centre of the cock and position it over the square and transfer the  marks to the cock.  With luck the hole you made in the insert will be smaller than the across flats dimension of the square, but larger than the size of your smallest square needle file. Now file the square out aligned with your marks, trying it as you go – Its easiest to get one flat surface almost done and use that to align with the square.  Obviously getting the second cock to align with the first one is tricky as it needs to be quite precise – that is where the ability to rotate the insert is useful…  Good luck – I won’t be fitting it for a day or two as I’m shooting tomorrow again – last one of the season!  An alternative way to mark the square is to tin the back of the cock with solder and press the lock into it in a vice (gently) to leave a mark – I guess some thick soft varnish might do instead…   That method is easiest to implement if the hole in the cock insert will just admit a screw that will go into the tumbler to keep it all in alignment – you can then drill it out to accomodate your file……….  I’m sure there are lots of other ways too…………………………..

The insert hardly shows on the face of the cock and will be covered by the cock screw.  The lines shown are on the diagonals of the square but I realised that it would be much easier to align them with the flats instead so I’ll change it………..

12th December – Another question re the Imperial caps – is it possible. using the proper supplied tool, to remove the caps with the barrel in the gun or do the cocks and flash guard get in the way?

11 December – bit of a lull as I got a nasty bug that laid me out in the evenings, now thankfully gone.   Having got my miller working I got on with the cocks of the little pistol – if you remember they needed the square holes remade as the alignment was wrong.  I think the miller runs much better now with the good old-fashioned Variac instead of its original electronic controller!   I Araldited them onto bits of wood and ran a 6 mm end mill through and then dropped a 9 mm endmill down 2.5 mm into the back and turned up a couple of inserts with 4.2 mm holes and made to fit the milled holes – they will be silver soldered in later and the square hole then put in – if I don’t get the alignment right I can reheat to melt the solder and rotate the insert.  Pretty foolproof and better than trying to exactly match a pair of cocks by filing the squares in rewelded metal.  This method does leave an indication if you take the cocks off that things are not original, but in this case it is acceptable as both cocks are replacements.   I picked up an interesting job today – a friend has a very nice S & C Smith percussion gun with Smith’s patent Imperial caps – these differ from the normal percussion caps in that they are flatish disks of around 10 mm diameter ( I don’t have one to check!) that fit on special nipples and with special noses on the cocks so they won’t in that configuration take normal caps.  I’m not sure what the supposed advantage of the Imperial caps was but the Smiths seemed to put them on most/all their guns and pistols so they must have seen something ‘better’ in their design – or perhaps they just liked to be different – they patented the design in 1830 No 7978. One special ( awkward) feature of the nipples is that the body of them is disk shaped and about  4 mm thick with a hole into the side for a peg on a special tool.  I don’t have access to a tool so will try to make on, but the mechanism for getting the peg into the side of the disk with very little space around the nipple is a bit challenging – I have emailed another friend to send me a photo of his original disk ‘spanner’. The recess in the nose of the cock is made very shallow – about 1.5 mm, which is OK for the very flat nipples/caps but will not provide any protection from flying bits of normal caps.  Fortunately the noses of the cocks are detachable, so I just have to make new noses and new nipples and all will be well – plus the tool for getting the Imperial nipples out.   The cock noses are screwed in with 3/16 x 32 threads, and I managed to locate a Unified extra fine die of that size – at a cost of £30 – and the noses should just accommodate a somewhat deeper recess – maybe not as  deep as a conventional percussion cock, but I plan to make rather flatter nipples than the normal ones – old percussion caps were always much deeper than our current ones, so conventional nipples are unnecessarily tall.  I do realise, before any kind soul tells me, that the thread form of Unified threads is quite different from the old thread forms, the UN is much steeper and sharper at the crest and valley, but the thread doesn’t take any force, just holds the nose on. I’ll screw the thread into the hardened cock before hardening the nose to swage the thread into a better shape.  One question I would be grateful for information on;-  were the Smith guns supplied with alternative  ‘conventional’ nipples and cock noses, and if so what were they like?

Secured for milling the holes.

Milled stepped holes and disks – the holes are concentric even if it doesn’t look likeit!.

Imperial Nipple on S & C Smith gun – the nipple body is round and has a hole, just visible on the right side, where the peg fits to uncrew it – tricky to make the removal tool!

8th December – The Anglian Muzzle Loaders single barreled shoot and Christmas Lunch today.  I had a bit of a revelation last night when getting out my guns for the shoot – as I mounted my usual little Henry Nock single ( as I usually do when I get a gun out) I noticed that my dominant eye seemed to be swapping from my normal right eye to my left eye on occasions – Without shutting my left eye I couldn’t guarantee that the gun would point where I was looking.  That might hopefully explain why I was having trouble hitting birds coming straight at me on previous shoots – anyway I took the time honoured solution and stuck a piece of sellotape on the top third of the left lens of my spare glasses, which is just enough to stop the left eye seizing control as you mount!   It must have worked because I did my usual score at clays.  I still haven’t worked out how my mind or body works when shooting clays – my norm, over many shoots, if I’m using a gun I can shoot with, goes something like this:  First stand- 6 clays – miss one, second stand  -6 clays – miss 2, third stand  – 6 clays – miss 3 or 4  and erratic thereafter!  It doesn’t seem to depend on which stands we start on either!  Strange.    Pete and I had discussed him firing his flintlock upside down as an experiment, but we completely forgot when we got to the shoot.  Cambridge Gun Club,  with whom we have a close relationship, put on a splendid Christmas Lunch especially for us – we all bring prizes and they are put into a raffle for which we all get a ticket – claiming prizes from what’s left when our number comes up – Pete picked a wrapped bottle, which when he unwrapped it turned out to be a bottle of Cherry Kirch that had been opened and a glass drank!  What can one say ? – so we decided that it will become a permanent feature of the raffle – being returned,  wrapped each year – possibly minus another glass……..in perpetual memory of whoever put it in….!   We now have a new supplier of Czech powder, thank goodness as it was getting tricky to get in the quantities that the club uses – 28 members were shooting today, 30 shots each, so 840 shots in total, at an average powder load of about  2.6 drams amounts to about 4Kg of powder, or if we were shooting 40 shots with  doubles, more like 5 Kg.  I don’t shoot as much as some of the members, but I probably shoot 3 or 4 Kg a year at least.  I managed to get my milling machine running yesterday using a Variac ( variable voltage transformer) and a bridge rectifier – seems to work OK, which indicates that in fact its a DC motor, no AC as on the motor label – anyway its all properly wired up with a switch and fuse etc.

6th December – Oh, I just remembered its my brother’s birthday!!   I finished off the trigger guard and butt plate by ‘colouring them down’  – it’s a sticky decision – how to finish work that you have taken down to bare metal.  The usual method is to form an oxide layer on the metal by heating it – the colour you get depends critically on the top temperature you reach so it can be difficult to get a uniform colour if you don’t have a big enough furnace/oven and the object has an uneven distribution of metal so some bits heat quicker than others –  It is possible with patience to do it with a gas torch.  An alternative is to heat to dull red and use a case hardening powder and then quench it in water – that generally gives a slightly mottled grey colour – its what I’d normally do for lock plates and screws which benefit from the case too.  Anyway for the trigger guard and butt plate  I used a calor gas torch and took them up to just about deep strew colour – around 275 C.   You need to keep the torch moving and go slowly so there isn’t a lot of metal that is above the required temperature that will leak out and over colour the smaller bits.  I  stop the heating by swabbing with an oily tissue and then dunking in water.  A brisk brushing on the very fine wire mop tones the colour down nicely and leaves an even greyish finish, ending with a light wipe with gun oil.  It is always important to realise that any heating of steel is liable to leave it the surface clean and ready for rusting to start.

Here is the toned down part – its difficult to see the colour, but its a lot more appropriate than bare steel.

5th December – I got to thinking about firing off a flintlock upside down –  but I don’t have any measurements  to check things against – I might borrow a crude high speed camera that will do 700 f.p.s. but that isn’t great and the resolution is dire.  My calculations suggest that the powder will drop around 1/2 a mm in the first 10 mSecs and 50 mm in the first 100 mSecs   – I am not sure how far the flash will spread and still fire the charge through the touch-hole, but I guess up to about 10 m.m.  which  takes  44 mSec. Since I can well imagine that the pan will open and a spark will be generated in that sort of time window – therefore one concludes that firing upside down is not so improbable – more experiments to follow.

4th December – Back from a trip to St Andrews for Tom’s second graduation – after 9 years up there he now has his PhD done and dusted and needs a job!  I now have to sort out all the jobs that are waiting for me – A set of electronic Incubator regulator boards to test and deliver, a gun to collect from Geoff, some invitations to do,  The Dolep pistol to finish – that involves doing something about the finish on the barrel, ditto the trigger guard below that needs toning down – plus I would like to uresolder the barrels of the Venables.  I now have the parts I need to check the speed control of my milling machine, which I need to finish Nick’s pistol cocks………………..  If it sounds like an impossibly long list of jobs to complete in the run-up to Christmas, I fear you might be right!  I’ve been chasing the Russian Internet Service provider that is hosting the IP addresses that keeps bombing this website – I’ve tried them 3 times but it achieves nothing except somehow the sender managed to change the indicated country from Russia to Brazil – but from the same IP addresses – I haven’t completely given up hope but it is beginning to look as if the ISP is part of the problem….

30th November – Decided to start the last job  first as I felt like a quite few hours engraving – the trigger guard and its tang were nice to cut, the butt plate and its tang a bit less so, but both are now done – the worst bit was putting a pattern round the top screw of the butt plate – the curvature is vicious so I used the GRS pneumaic graver as it lets you hold and move the work by hand since the forces are small.  I was trying to get the engraving to be clear and complete but not looking as if it was new – because the underlying material does not look new and I’d have had to refinish it drastically to get it to ‘new’ status – plus I don’t really like that approach! Anyway its now done and I’m reasonably pleased with the outcome.  I’m not sure what the client has in mind for the finish – I would probably run a torch over it to give it a bit of an oxide layer, maybe give it a coat or two of browning first to help.

29th November – I was trying to get my milling machine to run – the motor controller had  packed up last week, so I decided I ought to be able to put something together to replace the controller – the motor says quite clearly 240V A.C. 400W, and has 2 wires coming from it – but putting an AC motor controller just produced a lot of buzzing and a bit of heat.  So I tried it with a Variac – a variable transformer producing good smooth AC from 0V to 240V, but that was the same.   Unfortunately I can’t find a suitable bridge rectifier to test it on DC, but I did try it on my 30V D.C  3 Amp power supply and it ran smoothly but fairly slowly.  It is a brushed motor, which means it could well be a DC motor in spite of the label, so I’ll now get a bridge rectifier and see if I can get it to run .  I got a parcel from a client with a trigger guard and butt plate to be recut/engraved.  The trigger guard will be easy to recut exactly as its clearly visible, the butt plate is at the awkward stage – there is enough of the engraving left that you can’t ignore it, but not enough to use as a pattern.  My usual method is to recut the bits that I can still see, and then carry on in the same spirit – it usually works fine as you gradually make out more of the original pattern.  I guess the alternative is to file off the remaining engraving and start over – but that’s not an approach I usually take.

Quite a decent standard of engraving  – a bit of work in the borders on the bow – not sure who the maker was.

Need to have agood look at this under the microscope to ‘see’ the complete design.

 

Rather unusual cased pair of pocket pistols by Salmond of Perth in pigskin lined case.

28th November – At the Bonhams Auction yesterday – prices mostly in line with estimates – not many real bargains so I guess the market is  not as bad as I thought.  The only real surprise was an Ormolu tinderlighter and inkwell that made £15000 against an estimate of £3 – 4K.  I think only a couple of lots didn’t make the reserve.  The trio of Smith 12 bore muzzle loading sporting guns made £7500, well above the £3-4K estimate, and the silver mounted pair of Clarkson pistols lot 517 made £11000 against an estimate of £5 – 7.5K – bought by a collector from Essex who was very pleased with his purchase, as well he might be.  I got the lot I was aiming for – the pair of Public Service Overcoat pistols for the early Police force at Bow Street, at one bid over the bottom estimate, so that was OK.  I also got a pair of cased pocket pistols by Salmond of Perth in a pigskin lined case.

Not only are they very rare – possibly among the 50 pairs that were ordered from Parker in 1829 for the police – See Frederick Wilkinson’s book ‘Those Entrusted with Arms’

–  but they are also almost unused – they are numbered 3 and 16 on the brass trigger guard, but I guess they were not issued.

26th November – first an apology – the buyer’s premium on Bonhams is, unfortunately not 20% but 25 or 27 1/2  we couldn’t decide – the figure in the current catalogue is wrong!  – but don’t let that stop you buying the Egg for my Chrismas present!  Just back from another excellent shoot a Woodhall – possibly the last as its not clear they are continuing next year.  Jobs come in thick and fast and another couple of email queries today….   I used my little single barrelled Nock today – a bit frustrating not having a second barrel although not having to make the decision as to whether to reload immediately after the first shot, or wait and discharge the second barrel before reloading is a compensation.  My great ‘discovery’ of the day concerns the disposable hand warming heater pads – I bought a packet of toe warmers to see what they were, and opened them on the shoot to put in my pocket, where of course they get lovely and warm but don’t do anything useful.  Standing in the light rain my hand began to get a bit cold holding the gun at the wrist, so I got out the ‘toe warmer’ and had a look at it – it turned out to have a self adhesive back, presumably to stick to the sole of your boot – anyway I decided to stick it on the wrist of my gun so that I was holding it by the heating pad – I have to say that the pads don’t give out much heat when exposed and in contact with the gun, but it was  definitely better than holding a cold gun!

25th November – a day of disasters – just found my MOT had expired yesterday and my garage hadn’t reminded me although 6 weeks ago the said they would…. bother.  And then discovered that the last yacht charter company on the NW coast of Scotland is closing – it is the one we used last year  – the one we used this year also closed – so now nothing on the west coast North of Oban – it’s enough to drive one to drink!   Now what do we do to escape? I think we had a bit of a reputation for going to some pretty obscure anchorages – your average charterer sticks to the well beaten tracks.  I was showing a friend the Dolep pistol of about 1710 that I just finished restoring (see below)  and he wondered about firing it – the client had wanted me to ensure that it worked/flashed properly so I put a bit of fine priming in the pan and fired it off – went well. Then I remembered that a well set up flintlock was supposed to be able to fire upside down – i.e the powder ignites before falling out of reach of the touch hole.  Given that it’s an established fact that the flash travels faster than the flame front through powder, you don’t need a solid powder trail between pan and touch hole, so it should work. Anyway we flashed off the pistol upside down a couple of times and the flash seemed to originate from the immediate vicinity of the pan, so I think we would have been able to fire it.  I will try with my John Manton double flintlock some time for real!  In trying the Dolep I found that the full cock notch was only just engaging – a quick check showed there was no play in the trigger, so the sear arm is too low – a quick adjustment in the vice with a pair of pliers added maybe 1/2 or 3/4 mm clearance that was enough to put it right.    I’m shooting tomorrow – since my 14 bore Venables is out of commission I’m using the 16 bore single Henry Nock – that unfortunately means changing over my wads and overshot cards!  I still like to have wads, although I’m trying to wean myself onto a diet of semolina –  I remember semolina puddings from my childhood, without, it has to be said, any great joy, although the splodge of jam was good!  We don’t add jam when shooting.

The Dolep – a fine early pistol now working beautifully, and sparking up a treat.

24 th November – Just back from London and the viewing for the Bonhams sale on Wednesday.  There was a fair bit of interesting stuff, but it was catalogued all over the place as it was from named collections and I got confused finding stuff – plus there was a vast collection of swords and military bits and pieces that will take up half the sale day – guns don’t begin until 2 p.m. and they will have to motor on to get finished in a reasonable time!   I’m not going to splash the few things I might be after, but there were lots of things I covet that I can tell you about!   Lot 331 was a nice turnover 18 bore flintlock by Bunney from around 1775 in nice condition if you have a spare 8 – 10K kicking about.  I don’t think I’d get interested in lot 389 – a cased pair of pistols that are catalogued as ‘inscribed D.Egg ‘  Auctioneers are very careful of their language and if it doesn’t say ‘by D Egg’ then they are not sure.  This pair have had the barrels rebrowned and as the catalogue says ‘inscribed D.Egg London’  – with my eyeglass I can clearly see that the barrel inscription is recut as part of the rebrowning, and the (competent script) engraving on the lock is clearly done after most of the corrosion occurred.  None of that proves the pistols were NOT made by Egg, indeed the butts are properly chequered in his style with 4 dots within each large diamond and the rest COULD be his – its just that the restorer has removed any chance of establishing their true maker.  One pair I’d like to own were I ridiculously rich were Lot 392 – 15 bore ‘queen Anne’ style superimposed load pistols with turn off barrels – they were exceedingly clever in that the rear powder chamber had a post sticking up so that when the front charge fired, the back ball was forced onto the post, which expanded the ball to a tight fit in the bore and prevented the combustion creeping past into the first powder charge.  This effectively trumped Thouverin’s patent by 150 years!  And only 12 – 15 K – a snip….  I’m always a bit surprised at the price put on Queen Anne pistols, but I suppose they are early and not as common as the later big hefty full stocked pistols.  They did represent a major advance at the time, as it was possible to have a ball that was forced into the barrel by the charge, which had the dual advantage that it would take rifling and let the charge build up pressure before it started moving, thus effectively giving a longer burn time, so emulating a longer barrel – plus the tight fit meant that they could be carried around without fear of loosing the load through shaking – altogether a ‘good idea’ –  maybe I should get a pair – Lot 515 is a pair of double turnoff pistols in the Queen Anne style with single triggers by Barbar circa 1740 at 4 – 5K, or Lot 516 – a brass barrelled pair by Harvey est 4.5-5.5K.   There were a lot of guns and pistols by the  Smiths using their ‘imperial’  caps including 3 guns in a single case.   About the worst sin I saw was lot 332, an Adams 5 shot revolving rifle that had been horribly over refinished – I would have been interested but what a disaster – I suppose its possible to unrefinish a gun but I’d prefer not to own it in the first place – will be interesting to see just how the room copes with it – I’m usually more squeamish about these things than most people!  A beautiful & unusual  pair of 1710 Clarkson silver mounted horse pistols caught my eye – Lot 517 est. 5 – 7.5K, as did a splendid 25 bore double flintlock Covet gun by Egg, probably built for the Prince Regent (Lot 496 est 5 – 7 K..) Top lot was of course the last lot as always – just to keep people in the room – a pair of elaborately inlaid d/b pistols by John Manton for an Indian potentate – estimate a trifling 35 – 45K – well who can resist?    I checked over all the Adams revolvers and derivatives, but one or two were possible, I’d only be interested if they didn’t make the reserve.  As always if you subtract the price of all the accessories and the case, you get to the real value of the gun itself, Sometimes this turns out to be a bargain, sometimes not.  What of the stuff at the cheap end of the market?  There are a number of pistols at around 250 bottom estimate, but most I couldn’t get very excited about – I might pick up one for the blog, but I’ll have to be careful to remember which ones are passable!   I’ll regret not having made better notes in my catalogue.  If I had a fairy godmother offering me a Christmas wish and I wasn’t concerned about the value, I’d settle for the Egg covert gun – lot 517  so if you feel like buying me a Christmas present………. but don’t forget to allow for the buyer’s premium of  20% plus VAT at 20% of that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

2ch3rd November – Out to lunch and then a concert so no gun play!  Tomorrow I’m off to London for the Bonhams sale viewing – nothing really grabs me but there are a few possibilities, and I like to keep an eye on the market and what is on offer and meet a few friends.  There are several large collections around and most of the owners are getting on a bit – I don’t see the younger collectors in great numbers, and I’m not sure what will happen to the market longer term – I think America will mop up a fair bit, but our own political uncertainty casts a bit of a shadow – could be good or bad for antique firearms, who knows?  I’d probably rather have gold bars under the bed than antiques of any sort –  sad to say I don’t have much of value either way.  On Tuesday I have another shoot at Woodhall – since the barrel of my Venables is adrift I’ll use my little single barreled Henry Nock – I’ll have to put a bit more packing in the Irish shot belt scoop as it currently throws 1.1 oz which might be considered a bit much for a 16 bore weighing just 5 1/4 lbs – I’ll try to get it neared  15/16ths oz and use 2 1/2 drams of Czech powder.  I’ll use semolina again as I can’t fault it.  I found that my super card dispenser will work equally well for 13,14 and 16 bore cards so that will be in use.  My hope that the Russian abuse would stop as unfounded, so I have emailed the abuse address with a printout of the screen showing multiple attacks.  we shall see what transpires.

22nd November (2) – Shouldn’t get too excited but my Russian pest seems to have been stopped – fingers crossed – I must go after the rest!   Thought I’d nip into the workshop for a bit of recreation – in this case recreating the cock screws for the little d/b pistol – one of my favourite jobs.  I managed to get away with No 4 UNF for both the one I tapped out and the original one, which saved a  bit of time.  I haven’t coloured them down yet, but will do when I sort out the finish on the cocks etc….

I like the ‘bowler hat’ shaped screws!  this is about the most basic engraving – but right for the pistols. They have been polished off on the fibre wheel after engraving to make them look less new.

22nd November – This website attracts a number of nutters who set up requests for a particular page that then keep repeating and clogging up the internet – I have one such attack that comes from several different IP addresses in Russia but always tries to download a particular page – after there had been about 26000 requests for that slightly obscure page I blocked the IP addresses, which means they just get back a message saying they are blocked, but attempts continued at a rate of about 200 a day – obviously automated!  It just wastes the internet and the resources that it uses – loads of electricity – plus is just a nuisance to everyone.  Anyway I have now complained to their IP service provider and they have told the user to desist – we will see if the abuse stops in the next 24 hours. Should have done it ages ago cbut it takes time to monitor what is going on behind the scenes with this blog!  For a bit while it is in my mind I’ll go after a few of the other abusers!  I’m now going to attempt to reshape the cock of the little pistol…. watch this space!………………..  Its a tense game cutting and re-welding a cock – if you do make a success of the tricky job it just looks as it should have looked all along and no-one notices, if you screw up then it is obvious!  Anyway I took a hacksaw to the nose of the cock, wedged it into position with Plasticine and tacked it with the TIG welder – then took it apart and did it again as it wasn’t right – but on the third attempt it was aligned as well as it could be, so I filed out the joint between the two bits, leaving the tack, and welded it as deeply as I could, then filed out the tack and re-welded that – not too bad.  The cock was curved inwards a bit at the top, so got the top of the main part red hot and gently bent it outwards by maybe 3 degrees.  That was better, but now the spur on the welded cock didn’t line up with the other cock, so another hot bend and its pretty good.  It doesn’t go as far down on the nipple as the other side as this cock has a shallower hollow – if my miller was working I might take a bit out, but as you’ll see from the photos it’s a decent improvement. Next job is to get the cock squares sorted, but I need the miller for that……

Cock mouth edge rests on nipple.

The cock is right down on the nipple – it just has a shallow depression.  Both cocks are in place so they obviously match reasonably!

21st November – Went to Dicks to show him the pistol I’d been working on – a nice 1760s pistol by Dolep – its almost finished and looking very nice – wish it was mine.  We had a look at the two cocks of the little double barreled pistol so see where I could cut the one that doesn’t fit so it could be welded – we discussed for a long time but I couldn’t really see the best place – nothing really works exactly without at least 2 cuts and I don’t want to end up with three bits to weld together.  I remembered a friend who is involved in robotic orthopedic surgery and thought I ought to make models of the bits and try them – well at least cut out bits of paper and shuffle them around – think I got something that might work!  We’ll see.

Current panic is that I’ve just sold a Spitfire Gun Camera on ebay and now I can’t find it! Oh bother – I know it was on my bench a few months ago as I was trying to see if the motor would still run!  Its one of those things that you know will come to you in a revelation after you’ve spent hours and hours searching in totally unlikely places!  Apart from that, nothing else, as some child put at the end of an essay.

21st   Not sure where yesterday went!  I had another go with the semolina yesterday using equal volumes of powder,shot and semolina as that is the recipe that several of my friends use.  I used the contents of the handwarmer as a substitute for powder to save having to dispose of a mix of powder and semolina – I got rid of the last lot by throwing it all in a csmall container of water, which I then left on the bench – I have never seen such a splendid crop of mould growing on the top of the liquid  – I remember asking someone how to dispose of some unwanted gunpowder and they said ‘put it on the garden, its an ideal fertiliser’, so I now believe them. Anyway I did the same experiment as in the video but with No 6 shot and got more or less exactly the same result as with 7 1/2 shot –  most of the shot buried itself in the semlina, around 1/4 was left on top, the furthest shot penetration came within about 6 mm of the powder.   I did another video, but its so similar I won’t put it on Youtube to clutter up the planet further.  I had a call from Nick the other day and we discussed his little double barreled pistol that I was going to sort out – problems were;- cock screw sheared, cocks not indexed on squares properly (obviously modern replacements straight out of the box) and left cock doesn’t register on the nipple properly.  So I thought it was time to do something about the pistol…..   I had tried to drill the  broken cock screw from the tumbler but the bit of the screw seemed to be dead hard and I couldn’t drill it – so stripped the lock and heated the tumbler to dull red and cooled it slowly to anneal it, then drilled out the screw – fortunately it drilled fairly centrally and I  put a UNF No 4 tap into the hole – the taper tap didn’t do anything, but I was able to make a good thread (all 5 turns of it) with the plug.  So just need to turn up a new cock screw – it probably needs a matching one on the left too.  I have ‘walked around’ the job of the ill fitting cock and  the misaligned squares, but now I probably ought to do something  – the nose of one cock is too long and almost missed the nipple, the other is OK.  Both need ‘re-squaring.  My preferred technique for resquaring when I’m not dealing with original  cocks is to drop an end  mill through the square to just take it out, then cut from the back of the cock with an end mill that is a bit bigger than the across flat dimension of the square leaving a 1mm skin on the outside, then turn up a disc to fit the cavity  with a hole through the middle a bit less than the AF dimension of the square as a start for the new square.  The disc is then silver soldered into the cock and the square cut as usual  The advantage of this method is that you can reheat and adjust until the cock position is perfect.  I’ll post progress on that as I do it, but it will have to wait till I manage to get a new speed controller for my little miller – I ordered one from ebay but it blew the house electrics wtith a dead short and I haven’t had any satisfaction from the seller, so I’ve ordered another different one…….   The job of reshaping the cock is more of a mess – I’ll have to take the angle grinder to cut off the nose, and either re-weld it myself or take it to Jason…………………………. Oh, and as a quiet relaxation I copied some 17th century gun engraving – not perfect as I got it out of rather poor photos in books.

 

Mismatched cocks!

Quick and dirty copies out of Keith Neil and Back Great British Gunmakers  Dafte is 1690.  Unsigned is from a musket.

19th November – On the shoot on Saturday Pete gave me a disposable handwarmer – a small bag of powder that you took out of a sealed plastic bag to activate, after which it heated up most effectively, so standing in a field waiting for action I tried to work out what was in the bag and how it heated for the whole day.  It had to be oxygen activated, i.e an oxidation reaction and the only one I could think of that worked that slowly and controllably was rusting of iron, so the next day I cut open the now cold bag and applied a magnet – voila it picked up bits.  I later checked on Wikipedia  to find if I was right – the ingredients turn out to be finely divided iron, something to hold water, like vermiculite, salt to start the reaction, and sometimes a platinum catalyst – so we spend our time trying to stop rust, but use rusting to warm our hands!  I must say that they were a lot more effective than the lighter fuel powered ones, and much much better than the charcoal ones that it is almost impossible to keep alight.  I have ordered up a batch – around 70p each – you can even get ones to put in your boots. A small miracle….   I had a small engraving job for Dick  – he is restoring a French pistol with silver mounts and a brass lock that was in derelict condition- interesting because apart from a lot more carving on the woodwork it was almost identical  to a Dolep pistol made in England – you could almost have swapped the locks over with very little adjuctment, and the touchholes lined up perfectly.  Anyway he had replaced the buttcap with a casting from Blackleys and wanted it engraved to match the standard English pattern, which I did.;-

It still needs the casting sprue cut off and possibly a cover plate made?

18th November – I’m still trying to emulate the small scale scrollwork on the Purdey lock – I don’t get cuts that look the same, and also there is a perception problem – I normally do scrollwork and other engraving where the cuts are the thing you focus on, and which define the pattern, but with the Purdey scrolls its the remaining metal that makes the pattern, not the cuts – it may sound like splitting hairs but it is a real difference – in its extreme form I don’t get confused – say a rose left standing  in a cutout background, but as the two styles converge its not so clear.  Looking as a spectator at the finished engraving you just see the intended pattern and are not aware  of  the mechanics – but when you try to engrave it, its difficult to force yourself to see the pattern in the metal that is left rather than the cuts you make.  Anyway, I’ll struggle on!

17th  I was showing someone the little Post Office pistol by Harding and Son and they noticed that the lock wasnt fitting completely – a bit of investigation showed that the spring needed a bit ground off to clear the barrel.  In removing the spring I sheared off the peg that goes in the lockplate, I had had to weld on a new peg as it was originally in the wrong place due to an error in manufacture. Anyway from the fracture surface it was clear that the weld hadn’t fused onto the spring properly – in fact hardly at all.  Anyway I remembered I’d actually made a spare spring – no sure why – so was able to put it in and off we go.  One disaster down.  The big disaster came with my Venables when I came to clean it after yesterdays shoot near Beccles – a fine shoot with lots of pheasants and partridges – we were ‘double pegging’ so things go a bit quicker as there is less need to hold up the beating line to allow reloading.   I took off the barrel and did the usual wet clean with boiling water  and put it on the bench to take out the nipples etc and noticed that it was missing the block under the barrel that takes the through bolt to hold the barrel in place on the stock – I found the missing bit in the water!  Its all part of the sad saga of trying to resolder the ribs- I resoldered it all from a stripped state, but the top rib didn’t go down well – I hadn’t filed off enough metal to make it fit – someone had previously filed it a series of waves.  anyway I tried to resolder the top rib without doing the whole job again – the top rib went down perfectly, but in the process managed to partially unsolder the bottom rib, which I hadn’t wedged on securely.  So there is now no option but to strip the barrels down and redo the whole job – I WILL get the hang of resoldering barrels!  Talking to Bev about that particular job we both said that the first one we did (mine was the Perrins) was OK but thereafter we only manage to get it right in about 1 in 4 tries!   The Venables is a good quality gun and fits me well –  I got it cheap at Holts because the top rib was a mess, but I really want it to be perfect so I can make a case for it with my splendid card dispenser – someone at the shoot suggested I sell them to Purdeys to include with the new muzzle loaders they are threatening to build.  I had one hiccough with it on the shoot – when the cards are used,  the spring tension reduces and the bayonett cap is no longer as secure as it should be, since it relies on the spring to hold.  Since it holds over 100 cards I reckon it doesn’t need to be opened in the field so I’ve put in a small and inconspicuaous  grub screw to lock the top on. Anyway it dispensed cards perfectly – thin cards 2 at a time, and thicker ones singly – I might make the next one adjustable for card thickness.

16th  November – I didn’t really get going today! So no great thought to share – or even scrappy ones I’m afraid.  I did decide that the stove in the living room had to change from wood to coal so it would actually heat the house 24 hours – immediately noticeable improvement in comfort.   I was trying to imitate the Purdey engraving of yesterday but I couldn’t get the hand movements right – I think my mild steel is a little too soft for such fine work and the graver seems to plough deep – I might try on a bit of EN 8 with a bit of carbon and see if it is any better.  I tried to resharpen my fine graver to make the heels very short to reduce the ploughing round corners, and it did improve it a bit, but not enough – its annoying, because although I don’t particularly like that style of engraving I’d like to be able to reproduce it better.  Anyway I think I had better creep off to bed rather than do my usual 12:30 bed time as I have to be up at about 5 to get to the shoot breakfast tomorrow.

15th November – I get a steady correspondence from this blog – several emails a week – often asking for information about guns people own.  One of the requests for information that comes up from time to time is about guns that the writer has inherited but they don’t know anything about guns – there is usually a photo attached, often blurred and difficult to make out.  They are usually not guns that were on certificate, they are mostly repro pistols that someone has had without a certificate, and are usually functioning firearms – and  if made after 1919 (?) should be on a Firearms Certificate as a Section 1 firearm –  that, coupled with the fact that they are worth a lot less than the optimistic new owner was expecting it makes for disappointing news I have to deliver!   What to do with them?  I can’t advise that they are kept without a certificate, or sold without passing through a Registered Firearms Dealer – it is in fact illegal to have them in your possession without a certificate – strictly an offense carrying a mandatory prison sentence for possession of an unlicensed  firearm.  They can be surrendered to the Police as a last resort, or to a Registered Firearms Dealer, and one or two auctioneers who are registered to deal in firearms may take them and put them in their auction. (e.g. Holts, or Southams who do sell repros.) What you can’t do is put them up for sale on ebay!   All of which got me thinking of what happens when a gun owner/collector dies and his descendents are left with a pile of guns that may or may not be legal inert reproductions,  antiques,  on certificates -section 1 or section 2, or worse, section 7 or strictly illegally owned repros that are functioning firearms.  Its obvious from the emails that I get that people are searching for information and not finding anything useful apart from my blog.  So I’m contemplating putting up a post with advice, and possibly a draft letter/form to be given to next of kin by gun owners that sets out what they have and what to do with everything.  We shall see if thought gives way to action on my part!   On the engraving side, here is a photo of the Purdey lock I touched up the tail of – if you click on teh photo you can just see a line of brazing across the tail where all the engraving had been filed off to level the two sides.  In the blow-up of a different part you can see how crude the basic cuts are – its all done very quickly and almost automatically!

 

14th November – Now finished 3 of the jobs on my client list – a couple to go, both jobs that I’m waiting for inspiration for! One is a little double pistol that has one cock that is a bit of a misfit and I can’t decide if I’ll go at it with a grinder and welder or wait for inspiration, the other is a gun that has had a plain and very pedestrian lock fitted that needs it to be engraved, but again I can’t think what is the right thing to do – fortunately both clients are prepared to wait til inspiration comes!  The yr 3/4 ( 7/8/9)  teacher  came into my STEM club on Monday and asked what she needed for the children to make those ‘games’ that require you to move a loop along a twisty wire without setting off the buzzer – she needed 12 sets for her class of 36.  It soon became obvious that it would be easier for me to get/make all the parts and set it all up, – oh and which day would it be best for me to come in and ‘help’?  So I have been buying 3.2 mm aluminium welding rod as it should make the perfect shapes – you will be surprised how long it took me to find a supply in 1m lengths – most are 330mm.  Plus all the other bits (there are lots when you work it out) so that totally unskilled small children can produce a working puzzle in less than 2 hours.   And today I got a text asking if I had a breastplate (as in armour) that I could lend for something or other!  I didn’t realise when I volunteered to be a school governor just what was involved, particularly in the ‘props’ department. Next term the yr 5/6 s are doing the book ‘The Highwayman’ so that will mean taking in a couple of flintlocks and staging a highway robbery while wearing a tricorn hat and a cloak – no horse though.  I carelessly suggested that it would be fun if the yr 3/4s did a Dragon’s Den activity around some project – I did one at another school that went down very well – so I think muggins here has talked himself into  helping/setting another one up … – plus I still end up having to do the ‘serious’ governor stuff like checking up on all the catagories of children that need special attention in class (my particular responsibility) and the science teaching and attending boring meetings………   I’ve been doing a bit of engraving practice recently – I have a pile of perfect mild steel test plates waiting to be engraved, so I think I’ll try to capture a range of 19th century patterns.  I had a lock with a bit of missing engraving in the Purdy small scroll style, and I did manage to fill in the gap but the range of patterns I can do freehand and without thinking too hard is limited, and if I’m not careful things tend to drift back to a familiar pattern, so I need to do some serious practice.  I can see why there were a relatively limited range of patterns, and why it appears that each engraver had a distinct style.  I was quite shocked recently to find a copper bangle that I engraved about 60 years ago (when copper bangels were a thing) that had scroll engraving of the basic pattern I revert to now, despite the fact that I didn’t touch a graver for 50 of the intervening years!

 

Diary 13th November – Finished the horn fore-end tip today.  I is quite a complex shape as it has to fit round the end of the ramrod pipe and also accommodate the back end of the rib, but it wasn’t as bad a job as I expected and its now finished – I discovered a couple of small defects in the horn that show up as pale marks, they were not obvious when I started, but until you polish the horn it all looks grey anyway.  I don’t think the marks will affect the strength and they only show if you look for them, so I’m happy to leave them – especially as the alternative is to start again!  I managed to fair in the horn with just a little removal of the surface finish of the wood next to the joint, but a touch of colour and some slakum and it is back to where it was.  Job done.    I got an email with another job today – re-cutting a bit of engraving.  I failed to notice that the Birmingham Arms fair is next Sunday – I would normally go but I am shooting on Saturday – leaving home at 5:45 to get there for breakfast, so I don’t fancy spending most of Sunday driving to and from Birmingham – anyway I keep telling myself that I’m trying to get rid of guns, not acquire more!  I have had a look at the Bonhams catalogue and will probably view on Sunday 27th and go up for the sale – I just like the atmosphere, and there are one or two lots I might be interested in.  There is a whole collection’s worth of cased Adams pattern 1854 revolvers and derivatives, but not the one I’m looking for – I nearly bought a ‘mint’ one at Birmingham but was put off by a perfect finish but rounded arises to the engraving – I always carry a hand lens and use it!  Of course the vendor swore it was the original finish, and maybe he was right, but its my money!  I keep looking at the field articles but its mostly a bit breech loader specific – did see one interesting article on cartridges, showing that both the wads, top cards and cases and primers affect both the velocity and the patterning even if the powder and shot loads are identical – the differences are quite marked – sometimes half as many shot in the 30 inch circle at 40 yds with the ‘worst’ combination.

I haven’t taken out the dings in the wood – its a working gun and will only get more!

12th November – Went over to see Dick and look at some guns a client wanted sold – he buys stuff unseen at auction and passes it to Dick to restore and sell, but frankly he usually gets some pretty junky stuff and I’m sure he looses money on most of it!  Which is a good opportunity to think about what is happening to the prices of antique firearms – although it is not a very encouraging situation for people sitting on a fair sized collection – it seems to me that over the last few years the market for and price of  anything that isn’t of good quality in decent condition has dropped quite dramatically – and anything in the ‘junk’ or ‘in need of restoration’catagory even more so.  One possible exception is guns fit for sporting shooting or rifle competitions.  I’d like to think that cased revolvers of the 1850s are OK but when you add in the value of cases and accessories they are probably not commanding as high a price as a few years ago unless in very fine condition.  Anyway I had a look at the guns Dick has on offer, and didn’t feel even slightly tempted at any price.  I finished my 14 bore card dispenser today – I made the top for it and put a bayonnet fitting for removing it, and then made a leather sleeve to smarten it all up.  If I was doing it again I would make the end pieces out of a larger brass rod so that it  overlapped the leather – anyway it looks smart and complements my red leather covered shampoo bottle shot flask.  Dick suggested I should sell them, but when I pointed out that I’d have to charge around £150 – 200 each he could see that this wasn’t going to make my fortune!   I’m afraid nothing today on the ‘Field’ articles…………….

11th November – In school this afternoon with my STEM club – its lovely watching a dozen children aged 7 to 10 just making things.  The consumption of glue sticks for the cool glue gun is impressive, I think they got through 12 today, and the bench tops I made to protect the classroom tables get heavy use.  I must make another saw out of a 12 inch hacksaw blade cut down with a dowel handle and a bit of big heat shrink tube.  I sorted out the electrical supplies so they can make simple circuits – 9V batteries, buzzers, LEDs and switches.  My ‘job’ seems to be to supply a steady stream of interesting materials and offer a bit of help and encouragement where needed.    A bit more work in odd moments on the horn foreend tip – all filed by hand at the moment using a couple of those old fashioned files that are tapered half round with included flat handles – if it were a bit warmer in the woodwork shed I’d go and use the disk sander for the outside shape – a bit more and I’ll have to Araldite it onto the stock as its getting too small and fragile to hold reliably.    My ‘Field’ contribution today is the proof rules from 1806 for guns of the fourth class (d/b muzzle loaders without chokes).  For a 14 bore  the provisional proof (V)  the load was 11 1/4 drams of  black powder and a ball that was an easy fit in the barrel (hence no choke!) – probably a little over 1 oz and the definitive proof (CP)  was 6 drams of powder and 1 1/2 oz of shot, with the service load defined as 3 drams and 1 1/8 oz.  There was also a supplementary proof that was optional (?) using T.S.2 powder of  4 1/8 drams and 1 1/2 oz. – each proof cost 6d. except the supplementary T.S.2 proof that was 1s. 0d.  Other gauge loads on a sliding scale – e.g. 8 bore provisional was  17 1/2 drams and the ball, definitive 9 7/8 drams and  2  5/12 oz. for a service load of  4  15/16 drams and 1  13/16 oz.   Interesting that the powder loads were quite hefty but the ball/shot loads were very little more than the service load. – they were obviously all calculated according to some formula based on the bore size and then reduced to spuriously precise fractions!  I’m not sure of the significance of the supplementary proof, unless T.S. 2 was more powerful than the ‘normal’ proof powder. – I seem to remember from my visit to the proof house in London that they now use T.S.2 for all proofs of black powder guns.

Its beginning to get a bit fragile and difficult to hold, so soon need to be worked on in situ.

10th November – Bit of gun work today as a relaxation! I bought back a friend’s  Jo Manton single barrelled sporting gun from my shoot on Thursday that had the horn fore-end cap missing – – but a broken half was salvaged.  So my first action is to place the gun in context – so; its a conversion from flint, the number under the barrel is 1589, which the Manton book gives as a double gun that may not be by Manton as the signing is odd.  That number belongs to about 1801, which looks right for the lock engraving on this gun, the engraving  probably dates from about 1795 to 1805 .  There are no numbers on the inside of the locks – that is also right for that period.  The barrel is unsigned, which is a bit unusual for Jo Manton but has it been struck off?  And there is no poincon so not a classy gun!   The stock is OK for 1801, except it has probably been chequered since then.  Anyway it looks like a genuine Manton.  When faced with a broken part – in this case the horn fore-end, the first question is why did it break off after sitting there for 218 years and a bit of shooting?  Clue, the fore-end pipe is a bit loose.  On taking off the barrel its clear that there is a split down the middle of the fore-end through the hole for the pipe lug, about 2 1/2 inches long – obviously the split was too much for the horn and it broke and as it was only held on by animal glue it flew off.   So first job is to glue the split up with runny epoxy – work the joint to get it in, then a quick binding with self amalgamating tape.  Replacing bits like the horn on old guns is tricky – more so than when it was made, as then a part finished horn would be glued on and shaped along with the finish shaping of the stock.  I’ll make the new fore end cap from water buffalo horn ( buy on ebay for dog chews!) and glue it in place with epoxy leaving a bit of finishing to do.  A tough layer of tape round the wood will give some protection while its rough shaped, then I’ll have to remove the tape and finally shape it and probably have to refinish the wood locally afterwards.   I got a bar of 1 inch brass to make my 14 Bore overshot card dispenser, and found that I could use a piece of 22 mm copper water pipe for the body.  Anyway I turned up the brass dispenser end and filed the necessary slots etc.  and it now looks as if it will work – still to come are the spring and top cap.  One of the ‘gang’ suggested it would be very cold to use on a chilly shoot, so I might make a nice leather sleeve for it!   On the ‘Field’ puzzles, looking at the tables I put up on 4th Nov, one might expect a difference in flight time to 40 yards between 5 & 6 shot to be  4.2 mSec    and between 6 and 7 to be 6.6 mSec.  – this equates to a separation of  approximately  3.6 ft and 5.5 ft respective  – the difference is due to the greater falloff in speed of the smaller shot sizes.  Both effects would be significant compared to the normal shot string length of around 7 ft.   so using mixed shot might be noticeable, particularly if shooting in front!  Is this Bev’s secret weapon?

 

This will work for 14 and 13 bore cards, I hope, not sure about 16 bore. ( not yet finished)

Lock border is right for very late C18 or very early C19 so OK for 1801.

This split broke the horn tip. Still it is over 200 years old!

Never be without self amalgamating / self vulcanising tape!

9th November – Very pleasant shoot today – some good drives after a few barren ones, but that is how the cookie crumbles.    My browsing of the ‘Field’ articles and discussions led me to think about the consequences of swinging the gun.  A common misconception concerns the idea that swinging while shooting is like playing a hose or firing a machine gun – i’e’ that there will be some sort of sweep of shot.  In fact this doesn’t happen as the shot all exits the barrel still in a tight column in a small fraction of a millisecond.  There is a Youtube video of a shot fired into  water while swinging madly that shows that the pattern is broadly similar to a normal stationary gun pattern.  I tried to do some calculations of how much the end of the barrel moves during the time the shot is traversing the barrel – which I take to be around 5 mSec  (based on ‘Field’ data – but I need to check that again) .   Assuming the pivot for the gun is the shooter’s shoulder and it is 4.5 ft to the muzzle and you are swinging at a bird crossing at 30 yds (90 ft) that is doing 50 mph (75 fps) as a fairly fast crosser with the wind behind it, then the muzzle is moving at (4.5/90 x 75 ) fps  = 3.5 fps., so in 5 msec. the muzzle swings just less than 1/4 of an inch.  Most of that movement will occur during the initial phase of acceleration of the shot down the barrel, but nevertheless the shot against the ‘upwind’ side of the barrel HAS to follow a curved path, and will be deflected within the barrel, the question is how this affects the shot, not just that in contact with the upwind side of barrel – The Youtube evidence is  that it all leaves the barrel as a single column going in the same  direction but I don’t know what effect this might have on distortion of the shot or patterning – I would be surprised if the gun patterned the same for a fast swing as for a static shot, in particular it might affect the tail of the shot string more than the main forward part, but I would expect the difference to be small, possibly no more than variations between normal shots?. On another tack,  Bev, who is a crack shot, makes his own shot and it is not particularly well sorted in size ( I’m being charitable here!) but it shoots perfectly and he seldom misses.  This got me to wondering, based on the tables of fall off in velocity for different shot sizes ( smaller shot sizes fall off in velocity faster than larger sizes) if using mixed shot would increase the length of the shot string at range, and if this could be useful.    I’ll try to do some calculations next time……..

8th November – Had my shoot yesterday at Woodhall – a very good day with some super drives and no rain!  I was a bit worried as my gun lost its under rib – all but a small length at the muzzle.  It’s been on the cards since I resoldered the barrels and didn’t hold the bottom rib in place well enough while I did the top rib – I relaid it, but in a less than perfect way this morning as I need to use the gun for my next shoots and I didn’t want to take the barrels apart and start over.   As a point of interest you can just about get away with resoldering the bottom rib if you have it free and start at one end – but once its fixed in two places you can’t heat the bit between them without creating a bulge in the rib as it expands on heating.    I had an email from a regular, Robin, who pointed out, re semolina,that the early Eley patent wired shot packets made to Jenour’s 1823 patent (Eley bought the patent) were packed in bone dust to avoid ‘balling’.  I was aware that it had been used in that way, and in fact I do have a wired shot packet (probably not an Eley one as there is no maker’s name on it), presumably filled with bone dust under its paper wrapper – see photo.  I do know several inveterate shooters who want their ashes disposed of’ in this way – Penny points out that cremation ashes have a higher density than bone dust (some people know some pretty obscure facts, don’t they?).  The subject of balling is interesting in itself – Some experiment reported in the Field articles suggested that it was a common phenomenon, even for more or less normal loads although its not something I’ve heard  happen nowadays – there was also much discussion of the merits of ‘soft’ or ‘chilled’ shot as a possible issue in ‘balling’ – one of the many such discussions.  An afterthought re the bonedust – I did try with a friend  making packets of shot to ease loading but it is almost impossible to force a packet of loose shot down a barrel without it locking up – maybe the bone dust actually made loading easier/possible?  On the other hand my wired shot is quite distinctly tapered and is meant to be loaded small end down, and the small end is a loose fit in a 14 Gauge barrel – it gets tight about 10mm before it’s right into the barrel……..The excitement of keeping this blog up is that whatever I say, someone will have something interesting to add or correct- Bev said yesterday that my speed for pheasants of about 30 mph was too low, and it should be up to 43 mph, citing a Youtube video as evidence.  That raises an interesting further discussion – the measurements made by the Victorians were done very carefully and with considerable precision and accuracy, particularly to indoors tunnel flights, and with a very high degree of consistency – likewise I’m sure that the modern measurements are as good and of greater accuracy.  There are two realistic possibilities – either the Victorian birds were flying in such unnatural conditions or under such stress that they flew about 10 mph slower than free ranging birds, or that selective breeding for better sport has pushed up their flying speed by 10 mph.  You pays your money and you takes your choice! Just don’t expect me to adjudicate. ………..   Oh and I’d like to excuse the birds I missed yesterday on the grounds that I was given incorrect information as to their speed………………………..

The package is tapered – the small end is labelled ‘bottom’ – presumably you use the tape to open the pack.  But do you take the paper right off?

14 Gauge wired shot package – presumably packed in bone dust – overall weight is 1.48 oz.

6th November – In school fixing a guard on a classroom door to stop children’s fingers being trapped this morning (I am now the honorary unpaid caretaker it seems), Sam from year 3 kindly helped me – give the lad a house point, especially if he’s in Churchill House.  Whenever I walk round school now I either get accused by small children of being a knight or told of something that is broken – today a leak in the classroom ceiling ( that is firmly above my paygrade)!  To return to the Field articles and the crossing bird, I realised that the angle between the sight line and the bird necessary to get a hit in maintained lead is the same for all ranges, and it brought to mind something I vaguely remember seeing somewhere – a device on the end of the barrel with a sight on either side that gave you a scale to judge lead with – in our 30 mph bird the additional sights would need to be about 1 1/2 inches either side of the central sight – I have no idea if the whole thing is a figment of my imagination or has some basis!  Combining the data on the length of  a typical shot string at 30 yds (somewhere around 7 ft according to Field  articles) with the crossing bird speed shows that the bird will  travel about  1 foot forward during the passage of the shot string.  This means that if the front part of the string just misses behind the bird hit will escape, whereas if the front part just misses in front it will likely be caught by the remainder of the shot string  – effectively the shot pattern is effectively 12 inches wider if in front of the bird – given a typical shot pattern of say 3 ft at 30 yds from a cylinder bore you get an extra 30% lateral coverage in front! –  seems illogical but that’s what the science says.   That leaves one issue to be sorted in another blog – does swinging the gun ‘ spray the shot around’ ?  Here the Victorians don’t have anything to offer so I will be on my own!  Off tomorrow on a shoot I’ve organised down in Hertfordshire – should be fun now I have established that I can still (occasionally) hit things.  It will be my first Semolina game shoot and I’ll be interested to see how it pans out if it rains, which it might.  I have a tube  for my loading rod that sticks in the ground – it has a container at the top for my powder flask and I’ve now added another for the Semolina flask.  My next project is to make a card dispenser for my main shooting gun, the 14 Bore Venables – now pretending to be a live pigeon gun due to having lost its ramrod pipes on account of my poor soldering!  Brass bar and tube are ordered……..Maybe a good subject for a video

5th November – I am continuing my reading of the Field articles from before 1900.  There is an interesting letter concerning the convergence given to barrels in a double gun or rifle. We all know that they are ‘regulated’ to hit the same spot at the selected distance by being joined converging to the muzzle – but there was a active correspondence about why parallel barrels don’t hit the same spot at all ranges.  You can’t invoke the resistance of the shooter’s shoulder because a cross stocked gun still shoots more or less on the mid line.  One ingenious suggestion in the Field correspondence was that on firing the active barrel expands in diameter, and correspondingly shortens in length, thus bending the pair in the correct direction. The correspondent claimed to have done experiments to prove his contention. I have to say I’m not convinced by that argument – especially for rifles.  I’ve always assumed it was to do with the centre of gravity of the gun itself,  the recoil being some distance off the vertical position of the  CG so creating a local turning moment that is small and is not much affected by the person holding the gun. I assume the matter has been settled beyond doubt now – so if you know the answer, let me know!    Another interesting correspondence was related to shooting flying birds – they had pigeons, partridges and pheasants flying in a tunnel and in the wild and measured their speed, which turned out to be pretty much 30 m.p.h. in still air – which corresponds to 45 ft per second   A muzzle loader probably shoots with a velocity averaging about 900 f.p.s.  over a 30 yard (90 ft) distance, so takes one tenth of a second from the shot to leave the muzzle until it reaches the bird.  A crossing bird  will therefore have traveled  4.5 ft while the shot is in the air.  The delay between deciding to pull the trigger and ignition could be another 1/10 second ( but very variable between shooters) so if you poke at a crossing bird without swinging  you probably need to be 9 ft in front in calm air. If you are swinging with the bird – maintained lead – then you need to be shooting 4 1/2 ft in front.  Of course if the bird has a fresh breeze up its tail – say 20 m.ph, then your lead needs to be more like 7 1/2 ft.  If you are shooting ‘Churchill’ – coming through the bird and pulling the trigger as you pass it, I’m afraid you are on your own as far as calculations go as I don’t know your personal delay time!  Of course its not practical to do the calculations when about to pull the trigger, and my numbers are not precise, and the bird is seldom flying exactly at right angles to the shot direction……….but you get the message.

 

4th November – At our shoot on Sunday Bev and I were discussing shot strings and what effect swing might have – both having some familiarity with the physics it made for an interesting discussion and got me thinking.  I remembered I had two fine volumes from 1900 that consisted mostly of articles and letters from The Field magazine from around 1880 to 1890 ish covering many aspects of shooting – there was a lot of scientific interest – breech loaders were by now well established as was smokeless powder, but past percussion guns were still more or less within memory.  The two volumes, beautifully leather bound, are a delight and cover every form of measurement that was within the technology of the time – chronographs and barrel pressure gauges existed, and ingenious mechanical systems were devised to measure the length and shape of shot strings, and the penetrating power of shot.  Everything was tabulated very precisely and efforts were made to avoid errors and get meaningful results, and it all stimulated a lively correspondence that yielded more data.  Looking through the first volume I came across accounts of what it took to burst steel and damascus 12 bore barrels ( around 12 drams of powder and 12 oz of shot! ) with pictures of the results on 4 barrels.  There is a lot on shot strings and patterns, and one experiment looked at the velocities of shot for each of a number of concentric rings in the pattern  showing that the shot flies progressively slower the further from the centre of the pattern it is.   A further experiment collected shot according to its penetrating power and found that the slow shot was more deformed –  This implies that the outer part of the pattern travels slower because it is deformed, presumably through contact with the barrel – which might suggest that the the worse the barrel condition the more deformed shot giving rise to a bigger difference in shot velocity and hence a longer shot string and a wider pattern.  This leads to the idea that the shot pattern might be a cone – the nose of the cone undeformed shot and the conical tail the slower, deformed shot.  At longer ranges the slower shot will fall further under gravity, thus the cone will droop, maybe by as much as a foot.    A further interesting finding was that the guns patterned tighter with a thin card overshot card than with a thicker one – this was for cartridges so how relevant that is I don’t know.   But one possibility that it raises is that the slightly tighter patterns reported for semolina might be related to less deformation of the shot?   Another relevant finding was in the measurement of a number of flint and percussion bores – almost none of which were cylindrical for more than a short part of the barrel – most converged from the breach, had a foot or so of cylinder and then opened out by at least a few thou.

times for shot of different sizes – not sure if they are the same as modern shot sizes.

 

3rd November  – here at last is the semolina video – don’t know why it took 2 days to get there ;-

Shooting day with Anglian Muzzle Loaders at Cambridge Gun Club – ostensibly a hammer gun/black powder day but I had more important fish to fry so stuck to my percussion muzzle loaders.  I took the Westley Richards to see if I could shoot it, and used it for the mornings competition with very little success, although it has to be said in my defense that the birds were pretty challenging and I wasn’t (quite) the worst!  Anyway in the afternoon we had an informal shoot and a bit of freedom to choose which of the available targets on the stand we wanted to shoot – as Bev said, a good confidence building exercise…. Anyway I reverted to my  good old Venables and got a much more respectable score, which neatly solves the problem of which gun to use for my game shoots this week.  I was, of course, using fine semolina throughout ( except for the last few shots when I ran out) and was perfectly happy with the way the gun was shooting, so that settles that argument for me.  There is a lot of interest in changing to semolina – either coarse or fine, and discussion of whats and ifs. One big advantage I can see is if you need to pull a charge for any reason – all you have to do is remove the overshot card and shake out the mess.  We did realise that it would probably be wise in those circumstances to fire off a cap to clear any semolina from the flame path – particularly essential if you are unloading because you forgot to put any powder in the gun!  My card dispenser was excellent, but I now have to find a tube of the right size to hold cards for the 14 bore Venables – always something else to do, which reminds me I bought back a fine Purdy back action lock from a hammer gun that had the tail repaired and needs to be re-engraved on the last inch. Incidentally the Anglian Muzzle Loaders continues to gather members – not all of whom are geriatrics like me, to the point where it is on the verge of becoming unwieldy.  We must have made up half of the shooters today, possibly more.  I was interested to hear that the Cambridge Gun Club now has a number of muzzle loading pistol shooters and a range for them – must take my Colt Army along……

2nd  November – Had an email from Chris who has been patterning the 11 bore Wilkes I restored for him,  with the same load ( 3 dr, 1 1/4 Oz, 1 1/4 oz measure of semolina) a I was using for  patterning my Westley Richards 11 bore using semolina.  He got beautiful patterns at 30 yards – a lucky sparrow might escape through the pattern but nothing bigger.  I am shooting tomorrow at Cambridge Gun Club – its the Hammer Gun Competition but I haven’t loaded any Black Powder cartridges for my William Powell and anyway I want to do some more practice with the WR  (with semolina as I don’t have any wads for it), or maybe revert to my old  gun if I don’t hit anything – I have 3 muzzle loading game shoots in the next two weeks, so need to be on form!   I have been cleaning up a big Sykes flask for use for the semolina – its a tin body under leather, and the tin is eaten away in places but the top is in excellent condition – I may try to make a new body for it.  I took a Bartram flask top to pieces, but I can’t quite work out how the spring works – its within the top and is a curved piece of round wire, not a flat strip.  The top and bottom plates of the flask top are separated by a strip of flat spring bent round and fitted in grooves in the top and bottom with a gap where the ‘handle’ comes out.   must look out for a copy of his patent, and check Riling’s book ( it has virtually nothing on him).  The flask itself  is somewhat unusual in that it has an angled top.

1st  November – More semolina stuff – boring –  After posting last night I remembered to clean my gun – there is some discussion about whether it leaves the guns cleaner than wads or not – one might expect it to be dirtier as the sweeping action of a lubricated wad isn’t happening – but I didn’t see that – here is my experience;-

I hadn’t shot those barrels before and I’m not sure of their history – I had cleaned them a few times with a steel wire brush in a drill and got out a fair bit of red rust before oiling them.

After shooting 20 ish shots in each barrel with semolina I did get some deposit in the first wash water with bronze brush & detergent – probably charred semolina – not seen when using wads – the water was dark grey as usual – (I just fill the barrels once each to the muzzle with boiling water and a couple of drops of detergent and pump with the bronze brush)

Second scrub with nipples out using wadding as a pump and 303 cleaner didn’t get much dirt on the wad or in the  water – water is usually clean but wadding is dirtier with wads

Third scrub with kitchen roll and Napier gun cleaner that usually keeps coming out black with wads was pretty clean – but given that the barrels were probably not leaded before this shoot it may not be indicative.

Pete says that, if anything, his patterns were slightly tighter with semolina – I think he was shooting a 14 bore with 2 1/2 dr. and 1 oz and an equal volume of semolina ( he works on the principle that all volumes should be the same – keeps it simple!  He thinks his barrels were a bit dirtier, so no conclusive evidence either way!

31st October – Viking Pete and I had our semolina day at Eriswell!  It got off to a bad start when I fired the right barrel with about 4 dr.semolina (powder volume) at the pattern target and shot a great big donut shaped pattern with a hole in the middle.  At 15 m there was not a single shot in the centre 4 inches which means a pheasant sized hole at 30 m, and the bulk of the pellets  were in a ring extending out to about 24 inches – what I take to be a classic case of  too much powder although I wouldn’t have expected that using 3 dr of Czech powder and 1 1/4 oz of shot in an 11 bore.  The left barrel shot much better at around 18 – 20 inches . and an even pattern – the same load but the left barrel has around 10 thou of choke (barrel made post 1917 ish.) .   I repeated the same loads using  tight fitting wads  and the right barrel got rid of the hole in the middle and gave a more even pattern  a little tighter.  The left barrel was pretty much the same as with semolina maybe a smidgen less tight .  Pete was firing his 14 bore and there was not much difference between semolina and wad – I’ll check back with him to see if that  is true on closer inspection.  Anyway I dropped my loads to 2 3/4 dr and 1 oz and as we’d run out of pattern targets went on to shoot clays – I didn’t have any wads for the gun so it was all shot with semolina using about 4 dr. by  powder volume – I shot almost 50 shots with the gun and hit every other clay with no particular bias towards one barrel or the other – most of the ones I missed were because I was not on target so I’m happy that it was shooting reasonably well – I probably ought to get in another day’s clays before the next game shoot, but I fear there may not be time.  Anyway I  think the 11 bore will do nicely for game but I will have another go at patterning some time with the revised load.  Might go over to Dick’s and do it in his field with a sheet of polystyrene and brown paper or even newspaper.    In the back of my mind is the thought that I may have been overloading my gun at the last few shoots? What do I conclude about semolina vs wads ?  Basically not enough evidence to be sure, but it seems to work in practice.  I might wonder if semolina is a bit more susceptible to the charge blowing a hole in the middle of the pattern but apart from that, which might just be an anomaly, it might have tightened the left barrel pattern slightly – certainly didn’t open it out.  The good news is that my prototype card dispenser worked flawlessly dispensing two cards at a time – I could push down on the card and get only one if I needed to but it didn’t fail once – although it was only loaded with about 40 cards so I ran out at the end.  I don’t suppose I’ll get round to going beyond the prototype stage unless I want a different size of card.

 

 

 

30th October – I did a few measurements around the observations about semolina in the video (still processing!) to see how the volumes might work out.  I reckon 1 oz of shot has internal spaces of  about 4.6 ml, which is the same volume as 4.2 drams of powder  (for this volume the semolina weighs about 2.4 drams).   So my guess would be that if you use a powder flask to dispense your semolina you need at least a 3 dram flask for 1 oz. of shot.   I guess that 1 oz in a 16 bore needs less semolina than the same shot load in a 12 bore since the depth of the semolina layer is what slows the shot.  I’d never want to go for a smaller volume  of semolina than powder, and to be on the safe side 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 times the powder volume.  I can’t see any down side to using slightly more semolina than the above calculations.  I might have reservations if my loaded gun was going to be subjected to prolonged shaking as the shot might fall through to the powder – in that case I would feel the need for a  card over the powder.  As the video shows I think the semolina is probably a good thermal buffer provided the shot doesn’t penetrate to the powder layer. I might try my video experiments with coarse semolina some time.

30th October –  I am going to the clay ground tomorrow to try out semolina and see if I can actually hit anything –  I need to get my eye in again.  I have been meaning to have a look at what happens when you load semolina so I decided it was an ideal opportunity to make a youtube video.  I wanted to see if the semolina and powder stayed separate, and if the shot sat on top of the semolina or got buried in it.  I also wanted to see what happens to semolina when you apply heat, and I was wondering if the grains more or less locked up into a solid when under breech pressures.  I managed the first two experiments and given the results I’m not sure the last objective is particularly relevant.  My video explains it all, so I have put it in the VIDEO tab, and there is a link below.  I’ll try and see how it goes on a pattern plate tomorrow if I get time, and maybe make another video.  Now to see if I can remember how to link youtubes in to the blog – I think it may take some time for youtube to process – I seem to have read somewhere that it takes a while to put them on line ( its now been many hours!).  Another little project that, like the semolina experiments, has been hanging around at the back of my mind came to the fore – I’d had in mind to make a card dispenser but hadn’t got round to it (familiar story?) until I saw someone had one at the last shoot, so having an odd half hour and a pile of 11 bore cards I happened across a piece of  1 inch PVC  conduit that was the right internal diameter for the cards, so I turned up an end from a scrap of plastic and found a couple of springs and put one together as a prototype.  Its a bit Heath Robinson but it (mostly) works and will hold and dispense around 50 cards –   The design is pretty basic and could be tidied up and made more attractive, but first it needs field trials – and I need to know what bore of gun I  end up shooting most often. Oh and I realised that the tip of the sear of the early 18th century pistol I made the tumbler for was not properly hard so I must do that before I forget.

In theory the gap at the end between the white tube and the black end can be adjusted for dispensing one or two cards for greater economy of effort shooting doubles!  It needs some form of suspension loop and it could be prettier!

 

This was a trial run – I used more semolina than powder by volume – probably twice as much, and it went in with quite a slope on top.  My flask got stuck and dispensed far too much shot – but even when it only dispensed 1 1/4 oz it mostly buried itself in the semolina.  I didn’t have a problem with the black powder forming a level surface, and the semolina didn’t mix in with it.  But the semolina usually formed a sloping top surface.  For  what I thought were reasonable loads most of the shot was buried in the semolina and it almost reached as far as the powder.  Shaking and banging the ‘barrel’ caused the semolina to float up through the shot, but left the interface between powder and semolina pretty much undisturbed – although I guess the shot would eventually reach the powder.

 

 

 

 

29th October – Still no body in the ditch….  I finished off the tumbler and hardened it and made a new cock screw as the old one didn’t fit the new thread I’d cut – I put the trigger back in the stock and the lock all works as sweet as a nut.  Someone had painted the whole pistol in some kind of varnish that turned all the brass into copper colour – most of the furniture had been stripped and cleaned but the ramrod pipes were still ‘orange’  – I had hoped to remove them but looking at the pins holding them in, I decided to try to strip off the varnish in situ using paint stripper and various tools and 0000 steel wool and a small polishing mop in my ‘psuedo Dremel’ – it all worked a treat and saved any damage to the stock from knocking out the very rusty pins.  Dick now has the wood to patch up a couple of chips.  I was intending to try the Westley Richards some time but don’t have a wad punch for it, although I am expecting to be using semolina instead of wads now – still I need a punch for overshot cards, so a chunk of the 1 inch bar was made into a punch, starting off by putting a 3/4 inch drill up the middle for 35 mm (I like mixed units – so soothing)  I turned the inside with a slight taper (2 degrees) out from the mouth so that cards free up.  I was going to mill the opening in the side but alas the controller on my Axminster milling machine packed up, so I cut the slot with an angle grinder and files – just as good and in truth probably quicker.  The cutting mouth got hardened along with the tumbler and cock screw and works fine, although I may have made it a trifle large – the cards will be a tight fit.

Its designed to be run in a drill press or hit with a club hammer.

28th October – Expecting to find Boris dead in a ditch shortly!  Hope its not the one in my garden….  Went into school today to see how many children had taken up my challenge – 3 so far out of 20 ish – more to come.  I’ve been making prizes – little wooden boxes (£1 each from the cheap shop) with engraved brass plates.  Must be mad…    I had some time to attend to the tumbler of the early-mid 18th century pistol.  Having made it, I then had to tune up everything to get it so that everything was just right – that means making sure it lets the cock stop on the edge of the lock as it should, making sure the end of the spring rides smoothly on the tumbler arm, working on the bents to put the half cock and full cock positions where they should be, and the sear bar is in the right place in relation to the edge of the lock etc. and the half cock bent is secure but isn’t caught by the sear on firing and everything runs freely without binding…   All this has to be done in small steps as the only way to put things right if you take too much off is to apply weld and file it all up – nasty!  I think I must have put on and taken off the tumbler, bridle, sear, cock and mainspring about 30 times (minimum!) this evening as I sorted it out.  I think its all exactly right now, so I’ll leave it until tomorrow and check it in the cold light of day and if it is OK I’ll harden it – I think the steel has a fair amount of carbon in it, so it should harden nicely.  The mainspring is pretty strong and is marking the tumbler arm when you cock and uncock the pistol, so I’ll have to repolish it when I take it out before hardening it.  I’m planning to go to Eriswell to shoot on Thursday – its scheduled as a semolina day and I’ll try my guns out on the pattern plate as well as trying to remember how to hit clays!

I put a a flint in the lock to check the fired and half cock positions as I tweaked the bents etc.  The mainspring end acts quite close to the tumbler pivot, but it works OK.

27th October – Very pleasant sunny day – inspired me to trim the hedges this morning – I spent the entire day being disorientated by the time change but I survived.  This afternoon I made the new tumbler for the pistol as I found a 1 inch  bar of some very tough steel in the workshop.  My usual technique is to  turn up a disk with the lock bearing and blank for the square and tap the hole for the cock screw then partially turn the back and part it off and glue it onto the end of the bar (with a hole in it) so I can work on the other face. I used epoxy in the past but this time I was in a hurry and used instant glue which worked just fine  – I couldn’t break it off but a bit of heat shifted it.   I printed out the photo below on A5 and marked up lines to give a guide to the geometry and hacksawed off most of the spare metal and filed it up – first clear the part of the diameter that goes past the top tumbler mount, then the bit that has to clear the pivot of the sear, then shape the bit where the spring end rests.  I then put in the full cock bent some way round from its probable position.  At this point I put the square on the shaft by careful comparison with the old one and pressed the cock on – perfect fit!  Now it’s possible to fix the full cock bent and start work on the half cock  position  – while the full has to release, the half cock has to capture the end of the sear and hold it when the trigger is pressed, which calls for a bit of tricky filing.  I had to reshape the end of the sear as it was too thick to go into a reasonable half cock bent, but it all seems to work as for as I can tell – I will put the lock together as soon as I get time, and if its OK I’ll harden the tumbler. I may have to do a bit of fiddling with the bents when I can try the gun with the spring in place to make sure the sear doesn’t pop into the half cock bent as it goes past in firing. It all seems to fit reasonably together and I think there is no need to do anything with the bridle – most of the slop in the system has gone with the bearing fit of the new tumbler in the lock plate, and the gun will not be used for shooting, I assume!  A good afternoon’s  work – with a bit of the evening to put in bents and finish it – say 5 or 6 hours work.

26th October – Had another offer of a muzzle loading shoot yesterday – they seem very popular at the moment! I had a discussion with the owner of the pistol I mentioned yesterday and we decided the best course of action was to make a new tumbler rather than try and mess about with the old one.  The first step is to sort out the dimensions for the blank – mostly measure with calipers or a micrometer, but also photograph it against a ruler to get a better clue to the shape.  I’ll have a look for a suitable bar of metal when I go into the outside workshop tomorrow.  I’m still hoping someone will tell me what the slot across the tumbler is for – it must have been quite difficult to shape the axle in the middle of the slot!    I had to make a couple of wooden bench hooks/tops for my STEM club – the kids discovered the hacksaws in out trolley of bits and pieces and decided it was fun to saw up the strips of wood I provide for projects – I have no problem with that except I live in fear of them cutting into the nice classroom tables ( we don’t have a craft room and we always make a mess so I live in fear of the caretaker – I seem to remember that traditionally the caretaker strikes more fear into everyone than the head teacher! – certainly does for me) – hence the wooden bench tops.

The cock screw hole is well off centre in the square. It looks like 25 mm bar will just do without using a 4 jaw chuck.

 

25th October – My shoot wasn’t the best I’ve ever been on – I hit an unlucky run of pegs and didn’t see much action, and what I did see I didn’t make much of!  The last two drives were shot in pouring rain which with a muzzle loader is a bit more of a bother than with a breech loader.  I did feel a bit smug as I’d put on waterproof overtrousers at the start when the rest thought they could  get away with it so I was comfortable and dry throughout.  I expect my gear will dry out sometime!  We had several discussions about the use of semolina instead of wads so I must do some quasi-scientific experiments some time.   I had a visit from the owner of the Wilkes 11 bore so that has now left the workshop and another satisfied customer.  He brought a single barreled gun to ask me if the nipple ( a new commercial 1/4 BSF one)  was a tight enough fit to be safe from blowing out.  It was a slightly wobbly fit all the way down although the thread in the breech looked fine – it would probably have been OK, and if it had been my gun I might have used it, but if someone asks me, I feel obliged to ere on the side of caution as they are relying on my judgement. Anyway I was able to find a titanium nipple that I’d made with an oversize thread that was perfect.  As I’ve mentioned before, titanium is funny metal to work with as it does not like very fine cuts with a die so I tend to cut just once with the die opened out to make a slightly oversized thread as most nipple holes have worn a bit and when cleaned out with a 1/4 BSF plug tap ground a bit flat at the end come out perfect for  them.   I got another job in this morning – a nice classic flintlock pistol from the first half of the 18th century – its only unusual feature as far as I am concerned is that it appears to have a detachable pan.  Its main problem is that the half and full cocks don’t hold – basically a wear problem that is exacerbated by a bit of messing about at some time.  The bents in the tumbler seem to be worn but also reshaped with a file, as has the nose of the sear.  The tumbler is loose in its bearing in the lockplate but also in the hole in the tumbler, which has been crudely countersunk on the inside.  The tumbler has a fine crack and part is almost broken off.   The tumbler also has a groove filed across the middle that I can’t quite work out – my first thought was that it was for a fly – the little arm that steers the sear past the half cock notch when the gun is fired, but it doesn’t correspond to the form of that device that I am familiar with on later guns and I can’t see how it would work as it is.  So the question is how to sort it out.  The tumbler is straightforward – it needs annealing and flattening – I forgot to mention its a bit warped – and a spot of weld put on the crack.  The sear can probably be reshaped, possibly with a spot of weld on the nose.  The tumbler has three problems – the lock plate bearing, the tumbler bearing and the bents, so the best solution may be to make a new tumbler with oversize bearing surfaces,  or just to forget the poor bearings and pop a bit of weld on the bents and refile them.  To be discussed with the owner……….

Red arrows – evidence for detachable pan – green arrow bad sear/bents

What is the slot across the tumbler for?    The full cock bent is very deep, and there is no safety element to the half cock bent.

The countersunk bearing for the tumbler shaft is cracked at the thin bit and the large look has lost part of its side, its all also warped a bit.

23rd October – Shoot tomorrow, usual gun so I got the kit ready.  Its only just over an hour away so no need to get up at cock crow (ours starts around 4 a.m.).  Had a session today replacing duff fluorescent tubes around the workshops – in total I have something like 20 tubes in use, mostly 6 ft ones.  I’ve just replaced the first with an LED strip fitting which is very effective.  I changed over to white tubes some time ago and the one or two old ‘warm white’ ones look very dim by comparison. The fluorescent  LED fittings are pretty expensive, so I don’t think I’ll be doing a wholesale change yet – just the odd one or two.  They are not all used very often so there isn’t much saving in power.   I’ve been doing a bit of engraving for prizes for the school children’s half term challenge – mostly in CZ120 brass – I can now handle that as well as I can steel.  It’s mostly lettering  which is good practice – I have got my spacing almost up to scratch!   I was looking over the two 11 Bore guns I have in the workshop (finished) at the moment  – the Wilkes has a bore of around .751 in both barrels which is bang on for 11 bore, but the ’11 bore’ Westley Richards clocks about .753 in the right barrel and about .740 in the left – i.e. there seems to be a bit of choke in the left barrel. The WR barrel is so late for a percussion gun that I began to think it might be a 32 inch breechloading barrel from a 10 bore with the chambering cut off ( the barrel itself is 29 1/2 o.a.) but the bore is a bit small for that possibility ( 10 bore should be .775 ?).   Actually, having had a look at replacements for LED tubes its not too bad – but I can’t find a simple rewired 6 ft tube in daylight, but I’ll keep at it.

22nd October – tried to harden the WR lock plates in my electric furnace but the element kept popping out and shorting – needs a new element – they come for China so a week’s wait.  I did it with a couple of  gas burners – seems OK .  I put the locks together – the mainsprings were a bit of a struggle as my mainspring clamp is a bit worn and the springs were strong and quite open – I got thee eventually without breaking either spring!  So now that is all together – there are a couple of small wood repairs that I could make, but I’ll see how it shoots before I get carried away.  It promises to be a cracking gun – quite modern in its balance ( there is some lead in the stock for balance, or so it seems) and about the weight of a modern o/u 12 bore.  It seems to come up nicely.  That leaves me with a dilemma – I have a shoot this Thursday – should I take it, or stick to my regular gun?   Probably stick to the regular as I haven’t got any wads for the WR and I haven’t explored the equipment needed to use semolina instead of wads in the field – a jam jar and spoon probably won’t cut it with my fellow guns!   I have one small job to finish – I bought what I thought might be an original Spanish military pistol from a photograph but it turned out to be a repro – the buyer was happy sell it to me at the appropriate price as I wanted one as a demonstrator for the through the lock sear.  I am tweaking it a little to make it look a bit less like a repro – the screws are a terrible so I’ve made some new ones, and cleaned up the stock and distressed things a bit so it looks more presentable – I do NOT intend to pass it off as an original – the buyer had acquired it on her father’s death so had no inkling that it might be a repro, and had consulted an antiques expert – who of course would not necessarily know about guns.

Very modern semi pistol grip for a percussion gun –   the gun is part 1843 part 20th century.

21st October –  Quiet day – went up to school to take advantage of half term to try out a bit of soundproofing between classrooms – there is a big gap I was trying to fill with foam sheet to see if it had any effect – just as a test, as obviously foam is not a good sound insulator – anyway playing sea shanties at full blast (ideal as the sound level is pretty constant) I measured the loss through the existing structure as -20 dB and with the foam as about -25 dB so its probably worth replacing the foam with something more solid –  it’s wonderful what you can get a phone app to do – think of the cost of a sound level meter!   My gun time was spent finishing the re-engraving of the Westley Richards locks – They are not perfect, but I am happy to leave them like this as I don’t want to  refinish the lockplates down to clear metal as a) the job isn’t worth it, and b) it won’t add that much to the overall effect when I’ve coloured up the plates and put them in the gun. If I wanted perfect lock plates I’d probably make new ones anyway!   I now have to re-harden them and temper them – not sure if I’ll do it in the furnace or just with a gas torch – I’ll need to check the book for the right temperature.  There will be the problem of avoiding scale again – more important this time as the engraving will suffer if it scales up.

20th October – looking on the Westley Richards website at ‘New Guns’ I saw a picture of a very nice duplicate pair of rifles in a case and a nice leather label saying what they were, with special mention of their Patent Detachable Lock’s (sic)  – you would have thought that if you were selling a pair of rifles at, lets say £100K, you would at least proof read your labels and not commit the apostrophe sin!  I of course emailed them, troublemaker that I am….   I decided to bite the bullet and re-engrave the Westley Richards locks – One problem is that you have to anneal them or they are as hard as the gravers and you get no-where.  To anneal them you have to take them up to about 820 degrees C for 20 minutes or so and then cool them very slowly.  If you are not careful this puts a hard oxide layer on the metal that you then have to clean off  – I have two ways of defeating this – I have a coating from Brownells that in the past has been almost as  difficult to remove as the oxide, and a stainless foil that you can make a supposedly sealed packet from to exclude oxygen – you put a piece of brown paper in the packet to burn up the residual oxygen.  On this occasion I painted the goo on the backs of the locks, and put the faces together with chalk between them, wrapped them in brown paper and sealed them in a foil packet (its deadly sharp stuff so you have to handle with great care) – I then put them in my furnace set to 820 C and left them to get up to temperature and soak for a bit, then turned on my graduated cooling heater for 4 hours, after which they had got down to 100 C.  When cool I opened the packet and to my surprise the coating all brushed off and there was virtually no scale on the lock faces.  A first!   I gave the lock faces a rub with 600 grade paper and am re-engraving the first one.  It is always interesting re-engraving gun bits as long as there is enough of the original left to get an idea of the pattern.  In this case 95% was just visible so I was able to keep to the design – after a bit you get to work out exactly how the engraver did each sort of cut and are able to imitate his cutting, and with a bit more practice you can easily extemprise where there is not enough to go on.  I will go over all the engraving including the name as a first go, then look at whether I want to refine the finish on the lock, which will knock the engraving back, so I would have to re-cut a second time over my initial re-cut.  Here is the first recut of a bit of the lock – I have just done the W of the name, no more yet.

 

At this stage I’m just re-cutting the bits I can see clearly – in the next iteration I will look at possible missing bits, and do the name. I haven’t recut the fine border line yet but I have cleaned out the main line a bit.

18th October later – Just got back from ‘The Greek Play’ – every 3 years the Arts Theatre,  Cambridge puts on a play from ancient Greece  all spoken in ancient Greek – mostly performed by students.  Its a sort of culture fest – we have been going for many years so its become a regular if infrequent outing – my ancient Greek is no better than it ever was, i.e. non existent, but there are subtitles and its mostly declamatory so quite easy to follow. This year it was ‘Oedipus’ – the chap who murdered his father and married his mother, all ordained by the oracles – very complicated stuff, makes Brexit look like a walk in the park…………..At least this one didn’t have any blood – most are pretty full of gore.  The culture infusion will last  3 years!    At last the Wilkes barrel can be called finished after 14 rustings – I think probably the early rustings didn’t have enough time to bite, although the ramrod tubes that were made out of a different twist did go much earlier.  Anyway its now an acceptable shade of chestnut – its not as shiny as some jobs turn out, but I couldn’t take off enough metal to get rid of the twist texture – the original finish was  quite deeply textured.  The whole gun now looks so much better – the stock is showing some figure – I deliberately didn’t take out all the dings as it’s not a new gun and shouldn’t pretend to be one.  The titanium nipples I made for it do fit and the barrel is not too bad, there is a bit of pitting about 10 inches from the muzzle, but by then the stress is much less – altogether its taken a sad gun worth a couple of hundred pounds to a useful gun worth maybe £700 – not sure what the final bill will be – probably £240 for the barrel browning and new pipes and nipples etc, and  £120 for the for the stock and foreend pipe and general cleaning.  I usually give a bit of a discount if the owner doesn’t mind the job going on this blog – if they want to keep it off it costs them more!  I sometimes do a halfway house where I put a record of the work on the blog but don’t mention the maker’s name and blur it out on locks and barrels so that the work can’t be found by a google search but in general I like to put it all on the web!

 

 

18th October – Looking at the statistics for this blog, I had been puzzled why the post on the New Land conversion had had over 24000 visits – seemed a bit strange that something so obscure should be the second most popular visit after the main page.  I discovered that sites in Russia had been visiting that page every 5 or 10 minutes day and night – the Russians were using a block of IP addresses rather then a single address so they didn’t all show up together.  I noticed a lot of visits from one site a week ago and spotted other visits from sites with close IP addresses so I blocked the whole block of  addresses (easy to do in Wordfence) so now all those visits just get blocked – I can look at blocked visits and they still persist with the futile action – someone must have programmed it into their computer and they must also have access to a whole contiguous  block of IP addresses, which is unusual – it has been going on for several years! It’s probably not a solitary amateur.  I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the Wilkes barrel browning is getting somewhere – maybe a couple more iterations, maybe only one – photos will follow when this browning with Blackleys following steaming is done. I rang Westley Richards re the 11 bore – they have records for 1917 but they say that if it was rebarreled  and in the records it would have had a new number assigned to it and stamped beneath the old number on the barrels.  It doesn’t so the assumption has to be that it isn’t in the records  – all the original percussion records for the original number 1019 are lost.  In all probability it was indeed rebarreled by WR, but how or why is a mystery.

17th October – later – My strong treatment of the browning might just be paying dividends!  before rubbing off  it was a pretty solid brown overall, see below.  After rubbing off there was some coverage over the steel but still some way to go – I’ve given it another go with Blackleys and we’ll see, maybe steam it after that and perhaps another go with my solution – I rather like browning with a blackish tone – anything but the dreaded ginger browning!   Dick had got the bridles of the Westley Richards welded for me – a really neat job – I can’t keep my welds anywhere near that neat – it cleaned up in no time on the diamond hone and the hole only needed a couple of strokes with a round needle file to clear it. Dick has more or less pursuaded me that I ought to anneal and re-cut the lock plates of the WR – I am almost convinced.  I will ring Westley Richards archivist tomorrow and see what history he can dig out on this gun or general information that might be relevant – The locks are 1843 ish but the barrel has a post 1917 WR address and  post 1868 proof marks but the only number on the barrel is the same as the locks – 1019 – an approx 1843 number which implies that it was a replacement barrel from WR numbered for the gun ?

This has gone a bit further than I usually let it but desperate times call for desperate remedies!

 

That is a dummy tumbler to support the broken bridle during welding ( and soft in case I needed to drill it out if it got welded)  The sear bearing pin is most unusual – it screws in from the outside of the lock plate with the thread in the plate and the head countersunk slightly on the outside – it is a plain bearing in the bridle hole.  Niether Dick nor I have seen one like this before.

17th October – Very frustrating – I’ve now clocked up 11 rustings of the Wilkes barrel and so far there is no sign of any browning on the steel elements of the twist – I’m beginning to think that the barrel maker inadvertently invented stainless steel!  I’ve now tried Blackley’s and Dysons’s slow brown and my own pretty aggressive used printed circuit etchant, all to no avail, although the iron component is being well etched!  This morning in desperation  I steamed the barrel pretty thoroughly and then put a coat of my solution on while it was still hot – if that doesn’t get it going I don’t know what will!  I am not filled with hope.  I am going into school this pm to give the yr 5 & 6 children a challenge for their half term – to decypher some (fictitious) emails relating to a (fictitious) raid on the school – Penny is worried that they won’t realise it is fiction and I’ll scare them!   We shall see………………….   I took the locks of the Westley Richards to Dicks and he is going to take the bridles to our speciality welder as they both have small cracks across them.  I made up a couple of small dummy tumblers so the bridles could be welded while on the lock plates to ensure they are aligned properly – The dummies are soft so can be drilled out if they are inadvertently welded to the bridle.  My welding is not really up to such fine work and if I try to do it I’ll end up spending ages removing all the surplus weld and ruining my best files on bits of the tungsten electrode that get broken off when I touch it in the weld pool, which I do occasionally.  Every time I look at the WR lock plates I start to wonder if I should anneal them and re-cut the engraving as they would look so good.  The gun is obviously made up from bits of different generations, so I wouldn’t be destroying a straight antique…. I still can’t decide……

14th October – AT the Bullard Archive a.m. and then school this afternoon.  I managed to fit in a bit of barrel browning – but still not touched the steel bands after 7 rustings with Blackley’s slow brown.  It really is resistant stuff!  I’ll keep at it although I think I’ll try some of my solution as its a bit more dynamic!  I purchased a small Spanish flintlock pistol stamped for the King’s guard from a correspondent – it looked interesting and is in need of a little, I hope, gentle cleaning and tidying up.  It should arrive tomorrow so I’ll put up some photos when it does.  Tomorrow I’ll get a load of logs dumped on the drive so my day’s work will be shifting them to the log store… tedious!  Not too creaky from the climbing but my right  hand had the odd twinge  – I guess I don’t usually hang  by my fingers so climbing is a bit of a shock for them!  Better remember to take the Slacum off the Wilkes stock before bed!

13th October – Climbing (boulderng) this morning has left me a bit creaky – I do feel a bit out of place there as I’m usually the only person over about 25!  I am some way into browning the Wilkes barrel and its not going quite as I would hope – I’ve done 6 passes with  Blackley’s slow brown and a bit of my ex printed circuit solution but it is quite uneven in its action – it is etching the iron bands quite enthusiastically but has still left the steel more or less unmarked – the twist pattern shows clearly but I wish the shiny bits of steel would start to bite.  I guess its the metal, and it would account for the fact that when I first saw the barrel I thought it had been etched – I guess it was just that there is a marked difference in the effect of the rusting on the two components of the twist – more than usual.  Patience is the name of the game….I will carry on and see where it gets to – I may move to using my solution as it has a bit more bite than Blackleys.  I’m still putting Slackum on the Wilkes stock – that’s up to about about 5 coats and is beginning to have a uniform shine – I’ll probably be able to stop in a few more.  This afternoon I decided to try and melt my lemon brass and cast up some rods for making ramrod ends so made a mould and fired up my flower pot furnace with charcoal – I made the furness some time ago from a large flower pot that I set in plastic tub lined with weldmesh and filled the the gap with a mixture of cement and vermiculate ( plastic tub removed when set)  – I put an old vacuum cleaner on blow through a hole near the bottom.  Last time I used it I managed to melt and cast brass – this time I just couldn’t get it quite hot enough -I  packed the crucible in charcoal but the blower didn’t reach round it so it mainly heated from one side and that wasn’t enough so I ended up with a crucible of slush – I’ll have to do better next time!  We live and learn…    Following my visit to Shuttleworth and meeting up with my old school friend I thought I might learn to fly – not necessarily to get my license but just to find out how.  Anyway John kindly offered to take me up in his Auster which has dual controls so I might just do it!

 Wilkes 5 rustings in….Not great quality twist here – very different widths on the two sections.

Pot furnace and blower – I need to sort the air path within the pot so it heats all round.

11th October – I have started to brown the Wilkes barrel after scrubbing it with detergent and water and coating it in chalk paste – it’s had a light coat of Blackley’s slow brown and is hanging in the cellar, but I have to say after 10 hours its not showing much sign of any rusting although the pattern is emerging in places. Patience….   I made a couple of titanium nipples for the Wilkes barrel but as its being browned I don’t want to mess about fitting them so I don’t know if the threads will be a good fit – they have a 1.2 mm hole at the bottom about 2 -3 mm long, then 2 mm up to the top – that’s the generally accepted standard for modern caps.  Some people use 1 mm for the bottom hole, but I broke the 1 mm drill so its 1.2 mm!  I’m still putting coats of Slakum on the Wilkes stock – the workshop isn’t heated and it seems to get to a good tacky/gummy state in about 12 hours so as long as I remember to remove it before bed I will be OK – I have only left Slackum too long once before, and I had to take it off with steel wool and start again, so I am ultra careful.

10th Ocober – I filed up the cast Westley Richards cock to get rid of the casting ‘orange peel’ effect and engraved the tails and colour hardened both and fitted them.  It is amazing how exactly they now match – there must have been a limited number of patterns of cock made in whichever suburb of Birmingham made cocks, and the squares must have been put in by the maker/filer against a jig, leaving the lock fitter to put the square on the tumbler.  Anyway as you can see, the cock that was on the WR and the cock from Dick’s junk box line up exactly without touching the squares.  I keep looking at the locks of the WR, as the outside surface is quite worn/polished down and I did wonder if the lock plates were in fact a modern casting, but further examination at x25 has convinced me that they must be original, with the engraving just worn down and polished almost out.  I can’t decide whether to anneal the lock plates and re-engrave them – I probably won’t as its a working gun and from that point of view re-engraving them doesn’t do anything for the gun.   I just have to get a spot of weld put on the bridles where they are cracked from being dry fired out of the gun.    I bought some 400 grade wet and dry to finish the Wilkes barrel, and took it down to 2500 grit.  I managed to extract the remaining nipple without any damage – I got the tip of a square needle file onto the nipple so I could get a sharp bottom corner on the faces that the nipple key works on.  Just to make sure I touched the end face of the nipple key on the grindwheel to create a sharp edge with a bit of a burr to bite onto the flat of the nipple.  I put a fine hot flame on the nipple for a while.  The nipple key gripped well but I had to put a large vicegrip on it to get enough leverage and at one point I thought I was twisting the nipple key shaft!  I soldered on a fillet at the muzzle to hold the ramrod in place.  So its all ready to go – wash down with hot soapy water, coat with chalk paste and allow to dry, (? dip in copper sulphate – not sure about that) and brown very slowly – the last gun I did was too quick and the browning wore off quite quickly.

Wilkes 11 bore barrel – I can live with that finish as a base for re-browning.

Westley Richards 11 bore – Matching cocks!   I will have to do something about the german silver(?) plug in the breech plug – someone has tried to prize it out.

9th October – A couple of school meetings this morning, and then another look at the Wilkes barrel – I found I don’t have any wet & dry between 240 and 600 so I’ve ordered various grades and will wait til it comes.  I started on the old cock for the Westley Richards that I got from Dick – the spur was a bit oversize and the engraving was wrong, but fortunately the one I got from Dick was 1/2 mm thicker than the other so I could file off the unwanted engraving.  I reshaped the spur to be pretty nearly the same shape and size and recut the chequering  with the Gravermax – the advantage of the  gravermax, apart from it being less effort and less liable to slip, is that you can hold the cock resting on a surface while you engrave it, which means you can turn it to cut the lines across the curved surface without forever resetting the vice.  Having done that I ran it against the fibre wheel to wear the cuts down a bit.  Next job was to mount the cock on a piece of wood with setting wax and engrave it.  The metal was pretty horrible so I used a mix of hand and Gravermax.  It is now done and looks remarkably similar to the other cock – I do find it amazing how much standardisation went on in the gun trade, particularly in Birmingham. Anyone who imagines that every gunmaker  lovingly made all the bits of his guns in his own  workshop has some serious explaining to do!  Looking at the photo, I realise I ought to do some more surface filing on the casting to get rid of the cast surface – nothing is ever finished!

The re-engraved casting is on the left, the re- engraved cock from Dick’s junk box on the right – amazingly good match – even the square is right!

8th October –  I spent a dirty couple of hours stiking off the Wilkes barrel – it looks possible although there is really no prospect of getting rid of all the pits etc.  I need to get rid of some of the remaining scratches – its distressing how many faults always show up when I photograph things- my photos are always very revealing – most of the photos I get sent to look at are , by comparison, like looking through soup!   I keep my Canon M50 with  18 – 150 lens handy and have a 500mm square white LED panel on the ceiling so its very quick to do, and I always use manual focus.   I went to Dicks and we has a look at the locks of the Westley Richards 11 bore – the lockplates are castings as are the cocks, although the works look like they were originals.  Unfortunately the bridles have both been cracked – probably because the tumblers stop against then instead of being stopped by the cocks hitting the nipples.  I will keep the cast lockplates – they need the engraving recut – I managed to get an almost perfect original cock to replace the really bad one from Dick’s box of spare cocks, its a good fit and as often happens with late locks, the square drops on teh tumbler in exactly the right orientation. Dick’s supply of percussion cocks  is fine if you want a left hand cock (I did) but not so good if you want a right hand cock – in fact he has hardly any, not sure why, I think he bought them years ago in a box of junk from aWeller and Dufty auction, which is where most of his stuff originated.

It looks a bit better in the flesh but I’m not going to be able to get all the pits etc out – maybe a bit more though…..

7th October – I derusted the Wilkes barrel to see where we go from here – still not clear on the best course of action – the barrel has a very uniform fine pitting over its surface with no obvious areas of serious corrosion – I’m still puzzling out how it got to be as uniform !    I’m not sure how much metal I’d need to remove to get a smooth surface, or what it would look like if I did a partial strike off.  In any event its probably not possible/sensible to strike it off to get rid of the deeper twist related fissures.   But I do realise that leaving it as it is is not a viable option, so something has to be done…… And I still need to get one of the nipples out – I don’t like drilling them out as it risks messing up thread.  The one I did get out left a reasonable thread in the breechblock that I cleaned out with a 1/4 BSF plug tap but its a bit oversize so I will make up some (titanium?) nipples oversize for it.   I need to collect my fine gas torch from Dick’s where I left it, to see if that will shift the second one.  I probably need to make/find a better fitting nipple key as I can’t get a really good grip on it to put enough force to turn it – to do that I’ll need to buy some more 10 mm silver steel rod from ebay!  I have learned to be patient and try different things before resorting to anything too drastic!  There is always the option of recutting the nipple holes to 9/32 BSF (same pitch as 1/4 BSF) but I prefer not to have to do that.

Very uniform pitting over all the surface, with some deeper fissures as part of the twist pattern.

7th October – on Saturday I went on a trip to the Shuttleworth Collection at Old Warden airfield – my old school friend John had been the Director for several years and my nephew wanted to give my brother a day out as he is suffering from Parkinsons, so John kindly flew him down to Old Warden in his vintage Beechcraft Bonanza and we all had a tour round the collection – almost all the aircraft there are kept in flying condition and get an airing from time to time – John was one of the Collection pilots and has flown most of the planes, so was able to give a real insight into the merits and demerits of the various planes.  One thing I learnt was why the Spitfire became the dominant fighter plane in WWII in preference to the Hurricane – the Hurricane could never have stood the development that ultimately resulted in the Mk 10 Spitfire which involved fitting an engine of over 2000 bhp in an airframe originally designed for 850 bhp!  As John pointed out, you only have to look at the thick aerofoil section of the Hurricane to realise that the drag was always going to restrict it – its more like the (Clarke Y??) sections we used to use on our slow flying model planes when John and I were mad keen aeromodellers in the mid 1950s ( mostly control line planes – John gave me back the last plane I built – a Lucky Lady stunt plane some time ago).  Great day out, if you haven’t been to the Shuttleworth Collection – GO!

6th October – I think I’ve put enough coats of Slakum on the Wilkes for the time being – I’ll let it harden off for a few days.  I derusted the barrels inside and out in the tank and got all the superficial rust off.  There is quite a lot of structure in the exposed surface and I’m not sure how much I would have to take off to get a better finish – I’m not sure it is sensible to take them down to a perfect surface – it would mean removing a fair amount of metal, but I may be able to take it partially down and etch it slightly in copper sulphate before browning – I’ll have to see what looks possible.  I had another careful look at the Westley Richards and decided that the locks were a recent replacement from castings – nicely made but in need of some work on the engraving – luckily that’s something I can do.   I have been p[

lanning a challenge for the children at school and was looking for some prizes  – the school ‘badge’ is a couple of owls so I am engraving them on slices of rod and mounting them in oak blocks as I do with screwheads for the kids when I do engaving demos.

4 th October – I woke up in the night and realised that I’d left a coat of Slakum on the Wilkes stock and it was probably getting past the gel stage, but my concern didn’t overcome my desire to go back to sleep!  I had a meeting at 8:30 so rushed into the workshop early to find the Slackum still  just about workable, so rubbed it off with kitchen roll and linseed oil – hard work, but it looks good & I made the meeting. I put another coat on today (and I’ve taken it off before bed time!).  I made up a couple of screws – as regular visitors to this site will know, its one of my favourite jobs.  I made a side nail for the Westley Richards 11 bore to replace the brass one.  I reckoned that a 2 B.A. thread would fit as that seemed to be what the brass one was, so I made a blank and cut a thread with a new 2 B.A. die  -it didn’t fit the thread, so I closed the die right down and recut the thread but it still didn’t fit, which was odd as I’d tried it with a different brass 2 B.A. screw.  Rumaging in my screwcutting box I found an old 2 B.A. die that turned out to cut quite a bit smaller than the first one, so success.  I also had to make a small screw to hold the foreend pipe on the Wilkes – those are very short screws with large flat heads filed into a hollow to clear the ramrod – it worked so that is in place now.  P.M. I went over to Dick’s to see about the Wilkes barrel pipes that needed resoldering – a tricky job as it means locally heating the barrel up to around 300 C to melt the tin ( tin is the preferred soldering material as it melts at about 100 degrees C  lower than lead and is stronger) – Dick had made a couple of pipes out of a bit of a twist barrel, so they were tinned, and the mounting places on the barrel/under-rib were gently tinned keeping the heat to the minimum as one doesn’t want to expand the under rib to make it bulge out  – anyway suffice to say that they now appear to be soldered in place and the ramrod fits.  I have a gas/oxygen torch with a tiny nozzle that is ideal for localised heating – it was sold for lead welding.  We will see if they stay in place after derusting – I’ll derust the barrel inside and outside over the weekend, then take a view as to whether to strike it off or just rebrown as it is. I might be able to get the nipples out after derusting, as the moment I can’t shift them.  I filed off the face of one of the Westley Richards cocks at it was a plain but rough surface and engraved it in imitation of the other cock – both were modern castings and the metal isn’t ideal for engraving so I used the GraverMax machine – it’s a bit of a cop out but the metal was so horrible that I couldn’t really get passable curves with hand engraving – even with the GraverMax it was difficult to get flowing curves, but I think its passable.

Wilkes stock – Photo shows the grain but not the shine!

 

Westley Richards cocks – made from reject castings ?  I engraved the one on the right -not as conspicuous as the one on the left as that was smeared  in the casting process

 

3rd October – Carried on with the Wilkes 11 bore stock – after removing most of the shellac based finish the wood was looking a bit grey so I wiped it over with a damp tissue with oxalic acid on it to lighten the finish, then when dry put on a couple of coats of sanding sealer with another tissue and filled a couple of pits with instant glue and walnut dust.  After rubbing down with 0000 wire wool I’ve started to put on an oil finish – rub on ‘Slacum’ – a mix of boiled linseed oil with colouring from alkonet root, beeswax (4%) and Terbine drier (1%), then leave till it gels and rub off with linseed oil – it will take many coats to get a good finish but each takes only a few minutes.  The foreend pipe was missing so I ‘stole’ one from an old stock – its not quite the correct shape but will perform the function and with a bit of filler it will not look out of place.  I could have made a new one as an exact fit, but I’m afraid the job doesn’t really merit the expense.  See photo below.  Looking for a suitable foreend pipe I came across the 11 bore Westley Richards I’d picked up at auction and hadn’t done anything with – it looks like a good shooter so I’ll see what needs doing to it – If you look at the post about it, it is a mystery – I haven’t yet got on to WR to see if they have any history on it.  The first and obvious job is to replace the threaded Brass 2 B.A. screw used as a side nail for fixing the locks with something a bit more appropriate – a job for next week.  Tomorrow I have a meeting in school again – being a school governor is a very demanding ‘job’ if you take it seriously.  Schools are run and managed in a way that seems totally illogical to anyone who has been involved with businesses in the ‘real’ world.  How any small organisation can generate so many different policy documents, development plans, termly reports, head’s reports, action plans and newsletters not to mention inumerable charts, tables and graphs is well beyond me.  They almost always duplicate something that exists already with slight variations and many repetitions.  The nett result is that no-one can see the wood for the trees and there is no time to think – it’s what I believe is known as displacement activity.  One of the wonderful concepts introduced by the Department of Education and OFSTED is ‘British Values’.  Not only are the children supposed to learn and understand these hypothetical concepts, but be able to recite them if anyone asks ‘What are British Values’.  No one has yet given me a satisfactory explanation of what is ‘British’ about them – one is democracy (presumably a bit dented at the moment) and the rest are in part derived from (modern) Western  Christianity, which is in turn based on evolved ways of cooperative living with a bit of authoritarianism thrown in. All seem to me to be shared by any number of countries – Scandinavia, western Europe, Australia, Canada etc etc.   The only truly British Values I’d be sure about are a propensity to form queues, and to laugh at Monty Pythonesque humour…….but that won’t cut much ice with OFSTED……                        Howsoever, I’m told that as a governor I must take it all very seriously, which of course I do, as anyone who knows me would expect!

It will cover almost all the cutout – the fixing hole in the stock will need moving and some filler put in a few voids.

2nd October – One of my regular viewers rang me this morning and complained that I had ruined their mornings for too long by ignoring my blog – Apologies – I have been busy with school things and trying to bring a little order to our lives – alas without much success so I have reverted to playing with guns!  A friend brought a couple of guns he was thinking of buying to my stand at Sandringham.  One was a somewhat tired 11 bore double percussion – sound and once a good gun.  He was looking for something to shoot so I suggested he go for the other gun which was in better condition and didn’t need any work, but in the end he bought both – he paid at the low end of my suggested price for the 11 bore which I reckoned left a bit of a margin after I had sorted it.  The gun is signed T Wilkes London on the locks – I can’t find a T Wilkes in my books , lots of J Wilkes but earlier than this gun, and a T Wilks of the right date – so none the wiser – could just be the retailer. I forgot to take pictures of it before I started, but it looked sad but not bad!  The barrel was, I think, originally quite deeply etched twist as in the French or Rigby tradition, and had been a bit rusted but because the etched twist was an uneven surface it probably looked worse than it will prove to be. One ramrod pipe was missing and the other was soldered on with a great mass of solder over the pipe and barrel.  The bores looked possible but not perfect, although there was plenty of metal at the muzzle. The locks were OK – a bit of surface rust but still decent engraving and the actions were fine.  The furniture had need pretty well rusted so that there wasn’t much engraving showing, but the fit in the wood was very good – always an important clue.  The stock looked a bit worn and had the remains of a fairly shiny black finish, with little of the chequering visible through the thick layer of dirt/oil/varnish.  There were a couple of old splits in the foreend and the foreend pipe & finial was missing.   Estimating the value when restored as £600 to £800 leaves around £300 – 400 for restoration and a small margin- not a lot, and not enough to get too fancy!   My first job was to give the barrel to Dick to sort out the pipes, then I’ll get it back and de-rust it and decide if it needs to be struck down or just wire brushed and browned.  In the meantime I had an investigation of the finish on the stock as it was clogging up the chequering and didn’t look right.  First test was to go at a discreet bit with meths to see if it was shellac based – it was.  That meant I could use my normal method of getting rid of the finish – apply meths to a couple of layers of kitchen roll and wrap them round the stock and cover tightly with kitchen foil, then after half an hour remove and rub with 000 steel wool soaked in meths and wipe the gunge off with more kitchen roll.  A whole lot of dirty black muck came off with the shellac and the grain became visible.  After soaking the chequering under paper and foil I brushed it with a brass suede brush along the lines and it came up fairly sharp and clean after a few iterations.  I decided that I would strip all the furniture from the stock – its not always sensible but in this case all the screws came out fairly easily and the edges and backs of the furniture were not rusted so it all came to bits OK.  I  took the mainsprings out of the locks and a all the metalwork went into the de-rusting tank in relays, was then dipped in clean water, dried at gentle heat and brushed hard on a fine wire wheel and sprayed with gun oil.  Stripping and de-rusting and brushing took about 2 1/2 hours in total – all the parts could go back in without further work, although I might strip the locks right down later.  I may, if I feel like playing, recut some of the engraving on the furniture but the surfaces are rusted and for it to be effective I’d need to file  the surfaces smooth, and that is probably too much work – I’ll see.  Back to the stock, after a number of goes with meths I steamed the surface to lift a few small dents, and cleaned it up with meths again.  I could call it a day and apply sanding sealer and then oil, or I might do a bit more before I start to refinish – so far I think I’ve spent about 2  hours on the stock.  The whole gun begins to look like it will be nice when done, and I look forward to finishing it.  Although I didn’t take photos to start with ( I’d not done restorations for the blog for so long I’d forgotten), I do have some progress ones;-

As luck would have it, it was a shellac based old finish – easily removed!

After derusting & brushing:-  The lockwork and insides of parts is in good condition – the edges of bits are not rusted at all.

While the lock (hardened) is fairly rust free, the furniture engraving is  pretty far gone and would need a lot of filing to get it flat enough to re-engrave – its probably best left, but I’ll see whether I feel like having a go at it later for fun – almost certainly not an economic proposition.

26th September – I went to a School Governor’s meeting yesterday and was told that I had to send in a (short) report on my trip to Norfolk and to Kentwell Hall – there is no such thing as a free holiday!  I’ve been struggling with making my cupboard – the doors are a bit of a problem as the outer layer is planked in t&g and that is not ideal for screwing in hinges – in the end I bought a couple of pairs of ‘Parliament Hinges’  which are deep and will screw into the blockboard behind the T&G.  I had to buy large fancy ballbearing ones that will support 120 Kg per pair, rather overkill for a 900 x 450 door as they were the only ones Screwfix had and I wanted them today.  I’m looking at my pile of  gun jobs that I should be doing – a double percussion to restore, a single tubelock needs the lock engraving and an o/u pistol needs sorting – in fact I’ve even forgotten what needs doing to it, I think it needs its cocks refitting and matching….. Plus my own Venables is crying out for the barrels to be resoldered (again).. Ah well, I’ll do a bit when the cupboard is finished. Tomorrow I must take the funny pistol back to Dick as I’ve done a bit of engraving on it, and send back the rat tailed Albanian job.

 Posted by at 11:48 am
Dec 212020
 

December 21st 2020 – The new kitchen is more or less finished and about to be occupied, just in time for Christmas……..

 

 

This is probably the last time it will be so uncluttered!

 

At the beginning of the year I planned to redo our old kitchen – I had done a bit of work on it over the years, replacing the old coal fired range with an oil fired AGA and putting down another layer of vinyl floor over the deteriorating black and red tiles laid on a few dabs of lime mortar directly on to the earth and then coated in self levelling compound about 30 years ago before we bought Cables Farm.  I had also patched a large hole in the old lath and plaster ceiling that fell down when Penny slammed the back door,covering everything in a thick layer of gritty dust. Oh and the main sink unit was looking very tired when we moved in 26 years ago and was looking even tireder now, despite my best efforts at trompe d’oile!    I got Covid in early March, a week before the lockdown, which laid me out for about 5 weeks and took another 3 months before I was fit enough to do anything useful.  I was just about fit for our sailing trip to the Hebrides in late July, and on return I figured that I had better resume ‘normal’ activities – time to start on the kitchen…   A bit of planning and I figured I’d make units out of oak with wooden worktops, and of course the ceiling would have to be entirely re- plastered at the very least as quite a lot of it looked as if it would follow the example of the fallen chunk (which I had rather neatly patched!)  Obviously the damp and uneven floor would have to be tackled – old buildings don’t work well with any form of concrete slab as they need to breath to prevent the moisture in the ground being diverted to the walls, so a bit of research was called for into breathable floors, obviously incorporating a decent level of insulation.  Having got a few basic ideas I started gently on building the unit to hold the sink and a built in oven and gas hob ( I’ve always longed for a gas hob as electric hobs seem too uncontrollable). Having ‘got my hand in’ I decided it was time to get serious, so I recruited Matthew, my son from a previous incarnation, who had been a joiner and worked around buildings for many years.  We started on September 7th – Here is the story….

About the design:  The basic arrangement of the kitchen is more or less defined by the position of the Aga and the door to the larder and the window on the North wall, so any major rearrangement would be very difficult to imagine – plus it more or less worked, so there was only limited room for change – in the end amounting to moving the water softener from one end of the working area to the other.  The ceiling was very low – uncomfortably so both physically and aesthetically so, but without taking the AGA out and lowering it ( a massive job)  I reckoned that the best we could do was to lower the floor by about 30 mm.  We had always speculated on whether the ceiling beams would be good enough to expose – its a ‘normal’ conundrum in old houses like this – but without having a good look at a number of joists its impossible to guess.  We initally thought that it they might not be good enough, and expected to leave them covered – see below  but it became clear that they had originally been exposed.  We had a vinyl  that represented pale square floor tiles and we rather liked the look of it, plus  pale yellow tiles and bricks  are made using a local clay – Burwell whites.  We should probably have got floor tiles from the Burwell Brick company, but when I looked at them some time ago they were too small and too rustic for a kitchen floor so we went with the Norfolk Pamments tiles.  There is quite a lot in the room that won’t change with the work – the two leaded windows and the door to the utility room ( elm boards – hand sawn and 19th century or earlier) and the larder door ( pine boards with an old apotopical ‘witch’ mark inscribed by compass – maybe 18th century?) and bread oven (Victorian) that give the room its ‘period charm(!) but we didn’t want to add to the old-worldiness by putting in faux old features, so the furniture and fittings we added were designed to be comfortable to live with and not too ‘kitcheny’ since its a room we spend a lot of time in.  Kitchens  inevitably get cluttered but we have a decent utility room and a large larder so the intention is to keep things clear, particularly above the level of the worktops.   I’m happy that we pretty much achieved our goals – there isn’t much I’d change if I did it again, possibly a smaller, less dominant gas hob, but otherwise I’m very happy with the outcome, and the apparent  and real improvement in headroom is welcome.

Ceiling : First job after clearing everything out was to take the plaster off the old split lathes so I could replaster.  The original ceiling was quite low and the lathes were nailed onto the floor joists above, with the main cross beams exposed below ceiling level.  We got all the plaster off, and took out a few laths so we could clean the backs and see what was there.  In one corner we exposed a couple of older panels of lath and plaster fixed directly under the floor above and plastered and painted brown.  From what we could see, the joists looked in pretty good condition, some being squared and chamfered  (so must once have been exposed) and some pretty wavy and rustic.  After some discussion we opted to remove all the laths, clean off the joists and attach 1 1/2 inch battens alongside the tops of them and fix short laths to the battens and plaster between the beams, so as to maximise the ceiling height and create an interesting feature.  Fixing the laths under the batten edges was accomplished using an electric stapler, although it was still a very slow job re-using the old split laths, cutting them to fit between the joists and stapling each end a couple of times – a job I left to Matthew while I got on with fixing in the wiring for new lighting and getting rid of the old wiring.   I then plastered the strips between the joists using  lime putty plaster – one coat of ‘coarse stuff’ – sharp sand and lime putty with some chalk and goat hair mixed in – laid on so it extruded between the laths and the extruded bits bent over and held the plaster in place, the hair giving the wet plaster enough strength to stay in place (mostly!)  The second coat used plastering sand, lime putty and chalk with no hair and was laid on to form as level a surface as possible.  A very thin skim coat of chalk and lime putty was used to level up the second coat plaster when it had almost dried.   For the most part the finish worked although in places the surface cracked and needed a further skim to hide the cracks.  The plastered ceiling was given 3 or 4 coats of white limewash – water and lime putty to the consistence of milk (it covers a multitude of sins!).   Matthew then waxed the joists as they looked a bit dusty.  I was a bit skeptical about making them too shiny but they turned out perfect.

 

Two original ceiling panels from a previous ceiling on the undersides of the original floorboards – before 1850???

Matthew fixing reused split laths

Quite challenging plastering without getting plaster all over the beams! They look to me to be around 250 to 300 years old.

The Floor:  Having more or less finished the ceiling and the falling mess/plaster/limewash it was time to tackle the floor – there are a couple of firms specialising in flooring for old houses that use lime instead of cement based concrete – its called limecrete and isn’t as strong as concrete but is adequate for floor slabs laid on a firm foundation.  Two firms specialise in the materials, Mike Wye and Tyn Mawr.  We used Mike Wye although they are both similar.  The basic floor insulation is provided by foamed glass (Geocel) supplied  broken into chunks about 30 mm mesh and tamped down with a whacker plate to a depth of 150 to 200 mm, followed by a limecrete screed of 80 mm , followed by the tiles.  We wanted to drop the final floor level by 30mm from its original level so we ended up digging out the old floor to a depth of around 350 mm – generating 4 trailer loads of spoil – kindly taken away by our farmer neighbour  after being shovelled and barrowed out by Matthew – probably more than 10 tonnes judging by how much sand went into the limecrete!   Having dug out the floor to something approaching a level – all very compacted earth – we laid a patch of wine bottles in the centre as supplementary insulation, blinded them with sand, laid down plastic conduit for cable runs and put down a permeable membrane to receive the Geocel foam glass.  We had very little joy with the hired whacker plate as the Geocel won’t bond and just kept moving around – in the end we put a another membrane on top and ran the plate over that, which did improve things a bit.  We had been intending to put electric heating wires onto the Geocel layer, but this was clearly not practical, so we laid the first limecrete screed of about 75 to 80 mm thick, levelled from a laser datum.  We left that for a couple of weeks to dry, then laid out the in-screed 105 metres of electrical heating wire fixed into plastic strips precariously bonded to the very friable limecrete surface with fix-all. The heating was calculated to give around 140 watts per sq m.  We laid 2 inch battens on edge on the first screed as a guide for leveling the second screed – which was therefore laid to about 50mm and finished pretty level – probably to within +/- 2 mm over the floor.  This took an age to dry – 2 to 3 weeks while we got on with leveling the walls and decorating , fixing services and a long list of odd jobs, including Matthew laying a French drain along the outside North wall.  I ordered the clay pamments in February from Norfolk Pamments Ltd – hand made by a small mother and daughter business in Norfolk in a very pale white/yellow clay 12 x 12 inches by about 24 mm thick.  They are somewhat uneven in size and some are a bit convex underneath as we discovered later.   In order to keep the floor permeable we had to avoid cement (OPC) in fixing the tiles (modern tile adhesive is  impermeable and so not suitable)  and so we used a lime/kiln dried sand mix with a bit of lime putty for workability.  Our main problem was that the dry floor and the very permeable pamments sucked the water out of the mortar almost instantly, making adjusting the position of tiles very difficult after a few seconds.  We soaked the floor and wetted the pamments but only towards the end did we hose down the pamments repeatedly before bringing them into the kitchen.   Once dried I carefully walked on all the tiles, and discovered about 10 where the tile was so convex that it sat on a mortar pad in the centre and rocked – these were taken up and less bent tiles relaid.   We decided that, once dry, we could afford to use a modern grout, even if it wasn’t permeable as it only accounted for a small area.  During drying the tiles went through a nice range of colours, pink, deep yellow and back to pale yellow/white.  Suffice to say that when finished the floor looks fantastic!  Before grouting, and again afterwards I sealed the tiles with a natural, breathable seal – Natural Finish Stone Sealer from Eco Protec.  Since we started using the kitchen I’ve noticed how much warmer the floor is because of the Geocel insulation – I tested the underfloor heating, and it raises the temperature measured in the slab at a rate of about 1 degree an hour, with the surface temperature rising with a bit of a delay, and the slab seems to loose heat quite slowly – the heat input to the approx. 12 sq meters  covered by the heater is only 1.6 KWatts so I think it will work perfectly as a storage heater charging overnight on cheap electricity – although given the additional insulation in the floor, the AGA does a pretty good job of keeping the room warm.

Part of the 10 tons of earth removed from the floor.

Wine bottles for extra insulation !

First screed laid.

Underfloor heating cable plus battens for levelling next screed

Penny says the Norfolk Pamments look just like the vinyl that used to be on the floor!

The Walls:  The walls were not straight or flat and had texture on them where a previous finish had been partially removed – however I had put a number of coats of limewash on years ago and it had made a very hard and stable layer that was almost impossible to remove.  The wall I wanted to tile had to be straight and level so that was leveled up using a modern lime based plaster called R50 that turned out to stick to almost any surface and was easy to use to level the tiled area and also repair some dodgy bits of wall that had been hidden behind the sink unit and were wet and crumbling.   I had to replaster some areas of exposed lath using lime plaster, and on the ‘textured’ plaster walls I used a very thin skim of fine filler to hide the texture – not more than about 1/2 to 1 mm maximum.  The walls were then given half a dozen coats of limewash that I tinted using acrylic artist’s paint (cobalt blue, yellow ocre and phalos green) – its vital to mix the pigments thoroughly in tap water before adding to the limewash as the alkali in the lime prevents the pigment from disersing as it reacts with the paint medium, causing specs of pigment to come out in the brush strokes.   As a guide I generally mix pigments in quantities of 5 to 10 grams to add to 4 litres of limewash, its always possible to add more (dissolved) pigment but if you are not careful you will end up adding more limewash and have enough to paint the Forth Bridge.  Limewash is a vastly under-rated finish and costs almost nothing – a £10,  25 Kg tub of lime putty will make  at least 100 litres of limewash!   At one point Matthew put on rather a lot of lime in his limewash (my fault) and so the final finish is a bit streaky, which I rather like so I haven’t tried to rectify it.  I spent a long time messing around to get the right white for the bits of woodwork – window cills and wooden corner strips, and eventually settled on Farrow and Ball Shaded White, although I think maybe a bit more black in it would be better!

The problem with the walls was mostly due to previous patching with gypsum plaster or strong cement – both WRONG!

The Services;-  The lighting in the kitchen was horrible – basically a striplight in the centre of the room – so something had to be done – choosing light fittings for such a low ceiling is difficult as you need a good spread of light in the working areas.  After a bit of thought and hours looking at unsuitable fittings, I came across some fittings in IKEA that had 3 G10 spotlight bulbs in each fitting that could be controlled by the IKEA remote system.  I have to admit that the price of the TROSS  fittings (£7 each) was an added attraction and the sample I bought was so well made that I ended up buying 9 fittings and putting them around the kitchen – using 5 W LED bulbs that is 145 Watts of LED light!  The plan, so far not fully implemented, is to use a combination of static 120 degree bulbs and 30 degree remote controlled bulbs so that the lighting can be adjusted by remotes but the wiring is kept very simple – all the lights are on one circuit.  The power circuits were half on one consumer unit and half on a very old original one, so they were rationalised onto the newer one and circuits added for underfloor heating.

The plumbing was similarly chaotic, and the new plan involved moving the water softener (essential as we have a heatstore cylinder) so that was redone for the softener and sink – I enjoy a bit of plumbing!

The extractor fan was challenging as there was barely enough height to meet the regulation height above the work surface – in the end the hole through the wall is touching the floorboards above – just fits!  I went for a cheap Electriq extractor from Appliance Direct as all the possible models were exactly the same  dimensions and noise levels, so I guessed they all had the same components inside, even fairly expensive ones. The first one arrived with the glass broken, and they didn’t want the rest back so I now have a set of spares!

The gas hob necessitated a couple of  propane cylinders and a changeover switch outside and a 15 mm copper pipe through the floor screed. I have yet to get it finally connected and build a box outside for it.

And it all worked!

The furniture;-  I wanted to avoid kitchen units made of MDF in some monotonous tone, so decided that it would be nice to make them out of oak, with  slightly darker tops of black walnut ( which we had used in Giles’s kitchen).  I had a store of various old oak salvaged from goodness knows what bits of furniture, and my friend Richard, a local carpenter/joiner had a large stock of very good quality 18 mm ply in large offcuts left over from job.  So my basic design involved a carcass of 18 mm ply – massively heavy – with  oak framing and oak doors and drawer fronts.  I had to buy a couple of 200 x 50 x 3.4m  kiln dried oak boards for the framing and legs (£217 – but I’ve got half of one left over) but the rest is all reused wood.  When I came to make the door under the sink I planed up what I thought was a nice bit of oak for the door panel, only to discover that it was elm, with a beautiful figure. ( it had been a draining board in a darkroom in the Geodesy and Geophysics Department at the University – I had acquired it when the building it was in was demolished in the 1960s) .  I made the handles out of bog oak, a typical fenland wood from trees that have laid for thousands of years in fenland bogs – I had a few bits I had bought at a sale of timber 20 years ago.   Later on I got Matthew to build a more or less matching sideboard for the other side of the room, similarly out of reused wood and we wanted to put elm panels in all 3 doors – since Dutch Elm Disease killed all the trees its very difficult to get elm and I got laughed at by several timber merchants for asking.  I eventually sourced a beautiful old plank of elm on Ebay for £85 that made 3 panels with perfect grain patterns – its lighter than the surrounding oak frames but looks fantastic. All the timber for the drawer carcasses came from an enormous hoard of cherry shelving recovered from the refurbishement of Homerton College library, which also made some of the panelling under the worktop.  The window cill of 1 1/2 inch oak came from some table tops salvaged from an Oxford college  some 35 years ago, and the back Matthew put in the top of the antique dresser came from the back of an old cupboard from the Zoology Department –  all of which has run down my stock of salvaged timber to a sadly low level.  My old second hand radial arm saw and planer thicknesser earned their keep on this job as always!

 

The Bottom Line:-  Penny and I didn’t have a firm budget for the job as the priority was to make something that we were happy with – we’re not extravagant by nature so it is a fairly safe technique!   The overall cost of  the materials, wood, appliances and sundries  was a smidgen over £10K  although I am prepared to accept that I might have missed off a few expenses I can’t trace.  The biggest area of expense was the flooring materials, pamments (£2433.00), grout and tile sealant and heating cable, in total about 45% of the direct cost.  The solid wood worktops and table top accounted for around 15%, as  did the appliances.  The remaining 25% covered ceiling materials,  plumbing and electrics and lighting and everything else, including loads of small Screwfix bills for bits and pieces. The materials for the furniture apart from the worktops was almost all reused from old oak furniture  I had salvaged over the last 30 years  and 18 mm ply offcuts my friend Richard gave us and cut to size  and biscuit jointed for us – total spent on (new) wood was less than £300.  The whole job, minus the building of the sink unit that I did before Matthew started on the project, took the two of us 15 weeks from start to finish, We each had a couple of days off – Matthew worked a 5 day week, I worked 5 or 6 days a week if there was stuff I needed to do to prepare for the next week.  Given the Covid situation Matthew and I tried to work separately, at least at opposite ends of the room with a through air current between us, or with one of us working inside while the other worked outside.  It’s difficult to pinpoint where the most time was spent, but the floor took a long time to dry at each stage so it spread over a large part of the project.  Not surprisingly the ceiling was also a long job.   If you assume that Matthew and I together would have charged around £300 a day if we were being paid ( pretty much the standard trade rate for a similar two man team round here) then the labour would have cost around £25K, making it a £40K  minimum kitchen revamp at commercial rates!

 Posted by at 11:28 pm
Aug 072020
 

This year we had a charter from Alba Sailing in Dunstaffnage (near Oban) as all the other charter companies North of there have closed down.  We don’t normally go that far south as it is very crowded, even this year.  Around Oban and Loch Linne and up the Sound of Mull is a bit like Piccadilly Circus was in the rush hour in days gone by – Loch Dhroma na Buihde at the top end of the sound just inside Loch Sunart had 10 yachts at anchor when we went in!  I’ve never seen more than 4 at any one time before. North of Ardnamurchan Point things thin out a bit, and a bit more North of the Kyle of Loch Alsh, but over on the Outer Hebrides it is a lot quieter.  We went into Soay Harbour for the first time – its been on my bucket list for years – its the site of Gavin Maxwell’s ill fated Basking Shark oil factory in the 50’s.  Its a bit of a squeeze getting in as there isn’t much water – Penny doesn’t like rocks and sensibly stayed below while we went in.  A quick trip across to Lochboisdale – motoring into a headwind – found the new marina fairly busy although nominally closed due to Covid-19.  It was difficult to see what the problem was, but I suppose it was just that they hadn’t opened the loos and showers – there was water and electricity on the pontoons, but no charge for using the marina.  The marina has been built between two islands and is almost all imported rock – very impressive- its about a mile from the ‘town’  –  2 hotels and one small shop and a museum and sandwich stall.  From there another motor up to Loch Maddy where the marina looked a bit sad – I rang the harbourmaster who told me where to berth – again no loos or showers and no water on the berths.  We stayed an extra day there while a 30 knot wind blew – its not the wind speed per se that gets you up there, but the waves it throws up if you have to go into it.  Then a good long sail  chasing another Alba boat, Chantilly, to  Stornoway ( they just beat us!), which we love, as another blow was forecast – we got just about the last berth in the marina, which is mainly full of local boats – it didn’t materialise so next day we headed back across the Minch to a beautiful anchorage on Rona in the Inner Sound between Skye and the mainland – Acaraid Mhor (or something like that!) . We tried going South from there the next day but ended up slamming into an uncomfortable sea and 30 knots of  wind so turned back (very carefully across the seas) to the lovely anchorage and had a bit of a roller coaster ride on the waves in the downwind direction.  From there next day we went through Kyle Rhea with the tide to Isleoronsay on Skye, a not particularly attractive harbour, and from there to Loch Dhroma na Buihde.  We has a bit of a scare about running our of fuel at that point so went across to Tobermory next morning.  The fuelling berth had one boat on it already and very little maneuvering space, but I enjoyed squeezing  13m of boat into the space – and I didn’t hit anything even though we had to end up with our bows overlapping!  Manouvering big sailing boats in confined spaces is interesting as, apart from the effects of wind and tide, the boat makes sharp turns by effectively pivoting on the keel, so the stern sweeps out a path outside of path of the centre of the boat and this can catch you out in confined spaces.  One of the joys of chartering yachts is that you  end up taking the boat into marinas etc without knowing the habits of that particular boat – part of the enjoyment for me is to make a perfect landing on the pontoon!  On Pollyanna it was very difficult to see the port (left) side when at the wheel near the engine controls ( cockpit dodger and folded tent in the way) so docking ‘port side to’ was extra fun – why is that the way we seemed always to go?.  From there back to Dunstaffnage and the end of the holiday.  In all we visited 6 islands, lost 4 days from bad weather, covered around 350 miles and used about 150 litres of diesel.  We spent 6 nights at anchor and 8 in marinas, including 3 on the Alba pontoons – total marina bill was £31.25  – a great holiday.  Almost all of our navigation was done on a Galaxy tablet running Navionics Boating software – the tablet was in a decent waterproof case that allowed the USB port to be accessed. That meant we didn’t need to take it out of its case to charge, but more importantly it meant that I could plug in my big battery to keep the tablet running all day – The Nav software is thirsty and without the battery it would only survive a full day’s sailing by turning it off when not using the display – the nav continues plotting the track etc and jumps back when you turn it on again . I’m not even sure it would do 8 hours of background tracking without the battery.

Pollyanna from Alba Sailing.

Looking towards the entrance to Loch Dhroma na Buihde.  Its usually calm at nights if there isn’t a strong wind.

Just to show it wasn’t all wind and rain –  motoring in a calm  almost sunny spell ( one of two in two weeks!)

Apr 022020
 

25 April 2022  A year and a bit on from my last comments here, and now two years since I had Covid so I thought an update was due.  The somewhat milder symptoms of Omicron for most people means life is getting back to normal although more people have Covid at any one time than ever before – it seems the dread has gone out of it and we’ve gone from a situation where there were no treatments available to a range of very effective ones, and although ventilators are still occasionally necessry its mostly handled by the pressure fed oxygen masks if oxygen levels fall, and there are now something like 30000 unused ventilators in store – it was always going to be impossible to find enough staff to staff them, but I suppose it was a blind reaction.  Going back to 2020, I pursuaded Penny, my wife, that she should get an antibody test as she had been looking after me and didn’t appear to have had Covid.  The pharmasist who gave her the test was puzzled because she only had faint lines and said he had only seen that once before,  which turned out to be me, although at the time he didn’t know we were associated.  So she must have had it asymtotically and at a very low dose?     I seem to have made a pretty good recovery, although when I had a CT scan for my CLL review the radiologist said that I had characteristic Covid lung damage – not a lot but noticable on the scans, so I guess my lung function is less good than it was.   I’m really a bit unsure about how vulnerable I am if I get it again – I have had 3 jabs and the booster, and have the Lateral Flow test standing by to get me a rapid antibody infusion if I do get it, but I feel that at my age every year/month/day is too valuable to spend in a sort of dread and isolation, so I’m relaxing a bit, although I do avoid crowded spaces and big gatherings and try to keep my distance.  I am going back to running my STEM club at the primary school, which will inevitably carry a risk, but hey, I need to do things!   I’m reassured by my Oncologist who tells me he has 5 CLL cancer patients with Covid, and the antibody jabs they give the over 70s are working for them, and none are seriously ill with Covid.   My CLL is now being treated with Acalabrutinib – a rather expensive wonder drug that has no side effects for me – I’m grateful for medical science twice every day when I pop a £100 pill.  I am incredibly lucky with my CLL, because apart from swelling of my lymph nodes (now normal)  I’ve had no noticeable symptoms from the CLL or the treatment.  My Oncologist is frustrated because he is trying to run a trial on his patients to see if after a few years on Acalabrutinib they could stop taking it, with the option of restarting it if symptims reappear – however he is up against a problem, because NICE won’t let the NHS give Aalabrutinib to anyone who has had it before and stopped, so none of his NHS patients dare stop taking it, so his trial can only involve private patiens who are not so restricted.  Daft, as the NHS could save a lot of money if it was possible to stop and restart if that turns out to work.

28th December 2020  – I found a website that explains the gut feeling I had about the early medical response to Covid in the UK on STATNEWS.COM  – google “Ventilators are overused for Covid-19 patients, doctors say”

With ventilators running out, doctors say the machines are overused for Covid-19

12th August  – Had an antibody test yesterday (£69 @ the local pharmacist) –  very quick and simple finger prick and a drop of blood on a plastic strip and watch for lines in window – at first nothing appeared except the control line and I was told that I hadn’t had Covid, but then the two lines appeared faintly and bamboozled the pharmacist, who said I had definitely had it but he had never seen a result like that.  So my level of immunity is probably uncertain!  I will try hard not to get it again!  I did manage 90 lengths of the bag today so I guess I am reasonably fit.

7th July – Back from our sailing holiday –  I was well up to sailing the boat, although we had 3 younger crew on board to do the grunt work like winching- well, I had to leave something to them!   I think I am  almost back to my previous fitness – I did manage 50 lengths of our 10 m swimming bag today, and I’m aiming for 100 per day by next week…..   I came across a couple of studies of people who, like me, have CLL, in relation to Covid-19 which were a bit depressing – we stand a higher chance of needing intensive care, and a greater than 37% mortality if we go into an ICU. Which makes me realise how lucky I was to come out of it alive and with no apparent long term symptoms – its surprising and worrying how many people of all ages end up with very long lasting after effects.  I just hope I don’t catch it twice! If I hadn’t already had it I’d be feeling a bit paranoid .I’m about to book an antibody test with the local pharmacist to check my antibody levels.   I still haven’t made it to 65 Kg – I’m stuck somewhere between 63 and 64 Kg which is OK as its more or less in the middle of the normal BMI (body mass index) range.   My saturated Oxygen level is usually around 97 or 98 and my blood pressure is at the level it was two years  ago –  122/65, which BUPA says is OK at my age, so I hope all is well.

28 June – a month on from my last post here.  6 weeks ago I had lost around 10 – 12 Kg and was pretty much a skeleton at 55 Kg, as I didn’t carry much spare to begin with.  I couldn’t sit on a kitchen chair without a cushion as I had no natural padding left.  I started an eating campaign – cooked breakfast every day etc and initially put on weight fast and started to exercise a bit as I got my strength back.  I have now put back a good 7 Kg ( mostly muscle) and my weight gain has slowed somewhat, but I am still trying to put on 50 to 100 grams a day and will be glad to get to 65 Kg .  I got interested in finding out how much food, particularly protein, one needs.  One has a BMR, a Basal Metabolic Requirement that depends on height and weight – mine is about 1400 Kcal per day just to keep my body going.  Then you add a percentage depending on your level of activity – in my case that bumps it up to around 1700 Kcal/day.  The proportion you should get from protein depends on age amongst other things and increases with old age.  Mine is 20%, so I need 340 Kcal of protein, which equates to about 86 grams of protein – since I am trying to build, or at least restore muscles (its not clear if you can do more than restore when you get old) I am trying to concentrate on getting enough protein.  To put on weight you need to eat in excess of these requirements – the equation seems to be that you put on a pound (440 grams) for every 3500 Kcal you eat above your  BMR+activity level over a period of a week.  That is equivalent to  2 days worth of basic food requirement, so to put on 1 lb per week I need to eat 9 days food every 7 days – if I wanted the excess to be protein I’d need to eat almost a kil0gram of protein, which corresponds to around 3 Kg of meat.   I know – sounds totally improbable, and I’ll check the figures again but I think its about right –  maybe I’d better move to Texas where 14 oz (385 gm) steaks are considered a bit mean –  8 of them would just about do for my 1 lb weight gain!  Alongside eating I’ve been quite active and am doing exercises with weights and resistance work with elastic bands ( short bursts only) and doing some exercise each day – walking a mile plus being on my feet all day, or active swimming for 1/2 hour, so I feel reasonably fit.  I’m not sure how fit I’d be if I hadn’t got a bit obsessive about eating and exercise!

29th May  I think I can now safely say I’m finished with Covid.  Its a pretty nasty new virus and it seems to have taken  few weeks/months for the doctors to get a handle on it.  In the beginning they didn’t understand the effect Covid was having on Saturated Oxygen levels, and bunged people on ventilators willy nilly, and are now suggesting that this may have been wrong in some cases.  They now give Oxygen earlier and keep the ventilators as a last resort. ( people put on Ventilators have a chance of dying that is a quarter of what it was at the beginning of the pandemic, which suggests a change in outcomes whatever other factors may be involved)  In previous uses the average time on a ventilator was 7 days, whereas with Covid it was/is 7 weeks –  7 weeks with strong sedation is itself pretty dramatic.  When I got the Oxygen generator I bought a pulse oximeter to measure my Sat. Oxygen level –  to begin with it was often below 95%, but oxygen pushed it up to around 97 or 98 % – a more healthy level.  I’m not sure the Oxygen was essential for my recovery, but it certainly made thing more acceptable and reduced my anxiety level, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have got it from the NHS  – there was (is?)  no halfway house between being ‘on your own’ and being in hospital and on the treatment conveyer belt that all too often put people on Ventilators. ( In ‘normal’ respiratory disease a Saturated Oxygen level of 93 is taken as an indication that a ventilator may be necessary).

2ND May.  The encouraging thing is that every couple of days you notice something that is improving in your recovery, and only then do you realise how bad it had been.  I’m sure if you had asked me a few days ago I would have said I was eating  well, but in the last day or so I realised that my appetite had been  a lot worse than I realised.  All encouraging stuff.  I now have to persuade my oncologist that I am not fading away!  I bought a posh set of bathroom scales to track my weight  but I can’t yet take any comfort from them. I’m  just puzzled at how much my weight varies from day to day, even taking into account the obvious variables!

 

30th April,  Well, after just over 6 weeks since I got symptoms I  am beginning to feel almost human again.  I’m not sure how much weight I lost- probably around 8 Kg. so it will take me a while to get most of that back.  Hard to remember how nasty it was at the time!  I’m up and about all day and am finding  that I am unable to avoid  domestic chores.  Oh well, no gain without pain!

15th April,   Managed to sleep last night but it left me feeling tired all day – strange!  Anyway I’m sort of getting to grips with things, or at least I hope I am!  I will have to find something to occupy my mind before I go stir crazy………   I can understand how it got Boris J – and he has s few years on me!

1th April.  The oxygen concentrator is a neat gadget.  It strips nitrogen out of the air to give around 70 to 80% oxygen at up to 5 litres a minute.  I think I am getting to grips with most of my problems – I could even taste coffee this a.m.  But I still have difficulty sleeping….  Watching all sorts of iplayer and youtube junk.  A friend had been raving about ‘The Repair Shop’ series on BBC 1, but I thought it had too little technical content and far too much emotional clutter.  Shame as it could be good  Most of the you tubes are similarly disapointing – I’ll just have to make some more f my ow,

10th  Got an Oxygen concentrator from a friend so I  can trickle Oxygen up my nose at night and, I hope, get some sleep.  Before that I used the oxygen cylinder from my lead welding outfit to give myself bursts of oxygen – going up half a flight of stairs had me lying on the bed gasping for air for 5 minutes – not nice – a quick squirt of oxygen into a plastic bag and breath that speeded recovery! I seem to have lost up to 20% or my bodyweight in the last 4 weeks, so I’m trying to eat as much as possible -talk about turkeys and Christmas!  Giles is locked down in his flat in Cambridge, and building climbing walls on all the surfaces that are strong enough -Ive challenged him to build a compete climbing wall that will fold up into a matchbox.!

Now made it to 9th – I think things are slowly improving, and then I can’t sleep for 24 hours. At least there is better information  out there and my GPs seem to know what they are dealing with, which is pretty re-assuring.   Hang on in there and EAT and BREATH.

Its 6th April and things haven’t moved on much – normal temp but absolutely wiped out if I try to do anything except lie down. any effort leaves me completely breathless.  I am just about managing to eat, but I doubt that in reality it would keep a knat alive……….  Still overall not feeling too bad………  Not sure what the problem is so will have to talk to my GP if I can….

When I first got feverish around Tuesday  17th March I started to look at the  ‘official’ NHS symptoms and was confused that I seemed to have missed out on sneezing some exact number of times a day and coughing for so many hours.   So did I have COVID-19 ?.     As a 78 year old with Leukemia (CLL) I new I was a high risk patient, although a fairly fit one with minor CLL symptoms.     How long might it go on for?   and what else  might turn up as a symptom?  My Oncologist, and the CLL community in general don’t yet know if CLL is likely to make COVID-19 worst or better – COVID-19’s target is to set off a massive immune response in the respiratory-  maybe it would offer some protection.   Anyway here is what happened to me.  The first phase took about a week,  Fever 38 to 39 C, aching lower limbs and loss of appetite, or more specifically your mouth moisture all disappears, making it difficut to eat solids. I found it difficult to get my temperature comfortable.  After that I had a couple of days of mostly near normal body temperature 37.2C etc.  I was told by the ever helpful 101 service that I might expect breathing difficulties and temperature from day 8 (ish) but the breathing difficulties didn’t occur. (CLL bonus?)  I discovered over the next 6 days that I could be comfortable lying in a more or less unheated (17 -18C) bedroom with an open shirt and pants without feeling feverish.   After a few more days my temperature has come back to normal for most of the time.  Overall I’m impressed with 101 and with my GP and Oncologist who all seem to know the pattern – just a shame our official NHS advice is is nowhere near as good. It is a great shame the NHS thinks it knows all the answers – it has massively screwed up on testing by not buying reagents in time, not really knowing what it is going to do with its testing, and by insisting only PHE could run tests (at Colonwood)- a decision now revoked under government pressure to include commercial labs.  We love our NHS, but just don’t look too closely at the moment if want to avoid disappointment!   Good luck if you get it.j

I think mine started around 17th March – no real idea where I picked it up, but I was in a classroom for an hour a few days before that.

 Posted by at 3:57 pm
Jan 252020
 

The first question is ‘why would you want to make nipples out of titanium?’   I guess the answer ‘ because its there’ isn’t really adequate!  I like it for several reasons – T5 is very tough and doesn’t deform when hammered by the cock, it is  completely corrosion resistant as isn’t marked by the cap composition or black powder residues and it doesn’t get ‘gas cut’ by escaping gas past the thread – plus it looks distinctive and I find it as easy or easier to use than a steel of adequate carbon content.  I’ve made lots for myself – almost all my shooting guns have titanium nipples, and I’ve made a number for clients and friends and haven’t had any negative comments.. As with steel nipples, I always wrap the thread with PTFE pipe tape before inserting the nipple.

The one on the left is made from silver steel  – its a bit of a mess, the rest are titanium – much easier to make!

Most original gun threads are like the one on the left – the right hand one is a 1/4 x U.N.F. 28 t.p.i. thread in titanium.

All nipples are not born equal!  Most don’t follow the current trend for small holes at the bottom – old caps were more powerful so it was probably less important.

WARNING:-  I do NOT recommend that you make nipples for a gun that is going to be shot unless you are a competent engineer and understand the risk attached to a nipple blowing out – a detached nipple is effectively a bullet out of YOUR end of the gun!  Always proof test any gun/nipple combination remotely.

Caution:-  Titanium burns and can be ignited during fierce cutting – only special extinguishers will put it out.  Swarf is usually continuous and sharp and very strong. Stop the lathe  often to remove swarf (use a paper towel to avoid cuts if necessary) and put in a metal bin.  If you start a titanium fire and don’t have a special extinguisher use sand.

Advice:- When cutting do not stop the feed with the tool in contact with the work – retract it before you stop the feed – or you will leave a mark and likely work harden the titanium. The same goes for drilling.  If you use coolant, flood the work to carry away heat, otherwise I use oil to drill small holes – any smoke acts as a warning.

I was looking on the web at comments on turning and milling T5 titanium and I realised that in my ignorance I had got on much better than the comments would suggest!  The only thing I knew before I started was that titanium swarf burns with intense heat and is difficult to extinguish – impossible with water.  I know that because we had a fire in swarf on a lathe in a workshop I was responsible for many years ago.  We called the Fire Brigade who unreeled their hoses until we told them titanium and water didn’t mix – in the end they took a bucket into the grounds and dug up some sand.  Titanium T5 bar ( the titanium alloy of choice) can be found on ebay as reasonable prices for offcuts from production runs in 10 and 12 mm diameters.   The problems with machining T5 titanium are several – its very elastic (Young’s Modulus low) so will deform out of the way of the tool, it work hardens dramatically so if the tool stops cutting and rubs it may not start cutting again easily, and the low thermal conductivity and heat capacity means that very little heat is carried away with the swarf but remains with the tool.   I have made many nipples of T5 and I guess that I have learned how to do it by trial and error.  I can turn it with cheap replaceable carbide tipped tools to get a slightly ribbed finish on the boss of the nipple, or with a sharp HSS tool to get a fine finish, but its difficult to take off very small cuts because the elasticity tends to deform the metal out of the way.  I haven’t had too much difficulty drilling 1 and 2 mm holes up to 12 mm or so deep – if you stop the drill it does work harden but you can break through – it pays to use sharp/new drills – I found that Tracy tools sold Imperial 40 thou drills for £1 each whereas the equivalent metric 1 mm drills cost £3.00 – no contest so I got 5.  I break less drills than when I try to make nipples out of silver steel.  I am fairly careful to splash oil around when drilling and to clear swarf often – pull the drill out and don’t let it idle in the hole or it will work harden.  You need a smooth control on the tailstock thread so you can feel progress when using the 1 mm drill – I can tell even on my big lathe how it is going, and feel the breakthrough of the 2 mm drill into the 1 mm hole.

The most difficult part is putting an external thread on the nipple – you need a sharp HSS die and you cannot have several goes at getting the diameter down – you have to know what gap to set in the die with the wedge screw and go for it – unless you need to remove a significant go in your second try you’ll just end up swaging/work hardening the thread.  It is a pain to try cutting a thread with a blunt die – I used one for some time and couldn’t understand why it was as much effort to back off the die as to ‘cut’ it onto the work!  It is a good idea to turn up a dummy and cut the thread, then part it off and try it  in the breech before going through the whole process so you know how much to open the die.  I have opened dies up so far they break in attempts to get a better fitting thread – I have also run a TIG welder up the outside of the die by a hole to weaken it so it opens easier.  You will find that a standard die doesn’t cut up to the shoulder of the nipple so you can’t screw it in completely – you need to grind up a small tool (or use a parting tool) to undercut the thread at the top slightly.  You can also grind out surplus taper on the face of the die to let it cut a bit nearer the shoulder, but you will almost certainly still have to undercut with a tool.  Make sure that you get the thread length right by checking the depth of the hole in the breech and any nipple you removed from the gun – if you make the thread too long it will be the devil’s own job to shorten it once the nipple is finished, and if you make it too short you will be loosing security in the thread – try to get the bottom edge shaped to match the bottom of the hole if you can.  Having got the initial turning and threading done the nipple is screwed into a bit of tapped bar in the chuck and the nipple end turned using the top slide set to a taper of a couple of degrees – using the top slide complicates the use of the Digital ReadOut so you have to remember not to touch the leadscrew wheel – I can’t lock the saddle on my lathe unfortunately.  If you are making a slightly oversize nipple it’s a problem tapping the hole in your jig bar – you can sometimes do it by rotating the tap around the diameter at the same time as turning it. Getting the actual nipple to be a good fit in the cap is tricky because you can’t proceed in very small steps, and files are not that effective.  The nominal nipple diameter at the top for a 1075 cap is, I think, 4.20 m.m.   Having got the nipple blank turned I put in the flats with a file while its in the tapped bar in a vice because its too difficult to hold the nipple firmly enough for them to be milled – a file works (slowly!) although it doesn’t quite look as professional as it should.   We, the Anglian Muzzle Loaders, reckon that the most reliable configuration for a nipple is with a 1 m.m. to 1.2 m.m. (40 to 50 thou)  hole in the bottom extending 4 or 5 mm up the threaded part put in before bothering to cut the thread in case the drill breaks off in the blank, and a 2 to 2.2 m.m ( 80 or 90 thou) hole down from the top as you shape the actual nipple end.  If you use the tailstock wheel to advance the drill you can feel when it breaks through into the 1 m.m. hole and can then put the 1 m.m drill through to clear out the hole. Most nipples in English percussion sporting guns and pistols correspond to 1/4 BSF thread with 26 threads per inch, although the diameter is often worn somewhat oversize.  The thread profile used in guns is generally quite different from modern threadforms – it has a much lower angle, probably 45 to 50 degrees as opposed to 60 degrees for the BSF and a much more rounded top and bottom to the thread – this means that the thread depth as a fraction of the overall diameter is less, and may mean that modern male threads cut a bit small for the equivalent old hole..  Be aware that the 1/4 UNF is the only UNF thread that DOES NOT correspond in pitch to the equivalent BSF diameter – 1/4 UNF is 28 t.p.i.   The Smiths patent nipples I am copying use an oversize 1/4 by 28 t.p.i (UNF) which is a first for me.  If you have a breech with a very loose nipple you can recut the thread with a tap of a slightly bigger diameter but you really must keep to the same t.p.i.  Fortunately 9/32 BSF has the same pitch as the 1/4 BSF (26 t.p.i) so can be used for recutting those threads and making new nipples.  If tapping out the breech for a bigger thread you will almost certainly need to grind the end of a tap almost flat to cut down to the bottom of the hole – it may need two taps, a plug to start and a ground off plug to finish.

Jan 082020
 

This little pair of pistols are marked ‘Public Office’ and ‘Bow Street’ and are signed Parker, who was the contractor to the early London constables and supplied various arms for the early London law enforcement patrols around the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century.  Interestingly there was some objection even then to arming the police, but the level of highway robbery on the roads leading in and out of London made it expedient to arm the patrols with pistols.  These little pistols are identical, but are not a pair – one is numbered 5 on teh trigger guard and the other is 13 (?check!).  They fire a hefty ball and would have been able to cause a nasty wound, although they are fairly light, so would not have had a very large charge of powder – in any event any gun wound was likely to prove fatal from infection in those times.  For details see ‘Those Entrusted with Arms’ by Frederick Wilkinson.

 Posted by at 10:44 pm
Jan 082020
 

Here are photos of  ‘O’ gauge model railway bits that I am keen to pass on to good homes – they came from my 90 year old father-in-laws father, so probably before WWII.  The are not in particularly good condition and all have been modified early in their life.  Almost all the wagons and coaches appear to be home built, one or two commercial, some from kits? but some scratch built ?  Most of the locos wind up and run. There is an oval of track using what I would regard as 1/2 curves and full straights, plus a few quarter straights – I recognise the track as Hornby. I am keen to find out who made the locos.  These  trains were run on an outdoor layout that ran around a garden – the oval of track is barely big enough – there are enough coaches to make a train 15 ft long although it would have had to have most of the engines coupled to pull it!   There were around  a dozen coaches and 45 goods wagons plus the 7 engines!  I suspect that the locos are from a couple of different manufacturers as they take different sizes of keys – I don’t have original keys for any of them and the keys I do have (ex clocks) mostly don’t fit.

Loco No 1

Loco No 2

Loco No 3

 

Loco No 4

Loco No 5

 

Loco No 6

Loco No 7

Wagon parts etc – need axles, wheels from the box of bits!

 

there are half a dozen similar coached with different class configurations etc, and a number of scratch built LMS coaches.

Dec 202019
 

William Smith was a gunmaker  apprenticed in 1766 to John Joyner who at the end of his career had his shop at 64 Princes Street, Soho from 1821 to 1824.  The business passed to his son Samuel, who had the business from 1825. In 1830 he took out an English patent No 5978 for ‘Imperial caps and nipples’ to his own design.  In 1834 he took his brother Charles into the business and it became Samuel and Charles Smith, still at 64 Princes Street Soho.  In 1855 the business passed to Samuel’s sons, also Samuel and Charles, so continued to trade under the same name until 1877, although it  moved to Haymarket for the last 6 years.  Many of their sporting guns, rifles and pistols used the patent Imperial caps and nipples – some are now found cased with alternative conventional nipples so that common caps could be used.  I do not know if Smith originally supplied them as an option, and if so whether alternative cock noses were supplied. Thus early (1831 -1834) Imperial guns would have Samuel Smith’s name alone, with the Prices Street address, for the rest of the percussion era guns would be under the name Samuel and Charles Smith (usually abbreviated as on the lock plate below.) still at the Princes Street address

I haven’t yet seen the Smith patent so I cannot comment on what was claimed to be the advantage, but it was taken out fairly early in the percussion era so maybe the ‘standard’ percussion cap wasn’t yet fully established?  ( I believe it was that they needed less primer, and were easier to make, plus had a shorter path to the main charge).   The distinguishing feature of the Samuel Smith’s caps and nipples is that the caps were larger in overall diameter ( about 8.5 mm ) and sat over the round body of the nipple, which had a small projection in the centre with the hole for the flame – the projection forming the ‘anvil’ on which the cap was detonated by the cock. The nipple top was flat and circular except for the raised ‘anvil’ and so gave no purchase for a conventional nipple key  – they were unscrewed using a special tool that fitted over the body of the nipple and had a small (2.5mm diameter) sprung  peg that engaged with a hole in the side of the nipple  body.  The cocks of Smiths’ guns featured a removable nose on a 7/32 x 32 t.p.i thread – this was flared towards the end, which was around 12.3 mm in diameter (1/2 inch) and was recessed about 1.5 mm (1/16th in.) over most of its end diameter.  Guns seen nowadays usually have conventional nipples to replace the Imperial ones, although they do stand higher by 4 – 6 mm  than the Imperial nipples.  I have not seen replacement noses for the cocks for use with conventional caps ( original or modern) so I don’t know if such things existed!

When conventional nipples are mounted in Smith guns that retain the original cock nose intended for Imperial caps, the caps are not guarded by the usual skirt on the cock nose of guns intended for conventional caps.  The skirt on the nose of a conventional percussion is intended to prevent shards of red hot cap being blown out onto the shooter’s face and hands (it happens!).  It is possible that the Smiths’ cock noses were made detachable to allow the user to fit a safer design for conventional caps?   Early on a number of makers ( Joseph Manton, Samuel Nock etc…) did use detachable noses on the cocks, possibly a relic of the pill lock days –  these, of course, did have protective skirts.

 

The Samuel and Charles Smith gun shown below is a double 12 bore and is fairly heavy for a normal percussion sporting gun, weighing around 7 lbs.  It was made without a ramrod or fittings for one, which suggests that it was made as a live pigeon gun, probably around 1840, It is one of a cased trio of identical guns, two numbered consecutively and one later, all fitted with Imperial caps and without conversion nipples.  The guns are not individually numbered 1,2 and 3 as one might expect (or is it too early for that?).  The numbering of the guns suggests that they were made as a pair and that the third was made later to complete the trio.  It is difficult to see why anyone would want to have a set of three live pigeon guns, and that makes a case for them being game guns for driven shoots where the shooter might have had two loaders and therefore 3 guns on the go at once, or were they made before the era of massive driven shoots?   As always there exists an enjoyable puzzle!

 

My project is to convert them to use conventional caps (reversibly and without damaging any original parts, naturally!).  I will make new nipples of a squatter design that normal (modern nipples are about 1.5 mm shorter than the originals from 1840) and will  also make new detachable noses for the cocks to protect the shooter from stray bits of cap.

The nose on the Rt cock is my prototype nose for use with conventional caps & nipples.

 

Here is the original tool for removing the Imperial nipples – note the spring loaded arm with the pin (approx 2.5 mm diameter) that engages with the radial hole in the nipple edge.

The tool is not particularly worn, but doesn’t fully grip one of the nipples, which I assume had had its hole damaged by trying too hard to remove it.  I will try making a better design of tool – quite a challenge, although I do have a few ideas……

 

 

 

 

Here is the tool I made to get out the caps that the Smiths tool didn’t seem up to removing;-

The ‘original Smiths tool (above) didn’t grip the cap well enough as the side hole in the nipples was a little worn, and I didn’t want to damage the rather weak joint between the metal and wood of the tool.  I designed a ‘foolproof’ tool that I reckoned would allow me to put much more force on the recalcitrant caps and was ‘more or less’ guaranteed not to disengage in the process.  The principle is that the cup for the base of the cap is a good fit over the cap, but the shaft and end is split so that it can be opened and closed to allow a fixed peg on the inside of the cup  to slip into the hole in the cap, after which the cup is closed to grip the cap by sliding a tapered collar down the split and tapered shaft of  the tool.   I drilled a 2.5 mm hole through the cup and used a piece of hardened steel rod to engage the hole in the nipple – one nipple had the hole facing outward so I could leave the rod sticking out for a trial – it worked, although the thread was pretty stiff even after it had started to turn – too stiff for the original tool to work without holding the sprung loaded catch.  I have now silver soldered the peg into the cup and quenched it to harden it all up, and I’ll try the finished tool on the other nipple.  The thread on the nipple I have removed seems  to be   .253 O.D. and as near as I can judge 28 t.p.i. with a very shallow rounded thread as is common on old guns.  As far as I can see the best fit would be an oversize  1/4 inch U.N.F thread (28t.p.i.) rather than the 1/4 inch B.S.F thread (26 t.p.i.)  I was expecting.  I will cut some test threads – I have a UNF die, and if its opened up to the maximum it will probably cut a big enough thread.  If not I’ll open out a die holder and run a flame down one side of the die to soften it and open it some more………………………………………………………… nothing to do with old guns is straightforward!   If you want one of these tools please email me, see SHOP page at top for price etc.

I ought to have put a nipple pricker in one of the arms – …….. next time?

I cut the slot with a hacksaw, hence the wobble – I don’t have a suitable slitting saw.  It works!

There is still a bit of silver solder round the pin, it has now been removed.

New nose and nipple for 1075 caps.

The nipple could be a shade smaller diameter as the cap hasn’t gone fully down.

I made a new nipple with the same radial hole as the original Imperial nipples, and discovered that the space between the body of the nipple and the flash guard isn’t enough to allow either my tool or the original tool to engage with the nipples unless the radial hole happens to be pointing outwards.  I don’t think the threads and hole were all aligned so wonder how the original tool was supposed to work!  Anyway it isn’t a problem for the nipples I’m making as I can make them fit a normal nipple key, which I have done in the photo above.

Dec 172019
 

Here are the diary entries from June to the end of August 2019 24th September – A day at the Kentwell Hall Elizabethan Re-enactment with ‘my’ class of 9/10 year olds and their teachers.  The reconstruction was set in the year 1588, which was a momentous year – in July the Spanish Armada arrived off Plymouth giving rise to the apocryphal(?) story of Drake and the game of bowls.  The English fleet harried the Spanish but would not close engage, denying the heavily soldiered ships of Phillip the opportunity for hand to hand combat.  The Spanish needed to rendezvous with  the Duke of Parma  in Calais to pick up the main body of the invading army, but the wind was unfavourable and blew them into the harbour, which enabled the English to send in fireships and cause havoc.  Most of the surviving Spanish cut their anchors and fled north, eventually going round the north of Scotland and into the Irish sea, most being wrecked on the way.  Only the gentry talked of the great sea victory on our visit.  The whole of that period was one of religious upheaval following Henry VIII’s break with Rome, Mary’s Catholic revival and Elizabeth’s return to Protestantism all pursued in a  mightily brutal fashion.  The rise of Puritanism was smouldering around 1588 with the satirical Martin Tracts, although Elizabeth succeeded in keeping the lid on it during her reign, but of course it burst forth during Cromwell’s Commonwealth and then petered out. The Clopton family of Kentwell Hall were, one presumes, safe Protestants, so the Hall presumably has no priest holes for recusants!   The children had a great time and two small boys left the Alchemist’s demonstration hell bent on making gunpowder.  I found it difficult to discourage them as that is exactly what I did at that age – and I’m still playing with the stuff – mysteriously I still have all my fingers, eyes, hair etc although I might once or twice have had rather singed eyebrows.  Wonderful time was had by all – they are a lovely bunch of kids.  My only reservation was that the woodmen were cutting up Sycamore, although it had only been introduced into England in the last hundred years of so as a park tree. 22nd September – Another few days of hectic activity – a couple of days interviewing job candidates and a fantastic shoot on Saturday down on the Essex coast after Partridges.  We were expecting lots of English but in the end the bag was almost entirely Frenchies.  The whole shoot was on dead flat terrain and there was a steady breeze of around 15 m.p.h or so and all the drives were downwind so the birds were going at a fair speed – there were some massive flushes – with that wind its  difficult to pick and stick to one target when there are several nearby, and I find it almost impossible to pick up and hold a second bird by the time they are on top of me.  Anyway it was a great first of the year.  I always live in fear of accidentally shooting a pheasant  before  the season for pheasants opens, but this was not natural pheasant country and I only saw one in the whole of the shoot.  Ours was the first muzzle loading shoot on that estate – an experiment that I hope will be repeated.  Things should calm down next week – just the start of my STEM club at school and I put myself down for the school trip to Kentwell Manor, where the children will be taking part in an Elizabethan activity day – the only condition is that I go in some sort of period costume – I’m working on it but I don’t think I’ll be putting a photo on the webside! 17th September – Spent the day talking to a dozen groups of 14 year olds about seismics – its great fun and they are, for the most part, engaged and interested although I did have one group that was so badly behaved that I threatened to throw them out – and the ‘teacher’ sat there and did nothing… Its the first time in 20 years I’ve had to do that!   I’ve got another day of it tomorrow and then a couple of days of interviews, so no time to even think about guns, although Friday night I’ll have to get ready for a partridge shoot on Saturday ( 6:45 a:m start).   I did manage to get fine semolina from ‘Daily Bread’, a wholelfood supplier in Cambridge – at £1:87 per Kg. it is a lot cheaper than wads so I’ll see how it works some time. 15th  September – There is still a large pile of sailing stuff in the living room and I didn’t want to put it back in the bedroom that I have to renovate soon, so I spent most of the day making a cupboard in a void over the stairs to put it in – now  got to make doors etc…..  I went to Dick’s yesterday and brought back a strange percussion over and under pistol that he has been renovating as it needed a couple of bits of engraving 0n the tang of the breech and on the tang of the trigger guard – the breech one I can do easily but I hate trying to put lines on a very curved trigger guard tang as I can never get sufficient room to maneuver the tool. anyway it’s done – the rest of the engraving is very poor – its a low value job so I did mine to match rather than go over the whole thing and tart it up.  I have to confess I used the Gravemaster to do it.  I failed to find fine Semolina in Waitrose today……………….. 14th September – While we were sailing I asked Giles’s friend, a metallurgist, about brass and how to make a pale brass as used in 18th & 19th century guns.  Brass is basically an alloy of copper and zinc,  in different ratios for different purposes, with a melting point of 930 degrees C plus or minus 20 degrees depending on composition.  It is relatively easy to heat brass to melting point for casting but changing the composition is not so straightforward.  Copper melts at 1084 C so you need to get the brass to that temperature in order to up the copper content and make it a redder  brass – I tried this but couldn’t get the temperature high enough and the copper stayed in clumps within the brass.  Going the other way and trying to add zinc is much more difficult for although the zinc melts at 419 C, well below brass, it unfortunately has a boiling point of 913 C  so dropping zinc into molten brass just boils off the zinc at great hazard to anyone near.  One suggestion was to add tin rather than zinc, which would make a form of bronze (a tin/copper alloy) – tin has a very low melting point  of 232 C but doesn’t boil until 2720 C so adding it to molten brass should be OK, but I’m not sure what that would do for the colour.  There are a number of alloys of copper, zinc and tin – its the basis of Admiralty or Naval brass.  Nickel was also suggested but that melts at 1455 C so is beyond my furnace. Perhaps just melting old brass is the answer! 13th September – I bought back a’rat tailed’ pistol from Sandringham to be repaired- its quite an elaborate, well made brass bodied Miquelet pistol, almost certainly of Albanian origin, that would go to half and full cock but wouldn’t release by pulling the trigger.  I stripped out the lock to see what was wrong, and as I expected it was simply a bit of wear on the trigger where it contacted the sear, so a dab of weld along the edge of the top hung trigger fixed it – a quick and easy job.  The lock was in reasonable condition so I just gently wire brushed its exposed parts and oiled it rather than a more thorough derusting which would have disturbed the patina.   One of the hot topics at Sandringham was Semolina – yes,  the stuff you used to get for pudding at school?  But not in the pudding context here, more serious use!  Our team shooting in Hungary had discovered that some Hungarian team members were using fine ground semolina instead of wads between powder and shot – just put the powder in, then a scoop of semolina, then the shot, then the overshot card.  It sounds improbable but if people were using it in International competition they must be pretty confident it works.  Some of our shooters tried it a Sandringham and couldn’t tell the difference.  I wondered if the fouling would be worse and cleaning more difficult because there was no lubrication from the wad, but was told that if anything the barrels were easier to clean out after semolina.  So there is a thing.  I can see it being a convenient technique at clays, but I’m not sure about using it on a game shoot or in a strong wind, although perhaps if made up into paper packets it might work.  Something to try….. Oh, & it does need to be the fine ground semolina – I think the stuff we endured at school was coarse – and you must omit the jam  in guns………………………… The red arrow points to the blade on the cock, the green arrow points to a button that pops out under spring pressure. it has a notch to capture the blade.  The full cock detent is a flat plate hidden above the button.  Both plate and button are pulled back against the spring when the trigger is pulled. The red arrow points to the sear spring, the green arrow to the sear and the purple arrow to the arm of the sear that is towards you. When the top hung trigger is pressed the sear arm moves backwards and tilts the sear and withdraws the button and blade. The sear pivots on its rear edge and is located by the tongue that is  through it. 2th September – A chance I might get things under control again and find a bit of time for the blog!  I had a couple of weeks sailing round the Hebrides in a Jeanneau 419 during which time our home part of the UK was in a heatwave, while Scotland was wet and windy – it was ever thus!  A fair amount of motoring as the wind was always ‘on the nose’ and we had a series of drop offs and pick-ups planned that didn’t leave much leeway for waiting for the wind to change.  I got back from that and the next day set off for the Sandringham Game fair where I did an engraving display/demonstration to almost nobody!  The MLAGB stand that I’m part of was located in a backwater well out of any passing trade, so although the dedicated muzzle loader shooters found it, they were only interested in that.  Still I picked up a couple of small jobs – a ‘rat-tailed flintlock from ?Turkey? that wouldn’t fire when cocked, and an old double percussion gun that will probably clean up into something presentable.  Back from that on Sunday evening and off on Monday morning with the older children from ‘my’ school for their adventure camp in Norfolk – as the school has no male staff I go in charge of the boy’s dorm – I had 15 boys and the two staff had 5 girls between them!  Anyway I  I should have a few days before I do a couple of days at the Cavendish Labs in the University talking to groups of 14 & 15 year old would -be scientists – 12 groups a day  – come October things should have settled down a bit, although I’m threatened with having to finish and replaster a bedroom that has been used as a junk store for 20 years – it was lathe and plaster but has had the plaster stripped off so I have to make good the lathes and then do it out in lime plaster – easier than gypsum plaster as its setting time is hours not minutes!   All this with the shooting season starting………………………………….. Rather nice charter boat, new this year.   Martin Crix and a very pleased young shot, Molly, at Sandringham. 21st August – Things have got a bit manic on the commercial work front so I have had to put off any more playing guns for a bit, but I hope to get a day or two off sometime to play!  Maybe I ought to retire. I do have to get in trim for my engraving demonstration at Sandringham – I can’t do engraving ‘cold’, I need to get my hand/eye in for a day or two beforehand.  Oh and I made a discovery today watching a YouTube of making a Holland and Holland gun – their engravers use chasing, ie hammering chisels, or much to my horror, pneumatic gravers, probably GRS Gravermax like the one I have but hardly use.  There goes my illusion that they did it by push engraving………. 19th August – The last two days have been spent struggling with my internet – one or two devices were loosing the internet while still having connections to the local network while others are perfectly OK.  I got a new router but I am minded to send it back – the cord from the power adaptor is just over a meter and the LAN cable supplied is 2 feet long  – not sure why they think that it is a good idea to require users to rewire their houses to accommodate the router!  Anyway work in progress.   Following my visit to the Open prison, I’m pleased to tell you that my name has been put down for a rather nice room should I need it!  I did sneak a moment to do a few little jobs on the Fishenden to keep myself sane – I cut up a piece of 2 m.m spring steel for a turnscrew and found a chunk of ebony for the handle and turned up a brass ferule – The handle was turned and then flattened each side on the big disk sander – doesn’t look bad and fits the intended compartment perfectly – needs more coats of sanding sealer……  I ‘economised’ and used a bit of Indian Ebony instead of my real black Ebony so it isn’t quite as dark and has a much more open grain but I didn’t want to cut 4 inches off my ramrod stock length.  I also made a brass ring for the lid – it is probably the ‘right’ thing, although maybe my boss shape is wrong?  The wire could be a bit thicker but there was nothing between 1 m.m and 1.6 m.m on offer. I think maybe the knurled ring is a bit prominent – I don’t have a straight knurling tool so its skewed Needs holding down tighter – how I got a 1.2 m.m. hole through the centre is a mystery!   The only thing wrong is that the bullet mould is 30 bore and the pistol is 16 bore – I have to look out for one the right size. One might almost think it all fitted together by design!   15th August – Day out today on a visit to an Open Prison – since my time as an Independent Prison Monitor I’ve been interested in what goes on in prisons – I have to say that this catagory 4 prison is a pretty good place – 300 acres of estate, massive greenhouses and immaculate gardens and lots of the prisoners working in the voluntary sector and commercially outside the prison, and many of the rest working within the prison – all working towards release and rehabilitiation.   Although I’m not planning to commit an offence in the near future I can think of worse places to be – like the old people’s home my father ended up in, about which I still have nightmares!   I did crack Fusion 360’s toolpath generation but still haven’t cracked is zero reference positioning so although I can make the miller follow the correct path  its still displaced about 5 mm  from where I think it should, so it partially misses the piece of brass I’m trying to shape – I WILL crack it……………………. 14th August – Busy with clearing out another space..  But I did spend a little while on the Fishenden case – I had made a case label in A4 size on the assumption that by the time I had reduced it any imperfections wouldn’t show.  I was wrong! So this morning I had another go at drawing one in A4 but being a lot more precise.  I photographed it and printed it out and it looks much better than the first effort, although I probably ought to steer clear of script …..  I had a bit of trouble getting the exposure right as most of it is white, and in the end it came out slightly shaded, which doesn’t look bad.  Note that this isn’t a fake label, its for information, and has my name in small letters on the corner. This is about the size I’ll use it. 13th August – More clearing out – generated the best part of a full load for the dump!   In the course of clearing out I’ve generated at least another car boot sales worth!  I just bought a derelict Mortimer duelling pistol in need of some serious restoration that will become an autumn project, after finishing the pinfire double 12 bore and a client’s percussion pistol……  And put the finishing touches to the Fishenden case – Each time I pass it I rub on another coat of sanding sealer with a touch of  darkish brown spirit dye to tone down the colour a bit.  I have been trying to pursuade my cnc miller to profile out an escutcheon with scalloped corners for it, but so far I haven’t mastered the Fusion 360 software toolpath generation – it is the most awkward piece of software ever written, but its very powerful and free for startups.  Went climbing tonight- did manage a few good climbs – a bit tired after an hour of it………. 12th August -Clearing out the attics today – very dusty, although I only got about 1/4 done – I’ll have to go to the dump tomorrow!  I collected the pinfire that Dick has tightened up for me – it is now very good in the bite and and ‘on the face’ – I guess there is now no excuse for not getting on with it, except that I have a lot of  ‘serious’ work on over the next month or so, so my playing with guns will be curtailed, as will my postings on this blog – I’m afraid a Non Disclosure Agreement  prevents me from revealing what I’m doing – I’ll try to find time for a few gun bits on the blog, and I do want to wrap up a youtube video I’m trying to do on making springs – always too many things to do,……….. and I thought retirement would be restful, although I suppose in all honesty I don’t really want it that way!.  I hope to fit in a climbing session tomorrow evening – I am getting a bit rusty. 11th August – Did a car boot sale this morning to get rid of some junk – fairly successful but still have too much.  I  was selling a couple of brass candesticks, and realised that one pair was a somewhat paler brass than the other – the pale pair looking genuine and the others obviously being  modernish (Indian?) repros.  That got me thinking about ‘lemon brass’ for old gun parts, and wondering if most 18th/early 19th century brass was paler than modern brass.  I made an escutcheon for the Fishended box from modern ‘engravers’ brass’ and then found one stripped from an old box with a genuine Chippendale handle that was a whole lot paler – you can see in the photo, even though the surface of the original is pretty rough.  Checking out details of modern brasses, I can’t find any reference to the colour of the resulting brass – I’d like to get hold of  a couple of feet or so of 1/2 inch ‘lemon brass’  for making ramrod fittings.  I’ll have to consult Kevin Blackley as I know he uses it for antique brass castings.  I presume it is high in zinc, does it also have nickel ( which takes it Towards being German silver)?  I might have to sacrifice my candlesticks to cast a rod!  Maybe a helpful correspondent can help?  One such did enlighten me about the hole in the bottom of  patch boxes (blog passim) – its to push out the patches, especially if they are oiled or greased.  I’ll have to see if I can put a hole in the bottom – I keep learning from this blog! Anyway thanks – see comment…. The photo is taken in reflected white (LED) light on a white background! 9th August – My making treat for today was a quick box for the Fishenden for 1 1/2 inch patches – occasionally found in pistol and rifle cases, Keith Neil and Back say that the ones for patches had a hole in the bottom (why?) but the ones -later – for percussion caps obviously didn’t.  Anyway the thing to make boxes out of is clearly Box (the wood) – and I happen to have a branch of rather manky Box just big enough so I cut off a 6 inch length some distance from the split end and chucked it and rough turned it until it was a full cylinder, which fortunately turned out to be just big enough to make the box with about 51 m..m outside diameter.  I turned a bevel on the end to rechuck it the other way round with better grip and marked out the lid and body parts.  I filled the small crack that ran along one side with instant glue and activated it.  I cheated on this box – normally I would put a bevel on both ends of the blank so that I could work on the hollowed sides of lid and box so as to keep the body and lid as one continuous grain so the lid grain matched the body grain ( except for the bit missing from the overlap of lid and body).  In this case I was a bit short of length so I made the lid on the same blank as the body – meaning that the grain doesn’t match up across the joint – the lid being effectively reversed – but box has very little figure so it doesn’t show.  The top of the lid was turned by pushing it onto the finished box while that was still chucked (with a bit of tape to make it tight).  Anyway here it is – looks very good in the box, but I found I’d made the loading rod too long to share the space – luckily I had only pushed the knob on the rod, so I could redo the end 20 mm shorter – still long enough to load but now fits!  I bit the bullet and cut a bit of decent mahogany for the compartment lid and planed it down to about 5 m.m.  Its a bit fraught as you push the bit of wood into the thicknesser and then put a strip of ply in to drive it through – it worked although I did get a bit of a groove on what is now the underside of the lid.  I had a 25 m.m. scrap of fake ivory that was going to make a knob for the lid, but its made of polyester and if you don’t turn it right it starts to chip out big concoidal fractures – so I destroyed it pretty thoroughly – Ive just ordered some more (£2.99 for a 150 m.m. length of 25 m.m bar) so it will be a day of two before that is done.  (too many boxes in that paragraph!) The Box box – 1 1/2 inch patches are a perfect fit. The top right compartment might just a take a turnscrew with a ‘flag’ on the side for the cock screw – we shall see!   I picked up a couple of branches of Box during a walk along the Devil’s Dyke – someone had planted some bushes years ago. Woodturning is a good way of producing waste – you start with a decent sized piece of log and end with a little box! As shown its chucked on the log, which is not particularly good as it can’t be put back true  and it needs the tailstock centre – the bevel on the tailstock end will let it be chucked and rechucked if necessary. The body and lid were parted off near the chuck and chucked on the beveled end- the lid hollowed and parted off, then the box hollowed and finished and the lid put on and taped in place while its top was turned and rings marked. 8th August – Most of today I was clearing out the rubbish from various glory holes about the house – a mere 5 bags of rubbish and a half a Land Cruiser full of recyclables plus a couple of boxes for stuff for a car boot sale.  I was clearing my tools from the casemaking and happened to look in the oil soaked instruction book that came with the aforementioned Record No 50 plane and saw that it could be used to plane  dowels with its fancy cutters – well I had to try it out on a loading rod for the Fishenden – as I had a roughly correct sized ebony square already the plane didn’t turn out to be ideal, but I ran the square a few times through the thicknesser to get it the right size and got some way with the No 50, then reverted to a small low angle plane and eye.  Then it went in the lathe for 10 minutes treatment with hard  80 grit paper and it came out perfect – a few minutes with finer grade papers, burnish with a handful of shavings and a quick once over with friction polish and it looked perfect so I had to turn up a knob from figured walnut and a brass end with screw.  I am very suspicious of the highly tapered screws that are used in ramrods etc when used for ball as the expand the ball against the barrel walls as they are driven in, making it harder to get it out.  Anyway my loading rod wasn’t meant to be a fake so I sorted out a modern woodscrew with a vicious point and not much taper.  I do have a number of ramrod ends, but none suitable for a pistol loading rod.   I mentioned yesterday that I’d made the case with the pistol the unconventional way round – I did check ‘The Book’ and knew which way round it should be, but when I drew out the partitions on a sheet of card in the case I forgot to mark front and back, and it just got made the ‘wrong’ way.  I think I would probably have done it this way if I’d thought about it anyway as the main function of the case is to display the gun, and it does that much better this way round! 7th August – Almost there with the case –  internal lid and escutcheon and a few more coats of oil/shellac  on the outside still to do but it is OK for the time being.  I anguished about the finish –  in fact I still am.  I got the ‘Dark Brown’ suede dye but it gave a bright ginger colour. I tried the traditional colourant for mahogany – a solution of potasium permanganate  – it looks violent purple but soon goes dark brown, but I didn’t really like it.  In the end I put on a coat of diluted ‘Slacum’ (linseed, beeswax and turps) – it will probably go darker with time.    I was going to make a lid for the triangular compartment but the thin mahogany I had was too light and open grained ( it was a piece of a punt).  I am very mean with nice wood and reducing stuff to 5 mm thickness is wasteful as my thicknesser likes quite big bits of wood or they don’t come out of the other side!  I will find something better in time, probably by sacrificing larger pieces of  better mahogany. I can see a couple of bits that need attention – one see things in photos that escape the naked eye!  Case experts will immediately recognise that I’ve made this one the unconventional way round – normally the top of the pistol is nearest to the front of the case – i.e. the whole thing 180 degrees rotated.  It is normal to case single barreled pistols and guns with the lock up and I guess if the pistol is the conventional way round you can open the case and pick up the pistol with your right hand in a ‘shooting’ grip.  Having said that I have seen a number that break the rule. Its crying out for a loading rod, a round  box for wads and a pan brush, plus some spare flints in a leather pouch. 6th August – one of the mysteries of this blog is who looks at it – every day it gets between about 120 and 180 visitors, and only very occasionally gets to either limit – given there must be many tens of thousands of people round the world who might be interested, why does the number not fluctuate in a more random way?  Or are most of them regular viewers?  Between 20 and 45 each day come via a search engine, still not a lot of random variation.  I suppose I could put software on the site that would tell me how many returning visitors there are each day, but given the GDPR regulations that might be difficult.  Incidentally almost half the visitors are from the US, twice as many as from the UK.  Africa and Greenland are poorly represented! The case making occupied most of the day – AGAIN!  We used to have a motto at the lab when things got complex or our equipment had to be fixed in zero time on board ship with 50 crew waiting – ‘ Had I known what was involved I wouldn’t have started!’   – that probably applies to this case.  If you decide to make a case, start with a nice simple one all one depth and with fabric over the dividers – it is much easier.  Having said that, it is looking quite fancy, and coming together fairly well – I will prefabricate the compartments and part cover them before fixing them in place – I’m still waiting for the suede dye before I can finally put it together, but I did hinge the lid on today – at which point I discovered that the two hinges I had salvaged from a box were of different widths ( back to front).  I had already made cutouts on the assumption that both hinges were the same and couldn’t remember which I’d used as a template – but a bit of jiggling and a bit of screw hole filling got it there in the end…  …I’m having second thoughts about the escutcheon with the running leaf border – watch this space. I had planned to use the red baise, but when I made up some sample partitions it didn’t contrast enough and the paler green that we had initially rejected came out as favourite.  The upper left compartment will have a lid, the upper right is for a brush that I will have to make!  The rectangular one is for the flask – its a bit big.  All the rest of the junk will go in the lower compartment.  Compartments not fixed. 5th August – still playing with the case – made a small brass escutcheon for the keyhole and inlet it, fitted the lock and cutouts for hinges and made up some of the partitions.  The Fishenden double pistol is very wide so the case has to be around 100mm deep to accomodate the widest part but that makes the rest of it far to deep to be practical so most of it will have to have the base raised with packing by around 40 mm.  I found a box of pieces of balsa wood that we had bought for making things years ago – lots of different thicknesses, so that will be ideal for packing as it won’t add significantly to the weight – I guess there is some merit in not throwing anything away!  I made an escutcheon to put on the lid and felt like doing some engraving so I put a ‘running leaf’ border as on 1800 locks round it.  I might just feel the need to put a ‘stand of arms’ engraving in the middle there is one on the tails of the locks of the pistol. I’m now waiting for Amazon to deliver a bottle of dark brown suede shoe dye  – it is by far the best way to colour wood if you want to go for a significantly darker colour – my bottle is almost empty. Probably ought to be mounted the other way up?   4th August – Bit more work on the case – preparing stock for the partitions – I decided that as its not meant to be a ‘fake’ old box I could do what I liked, so I’ve started to make partitions that show a strip of mahogany at the top rather than fold the cloth over the top – more work but more fun.  I have 4 different biases for lining cases – all dyed in original military colours from Bernie the Bolt – I got Penny to help me decide which went best – to be revealed later…. 3rd August –  Got the basics of the box done – the ‘lining’ round the inside of the box that stands proud of the base to form a lip is a tricky machining job – the outside needs to be chamfered at about 15 degrees so the lid closes.  I managed to do that on my table router. The inside surface is less easy – the biase only comes up to the level of the sides of the box and ends in a recess that needs to be tapered  – I spent a long time trying to work out how to do it with a router, before I realised that I had a very fancy old Record plane that did all sorts of ploughing jobs somewhere in a box – I tend to forget that often hand tools are much easier for some jobs than trying to fudge things with machine tools.  In a similar vein I made the traditional bead round the bottom of the lid using a simple scratch plane with a blade I filed up for the job.  Anyway it is now looking like a box – a few more jobs to do – fit hinges, make internal partitions, make keyhole escutcheon, make lid escutcheon/handle, plus all the finishing – colour it down, sanding seal it, varnish//wax it and line it  etc etc.  In the end it will represent almost a week’s work – no way an economic proposition but I’ve wanted to have a go at casemaking for some time, and I can rest on my laurels when that is finished.   I didn’t put hooks on the front as I wasn’t confident I’d get them right, so presumably I should not really put a handle on the top – I do have a lock for it, but no key  If I were doing it again I’d try to get my cnc machine to make the pockets for the hooks before I assembled the box, and also get it to machine the hooks themselves from brass.  Maybe I’ll fit hooks after all – by hand………… Thinking about the typical construction of cases, I reckon that the bead round the edge of the lid (sometimes round the box instead)  is there to hide any misalignment in the two parts, which it does rather well! 2nd August – Bit more work on the pistol box for the Fishenden and on discovering how the cnc software and hardware interact – I could be getting there but I can’t get the hang of the z axis – the tool raising and lowering – I think I have got it sorted, and then it goes and digs a hole in the piece of wood I’ve put on the bed to protect it from just such events – I will get to understand what it thinks it is doing – at least with computers I’ve learnt that everything that goes wrong does so for a reason – almost always human error or misunderstanding. One little quirk of the free software I am using is that every time something goes a bit wrong I have to restart the whole shooting match.  I went over to Dicks – he has just fitted new frizzens on a pair of locks that had lost theirs, and they really look as if they have always been there – he also found a perfect matching top jaw in his box of old parts – great to have a workshop absolutely packed with the pickings of 30 years in the game!  Dick is now sorting out the Sturman pinfire – tightening up the action and getting it back on the face – that involves putting a bit of weld on the breech hook to move the barrels back a bit, and putting some on the rotary catch to pull them down onto the action flat.  I probably ought to learn to weld properly as our specialist has now started charging a high price for his expertise!  I did manage to weld a pin on the side of a small mainspring for the Harding pistol so maybe there is hope for me yet! 31st July – Trapped at home waiting for a delivery that didn’t come so a repeat tomorrow!  I was going over to Dick’s to see  how he is getting on with pair of locks that he is conjuring up frizzens for – I need to take the Sturman to get him to tighten the action – too modern for me.  I also need to sift through his collection of percussion cocks to see if I can find a better pair for a double barreled pistol I’m restoring for another client – both cocks are replacements and don’t match, one doesn’t strike the nipple and neither are anywhere near the right half and full cock positions.  When I think about it at least half of the antique guns that pass through my workshop have had the cocks replaced – flint as well as percussion.  Most are modern replacements – by modern I mean in the last hundred years – I had one replacement flint cock that was dated 1969 on the back  – I think people, including Blackleys, have been selling casting since the 1950s.  It would appear that quite often replacement percussion cocks are recycled old ones, maybe from the recoversion of percussion to flint, and they often have their squares in the wrong alignment.  Actually gunmakers from about 1830 ish seem to have had a standard square alignment that many followed, especially for sporting guns.  I have been able to swap cocks with perfect alignment  – in one example I put John Manton cocks on a Samuel Nock double gun and the were perfect – they were even a decent tight fit.  I’m still using them regularly! My ‘playing’ today took the form of making a case for my double flint coach pistol by Fishenden.  There are two photos of cases in the Keith Niel and Back Case book , and I am  more or less copying the one for a John Manton pistol as the pistol looks similar.  My first task was serious timber conversion to get enough strips of 10mm wide mahogany for the sides, and a sheet 8 mm thick for the top.  I’ve done the dovetails and glued up the bottom of the case – I made the sides 10mm tahick but I had a bit of a job chasing round to find a small enough lock and hinges.  Hinges for gun cases can be a problem as gun always had ‘stop hinges’ that allowed the lid to be opened just over the right angle.   Stop hinges are difficult to buy and can be horribly expensive if you can find any.  They do come oon old boxes from time to time, but take some tracking down.  The best proper antique stop hinges were made from solid brass but I’ve found two alternative constructions – cheap stop hinges made of folded brass sheet are like normal cheap hinges, except that the brass is folded back from the ‘inside’ edge of the hinge and carried back under the hinge to protrude at the back and form the stop.  The other ‘cheat’ is very useful – just cut a piece of  brass sheet to go under each side of the hinge and let it stick out the back and file bevels to act as the stop – they are drilled to match the hinge and could be soldered on for added security – that means you can turn any cheap hinges into stop hinges. I was trying to look at some adverts for guns on Gunstar to see if it was worth putting any on there.  The thing that struck me most was how awful a lot of the photos are – it may be that Gunstar cuts the resolution down to save space although that would be both silly and unnecessary.  I think it is that in spite of mobile phones being perfectly adequate cameras, people just point them in the general direction of the chosen gun and never look at the result – failing to notice that the framing was all over the place so it doesn’t show what they want, the lighting is terrible and the focus is like looking through thin soup!  Some of the correspondents to this site send me similarly awful phots – some are OK, a few good, but mostly its difficult to say anything constructive about a brown blurr, or worse, half a dozen brown blurrs.  I do take a lot of trouble to get good photos for this blog, although sometimes I can’t get the optimal lighting and occasionally I  don’t remember to manually focus perfectly – I probably take 6 photos for every one that gets on the blog.  I am awaiting delivery of another Canon lens for my M50 – I managed to find a good second hand one with a year’s guarantee for half the price of a new one – lenses are far and away the most expensive part of serious photo kit.  Sturman;-  Recut engraving – first iteration.  The barrel will be ‘struck off’ ready for browning and I’ll then go back over any lettering that has disappeared and recut as necessary. 30th July – I got a coarse diamond disk for my hone and tried grinding flints with a view to reusing worn ones – it works to an extent, in that it does grind down the flint, but the grinding chips off the edge in a way that doesn’t leave a sharp edge – so you need to grind down to a suitable angle and then tap along it as you would to refresh a blunt flint, and take off a series of very small chips – the flints then spark well.  I managed to make a mini flint for the Harding pistol by putting a larger flint in the lead covered jaws of my 4 inch vice and using a pin punch and a tack hammer to take off the back and edge and then grind down the thickness a bit – works and looks OK.  I spent this evening recutting the engraving on the Sturman pinfire barrel  – it is presumably an 1860s gun so its quite old – it has a fairly simple single bite action  of the early form – well back from the action face- the action flat is signed EMME – as with most of those early single bite actions this one is quite loose and ‘off the face’ so I’ll get Dick to tighten it up when the barrel is done.  Pinfires had a very short period of popularity before Daw’s centrefire rendered them old fashioned, although they went on being used for many years.  Anyway it is now ready to be struck off and then re-browned.  I came across an article in a 1995 copy of Gun Review (There used to be lots of mags for us then!) about a magic gun cleaning solution – so I checked it out on the ‘interweb’ as its known locally. Found a firm selling it for lab purposes and had a chat with their technical people, and I have a sample on its way – I will report back when/if I get it…..   Oh and I read the Home Office consultation on firearms licensing and filled in the online questionnaire  _ I’m afraid we are moving towards a more tightly controlled system, but the arrangements for medical checks are very dodgy and may make it very hard for some people to who have uncooperative GPs to get licenses – plus undefined fees for the medical records check.  The main problem is the discretion it gives to Chief Constables to make decisions about the significance of mental health issues and ‘intemperate behavior’  while the aim is OK we are putting far too much power in the hands of the police – which mostly they don’t abuse but there are enough cases where they do for it to be a matter of concern..  I heard of one case where a person was refused because they went to the pub regularly – irrespective of what they consumed there. Find the survey here;- https://www.homeofficesurveys.homeoffice.gov.uk/s/T7L6I/ For the guidance here;- https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/statutory-guidance-to-police-on-firearms-licensing] 29th July – Now that the Harding pistols are done and dispatched I had a chance to get rid of some of the clutter from the workshop and take it to the loft ( or in the case of a depressingly small amount, bin it).  In the process I found my little cnc machine that had been moldering for 4 years since I bent the spindle shaft – so I thought I’d better replace it and try again to use it as I want to make the stocks for a pair of duelling pistols and it would just be big  and powerful enough – watch this space. I also uncovered 20 gravers waiting to be sharpened – so I’m some way through that.  Before I get distracted into doing any other projects though, I must finish off  the video on making a mainspring, including  film of the flaming tempering.   I have at the back of my mind the fact that I am scheduled to take my engraving demonstration to the Sandringham Country Fair at the beginning of September and, this being the summer and distractions many, I ought to think about what I’ll need to take – to that end I took the dramatic step of ordering business cards instead of endlessly printing them and cutting them up myself with pretty second rate results – you get 250 cards for £25, which seems OK compared with the time it would take me to make that many, and the ink for my printer isn’t free either – people seem keen to take them when I’m doing demonsrations.  It was a day of extravagance on account of getting paid for a job – I found a good cheap secondhand 18 -135 lens for my Canon M50 so I don’t have to carry round the big old EF-S 18 – 135 lens and adapter from my old 760D!  Spent out now so I can rest. Out of curiosity I was searching the web for pictures of other similar Harding Post Office pistols – they are certainly rare – I located one that was sold in an American auction, and one in the UK Postal Museum in poor condition, plus Dom Garth Vincent sold a very similar pair by Mortimer that were supposed to be the design patterns for Harding when he got the PO contract. Anyway the Postal Museum specimen is a bit rusty and missing the top jaw and screw, so I offered to fix it up for them, pro bono. 28th July – Most of the Harding stuff is now on its own post.  I finished the Harding – pinned the brass ‘bolt’ to the slider with a piece of 0.8 mm diameter rod tapered slightly  and driven in and hardened the tumbler and sear, so now its finished!  I had made a spare spring blank so I thought I’d replace the spring in the first (PO) Harding that had a cut down main from something else.  I was doing a video of bending the spring, and got so carried away that I bent it the wrong way, so the tab for the pin was on the wrong side.  I didn’t fancy straightening it and starting again so I filed off the tab and welded a small pip for the peg on the correct side – I managed to get a blob of the right size in the right place and it filed down into a 1.8mm peg perfectly.  I hardened the spring in oil and the used the traditional method of tempering springs in burning oil – I made a video of that too.  Anyway that seemed to work – at least the spring is in and working and hasn’t gone ‘ping’ yet.  The spring and the metal container I fired it in are both pretty black! The process looked a bit like a firework display – I thought it was because of the  light rain but it persisted when I held a slate over the top.   Anyway both Harding pistols are now done and look fantastic, especially when compared to the starting point.  They are quite special – I might even make a box for them one day, its a shame they are not an exact pair!  Anyway its now time to move on to the next project!  Nick suggested the pinfire I got from him might make a good project – so I’ll see what I can do!  My first job was to get rid of the absurdly highly polished finish to the case which looked completely over the top.  It would appear to be French polish as fine wire wool and meths ( alcohol) broke the surface.  here are some photos – the main jobs are:-  tighten the underlever catch and put the breeches firmly ‘on the face’ ( a job for Dick),  recut the engraving on the barrel and strike it down and rebrown SLOWLY.  Engrave  the right hand cock which is s replacement.  get the dings out of the stock. recut the chequering, inlet the barrel bolt escutcheons as they are proud of the old chequering.  Make a new horn bit for the foreend.  Then sell it! Perhaps keep the case as it would do for the Venables, which deserves a good case!  Talking of which I need to sort out the barrel again(!) as the ramrod pipes came off! Before: What a depressing sight! I’m really pleased with the way they have turned out – it almost justifies what I paid for the bits. And the next project;- 27th July – bit cooler and wetter today!  Had a visit from a regular client to collect some pistols – I swapped some work for a little 1860s pistol case and a cased double pinfire 12 by Geo Sturman that need a little tidying – the barrel needs striking up and rebrowning – I need to have another go at browning as I am keen to improve my technique – basically slow it all down…  I did a bit more fiddly work on the sliding safety of the second Harding pistol  – this one turns out to be a bit different in its internals from the first, which was conventional.  here there wasn’t a lot of space so I modified the mechanism so that the slider itself actually bolted the tumbler, the slider being retained by a small brass ‘bolt’ that had the ramp on its tail that engaged with a pip on a small spring retained by the sear spring screw.  I found that this time the bridle had a slot that aligned with the slider, so I left a pip on the slider to engage in the slot  – actually that’s not true – I’d already filed off the slider when I realised that the slot lined up, so  I had to weld a tiny  blob in the right place….. Slider and its brass retainer  – ramp on the tail,  plus sear and slider springs –  slider spring has dimple to engage ramp.  ( bridle removed)  All very fiddly as its a very small pistol.   25th July  Predictably the pool got a lot of use today from friends and neighbours -seemed to be full of children all  day!   I sheltered from the heat in my ‘machine shop’ which keeps a reasonable temperature, so I was able to finish a couple of jobs on the Harding –  I glued up a piece of dowel with a turned end into a horn blank – Araldite went off rapidly in the heat, and turned it all down together – looks fine and fits perfectly. I also turned up a side screw – I was going to cut off the thread portion and weld on a new head but found that an M3.5 thread would just do, so made a new screw – I had a very cheap non adjustable die for M 3.5 which worked well enough.  I filed up the slider for the safety catch from the blank I machined yesterday – it must be one of the fiddliest jobs – especially for such a small pistol – anyway its almost done.  Not quite sure how to do the mechanism inside – there is precious little room for the bolt to intersect the tumbler so I might just make a slot in the tumbler to take the blade of the slider, then make a dummy bolt to stop the slider falling out…. I’ll see what is possible. I gather we have a small group for the ‘Have a go’ tomorrow, and I’ll take a breech loader for some lazy shooting afterwards – not sure which – I’m not sure the Beretta I bought fits terribly well, so I might take something else. 24th July – rather warm today – when I got in my car to go to Dick’s it said 38 degrees (C) – that went down to 33 when I was moving!  By 4 oclock I was ready for a swim in the giant bag of water – I reckon I’m up to 700m a session and am aiming for I km – that’s a lot of turning as its only 10m long- I think I’m going to have to make something to keep track of how many lengths I swim!. A good day on the tinkering front – I machined blanks for the top jaw and slide safety, and turned a top jaw screw and a better cock screw, and filed up the top jaw and gave them a once over with Blackley’s case hardening powder to colour them down a bit – they actually look quite good now.  I ‘spiked up’ the bottom of the top jaw with a 45 degree graver without the heels, mounted in a metal rod and tapped with a small hammer – it throws up really vicious little hooks that are just like the originals must have been – its always a give away that a cock has been replaced by a casting as very few people bother to file off the cast ‘teeth’ and replace them with nice sharp ones.  It only takes a few minutes!  Anyway the little pistol is beginning to look really good – the photo has a nasty bit of flint I broke off a larger on as I don’t have any micro flints in stock – it does actually spark up although probably not reliable enough to set off priming consistently – anyway better than a repro Scottish Pistol I was looking at with Dick that would not spark except very occasionally one feeble little spark.  I didn’t have any perfect flints with me – most had been used but you can usually persuade a few sparks out of the lock if you tap a new edge on the flint.  It was sold as a working repro with proof marks so presumably was intended to shoot but I think its going to need some work on the frizzen, either some heat treatment or facing with a bit of old saw blade or whatever – I’ve never had any problems using Blackley’s frizzen  casting – they spark OK – and I’ve never worn a frizzen to the point when it needed refacing.  I don’t shoot flintlock that much – I have enough of a job hitting things with a percussion!  Having said that I’m doing another corporate ‘have a go with a muzzle loader day’ on Friday for Cambridge Gun Club and I have to take both a flintlock and a percussion.   Slide safety and ramrod to do and it can join its ‘almost’ pair, the P.O. pistol   23rd July – I went into ‘my’ school for the ‘Leaver’s Assembly’ to say goodbye  to the year 6 pupils who are moving on to secondary school – a few tears amonst them, but they will do well – their teachers have been so caring.  More tinkering with the Harding – I used a chunk of thick tubing as a heat reservoir to temper the spring and it worked just fine with the radiant thermometer and got a good uniform blue towards the bright end of he spectrum – the spring fits, so I adjusted the full cock bent on the tumbler – very carefully in stages as I didn’t want to loose any more cock swing than necessary.  Once that was done I case hardened the tumbler – it was made out of mild steel – and made a ‘cut price’  sear spring from a bit of spring steel sheet – works fine but looks a bit naff!  might have to revisit.  Anyway so far so good, the lock fits, the spring, trigger and sear work fine – I’ve filed up the cock to a slightly better shape and put a bit of engraving on it – I now need to tap the hole for the cock screw that holds the top jaw, and make a top jaw, plus the safety slider and internal bits – I realise that I case hardened the tumbler and haven’t put in the notch for the safety bolt, but I’m sure I can file through the case. I reckon the restoration of this pistol has already cost far more than it could possibly be worth and it isn’t finished yet – a true labour of love – but at least it all goes on the blog!   Thick tube as heat sink for tempering springs etc.  Bean can holds wood ash insulation so parts cool slowly to avoid hardening them. 22nd July  – Went into Cambridge to do some work on the Bullard Archive but ended up towing a giant skip with my Landcruiser and sorting some junk.  I made one of the springs for the Harding pistols.  This one looks a bit more convincing than the last one.  I’ve hardened it with an oil quenching and its now glass hard so I’m being very careful not to break it – I suspect dropping it on a hard surface might even do it.  Now I have to decide how to temper it, since I screwed up on that stage last time.  I normally find a spot on the hotplate of the AGA which is the right temperature, using a remote temp probe and pop it on there with a couple of layers of aluminium foil over it and shut the lid down for ten minutes, but the AGA is out for the summer.  The traditional method is to put the spring in a pool of oil in a tobacco tin (now a historic item!) and burn it off, after which the spring will have got to the right temper as if by magic.  There is always a discussion about what oil to use – used engine oil is often quoted, but whether its the engine oil or the used bit that’s critical isn’t revealed.  I think I’ll probably heat a thick walled tube in my furnace to 300C, check it with the radiant thermometer  and then pop the spring in and leave it to cool down.  – a lot more trouble than the burning oil, but at least measurable!  As I wrote yesterday, the spring feels different now its fully hard, even when its just resting in my hand – mysterious or imaginary? I can never decide if the two arms should touch along the joint – I think most original springs don’t so I’ve left this one slightly open – you can get a piece of thin card in the joint.  I think this spring is a better shape than the last one.  We shall see!

21st July – What a lovely day sailing in the dinghy on the Orwell! Yesterday I made a couple of blanks for new springs – This time I did the thicknessing of the blank on my medium soft  grindwheel (after flattening it with a diamond tool) rather than the linisher and it worked much better.  I had a look at the broken spring – it was fairly clear that I hadn’t tempered it sufficiently as I could barely mark it with a file – a spring properly tempered should just  be fileable.  Thinking about hardening, I sometimes think when I handle the occasional metal component that I can tell if they are soft or fully hard just by the feel of them – and not by trying to flex them either.  It sounds pretty improbably, but I guess the elastic properties are quite different and maybe this affects the internal damping of vibrations so they do feel different?  Or maybe its just a vivid imagination…….  

19th July – Tragedy  – my new spring broke when I tried to put it in the pistol!  I had hardened it and tried to temper it in my furnace, the AGA being out for the summer, but its not good at controlling temperatures as low as 300 C and I don’t think it was taken to spring temper.  Anyway it seemed a bit strong, and pinged when I compressed it – I think maybe it should have been thinned a bit more, and I need to be more careful to compress it at the ends to allow more of the spring to flex.  Anyway its busted, so I can have the excitement of making another one – I’ll probably make two whle I’m about it as the other little pistol has a fudged spring…. Oh well, I’m going sailing on Sunday and will be busy tomorrow so it will just have to wait – at least I should be much quicker this time.

18th July – yet more tinkering with the little pistol!  I worked on the tumbler and spring to get the combination working – its an iterative process – check, file, check as you converge on what looks like a satisfactory arrangement.  I filed a square on the tumbler shaft and drilled and filed a matching hole in the cock so that I could see how that fitted at the same time.  It all went together quite well as far as I can test at the moment.  I found a sear that will probably do although I might have to bend the arm a bit as it threatens to foul the edge of the lock pocket – so now I’ll need to file the bents in the tumbler for half and full cock – the half cock is more difficult as it has to resist firing by letting the sear nose enter a slot.  I’ll have to make a cock screw to keep the cock in place – although its not loose it still comes off, and also a screw for the sear pivot.  The cock  screw is 5 UNC ( I made the tumbler) but the sear pivot seems to accept an  M2.5 thread, and I don’t have a die for that one – for the moment I can use an existing screw.  That just leaves making hardening and tempering the spring and any other bits, and making the sliding safety catch and spring, oh and the sear spring…. not much to do then!

The shape of the end of the spring, the ‘spur of the tumbler and the orientation of the cock on its square all have to be right – its a slow job if you haven’t done it very often.

17th July  Bit more tinkering with the little pistol – I made a new mainspring and also made a video of the operation – difficult to concentrate on two things at once – tryiing to bend the spring into a ‘hairpin’ while juggling an oxy/gas torch and talking to the camera is fun.  I can’t put it down without turning it off, by which time the spring is cold. I got it in the end  though. Anyway it is almost there – just got to alter the bend a little to make it more even and slightly less open, and shape the end that bears on teh tumbler.   Very satisfying making springs!  Much more so than struggleing with editing documents in Word – I’ll have grey hair if I have to do it much more – making springs etc is a doddle compared to struggling with Bill Gates’s constructions.  I think I got the bridle to fit as well, so progress!

The bend has a face with a slight angle so it looks dark – its fine!

16th July I did some work on a gun case – I bought a set of ‘furniture pens and crayons’ from Amazon for a few pounds – they are meant for touching in scratches on furniture but they might be useful on guns and cases – I’ve aleady deployed the mahogany one – it helps but I really need darker shades.  In my ‘spare’ time I’m still tinkering with the little Harding pistol.  I put the proto tumbler in the miller and got a bit more metal off it, and have now filed it to an approximate shape.  I found a sear that looks as if it will fit so I’ll  have to sort out the bridle and fixing screws  – I think I can use the bridle out of the box of bits if I weld up the hole for the tumbler extension shaft and re-drill it in the right place.  Then its just a case of making the mainspring, the sear spring, and the sliding safety catch, bolt and spring – nothing really!!!!!

Part way there with the tumbler. not sure about the sear?

15th July – Looking through my Manton book yesterday I realised that whoever botched the single NOCK barrel to have a recessed breach didn’t need to recess the side opposite the lock – Joseph never did on single guns….

I bought back a pair of continental locks sans frizzens to see if we could find replacements for the owner – and indeed we found a pair of matching frizzens with pan lids exactly the right size – the tails need extending to reach the pivot position but that can be done…. a result.

My ‘office’ table is now covered with nautical charts as we begin to plan our summer trip to the NW of Scotland – we have a new charter yacht from Skye and will head out to the Outer Hebrides – we are a bit light on crew this year, so a bit more work for me, although the boat has in-mast reefing on the mainsail so not so much deck work needed  – its 43 ft long so it will be interesting to see how we get on with just 3 of us.     It’s the coming alongside in marinas that’s tricky, although we don’t do that very often. The last few years we’ve had the same boat so I knew how it handled under power – its going astern that is always tricky – most boats just won’t steer until they are moving so you never know quite how they will set off backwards so there will be a learning curve with this one.

The table is  also covered with the bits of a pistol case that I am remaking – fortunately was just held together with animal glue – or indeed no glue at all!  Anyway its all in pieces now.

I’ve had a couple of conversations with experts on gun browning in the last few days – one, supposed to be the best in England says it can take up to a month to get a good browning on some barrels, and he stops if the weather gets too hot.  The other friend says he reckons up to 16 days and thinks that if you brown them faster than one rusting a day the browning wears off very quickly – so maybe I need to slow down as I had been aiming to get at least two brownings a day……..

14th July  – Holts shoot at Cambridge Gun Club.  Not my best day – but I did manage to hit one of every different clay except one – at least that shows something!   Derek brought the owner of the Joseph Manton 22 bore featured in the posts and the gun for Nick Holt to have a look at – I was able to assist him in unravelling the gun as I’d done a blog on it.  He was shown another gun that was a bit of a mystery – a very late Jo Manton flint lock on a single barreled gun  signed H Nock on the barrel – its difficult to appraise a gun without my list of dates and references etc, but  the gun had the patent Jo Manton recessed breech C1810(?), while the barrel and trigger guard looked older. My suspicions were confirmed when I noticed that the breech blocks had been machined down from a normal width to the recessed width to take the late lock, and not particularly carefully.  The lock fitted quite well. Nothing on the bottom of the barrel made a lot of sense – no HN maker’s stamp as I would expect, or a number (Henry Nock was amonst the first to number his guns around 1790). In the absence of any further info I thought it was maybe a Nock gun of maybe 1790ish with the ‘wrong’ lock. Possibly a spuriously engraved NOCK?   The left side of the breech plug had also been recessed – I didn’t see if the stock had had a bit glued on to fill the gap where the barrel was milled away. If not I’d have to suspect that it had been restocked – the lock was very well inletted so a possibility. I’m afraid the jury is out on that one! I was hoping for a valuation on the Post Office pistol – I know what its worth as a little pistol but not what the rarity value of the P.O. connection is – but it wasn’t fair to expect Nick to guess that.  I actually found a reference to one similar being sold at Bonhams in 2015 for $2800 – so obviously some rarity value there….

13th July  – bit more tinkering with the pistol below – I had to make a replacement screw ( I had to grind it out) for the tang of the trigger guard – I don’t like just using a woodscrew as the heads are never right and in this case they don’t work well into the endgrain of the plug I had to glue in,  so I turned up a countersunk screw with a No 5 UNC thread and an extra false head.  I slotted the false head and screwed it in, then marked the fore and aft line, cut off the false head, put in the aligned slot  and filed it to conform to the curved shape, then engraved a few lines on it and used Blackley’s case hardening powder to colour it down (and incidentally harden it).  Jobs left include all the works of the lock, some reshaping of the cock casting I have, to reduce the prominent breast it has and scale down the spur, and make a ramrod.  Tomorrow is the Holts Shoot at the Cambridge Gun Club – I am, of course, going and will hope to exceed my 50% target – I didn’t quite make it at the Helice shoot – I was on target but missed all of the last 4 ‘easy’ birds!  I’ve finished a batch of de-cappers to take to CGC – they make good engraving practice so I did a little stand of arms, and a stand of music and a sunburst and a scroll plus some borders.  Quite interestingly (at least for me!), the strip I was using that I said was as soft as butter turned out to be pretty tough down the other end – just goes to show what cold rolling does to the grain structure near the surface.

11th July   I more or less finished the woodwork for the second Harding pistol, at least in so far as anything is ever finished in this game!  I’ve given it an initial coat of stain to darken it down and match the wood repairs in – a coat of Van Dyke solution first, that didn’t do much, then a coat of Jacobean Oak stain. The problem with stains that are supposed to be black is that there is no effective black stain – so they mostly contain black solids, which in this case I had to rub off, which leaves a decent dark brown colour that matches the original colour pretty well.  The various joints are still visible but not too bad – I’ll work on them a bit as I apply finish – probable a couple of coats of sanding sealer, then alkonet root coloured oil finish to give a deep rich colour and finish off with a very hard wax finish.  Any recalcitrant joints will probably get blended in with a black Sharpie pen and smeared with a finger!  – it works a treat.  One trick that does help if you want to disappear a joint is to take a very sharp modelling knife and create some ‘grain’ across the joint matching that around it – do this early on in the process so they get treated the same as real grain!  Oh dear, maybe I shouldn’t reveal trade secrets here but anything that is continuous across the joint hides it from attention!  On this pistol the main joint runs with the grain, so that technique is of marginal benefit!

10th July – I seem to have got landed with compiling a document for the school governors – I am thinking of enrolling for ‘Say No‘ lessons!  It rather got in the way of my gun activities.  I finished the blank for the tumbler for the Harding pistol and unglued it (heat) and then glued it onto a piece of scrap plate to put it centered on the turntable in my miller so I could reduce the diameter over most of the circumference – I did get some way, but the strain was too much for the glue, so I’ll have to finish it by hand.  I’m made some progress on with the woodwork – I now have sundry bits of wood stuck onto the pistol and tonight I managed to inlet the barrel – I think its now just a matter of filing/sanding everything to shape and inletting the lock.  I put some oxalic aid on the existing wood which got rid of most of the black stains – I should have done it before selecting the wood for the repairs as its now a bit darker than the original – but the other little Harding pistol is almost black so I can colour this one down – it will help to hide the repairs too.  In the course of sanding down blocks of wood for the repairs I managed to sand the end of my thumb on the 12 inch disk sander – painfull still!

Tumbler blank on a scrap plate – the glue failed!

Clingfilm on a dowel to locate the repair in place – self amalgamating tape as an elastic binder. see earlier photo for the ‘before’ state.

9th July – several jobs on the go, which is handy when there is adhesive setting time involved.  I started the new tumbler for the little pistol  – I turned  the axle that bears in the lockplate plus a bit for the square and tapped it No 4 UNC, and faced a 22mm diameter disk to make the actual tumbler out of,  I then parted off the disk and axle, leaving a bit for the bearing in the bridle, faced off the bar left in the lathe and drilled a hole that is a good fit on the lock axle and Araldited the proto tumbler to the bar so I could finish the other side of the tumbler – its still in the lathe hardening off.   I milled some of the broken wood from the pistol lock area and glued in a piece of walnut – there is still quite a lot of wood to be fitted in, but its starting to look less bad.  I also decided to make another batch of de-cappers in case I get orders from the Holt’s shoot participants – I know Martin is keen for everyone to have one on safety grounds. And I got the new screen for my PC so that had to be set up…….

8th July – I got a request for a couple of my personalised decappers – I had run out of my original supply of metal and bought some 15m.m wide strip but it is a bit wide to fit round the nipples of some guns, so I picked up a length of scrap 1/2 x 1/8 from my old lab and made two decappers – when I came to engrave the names etc on them it was a bit of a revelation – they cut like butter, and it made me realise how horrible most of the metal I engrave is!  I guess the scrap was mild steel but it didn’t have the cold rolled crust that most mild steel strip has.  Anyway a pleasure to work with.  I did some more on teh little pistol woodwork.  It was fairly riddles with cracks as well as having chunks of wood missing, – the first job is to find all the cracks and see which move if you gently flex the wood.  If they are wide or full of muck they need clearing out with the back of  a modelling knife blade – these I fill with liquid epoxy, mixing in a bit of walnut dust to fill the surface.  As you put the epoxy in, flex the wood to open the joint more and suck the glue in.  You may need to clamp or bind the wood to close up cracks while the epoxy sets – I find self amlgamating tape is ideal for quick elastic binding of parts while glue sets – a couple of turns and it will stick to itself and hold things in place.   For small cracks I use an instant isocyanate glue and again work the joint to get the glue in – I keep a spray can of activator handy to start the polymerisation.  I also put walnut dust in the top of these cracks and drop a little instant glue on it and set it with the activator. I’ve done all that for the Harding pistol and the next step is to work out how to do the replacements and what needs milling out, and find a bit of matching walnut from my offcut box, or go over to Dick’s as he has a much bigger box of offcuts.

7th July – I started to strip the little Harding pistol so that I could sort the woodwork, but the woodscrew holding the tail of the triggerguard proved to be a major problem – first, the slot had got worn into a ramp and wouldn’t shift even with heat, then it turned out to be dead hard and I couldn’t drill it with any of my drills.  I ended up grinding off the head and digging out bits of it with the GRS graver – that released the guard.  That left the stub of the screw very firmly embedded – I tried cutting a slot in it with a small disk but the screw broke when I put a screwdriver on it!   Only solution was to core out the remains of the screw so I made a corer from 8 mm silver steel with a 4 mm hole in the centre and a 5.5 mm outside diameter and filed up some teeth and hardened it – at least that got it out and I could glue in a wooden plug for the next screw!   A lot of work to get one screw out – lucky I enjoy making tools!  I derusted the lock and the barrel, which is in good condition – I lightly recut the barrel engraving.  I will have to make a new tumbler as the one with the pistol is completely wrong, but I might get away with the existing bridle – I think it might have been the right one, but it had been broken and rewelded with the parts not quite aligned – I will make the tumbler and see if the sear is right before I decide whether to make a new bridle or fudge that one.

Corer for removing headless screw.

A bit of pitting but not too bad!

6th July – Dick got the pair of hammer gun hammers welded and filed up – they are a pretty good match in shape, but without the gun to try them on its difficult to be certain.  Photo below.   I was looking round for another project to do – apart from the documents I offered to edit for the School – I decided it was time to tackle the wrecked Harding flintlock pistol.  I bought a box of junk that purported to contain two rare small post office pistols by Harding. I paid good money for them, heaven knows why. Anyway one was actually stamped for the Post Office and was more or less complete so I’ve done that one up (see diary past) and it is a very pretty little pistol even if a bit corroded on the barrel.  The second set of parts is more problematical as these photos will show – the wood is badly broken with large missing bits and cracks, it has no mainspring , no cock or topjaw or screws, the bridle is a bit wrong, the tumbler is completely wrong, I’m not sure about the sear either, and so on….   I will strip it down and derust it (for a short while so as not to disintegrate any faulty metal) then mill away the broken wood so I can match in new wood to clean flat surfaces -As you can see, there is quite a lot of work in reshaping the inserted wood to match –  I usually leave such woodwork to Dick, but I will do this one – I need to up my woodwork skills – I can make a reasonable job of it but Dick usually manages to find better matching wood and grain, and make tighter joints.

There are slight differences in the overall shape of the cocks – the one on the left has a less rounded breast.  possibly one was a replacement, or more likely they never matched fully.

Pistol has very nice brass furniture

The barrel, lockplate, frizzen and frizzen spring and barrel bolt are the only parts of the original pistol – the tumbler,bridle and  sear don’t fit and will need replacing.

4th July – I tried out the CZ120 brass to see how good it was for engraving – its a ‘free cutting’ brass with about 2% lead, 60% copper and the rest zinc.  Its better than most brass that one comes across for hand engraving, but still not as ‘steady’ as copper, silver, gold or well prepared steel.  I did a quick trial freehand to see what it was like – I’m sure if I used it for any length of time I’d adapt my technique to work better, possibly even sharpen my tools differently.  I found it more difficult than steel to cut long straight lines of uniform width – it was more difficult to maintain a uniform depth and the resistance of the metal seemed to be more variable.  I found it had two modes of cutting –  in one it cut in a series of small jerks that were visible in the cuts under the microscope,  in the other mode it cut smoothly – it wasn’t always easy to predict which would prevail.  I did get a couple of skids, and the tool had a tendency to dive deep and it wasn’t easy to drive the cut back up – cutting ‘O’ s I had to stop half way through the down loop and come back from the bottom.   The $64,000 question – would I recommend someone learns hand encraving using CZ120 brass?  It requires a good deal less force to cut than steel and is much kinder on the gravers, both of which are advantages for the beginner.  Its not a pushover so you’ll learn most of the basic skills, although it will take you a while to adapt to steel if you ultimately want to be able to do that. On the other hand if you have reasonably strong hands I’d probably say go straight in with the steel.  Here is my test piece, skids and all….

The brass is 22 m.m.high – a very quick & dirty test….

4th July – bit the bullet and bent the 38 bore  Adams spring – I’d filed up both ends while it was flat, so the bend had to go in the right place – difficult to change if you get it wrong!  Anyway it all bent & went together just fine, I haven’t hardened and tempered it yet, but it all works  and I suppose I could just leave it – the thought is tempting as the cock tension is just about OK and it all functions as it should and it was a bit of a b***** to assemble………  It even looks the same shape as the original although the bend is not quite as tight – there is no point in stressing the metal any more than necessary!  I really enjoy making springs although I have had my share of failures!

The Adams patent is a very simple self cocking mechanism.

3rd July – more work on repairing the Adams revolver – Tom has now left for St Andrews so I have to do my own filing!  I never served a proper workshop apprenticeship so my filing is not so hot.  Anyway I finished off the link and started making the new spring from a piece of 15 mm x 2.5 m.m. spring steel.  I first annealed the steel at 950C for half an hour  and cooled it over an hour or so as it was a bit hard to file.  First job was to build a ridge of weld  across one end so I could file the claws that hold the link when the rest of the spring was shaped. ( I should have done that before annealing the metal, as I had to anneal the weld anyway.)   There was quite a lot of thickness reduction to do – the business end of the original spring was 1 mm thick, tapering to around 1.4 at the other end – most of the removal was done on the linisher, both flat on the platform and over the end roller, but eventually I got there.  The width had been roughly cut with a 1 mm cutting disk, and I filed up the claw to fit the link  – the next problem is bending the spring to shape and hardening it.

Link and flat spring without the slot to hold it to the frame

A lot of people ask me about engraving and want to start off engraving brass.  Most brass is a pain to engrave because its very hard and the tool chips rather than cuts cleanly – its very prone to slip etc. I checked a couple of websites and found the spec of  engraver’s brass, which is what its name implies. Brass is the usual copper /zinc mixture but some had lead added to soften it up – engraver’s brass should have between 1 and 3 % lead and around 60% – the type numbers seem to be CZ120 or CW612N or C35600 – all thses are classed as engravers brass.  I have ordered a sample of CZ120 to try out and will keep you posted with how I get on.

Here is a summary of the countries that visit the site most often over the last three years;-

Rank Flag Country Visitor Count
1   United States 70,644
2   United Kingdom 48,099
3   China 27,032
4   Germany 14,004
5   Canada 13,931
6   France 12,545
7   Russian Federation 11,212
8   India 7,121
9   Ukraine 6,330
10   Australia 5,828

2nd July – In the end I milled the blank for the link as it was easy to make several in case they went wrong.  Luckily I left the ‘pins’ oversize as I did have a problem matching the milling on the top and bottom in spite of having a clear index hole.  Tom has done the bulk of the filing and it is looking good – a little finishing at the spring end, and then its making a new spring……….

part filed link and blank for a spare.

1st July again…  A small problem – Tom was looking at my Adams 38 bore revolver and was testing the action when the mainspring stopped functioning – I don’t think he did anything wrong as its difficult to see what that could have been, but it seems the link broke and the mainspring then broke as it ‘dry fired’.  So that has to be fixed!  We have drawn up the link and one possibility is to turn up a blank from which to cut the link  – the plan is to turn up a disk with one pin at the centre and a rim that will yield the other pin, then part it off and glue it onto a boss and repeat on the other side. Its rather a longwinded method but I have done it before.  An alternative would be to mill the shape with square pins – but turning it over to mill the back and ensure register would be a little difficult, although I guess it too could be glued into registered holes.  not sure there is much in it! The easiest way to measure such things is to photograph them with a ruler and print it out A4 and scale from there – you need a good mm ruler graduated in 1/2 mm as in this pic, and a micrometer to check the pin diameters.  Anyway its another job to keep me busy….

The break is just visible at the arrow tip.

1st July – half way through the year!  Here is the promised pic of the finished trophy – off to cut the hedge now…..

beautiful piece of old stock and offcut for base – but not very good photo!

   

 Posted by at 4:50 pm
Nov 222019
 

Here are some details of the workings behind the blog in case you want to know how to set one up yourself – posted 11/2019.

( Note – Internet Hosting Service provides storage space and hosts your domains, i.e. your website addresses – you only need this if you want your own website/s.  The Internet Service Provider – ISP connects your computer to the internet and send requests to internet Hosts for the information that makes up the webpages you want and passes them to you. It also passes you email to and fro from whatever email Host you are using – i.e. Googlemail etc.  You can’t get on the web without an ISP – you pay them for your line rental etc.)

I have an Internet Hosting Service that provides me with facilities to have have a number of different websites and to have an unlimited number of email addresses and mailboxes associated with each website.  The service provides me with the storage space I need to build the websites, and allows those websites to be available to anyone on the web. (1&1.co.uk)

I used to build my websites in HTML, the language of the (old) web, but that is slow and laborious and difficult to change, so I use a proprietory package called WordPress that lets me work on the website as if it was just a simple word processor, and then put any changes and photos onto the visible website immediately and seamlessly.

My WordPress websites are built on  my hosting service servers in my own ‘domains’ i.e. my own web addresses, but you can put your WordPress sites onto the WordPress server for free if you don’t mind the website name being www.wordpress.com/yoursite or whatever.

WordPress has all the tools for making your website, and a great many ‘themes’ you can use to give it all different appearances. I use just one – ‘Suffusion’

You can add any number of ‘plug ins’ to WordPress to let you do various things – I use a number including ‘Statistics’  that lets you see how many visits and visitors the site gets each day and in total, which pages and bits are most popular, how many referrals come from which search engine and more. It provides the numbers you see on the start page – It is free.

Another vital plug in is ‘Wordfence’ – it comes in two flavours, free and paid.  I use the free one as the website isn’t earning anything.  Wordfence guards your site for you and keeps out undesirables – it also let you see who is doing what, and if you see that your site is being attacked by a particular IP address or a group of addresses you can easily block their access. It tells you the location and IP address of all visits for security purposes.  It is a very powerful tool, and I would not be without it, although tracking miscreants can become a bit addictive at times.  One of the little known features of the internet is that all ISPs (Internet Service Providers) have to have an email address for reporting abuse from IP addresses they are hosting, and they are supposed to get after anyone who abuses the service they provide – I have used this on a number of occasions and the ISP will usually stop blatant abuse like excessive calls to your site for no apparent purpose.  For instance I had one post (Hanover Pistol..) visited 26000 times by a Russian site at regular intervals – obviously programmed into a computer for the purposes of goodness knows what – but the Russian ISP has ( I hope) stopped it following an email to their abuse account.   If you do see an IP address that is causing you problems you can put it into ‘Whois’ and find their ISP and the abuse email address.  It has worked for me in the past including taking out a whole botnet that was attacking my site, although that was mostly down to a bit of detective work on my part and carelessness on the part of the botnet operator.

There are a number of other plug ins that are useful – a backup plugin stores regular ‘images’ of the website.  A login diverter hides the login from view to add another level of security – that seems to work well.  Anti spam plug ins guard you from (most) spurious comments to your posts.

For me an essential plugin is the ‘classic editor’ as I don’t like the  new default editor, but if you haven’t known the old one you may prefer the new one with blocks, whatever they are!

While on the subject of backups – a very useful feature of the internet is a website called ‘the wayback machine’ that periodically stores images of the whole of every website on the entire web – sounds improbable, then try it!  I was involved as a witness in an American legal patent case, and part of my evidence was something I put on my company website in 1999 – the wayback machine had a snapshot of my website from then, with the thing on it, and that was acceptable in a court of law in America as proof of the date it was put on the web.  There are something like 40 versions of this website stored, going back to 2011 when I started it for rebuilding this house – then as a baker, then for the present purposes.

 

How does it all work?  very well and not a lot of trouble but it pays to be a bit technically savvy, although once set up it is easy for anyone with basic word processing skills to use and edit!

What does it cost?   To be honest I’m not sure – I have about 10 websites and use a professional Hosting package which costs about £200 a year, then there are the renewal fees on the domains that come to around £10 per year each, and then the ISP connection fee that is around £40 a month for a professional service – so maybe £800 a year total, or £80 a website equivalent, which given the service I get is reasonable – this website alone is pretty massive as you will see as you explore it.  I pay nothing for Wordfence or WordPress or any of the plugins although I do occasionally donate to them.

 

Photographs;  Photos are an essential part of this website – you’ll see in various places details of the setup I use – basically at the moment a Canon M50 camera with 18 to 150 lens, and crucially, PhotoScape as a free photo editor.  There are so many  photos on the site that I am careful always to edit them down to a width of 1200 pixels, unless they need extra detail, in which case I use a width of 1600 pixels.  Computer screen get bigger all the time, but those sizes work at the moment.

To make the blog more interesting it is important to have good, detailed photographs to illustrate the work, and that means you need to be able to take technical photographs quickly and without a lot of setting up.  I don’t have space to leave everything set up permenantly, but I have a 50W white LED panel on the ceiling above the big table in the library/office and a stand with a tripod head that gives a good coverage, so I can photograph anything from a screw to half a long gun in a couple of minutes, and edit in Photoscape quickly and get it on the web in around 5 minutes.  The 18 to 150 Canon lens is perfect for the job – it doesn’t focus very close but as I’m putting photos of limited resolution on the blog ( 1200 or 1600 pixel width) I can get my ‘macro’ shots by cropping my 6000 pixel wide images, which effectively gives me x4 zoom.

 Posted by at 10:02 pm
Oct 042019
 

 

Here are some exerts from my blog relating to the gun I bought at Southams earlier in 2019:-

The gun I bought is a Westley Richards percussion double 11 bore – I had left a bid above the bottom estimate, but got it for £380 Hammer price – just below the bottom estimate, so good!  There were a couple of expensive Westley Richards guns for sale that went for what I thought were fairly high prices given their condition, which frankly wasn’t wonderful, but I bought this one as I thought it would make a good shooter.  It is a bit of a dog’s dinner, and I havent yet quite worked it out fully.  The barrel is very good externally with pretty fair bores – its genuine Westley Richards with his barrel maker’s stamp, signature ( very clear and unworn and looks genuine but unusually read from muzzle to breech ) ‘Westley Richards & Co  23 Conduit Street London’ and Birmingham proof marks V & BPC which were used 1868 to 1925.  The problem is the address – it was only occupied by WR & Co  from 1917.  The barrels are numbered 1019 as are the locks – all looking like they are original numbers.  The numbers, according to Nigel Brown’s book, should be for 1843 ish.  The gun has a rounded or semi-pistol  stock which was quite a late style.  There are a number of things that are notably odd – the stock at the breech isn’t deep enough to cover the sides of the false breech by about a mm or so.  The forend pipe and trigger finial don’t quite fit the cutouts suggesting that they are replacements.  The forend ramrod pipe has somewhat abbreviated engraving, the trigger guard finial very abbreviated but of classic shape.  The trigger guard has no engraving and is blued, the butt cap is full steel and similarly plain and blued.   The barrel looks much less worn than the lock plates which are signed Westley Richards and numbered 1019 on the insides – the cocks are poor replacement castings.  The nipples are loose – the holes are too big for 1/4 BSF and too small for 9/32 BSF so I’ll see if borrowing oversize 1/4 BSF taps will work.  The screw holding the locks in has been replaced with a round headed brass screw with the head filed down.  There is no ramrod.

What would I speculate about the gun?  one guess is that there was an 11 bore percussion gun made in 1843 ( the locks are signed Westley Richards, not ‘& Co’, and are fairly worn).  The gun was then rebarreled by WR & Co post 1917 (I know it sounds unlikely?).  The stock is not original to the 1843 gun but is later,  possibly reused from something else, but fairly unworn and certainly not 1843 style – possibly dating from the rebarrelling.  The good news is that WR still exists, and their historian may be able to help with the puzzle.

 

I borrowed a set of oversize taps to fix the nipple holes on the Westley Richards, but even the 15 thou oversize one was still a bit loose, and they are UNF  which is 28 t.p.i. ( 1/4 and 9/32 BSF are 26 t.p.i. and 1/4 is what is used on most later English percussion nipples) which means that in 1/4 deep hole you are almost half a thread out by the bottom.  So I tapped them out  9/32 BSF, which is 30 thou bigger than 1/4 BSF, and that worked fine.  I made a couple of titanium nipples, but one didn’t start the die properly, and doesn’t have a very good thread so I’ll remake it before I try to use the gun.  The photo shows the back of the die, which I have ground on the 5 inch grindwheel so that it can cut the thread right up to the shoulder of the nipple – use the unmodified side first.   Here are a few shots of the WR markings etc….  The gun is 11 bore, weighs 7 1/4 lbs and has a pull of 14 1/4 inches – about 1/4 inch of cast off.

Bottom of die recessed on grindwheel.

Serial number appropriate for about 1843 on barrels (above) and inside lock plates

Address occupied by WR from 1917….

Locks are well made inside, engraving is bog standard minimal Birmingham standard of the period. cocks are castings – they look like Kevin’s rejects!

Rounded or semi pistol grip – hardly a 19th century style!

 Posted by at 3:27 pm
Aug 152019
 

Having made a case for a double barreled flintlock coaching pistol I thought I’d put  post on it using bits from the diary and some additional hints and tips.

This case is unusual as its rare for a single flintlock pistol to be case – almost always flintlock pistols came in pairs – at least from about 1760 to 1850, and it wasn’t until the percussion revolver era post 1851 that single percussion revolvers pistols were commonly cased in oak boxes with brass screws visible on the top.  prior to that it was usually pairs of pistols, most commonly duelling pistols in mahogany cases.  _ See Keith Neil and Back’s book on Trade labels and cases.

Material;-

Oak – dark, for early cases

Mahogany – fairly fine grained , for pistols and long guns up to around 1850.

Oak – light yellow in tint – for single percussion revolvers from ?1851.

Construction;-

The carcass of almost all old cases used open  dovetailed joints – the joint provided the strength as there were no good glues.  These joints were cut with very fine ‘pins’ – on the outside edge of the tapered pin they were often no more than 1/16th of an inch  thick – they were, of course cut by hand and they still need to be as router cutters can’t do such narrow pins – dovetail cutters for doll’s house furniture are not long enough and regular cutters have too thick a shaft.  Cutting such narrow dovetails by hand requires a saw with a very thin ‘kerf’ (cut thickness)  – certainly no bigger than 0.5 m.m. – I use a Japanese pull blade with a kerf of 0.3 m.m. – a fine tool for the job.  The bottoms of the cuts is best done with a very fine blade in a fretsaw.   We can of course use modern glues to disguise our imperfetions – but that is really cheating!  Cutting fine dovetails by hand is very satisfying.

The bottoms of boxes were usually fixed in a rebate in the sides and were often of pine and quite thin.  The tops were usually placed on top of the sides and held by animal glue and often panel pins.  In the case of oak cases for revolvers the tops were invariably screwed in place with small brass screws.

For a pistol case the sides were usually between 10 and 12 m.m. thick, the bottom probably 5 or 6 m.m. and the top maybe 6 to 8 m.m. thick.

Lining;-

Gun cases almost always had a lining around the sides of the base that stuck up above the sides of the base by at least 12 m.m – I guess it sometimes/often reached the inside of the top of the lid.  The lining strips were from about 6 to 8 m.m. thick.  The outside edge was chamfered from the top of the sides and rounded on the top edge.  The chamfer ensures that the lid fits snugly without rubbing as it closes.  The lining could be fully covered with the lining material (baise or velvet etc) on the inside and over the top and down below the top of the sides – in which case the lining wood needs to takea ccount of the thickness of teh covering.  Alternatively in better class cases the cloth ends in a sloping cut on the inside of the lining and in line with the top of the sides.  The lining strips are carefully bevelled at the corners so that they fit together neatly. The lining strips are a good fit in teh carcass and can be held with animal glue.

Partitions;-

These can either be fully covered with cloth, or they can have a  strip of wood showing at the top ( probably about 10 m.m. deep) with the cloth stopping in a sloping groove as for the lining strips. They are usually glued in wth animal glue and may also be pinned through the base.  Sometimes in better cases they are fitted into slots cut in the lining strips.

Fabric covering;-

It is normal for the inside base of the case to be  covered in one piece of fabric (baise) fixed down with animal glue before the partitions are put in place, and the lid is similarly covered inside.   Traditionally animal glue was what was available – basically collagen that melts and absorbs water  at fairly low temperatures ( 60C ) and sticks within 10 minutes of so.  It has the advantage that joints can be taken apart with steam and patience.

 

to be continued!

 Posted by at 11:55 pm
Jul 282019
 

I bought a pile of bits at a Bonham’s Auction for a pretty exorbitant price and they sat in the tin box they came in for a year or so. One stock, barrel and lock plate were fine – fortunately the one with the Post Office stamps as that is a very rare pistol.  J Harding was the official contractor to the Post Office and made many brass barrelled blunderbusses and brass barreled coach pistols for the mail coaches, plus it would seem, a very (?) few pocket pistols for Postmen on foot.  There were bits for two pistols, they were not identical- the Post Office stamped one was by J Harding and Son and the other was just Harding, both of Borough in London.  The names indicate that the Post Office pistol was post 1834, the other earlier.  The differences between the two are subtle  – slightly different butt shape and barrel shape, and slightly different lock size and action parts.  Anyway when I came to sort out the pile of bits it was clear that only some were related, but I got enough parts to make most of the Post Office one – minus the sear , mainspring and sliding safety parts – there was one small part of the wood missing at the muzzle but apart from making a few new parts it is original, althought the cock is an old (1969)  replacement and I had to re-adjust the square fit.  The second pistol stock was a complete wreck and almost looked beyond repair, but in fact only needed three bits of wood let in and it is  as good as new – in fact its difficult to distinguish it from the other.  I had to find a cock, make a tumbler and sear etc and sliding safety, plus top jaw and cock and side screw.  But now its finished what you see is largely original! Here are the before and after photos!  

The positive is that they have the original barrels, lockplates, frizzens & frizzen springs, brass furniture and the overall woodwork – just a few minor details missing!

 

What you see in the end is almost entirely original except the cocks and slide safety catches and one (?) ramrod.  The top cock is a 1969 replacement (it was dated on the back) and the bottom is my replacement – not identical but pretty similar.  The top pistol is stamped for the Post Office.

The following bits are extracted from the Diary posts for 2018/19

This starts with the Post Office pistol – my ref 146A

26th December  Pheww……  Christmas is passed, now just 2 big parties to organise and run in the next week – but at least we had today to relax!  We even managed to go to the cinema and see ‘Mortal Engines’ which seemed rather like the last Star Wars film I saw, lots of shootups and clever cgi.  Anyway I did manage to get more done on the sear for the Harding pistol – it just needs to be finally adjusted after the mainspring and cock have been sorted.  I rather like fiddly machining, although I’m prone to being a bit careless at the last moment and taking off too much metal somewhere. I just about got the sear OK, – the arm that intersects the trigger plate was welded to the sear itself rather than machined as one piece to save more machine ops, and I left the joint as a fillet.

There is a bit of a puzzle with the works of this pistol that I can’t get my head round at the moment – the bridle appears to fit perfectly on the lock plate – the 2 screws, tumbler and the peg are in perfect alignment, and the tumbler seems right.  The puzzle is that the lock plate has a slot for a sliding safety catch and the tumbler has a slot into which a catch would fit at half cock – all as it should be to work with a small part moving inside the V of the sear spring, with a cover spring with a pip to hold the catch in either position.  All as I would expect – But the puzzle is that there is a slot in the bridle that doesn’t quite align with the slot for the catch in the lockplate, and a additional hole in the bridle that doesn’t coincide with a hole in the lockplate, and anyway is half obstructed by the tumbler when its on full cock  – so what are  the slot and the hole in the bridle for – they would appear to get in the way of the sliding safety and tumbler ?  Any ideas or photos would be appreciated;-

25th December 00:12 hrs    Happy Christmas, and thanks to all the followers of this blog who have contacted me over the past year – have a good day, and may Father Christmas bring you something special, or, more likely if you are like me, you’ll have to buy it yourself if its in the gun line!

23th December – I couldn’t keep away from the workshop and came across the little pair of rubbish pistols I had bought at too high a price, and thought they deserved a bit of attention as at least one is restoreable.  The first problem was fixing the stock – the muzzle end was cut away so I needed to splice on a bit of matching wood, glue up a crack down the middle ( partly covered by the patch wood) and then patch a couple of small holes with instant glue and sawdust, then steam a few dents out and colour up the patch.  That is all going well so the next problem is the cock, which isn’t the original one – its a casting and is stamped on the back with initials and the date 1969. – it had never been fitted to this pistol as the square is completely out of alignment with the tumbler.  I cleaned up the cock and recut the engraving and filed it up a bit to make it look a bit less like a casting – the next job is to fill up the hole in the cock and weld it all up ready for a new square to be cut.  I’ll fill up the hole with a square plug of steel with a pilot hole drilled in the middle, and weld round it.  I’ll need to get a sear that fits and make or find a mainspring, plus all the bits of the safety catch that locks the tumbler in half cock position.

De-rusted and ready for restoration.

The wood of the patch is a little light but it will colour down OK

Cock stamped 1969 – with plug to block the square.

24th January – Switched back to my little Harding Post Office pistol.  I needed to remake the square in the cock as the cock was from another pistol.  As mentioned I decided to bore out the tumbler hole in the cock and silver solder in a disk and put the square hole in that.  The cock was Araldited to a scrap of wood and centered under the mill/drill and a 6 mm end mill put through – the square on the tumbler is a 5 mm diagonal, approx 4 mm square.  I then dropped an 8 mm end mill into the back of the cock 1.5 mm deep, and turned up a disk to fit the two milled holes with about 0.2 mm proud on the back surface and a 3.5 mm hole in the centre to start the square from.  I had intended to put the square in the disk before fixing it in the cock, but there is no way to hold it so I silver soldered it in place with ‘easy’ silver solder paste that melts at 650C (dull red heat).  I then filed up the square hole very carefully to fit and , I thought, in the right orientation – but it turned out to be about 10 degrees from where I wanted it, so I just heated the cock up  to dull red and turned the insert with the end of a screwdriver to the correct angle.  That all went well so I worked on the sear to get it all aligned as I hadn’t done the final shaping until the cock was on.  I am not sure that all the parts I had were from the same pistol, and the shape of the full cock bent was a bit too ‘re-entrant’ for the motion of the sear and you couldn’t fire the lock – so the bent had to be opened out a bit.  All done so I tweaked the mainspring and hardened it and tempered it to blue – and then broke it while clamping it to put it in place!  It was my fault as I couldn’t find a small mainspring clamp and used a mole grip too near the ‘elbow’ and overstressed it – another job to do, although I might just try welding it.

The cock is actually stopped by the step hitting the edge of the lock as it should be, but the ‘chin’ of the jaw is a bit close – the cock needs slightly reshaping, although I’ll have to be careful not to loose the square insert if I heat it to red heat….. 

 

Yesterday I started on the safety catch slider for the Post Office pistol – I took a chunk of 8 mm EN8 and cut out a tab of about  the right size on one end so I could work on it and have a decent bit to hold in a vice.  I milled the rough blank – slightly oversize and still attached to the chunk – and filed it to fit, only separating it from at the last minute to shape the knob.  It looks fine, or will do when I’ve engraved the slider – now to do the internals.

 

 

 

  4th Feb Update – did a bit of work on the Harding Post Office pistol safety catch today (workshop was up around 25C!) – I couldn’t see a good way of making a 1.5mm wide slot through the inside bolt for the tongue of the external slider – my mill is nowhere near good enough to use such a small cutter, so I decided to mill a groove in a strip of metal and silver solder another piece over the top to complete the slot – worked a treat…   And it all fitted together after a bit of filing – you can’t see the silver solder line.  As before I left the part attached to the strip of metal until the last minute as its much easier to handle that way.

Strip with milled groove and piece silver soldered on top.

Shaped bolt still attached.

The bolt fits neatly over the tab on the slider – it will need pinning.

Safety slider is now engraved.

4th February – It continues cold, although I did get the indoor workshop up to 25 degrees C yesterday by  burning wood at a rate of knots for 6 hours.  I need to do a bit of TIG welding but by Argon has run out – annoying because it has leaked out of the cylinder – I’ve not used much in two years but its empty so I’ll have to change it.  I couldn’t do that with the loan car as it wouldn’t fit in. but I’ll take it on Tuesday.  I got some parts from Fred in the US to engrave for a gun he is making, so I’ll have to do a bit of design work.  I have the Post Office pistol to finish making the safety catch parts for, and the Venables barrel to re-do, plus a bit of silver soldering for Dick on a flintcock to fix a disk for a remade square.  I have converted Dick to using Bev’s method of re-doing the squares in cocks by milling out a hole and silver soldering in a disk.  My method is to mill a stepped hole so there is some depth location when it comes to the soldering, but Dick has done a plain hole – We shall see if that works as well.  The advantage of the stepped hole is that you can have a smaller ring of silver solder on the cock face so it doesn’t show round the cock screw but get an increased area for the solder as you can make the back mill of greater diameter.  Anyway we shall see which is best….

 

The following is for 146B – the non PO J Harding pistol

 

Pistol has very nice brass furniture

The barrel, lockplate, frizzen and frizzen spring and barrel bolt are all original – I’m not sure about the bridle or tumbler but I think the are original – the tumbler is wrong.

 I did some more on the little pistol woodwork.  It was fairly riddles with cracks as well as having chunks of wood missing, – the first job is to find all the cracks and see which move if you gently flex the wood.  If they are wide or full of muck they need clearing out with the back of  a modelling knife blade – these I fill with liquid epoxy, mixing in a bit of walnut dust to fill the surface.  As you put the epoxy in, flex the wood to open the joint more and suck the glue in.  You may need to clamp or bind the wood to close up cracks while the epoxy sets – I find self amlgamating tape is ideal for quick elastic binding of parts while glue sets – a couple of turns and it will stick to itself and hold things in place.   For small cracks I use an instant isocyanate glue and again work the joint to get the glue in – I keep a spray can of activator handy to start the polymerisation.  I also put walnut dust in the top of these cracks and drop a little instant glue on it and set it with the activator. I’ve done all that for the Harding pistol and the next step is to work out how to do the replacements and what needs milling out, and find a bit of matching walnut from my offcut box, or go over to Dick’s as he has a much bigger box of offcuts.

7th July – I started to strip the little Harding pistol so that I could sort the woodwork, but the woodscrew holding the tail of the triggerguard proved to be a major problem – first, the slot had got worn into a ramp and wouldn’t shift even with heat, then it turned out to be dead hard and I couldn’t drill it with any of my drills.  I ended up grinding off the head and digging out bits of it with the GRS graver – that released the guard.  That left the stub of the screw very firmly embedded – I tried cutting a slot in it with a small disk but the screw broke when I put a screwdriver on it!   Only solution was to core out the remains of the screw so I made a corer from 8 mm silver steel with a 4 mm hole in the centre and a 5.5 mm outside diameter and filed up some teeth and hardened it – at least that got it out and I could glue in a wooden plug for the next screw!   A lot of work to get one screw out – lucky I enjoy making tools!  I derusted the lock and the barrel, which is in good condition – I lightly recut the barrel engraving.  I will have to make a new tumbler as the one with the pistol is completely wrong, but I might get away with the existing bridle – I think it might have been the right one, but it had been broken and rewelded with the parts not quite aligned – I will make the tumbler and see if the sear is right before I decide whether to make a new bridle or fudge that one.

Corer for removing headless screw.

A bit of pitting but not too bad!

I more or less finished the woodwork for the second Harding pistol, at least in so far as anything is ever finished in this game!  I’ve given it an initial coat of stain to darken it down and match the wood repairs in – a coat of Van Dyke solution first, that didn’t do much, then a coat of Jacobean Oak stain. The problem with stains that are supposed to be black is that there is no effective black stain – so they mostly contain black solids, which in this case I had to rub off, which leaves a decent dark brown colour that matches the original colour pretty well.  The various joints are still visible but not too bad – I’ll work on them a bit as I apply finish – probable a couple of coats of sanding sealer, then alkonet root coloured oil finish to give a deep rich colour and finish off with a very hard wax finish.  Any recalcitrant joints will probably get blended in with a black Sharpie pen and smeared with a finger!  – it works a treat.  One trick that does help if you want to disappear a joint is to take a very sharp modelling knife and create some ‘grain’ across the joint matching that around it – do this early on in the process so they get treated the same as real grain!  Oh dear, maybe I shouldn’t reveal trade secrets here but anything that is continuous across the joint hides it from attention!  On this pistol the main joint runs with the grain, so that technique is of marginal benefit!

10th July – I seem to have got landed with compiling a document for the school governors – I am thinking of enrolling for ‘Say No‘ lessons!  It rather got in the way of my gun activities.  I finished the blank for the tumbler for the Harding pistol and unglued it (heat) and then glued it onto a piece of scrap plate to put it centered on the turntable in my miller so I could reduce the diameter over most of the circumference – I did get some way, but the strain was too much for the glue, so I’ll have to finish it by hand.  I’m made some progress on with the woodwork – I now have sundry bits of wood stuck onto the pistol and tonight I managed to inlet the barrel – I think its now just a matter of filing/sanding everything to shape and inletting the lock.  I put some oxalic aid on the existing wood which got rid of most of the black stains – I should have done it before selecting the wood for the repairs as its now a bit darker than the original – but the other little Harding pistol is almost black so I can colour this one down – it will help to hide the repairs too.  In the course of sanding down blocks of wood for the repairs I managed to sand the end of my thumb on the 12 inch disk sander – painfull still!

Tumbler blank on a scrap plate – the glue failed!

Clingfilm on a dowel to locate the repair in place – self amalgamating tape as an elastic binder. see earlier photo for the ‘before’ state.

9th July – several jobs on the go, which is handy when there is adhesive setting time involved.  I started the new tumbler for the little pistol  – I turned  the axle that bears in the lockplate plus a bit for the square and tapped it No 4 UNC, and faced a 22mm diameter disk to make the actual tumbler out of,  I then parted off the disk and axle, leaving a bit for the bearing in the bridle, faced off the bar left in the lathe and drilled a hole that is a good fit on the lock axle and Araldited the proto tumbler to the bar so I could finish the other side of the tumbler – its still in the lathe hardening off.   I milled some of the broken wood from the pistol lock area and glued in a piece of walnut – there is still quite a lot of wood to be fitted in, but its starting to look less bad.  I also decided to make another batch of de-cappers in case I get orders from the Holt’s shoot participants – I know Martin is keen for everyone to have one on safety grounds. And I got the new screen for my PC so that had to be set up…….

8th July – I got a request for a couple of my personalised decappers – I had run out of my original supply of metal and bought some 15m.m wide strip but it is a bit wide to fit round the nipples of some guns, so I picked up a length of scrap 1/2 x 1/8 from my old lab and made two decappers – when I came to engrave the names etc on them it was a bit of a revelation – they cut like butter, and it made me realise how horrible most of the metal I engrave is!  I guess the scrap was mild steel but it didn’t have the cold rolled crust that most mild steel strip has.  Anyway a pleasure to work with.  I did some more on teh little pistol woodwork.  It was fairly riddles with cracks as well as having chunks of wood missing, – the first job is to find all the cracks and see which move if you gently flex the wood.  If they are wide or full of muck they need clearing out with the back of  a modelling knife blade – these I fill with liquid epoxy, mixing in a bit of walnut dust to fill the surface.  As you put the epoxy in, flex the wood to open the joint more and suck the glue in.  You may need to clamp or bind the wood to close up cracks while the epoxy sets – I find self amlgamating tape is ideal for quick elastic binding of parts while glue sets – a couple of turns and it will stick to itself and hold things in place.   For small cracks I use an instant isocyanate glue and again work the joint to get the glue in – I keep a spray can of activator handy to start the polymerisation.  I also put walnut dust in the top of these cracks and drop a little instant glue on it and set it with the activator. I’ve done all that for the Harding pistol and the next step is to work out how to do the replacements and what needs milling out, and find a bit of matching walnut from my offcut box, or go over to Dick’s as he has a much bigger box of offcuts.

7th July – I started to strip the little Harding pistol so that I could sort the woodwork, but the woodscrew holding the tail of the triggerguard proved to be a major problem – first, the slot had got worn into a ramp and wouldn’t shift even with heat, then it turned out to be dead hard and I couldn’t drill it with any of my drills.  I ended up grinding off the head and digging out bits of it with the GRS graver – that released the guard.  That left the stub of the screw very firmly embedded – I tried cutting a slot in it with a small disk but the screw broke when I put a screwdriver on it!   Only solution was to core out the remains of the screw so I made a corer from 8 mm silver steel with a 4 mm hole in the centre and a 5.5 mm outside diameter and filed up some teeth and hardened it – at least that got it out and I could glue in a wooden plug for the next screw!   A lot of work to get one screw out – lucky I enjoy making tools!  I derusted the lock and the barrel, which is in good condition – I lightly recut the barrel engraving.  I will have to make a new tumbler as the one with the pistol is completely wrong, but I might get away with the existing bridle – I think it might have been the right one, but it had been broken and rewelded with the parts not quite aligned – I will make the tumbler and see if the sear is right before I decide whether to make a new bridle or fudge that one.

27th July – bit cooler and wetter today!  Had a visit from a regular client to collect some pistols – I swapped some work for a little 1860s pistol case and a cased double pinfire 12 by Geo Sturman that need a little tidying – the barrel needs striking up and rebrowning – I need to have another go at browning as I am keen to improve my technique – basically slow it all down…  I did a bit more fiddly work on the sliding safety of the second Harding pistol  – this one turns out to be a bit different in its internals from the first, which was conventional.  here there wasn’t a lot of space so I modified the mechanism so that the slider itself actually bolted the tumbler, the slider being retained by a small brass ‘bolt’ that had the ramp on its tail that engaged with a pip on a small spring retained by the sear spring screw.  I found that this time the bridle had a slot that aligned with the slider, so I left a pip on the slider to engage in the slot  – actually that’s not true – I’d already filed off the slider when I realised that the slot lined up, so  I had to weld a tiny  blob in the right place…..

Slider and its brass retainer  – ramp on the tail,  plus sear and slider springs –  slider spring has dimple to engage ramp.  ( bridle removed)  All very fiddly as its a very small pistol.

 

25th July  Predictably the pool got a lot of use today from friends and neighbours -seemed to be full of children all  day!   I sheltered from the heat in my ‘machine shop’ which keeps a reasonable temperature, so I was able to finish a couple of jobs on the Harding –  I glued up a piece of dowel with a turned end into a horn blank – Araldite went off rapidly in the heat, and turned it all down together – looks fine and fits perfectly. I also turned up a side screw – I was going to cut off the thread portion and weld on a new head but found that an M3.5 thread would just do, so made a new screw – I had a very cheap non adjustable die for M 3.5 which worked well enough.  I filed up the slider for the safety catch from the blank I machined yesterday – it must be one of the fiddliest jobs – especially for such a small pistol – anyway its almost done.  Not quite sure how to do the mechanism inside – there is precious little room for the bolt to intersect the tumbler so I might just make a slot in the tumbler to take the blade of the slider, then make a dummy bolt to stop the slider falling out…. I’ll see what is possible. I gather we have a small group for the ‘Have a go’ tomorrow, and I’ll take a breech loader for some lazy shooting afterwards – not sure which – I’m not sure the Beretta I bought fits terribly well, so I might take something else.

24th July – rather warm today – when I got in my car to go to Dick’s it said 38 degrees (C) – that went down to 33 when I was moving!  By 4 oclock I was ready for a swim in the giant bag of water – I reckon I’m up to 700m a session and am aiming for I km – that’s a lot of turning as its only 10m long- I think I’m going to have to make something to keep track of how many lengths I swim!. A good day on the tinkering front – I machined blanks for the top jaw and slide safety, and turned a top jaw screw and a better cock screw, and filed up the top jaw and gave them a once over with Blackley’s case hardening powder to colour them down a bit – they actually look quite good now.  I ‘spiked up’ the bottom of the top jaw with a 45 degree graver without the heels, mounted in a metal rod and tapped with a small hammer – it throws up really vicious little hooks that are just like the originals must have been – its always a give away that a cock has been replaced by a casting as very few people bother to file off the cast ‘teeth’ and replace them with nice sharp ones.  It only takes a few minutes!  Anyway the little pistol is beginning to look really good – the photo has a nasty bit of flint I broke off a larger on as I don’t have any micro flints in stock – it does actually spark up although probably not reliable enough to set off priming consistently – anyway better than a repro Scottish Pistol I was looking at with Dick that would not spark except very occasionally one feeble little spark.  I didn’t have any perfect flints with me – most had been used but you can usually persuade a few sparks out of the lock if you tap a new edge on the flint.  It was sold as a working repro with proof marks so presumably was intended to shoot but I think its going to need some work on the frizzen, either some heat treatment or facing with a bit of old saw blade or whatever – I’ve never had any problems using Blackley’s frizzen  casting – they spark OK – and I’ve never worn a frizzen to the point when it needed refacing.  I don’t shoot flintlock that much – I have enough of a job hitting things with a percussion!  Having said that I’m doing another corporate ‘have a go with a muzzle loader day’ on Friday for Cambridge Gun Club and I have to take both a flintlock and a percussion.

 

Slide safety and ramrod to do and it can join its ‘almost’ pair, the P.O. pistol

 

23rd July – I went into ‘my’ school for the ‘Leaver’s Assembly’ to say goodbye  to the year 6 pupils who are moving on to secondary school – a few tears amonst them, but they will do well – their teachers have been so caring.  More tinkering with the Harding – I used a chunk of thick tubing as a heat reservoir to temper the spring and it worked just fine with the radiant thermometer and got a good uniform blue towards the bright end of he spectrum – the spring fits, so I adjusted the full cock bent on the tumbler – very carefully in stages as I didn’t want to loose any more cock swing than necessary.  Once that was done I case hardened the tumbler – it was made out of mild steel – and made a ‘cut price’  sear spring from a bit of spring steel sheet – works fine but looks a bit naff!  might have to revisit.  Anyway so far so good, the lock fits, the spring, trigger and sear work fine – I’ve filed up the cock to a slightly better shape and put a bit of engraving on it – I now need to tap the hole for the cock screw that holds the top jaw, and make a top jaw, plus the safety slider and internal bits – I realise that I case hardened the tumbler and haven’t put in the notch for the safety bolt, but I’m sure I can file through the case. I reckon the restoration of this pistol has already cost far more than it could possibly be worth and it isn’t finished yet – a true labour of love – but at least it all goes on the blog!

 

Thick tube as heat sink for tempering springs etc.  Bean can holds wood ash insulation so parts cool slowly to avoid hardening them.

22nd July  – Went into Cambridge to do some work on the Bullard Archive but ended up towing a giant skip with my Landcruiser and sorting some junk.  I made one of the springs for the Harding pistols.  This one looks a bit more convincing than the last one.  I’ve hardened it with an oil quenching and its now glass hard so I’m being very careful not to break it – I suspect dropping it on a hard surface might even do it.  Now I have to decide how to temper it, since I screwed up on that stage last time.  I normally find a spot on the hotplate of the AGA which is the right temperature, using a remote temp probe and pop it on there with a couple of layers of aluminium foil over it and shut the lid down for ten minutes, but the AGA is out for the summer.  The traditional method is to put the spring in a pool of oil in a tobacco tin (now a historic item!) and burn it off, after which the spring will have got to the right temper as if by magic.  There is always a discussion about what oil to use – used engine oil is often quoted, but whether its the engine oil or the used bit that’s critical isn’t revealed.  I think I’ll probably heat a thick walled tube in my furnace to 300C, check it with the radiant thermometer  and then pop the spring in and leave it to cool down.  – a lot more trouble than the burning oil, but at least measurable!  As I wrote yesterday, the spring feels different now its fully hard, even when its just resting in my hand – mysterious or imaginary?

I can never decide if the two arms should touch along the joint – I think most original springs don’t so I’ve left this one slightly open – you can get a piece of thin card in the joint.  I think this spring is a better shape than the last one.  We shall see!

21st July – What a lovely day sailing in the dinghy on the Orwell! Yesterday I made a couple of blanks for new springs – This time I did the thicknessing of the blank on my medium soft  grindwheel (after flattening it with a diamond tool) rather than the linisher and it worked much better.  I had a look at the broken spring – it was fairly clear that I hadn’t tempered it sufficiently as I could barely mark it with a file – a spring properly tempered should just  be fileable.  Thinking about hardening, I sometimes think when I handle the occasional metal component that I can tell if they are soft or fully hard just by the feel of them – and not by trying to flex them either.  It sounds pretty improbably, but I guess the elastic properties are quite different and maybe this affects the internal damping of vibrations so they do feel different?  Or maybe its just a vivid imagination……. 

 

19th July – Tragedy  – my new spring broke when I tried to put it in the pistol!  I had hardened it and tried to temper it in my furnace, the AGA being out for the summer, but its not good at controlling temperatures as low as 300 C and I don’t think it was taken to spring temper.  Anyway it seemed a bit strong, and pinged when I compressed it – I think maybe it should have been thinned a bit more, and I need to be more careful to compress it at the ends to allow more of the spring to flex.  Anyway its busted, so I can have the excitement of making another one – I’ll probably make two whle I’m about it as the other little pistol has a fudged spring…. Oh well, I’m going sailing on Sunday and will be busy tomorrow so it will just have to wait – at least I should be much quicker this time.

18th July – yet more tinkering with the little pistol!  I worked on the tumbler and spring to get the combination working – its an iterative process – check, file, check as you converge on what looks like a satisfactory arrangement.  I filed a square on the tumbler shaft and drilled and filed a matching hole in the cock so that I could see how that fitted at the same time.  It all went together quite well as far as I can test at the moment.  I found a sear that will probably do although I might have to bend the arm a bit as it threatens to foul the edge of the lock pocket – so now I’ll need to file the bents in the tumbler for half and full cock – the half cock is more difficult as it has to resist firing by letting the sear nose enter a slot.  I’ll have to make a cock screw to keep the cock in place – although its not loose it still comes off, and also a screw for the sear pivot.  The cock  screw is 5 UNC ( I made the tumbler) but the sear pivot seems to accept an  M2.5 thread, and I don’t have a die for that one – for the moment I can use an existing screw.  That just leaves making hardening and tempering the spring and any other bits, and making the sliding safety catch and spring, oh and the sear spring…. not much to do then!

The shape of the end of the spring, the ‘spur of the tumbler and the orientation of the cock on its square all have to be right – its a slow job if you haven’t done it very often.

17th July  Bit more tinkering with the little pistol – I made a new mainspring and also made a video of the operation – difficult to concentrate on two things at once – tryiing to bend the spring into a ‘hairpin’ while juggling an oxy/gas torch and talking to the camera is fun.  I can’t put it down without turning it off, by which time the spring is cold. I got it in the end  though. Anyway it is almost there – just got to alter the bend a little to make it more even and slightly less open, and shape the end that bears on teh tumbler.   Very satisfying making springs!  Much more so than struggleing with editing documents in Word – I’ll have grey hair if I have to do it much more – making springs etc is a doddle compared to struggling with Bill Gates’s constructions.  I think I got the bridle to fit as well, so progress!

The bend has a face with a slight angle so it looks dark – its fine!

16th July I did some work on a gun case – I bought a set of ‘furniture pens and crayons’ from Amazon for a few pounds – they are meant for touching in scratches on furniture but they might be useful on guns and cases – I’ve aleady deployed the mahogany one – it helps but I really need darker shades.  In my ‘spare’ time I’m still tinkering with the little Harding pistol.  I put the proto tumbler in the miller and got a bit more metal off it, and have now filed it to an approximate shape.  I found a sear that looks as if it will fit so I’ll  have to sort out the bridle and fixing screws  – I think I can use the bridle out of the box of bits if I weld up the hole for the tumbler extension shaft and re-drill it in the right place.  Then its just a case of making the mainspring, the sear spring, and the sliding safety catch, bolt and spring – nothing really!!!!!

Part way there with the tumbler. not sure about the sear?

15th July – Looking through my Manton book yesterday I realised that whoever botched the single NOCK barrel to have a recessed breach didn’t need to recess the side opposite the lock – Joseph never did on single guns….

I bought back a pair of continental locks sans frizzens to see if we could find replacements for the owner – and indeed we found a pair of matching frizzens with pan lids exactly the right size – the tails need extending to reach the pivot position but that can be done…. a result.

My ‘office’ table is now covered with nautical charts as we begin to plan our summer trip to the NW of Scotland – we have a new charter yacht from Skye and will head out to the Outer Hebrides – we are a bit light on crew this year, so a bit more work for me, although the boat has in-mast reefing on the mainsail so not so much deck work needed  – its 43 ft long so it will be interesting to see how we get on with just 3 of us.     It’s the coming alongside in marinas that’s tricky, although we don’t do that very often. The last few years we’ve had the same boat so I knew how it handled under power – its going astern that is always tricky – most boats just won’t steer until they are moving so you never know quite how they will set off backwards so there will be a learning curve with this one.

The table is  also covered with the bits of a pistol case that I am remaking – fortunately was just held together with animal glue – or indeed no glue at all!  Anyway its all in pieces now.

I’ve had a couple of conversations with experts on gun browning in the last few days – one, supposed to be the best in England says it can take up to a month to get a good browning on some barrels, and he stops if the weather gets too hot.  The other friend says he reckons up to 16 days and thinks that if you brown them faster than one rusting a day the browning wears off very quickly – so maybe I need to slow down as I had been aiming to get at least two brownings a day……..

14th July  – Holts shoot at Cambridge Gun Club.  Not my best day – but I did manage to hit one of every different clay except one – at least that shows something!   Derek brought the owner of the Joseph Manton 22 bore featured in the posts and the gun for Nick Holt to have a look at – I was able to assist him in unravelling the gun as I’d done a blog on it.  He was shown another gun that was a bit of a mystery – a very late Jo Manton flint lock on a single barreled gun  signed H Nock on the barrel – its difficult to appraise a gun without my list of dates and references etc, but  the gun had the patent Jo Manton recessed breech C1810(?), while the barrel and trigger guard looked older. My suspicions were confirmed when I noticed that the breech blocks had been machined down from a normal width to the recessed width to take the late lock, and not particularly carefully.  The lock fitted quite well. Nothing on the bottom of the barrel made a lot of sense – no HN maker’s stamp as I would expect, or a number (Henry Nock was amonst the first to number his guns around 1790). In the absence of any further info I thought it was maybe a Nock gun of maybe 1790ish with the ‘wrong’ lock. Possibly a spuriously engraved NOCK?   The left side of the breech plug had also been recessed – I didn’t see if the stock had had a bit glued on to fill the gap where the barrel was milled away. If not I’d have to suspect that it had been restocked – the lock was very well inletted so a possibility. I’m afraid the jury is out on that one! I was hoping for a valuation on the Post Office pistol – I know what its worth as a little pistol but not what the rarity value of the P.O. connection is – but it wasn’t fair to expect Nick to guess that.  I actually found a reference to one similar being sold at Bonhams in 2015 for $2800 – so obviously some rarity value there….

13th July  – bit more tinkering with the pistol below – I had to make a replacement screw ( I had to grind it out) for the tang of the trigger guard – I don’t like just using a woodscrew as the heads are never right and in this case they don’t work well into the endgrain of the plug I had to glue in,  so I turned up a countersunk screw with a No 5 UNC thread and an extra false head.  I slotted the false head and screwed it in, then marked the fore and aft line, cut off the false head, put in the aligned slot  and filed it to conform to the curved shape, then engraved a few lines on it and used Blackley’s case hardening powder to colour it down (and incidentally harden it).  Jobs left include all the works of the lock, some reshaping of the cock casting I have, to reduce the prominent breast it has and scale down the spur, and make a ramrod.  Tomorrow is the Holts Shoot at the Cambridge Gun Club – I am, of course, going and will hope to exceed my 50% target – I didn’t quite make it at the Helice shoot – I was on target but missed all of the last 4 ‘easy’ birds!  I’ve finished a batch of de-cappers to take to CGC – they make good engraving practice so I did a little stand of arms, and a stand of music and a sunburst and a scroll plus some borders.  Quite interestingly (at least for me!), the strip I was using that I said was as soft as butter turned out to be pretty tough down the other end – just goes to show what cold rolling does to the grain structure near the surface.

 

 

Jul 112019
 

 

30th June – Shooting Helice at Rugby yesterday – boy was it hot!   Its a difficult form of clays and great fun – I wasn’t the worst there by any means – lets leave it at that!  I don’t know who won as I left after my last shot ( knowing it wasn’t me!) to have dinner with the family.  I jumped in the swimming pool aka large plastic bag of water and when I got out sons pointed out that I had a spectacular bruise on my shoulder in the shape of a gun stock.  I was shooting in shirtsleeves with my  14 bore – weight 6.4 lbs – using 2 1/2 drams of Swiss No 2 and ( it turned out when I checked the flask) 1 1/4 oz of  shot, which I suppose is a fairly heavy load for the gun, although its what I usually shoot without feeling anything special in the way of recoil – in fact I had been using 2 3/4 drams and the same shot load  – I probably ought to put a bit of sheet metal in the flask neck to get it down to 1 oz.  The only thing that bothered me is that the trigger guard makes a mess of my second finger – I smoothed it down, which stopped it cutting my finger but it still pummels it into gory submission.  I realised afterwards that the trigger guard has a rear loop as in rifles and If I grasp the wrist of the gun in my normal shotgun way there is only just room for three fingers on the guard so my second finger is already pressed on the guard.  You don’t often see those guards on shotguns – thinking about it, I shoot shotguns with a full grip using the joint of my finger on the trigger whereas I hold rifles so that I use the middle of the first joint of my finger on the trigger to get more feel, in which case there would be a lesser grip and more room in the guard.  Maybe that accounts for the different guards in shotgun and rifles.  Not sure what to do about it – it was suggested that its because the stock is too short, but it measures up OK and is longer than many guns I shoot without problems.   I more or less finished the Trophy (see past diary) today – cutting and milling the old stock and making a base – wood courtesy of Chris Hobbs.  Looks quite good now – I’ll post some photos when I get a moment! 

The effect of 20 shots – 2 1/2 oz of Swiss 2 and 1 1/4 oz of shot in a 14 bore weighing 6  1/4 lbs – strangely I didn’t feel it as particularly savage.

Quite limited gap for 3 fingers!

28th June – Shooting yesterday – seem to have lost my previous form!  Obviously not a good idea to change guns…. Off to the Helice shoot at Rugby so I’ll shoot my regular percussion gun for that…..   I had a a cock off a hammer gun sent to me to have welded as the spur had broken off, so I asked for both to be sent so that I could be sure the spur got put back on at the matching angle.  When I looked at the ‘good’ cock I noticed that it had a bit of a kink in the line of the spur (see arrow)  – A closer inspection showed a whole lot of small cracks across the back of the spur at the bottom, indicating that it too was not far from breaking.  There is a popular misconception that the spurs (and cocks of flintlocks) break because of the force of cocking them – but the actuality is that they break due to the sudden stop when the cock connects with whatever halts its progress  and the part ‘outboard’ of the stop carries on under interia.- in the case of a hammer gun probably the cock hitting the surround of the firing pin if the firing pin doesn’t offer enough resistance to slow the cock –  this might happen e.g. if the gun is dry fired without a snap cap, or a flintlock is fired with the frizzen open – or just through inadequate design or poor materials..

Arrow shows slight kink in the line of the spur – dents on the back of the cock show where it had been tightened up on the square.

Very clear cracking on the back of the ‘good’ cock show its not far from breaking – there is a slight compression crease forming on the front of the cock!  It will get welded along with the broken one.  The weld needs to be deep to put some strength back, and use a reasonably high carbon steel rod.

 

26 th June – I cleaned up the lock of the Pistoia pistol – my electrolytic deruster ran out of steam as the iron positive electrode had got so rusted  (the rust is stripped from the negative electrode and forms on the positive where the active oxygen is released.  I cleaned off the positive electrode but decided to electrolytically derust it properly by putting a sacrificial chunk of mild steel as the positive.  I left it for about an hour at about 2 1/2 amps and the result was quite impressive, at least in terms of the rust on my chunk of steel –

I needed a ramrod for the 11 bore Westley Richards – its a ‘working gun’ so it doesn’t need to be fantastic, so I spared the ebony and used a 10 m.m. ash dowel I bought at a re-enactment fair as an arrow blank – I selected all his straight ones!  I wrapped masking tape round one end so it fitted in the chuck of my woodturning lathe – the other end just rested inside the hollow tailstock.  Using 80 grade sandpaper I tapered the rod to 8.5 m.m at the end, and smoothed it down.  I have had problems staining the wood to match ebony – the ash is not very absorbent and its difficult to get a deep enough colour – I did think of ‘ebonising’ it with a blowtorch but wasn’t sure if it would work.  In the end I got a black felt pen of the sort that marks on everything and ran it down the rod while the lathe turned slowly so as to cover the entire surface – result a fantastic deep black – a couple of coats of water based satin varnish rubbed in with a tissue and its a very convincing ebony rod!  I decided to make a proper screw end as they are sometimes handy if I forget my unloading rod.  I has a 1/4 x 32 tap and die (Model Engineer threads) for the cap thread, and cut off a 5 m.m. hardened zinc plated screw – getting rid of enough of the tread to solder into the brass body was done by putting the screw point first in a drill and running it against the grindwheel.   A 5.4 mm hole up the cap end cleared the screw and was right for tapping the 1/4 x 32 thread.  The head was turned freehand – not perfect but OK – result a perfectly acceptable substitute for the real thing – NOT a fake – you can tell because I Araldited the ends on and didn’t put ‘fake’ pins through!  Note for future efforts – be more careful to size the rod and ends to the same diameter and make sure the reduced diameter on teh rod is concentric.

The zinc plated screw was blacked with TIFOO instant gun black.

It really should be lemon coloured brass, but it will still work!

I think I soldered the screw in slightly crooked so its pushing the cap out of true – I’ll fix it sometime! (or just get used to it).  The brass has been toned down a bit with dilute Blackley’s brass browning solution.

25th June. Thinking to put the Westley Richards on my certificate to shoot it so I had a look for wads and cards – I decided that it would just about work with hard 12 bore wads soaked in oil/wax but Pete says he has some I can use.  I decided to make a wad punch for cards anyway, but couldn’t find any suitable metal in the workshop short of turning down a bar of 2 inch steel – then I remembered a set of box spanners that I had and didn’t use – the biggest, 20/22 mm had a section of tube in the middle that was just about the right size.  It turned out to be quite hard and my parting tool didn’t want to cut it so I cut it with a hacksaw (it finished the blade!) leaving one spanner with a short stem, and the other with a long stem – I bored the end of the long tube with a carbide tool &  turned the outside taper with a carbide tipped tool and got a good  edge – it works very well – the only disadvantage is that I was too lazy to cut a hole in the side for the cards/wads to escape, so they have to be pushed out with a rod.  The size was about right – .770.   I started to clean up the Pistoia pistol – see that post.   I’ve been finishing a pair of duelling pistols for a client – we had a discussion about what the appropriate finish was.  The arguments revolve around whether it should be varnish or oil finish.  Most of the originals were probably varnished, but it is a very unforgiving finish and needs almost perfect woodwork or it shows up every ripple and unevenness – these pistols have less than perfect wood so I think a high shine oil finish would be better – they also have potentially uneven colouration that has been toned down – varnish needs an almost perfect substrate.  We shall see how it turns out……  I did a bit more research into the P53 type gun – Looks like after the failed Indian Mutiny of 1857 when the British Government took over the administration of India from the East India Company there were effectively 3 Indian armies officered by the British for three provinces – I presume that this gun was issued at some point to one of the armies.  I can’t quite identify the proof marks on the barrel – I don’t think its Liege, but it is not in my book as a London or Birmingham proof for anthing like 1868.

24th June.  I picked up my purchases from the local auction – I missed out on the nice little flintlock pocket pistol (picture below) because someone had put in the same top bid before me.  Anyway I got a pretty little continental(?) pistol and a percussion Enfield style musket that I’d like some help from visitors to this site to pin down.   It has a P53 type lock externally marked LSA Co and 1868 with a strange pattern just visible in front of the cock – the lock is pretty pitted on the outside, but the inside is shiny &  good quality and carries a broad arrow mark and the name Barnett plus the stamp J.C. –  Barnett & Co made locks and barrels for the British Government  from about 1854(?)  It is missing its bridle (holes exist).  The barrel appears to be a musket barrel of about .630 bore (not the .656 that was used when Enfields were made in smoothbore), of length 33 inches, giving the gun an overall length of 48 1/2 inches (weight 7 1/2 lbs)  The barrel carries the stamped name  ‘MANTON & CO CALCUTTA’ as one stamp, followed by ‘& LONDON’ made of individual letter stamps.  It carries Liege proof marks. There is a bayonet boss in the usual place, and a foresight but no rear sight or any sign that one was ever fitted.   The trigger guard is stamped with the number 35110 and the butt (LH side) has 88 in one place and 77 in another.  The stock looks fairly like a normal P53 stock, although I’m not really familiar with them.  It has three old style barrel bands (before Badderley) – the sling swivel is on the muzzle one, the other swivel is on the rear trigger guard screw.   The ramrod is steel, and has a somewhat squared end with a slotted jag – no bulge – I can’t see a retaining spring in the stock.  Overall it looks ‘of a piece’ and not mucked about with in recent times.  The British were at pains to equip the Indian troops with guns that looked like Enfields but were not effective against their own weapons – this gun may have been made up by Manton Calcutta (at that time run by Wallis) using old British Enfield locks, or maybe old stock complete guns, with the barrels replaced by new Liege smoothbore barrels to ensure inferior performance.  It would seem that this gun must be one of many that were issued, hence the 35110 stamped on the trigger guard.  Any thoughts gratefully received. 

I am also contemplating the two pistols below – rather pretty little Continental pistols, the top German, the bottom has a possibly Italian barrel with a gold PISTOIA stamp and a lion stamp( or might be a a fake Italian barrel?) one – any ideas??  New poston this too – Continental Pistols.

See new post ‘Indian Enfield’ for the bulk of the photos.

 

22nd June – Yesterday I went to look at the guns in the Willingham Auction and was amazed at how random the cataloguing was! There was an obvious repro blunderbuss that might or might not have been Section 2 catalogued as an antique with ‘loss of patina’ to the stock!  I emailed them to warn them and I’m glad to say it was withdrawn.  There was a ‘percussion pocket pistol with bayonet under the barrel’ that, on a cursory glance was actually a diecast toy pistol – I should have warned them but it wasn’t a matter of law so I didn’t.  It sold for £120 – I just hope the buyer throws it back!  I got the only 3 guns that hadn’t been messed about and were not relics – a little turnoff flintlock pocket pistol, a pretty ?French pistol and a P53 type rifle by Manton of Calcutta.  I’m off the Birmingham Arms Fair tomorrow with a couple of guns for David Stroud to put on his stand – I need to recoup some money to fund  my recent purchases.  The P53 will get some TLC and appear on this site – I’ll probably keep the French pistol, and I might or might not keep the little pocket pistol (photo below) – I am tempted to make a box for it – I know they didn’t come in boxes, but they look nice and I don’t think its a terrible sin to sell people a pretty little boxed pistol!   I tracked down the problem with my screen colours – it got a technical review as having the worst contrast of any that the reviewer had ever seen – I should have read the reviews before I bought it – my stupid fault.

It’s all there – needs the action fixing, which is a nice exercise!

21st June – Going through the photos I took in Norfolk – which was difficult because I brought a completely useless monitor with my new computer – I came across a detail I hadn’t seen when I looked at the gun.  On a good quality brass blunderbuss of mid 18th century by Barbar I found one part of the lock engraving that had been (partly ?)  chased with a hammer and chisels – the rest of the lock and cock and all the brass seemed to have been engraved by ‘push’ engraving – I think that is the first time I’ve noticed chasing on old English guns.  I found a similar age blunderbuss by Turvey that definitely had the steel engraving on the lock done by push engraving.

Blunderbuss by Barbar – classic early engraving

Click on the photo and you will see the serrations on the lines of the foliage – at least you should if your monitor is not as bad as mine (its going back- I’ll have to replace it with a more expensive one though!)

This all looks like bona fide push engraving!

20th June – Back from Norfolk, where I have been photographing guns from a friend’s extensive collection – I’m adding to my library of early gun English engraving as my own own limited collection is mostly late 18th and 19th century sporting guns.  He has some nice engraved blunderbusses and pistols from early and mid 18th century that have the characteristic shapes of that period, and I’m planning a series of plates showing the different styles at different periods. Photos will follow!

18th June  – Edited another part of the trophy engraving series – Engraving the Thistle, which I have now put on Youtube.

17th June – AT a school meeting all day!  I did manage to make another nipple for the Westley Richards, so I’ll be able to try it sometime – the stock is very heavy, so I think it must be weighted, or at least a specially dense wood! The Bonham’s auction crept up on me un-noticed so I haven’t viewed it – just a quick glance through the catalogue.  Nothing that excites me – the Adam’s revolvers were nothing special, a good lot of American stuff, but that’s not really my scene.  There were an interesting assortment of percussion shotguns – maybe somewhere among them there is a bargain!  No flintlock rifles, which is my next ‘want’ – its about the only long gun I haven’t got, apart from a blunderbuss.  I put a new Video showing engraving of a Stand of Arms on the site, see VIDEOS at the top.

16th June – three parties in 2 days left me a bit dazed…  Anyway it was out annual Recession shoot at Cottenham today – we ‘invented’ the competition in the bad old days to be shot with 1/2 oz of shot only – muzzle loaders of coarse – it is amazing how little difference it makes halving the shot load.  I left before the final tally, but our group contained its share of the top M/L shooters  – top score in our group was 21 out of 30 – I was very pleased to hit 18 – my aim is to do a little better each shoot, but strictly keeping to the game shooting technique and not shooting ‘gun up’ like most of the people who bettered me!  I borrowed a set of oversize taps to fix the nipple holes on the Westley Richards, but even the 15 thou oversize one was still a bit loose, and they are UNF  which is 28 t.p.i. ( 1/4 and 9/32 BSF are 26 t.p.i. and 1/4 is what is used on most later English percussion nipples) which means that in 1/4 deep hole you are almost half a thread out by the bottom.  So I tapped them out  9/32 BSF, which is 30 thou bigger than 1/4 BSF, and that worked fine.  I made a couple of titanium nipples, but one didn’t start the die properly, and doesn’t have a very good thread so I’ll remake it before I try to use the gun.  The photo shows the back of the die, which I have ground on the 5 inch grindwheel so that it can cut the thread right up to the shoulder of the nipple – use the unmodified side first.   Here are a few shots of the WR markings etc….  The gun is 11 bore, weighs 7 1/4 lbs and has a pull of 14 1/4 inches – about 1/4 inch of cast off.

Bottom of die recessed on grindwheel.

Serial number appropriate for about 1843

Address occupied by WR from 1917….

Rounded or semi pistol grip – hardly a 19th century style!

14th June – I got the gun I wanted at Southams, but not the two miscellaneous lots  – someone else must have spotted the Blackley flintlock castings in the box of junk as the lot went for £110 Hammer price, as did the oak case I was after – both just a bit more than my limit.  I did buy a flintlock pistol by Kruchenreuter that is nice although it needs a bit of tlc.  The gun I bought is a Westley Richards percussion double 11 bore – I had left a bid well above the bottom estimate, but got it for £380 Hammer price – just below the bottom estimate, so good!  There were a couple of expensive Westley Richards guns for sale that went for what I thought were fairly high prices given their condition, which frankly wasn’t wonderful, but I bought this one as I thought it would make a good shooter.  It is a bit of a dog’s dinner, and I havent yet quite worked it out fully.  The barrel is very good externally with pretty fair bores – its genuine Westley Richards with his barrel maker’s stamp, signature ( very clear and unworn and looks genuine but unusually read from muzzle to breech ) ‘Westley Richards & Co  23 Conduit Street London’ and Birmingham proof marks V & BPC which were used 1868 to 1925.  The problem is the address – it was only occupied by WR & Co  from 1917.  The barrels are numbered 1019 as are the locks – all looking like they are original numbers.  The numbers, according to Nigel Brown’s book, should be for 1843 ish.  The gun has a rounded or semi-pistol  stock which was quite a late style (?) .  There are a number of things that are notably odd – the stock at the breech isn’t deep enough to cover the sides of the false breech by about a mm or so.  The forend pipe and trigger finial don’t quite fit the cutouts suggesting that they are replacements.  The forend ramrod pipe has somewhat abbreviated engraving, the trigger guard finial very abbreviated but of classic shape.  The trigger guard has no engraving and is blued, the butt cap is full steel and similarly plain and blued.   The barrel looks much less worn than the lock plates which are signed Westley Richards and numbered 1019 on the insides – the cocks are poor replacement castings.  The nipples are loose – the holes are too big for 1/4 BSF and too small for 9/32 BSF so I’ll see if borrowing oversize 1/4 BSF taps will work.  The screw holding the locks in has been replaced with a round headed brass screw with the head filed down.  There is no ramrod.

What would I speculate about the gun?  one guess is that there was an 11 bore percussion gun made in 1843 ( the locks are signed Westley Richards, not ‘& Co’, and are fairly worn).  The gun was then rebarreled by WR & Co post 1917 (I know it sounds unlikely?).  The stock is not original to the 1843 gun but is later,  possibly reused from something else, but fairly unworn and certainly not 1843 style.  The good news is that WR records still exist and I should be able to track the gun down from the serial number.  Photos of my purchases tomorrow.  I am also working on an engraving video or two to put on Youtube based on the trophy engraving – I have something like 60 GBytes of videos to edit down to about 5 Gb!

11th June – I went to Southam’s Antique firearms etc auction viewing in the big new Auction Centre outside Bedford – a pretty impressive place and quite an expansion in the volume of stuff that Southams had gathered (I was going to say ‘raked up’ but that would be a little unfair!) for the sale compared to their previous sales – they now have their sights on Bonhams and Holts but will somehow have to pursuade the vendors of quality antique arms that they can achieve top prices – their big selling point as far as buyers are concerned is the 17 1/2% commission as against 27 1/2 elsewhere..  I guess they are more like Holts in that they clearly take everything anyone wants to sell, and had all those delicious boxes of junk that mirror what we all have in our workshops!  There were one or two good antiques, but I didn’t find anything in the way of English 1850s revolvers that excited me- most were just not good enough to make it into my collection – I found a couple of hidden treasures in the junk listed for a song, and one possible gun for restoration, but I’m not going to give anything away at this point! I did a bit of sleuthing for a friend so he will have a couple of bids.  Not sure if I’ll watch the auction on line, I might be tempted to bid on other things…..    I still think I will redo the Trophy, although people tell me its fine – here are some of the things I think are wrong with it….

10th June – I fixed the element back in my furnace and finished ‘normalising’ the steel test plates.  Cleaning off the anti-scale paint is a pain, but having done that, the metal seems to be much better to cut, although I only did a small bit on the edge.  Surprisingly the plates have distorted very slightly so that a sheet of 1200 grit on a flat plate doesn’t abrade the whole surface – the surface is probably out of true by about 1/10th  of a mm in a smooth curve, not enough to matter for my purposes, but in future I’ll  ‘regularise’ the metal BEFORE I get it ground flat!  Obviously some stress relief took place.  Looking at my Trophy engraving, I think I’ll have another go at it – there are a few details I’m not happy with, and I wasn’t careful enough with the lettering spacing – it is one of the problems of engraving using a microscope, that your field of view is small – only a few letters – so you can ‘drift’ away from your chosen spacing – I mark out the lettering, then when I come to cut it I adjust somewhat as I go along, and then find its not all evenly spaced.  Anyway I’ll have another go, and make sure that I get the gold inlay right this time. I could do with more practice!  I’m about to start on the wheellock video, but got held up because the hard drive on my computer is almost full (it takes ages to do anything) and all my SD cards for the camera are full.  An upgrade of my computer system is on the way  – I can go about 5 years before the system gets too slow and clogged up,  at which point I get fed up and replace it – by then it will have earned its retirement!  My new system will have 6 terabytes of hard disk – which should see me OK for a few more years, although its only enough space for about 1000 videos.

9th June – a Pleasant party today making Elderflower wine with friends.  I had a chance to ask Giles’s girlfriend, who is a doing a PhD in materials science, about my struggles with mild steel blanks.  I had thought that as they are more or less pure iron with very little carbon they wouldn’t suffer from hardening, although it was clear from experience that they did.  Anyway I now understand what happens, more or less.  Its all to do with the grain boundaries and the stresses within the grains and between grains which are generated by the cold rolling process, essentially work hardening – so the answer is to anneal the blanks – I thought I’d tried that without a great deal of success, but apparently I should take the metal to around 80% of melting temperature for a good long soak.  That means going to  around 1000C for a couple of hours, which I should be able to do in my furnace, but when I tried tonight I got it up to about 950 but after half an hour the element in the furnace came out of its groove and tripped the supply by shorting to the metal load, so I’ve left it to cool to see whether it managed to anneal or not.  The tedious part is the preparations you have to make to prevent scale forming on the plates – I have some antiscale paint (it is difficult to remove after heating) and also some stainless/titanium foil that you can make packages from that you seal by folding over the edges  to exclude air- its vicious stuff as its thin, hard and sharp as a razor.  I used both tonight.  The trophy engraving is now complete – there are a number of slips and bits I would do better a second time, but it is not too bad!  I wouldn’t want to do it again with the metal in that state – I must have sharpened my gravers over 100 times in the course of engraving it – about half because I snapped the points off, which is mainly down to my lack of practice with hard metal , and half wore down and were ploughing through the metal rather than cutting it cleanly as they should – they wore much more quickly than they should.  My previous test plates were EN8 steel with a bit of carbon but I had 1/2 mm ground off the surface which got rid of some of the work hardened layer.

8th June – a bit more work on the trophy engraving, starting with sharpening about 20 gravers!  I also made a key for the wheellock so I could wind it up properly and see how/if it worked. The answer is that sear is worn and won’t hold the wheel against the mainspring, which is pretty strong.  Also the cam action that is supposed to open the pan as the wheel starts is worn. but overall it seems to be complete and potentially working.  but I have yet to work out how the trigger operates the sear  – the tail of the sear has a small spring catch that could be a safety catch.  I haven’t yet stripped the lock down so I can’t see all the works, but its in good condition with almost no rust except around the pan where it has been fired, although the wheel is perfect.  As soon as I’ve done a bit more exploration I’ll make a video.   I was hoping to make a video of the engraving of the trophy, and I have got quite a lot of bits of the engraving etc, but the job has taken maybe 12 hours, and its difficult to attend to the camera and the enraving – when I look at the camera its often run out of battery ( rather poor capacity for videos) or the card is full or its got knocked and the focus is off….. so I’m not sure I’m really keen on the job of editing it all down to a manageable length!  Anyway here is the key I made for the wheellock…..

Filing the square hole up the middle was a tedious job – luckily I had a square file just the right size.

7th June – I spent today on my tropy engraving,  the metal is somewhat challenging and I spent ages sharpening gravers that had worn blunt – I have a pile with the points broken off, but they will have to wait til another time…  I finished the pictorial stuff (excpt for a couple of bits I only just remembered) and started to think about inlaying a gold ‘1’ in the centre of the shield – I did a practice on a scrap plate and it worked reasonably well – I made the upright wide enough to take two pieces of 0.5mm gold wire side by side.  When I cut the final one I made the recess too deep so that 2 wires didn’t fill it but I couldn’t get a third piece of wire to stick in the middle as it didn’t have any undercuts to grip.  Despair for a moment! I pulled all the gold I had got fixed out – it was pretty firmly in the undercuts.  Anyway I have some silver sheet so I cut a strip the width of my cutout and ‘hammered’ that in using a polished rod in the GRS gravermax as a ‘Kango Hammer’  – it actually worked very well and stands proud in a nice convex surface that catches the eye.  It  should be gold, but that is for another time when I’m feeling rich!

I rushed the lettering so the spacing is a bit erratic!

5th June – back from a trip to London, which gave me an opportunity to pick up the bits I’d bought at Bonhams at the last auction.  I was particularly interested to see the little pocket pistol I’d bought – signed BOBY NEWMARKET on the barrel – I bid for it sight unseen as I hadn’t noticed it when I went to the viewing, but I am inclined to trust David Williams who does the Bonhams valuations, especially for ‘run of the mill’ things like that,  Anyway it was a pleasant surprise as its middle quality pistol in fair condition, its only fault is a few marks on the barrel corners near the breech where someone has used a wrench to unscrew the barrel.  It raises the usual question of just how far to go with any work on it.  It does need a quick going over to remove surface dirt and maybe a little cleaning out of the barrel engraving.  Its probably good enough  for it to be better to keep the barrel finish as is, and put up with the wrench marks than to strike up the barrel and rebrown or blue it.  The chequering on the butt is very fine and in pretty much mint condition, and the butt fits well – somewhat unusually for these basically cheap little pistols.  The wheel lock is a very fine piece and I’m pleased I got it.  It has the stamp of Jacob Schachtner of INSPRUGG  (Innsbruck) who worked from 1709 to 1778 and looks genuine – it has certainly been fired a few times.  I  guess it probably dates from around 1740 or later as Jacob wouldn’t have put his stamp on locks until he was at least in his mid twenties (?). You can see why the mechanism wasn’t much used in England at that time – its so much more complicated than a simple snaphaunch or flintlock.  Anyway its in very good condition and I think it will work, although I have to make of find a key to wind it up.  I wanted it for a video on the development of firearms, but I think I’ll have to do one on stripping the wheellock to show how it works…..

Nice clean pistol with a bit of rust and a few marks, but still well preserved.

There is a lot of work in this lock – the German gunsmiths were not deterred by the complexity and the wheellock hung on there long after it was abandoned elsewhere.

2nd June – busy day.  Penny decided it was time to put up the ‘plastic bag’ swimming pool – it is a pretty large pool, about 30 ft x 10 ft and holds 30 tons of water – We’ve had it for 12 years and its given good service – it only has one small repair. Anyway I had to do some shifting of earth to level the site again but its now filling up happily.   I did a bit more on my Trophy – I’ve got a more or less final design and started to cut the outlines.  Unfotunately I  slipped and sat on one of my cameras ( the 760D fortunately) and broke off the folding screen – it sort of works but occasionally complains that it has an error and I have to take out the battery and start again.  Anyway I managed to do a long video of the basic engraving that will need editing extensively.   I almost forgot I was supposed to be filming it!  Here is the final sketch and most of the outlines – just the thistles to outline and then its into the detail.  The scale of the stand of arms is a lot bigger than anything you’d get on a gun, so lots of opportunity for careful detail!

Getting the letter spacing is much more difficult when you are constrained by a fixed length – mostly on guns its either short words or unterminated space – it will take a bit of playing about to get this right – you can measure and count letters but it’s basically trial and error..  Its easier if you have big spaces at the ends – I don’t!

Here is a first sketch for my MAXWELL Scottish Nationals Trophy;-

Just about actual size – 50 x 120 mm

1st June – the last post was really 31st…   Fiddly job this morning, Penny’s expensive spectacles broke again – crazy design with a tiny plastic bobbin that is the hinge pin – this is the second one I’ve had to replace with a brass one – I am not a watchmaker so making a bobbin 3.4 mm diameter by 3 mm hight with parallel  grooves top and bottom is challenging!  Especially when I dropped it on the floor – it took me 10 minutes to find it but that’s a lot less than making another one!

Spectacle frames are a rip-off – look at the hinge of a £200 frame!

That’s my replacement brass bobbin – original was plastic and broke.

1st  June – Not much to report!  I spent a boring couple of hours sharpening 20 gravers that I’d used at the Northern Shooting Show and hadn’t got round to sharpening.  When dealing with that many I sort them into lots according to how worn/chipped they are so they only get as much grinding as they need – you can’t really see if you have done enough without going back to the microscope.  At each stage they get checked under the microscope to make sure the faces are all even.   I had a bit of a go at undercutting simple letters for filling with gold – didn’t get very far as its very easy to cut where you didn’t mean to, or to break the tip of the knife tool used for the undercutting – I’d like to watch a ‘proper’ engraver doing inlay on letters – I’ve seen inlay of areas of gold but that seems a lot easier, although still difficult enough!

30th May – finished off the case for the Beaumont Adams 54 bore revolver – the lids for the compartments are made from mahogany salvaged from a St John’s College punt – quite a lot of ‘conversion’ to get from a 16 ft punt to a bit of wood 1/4 inch thick but it looks the part. The knobs are better than they look in the photo as they are ridged on top – they are made from faux ivory as I happened to have a small chunk.  The box looks right for the pistol, although it is mahogany and most were oak – the construction is identical to the original boxes I have.  The advantage of using the dark baise is that it already looks somewhat dirty! – a quick run over bits with a disposable ‘ladies’ razor helps a bit too.   It is not my intention to pass the box lining off as original (anyone who knew these revolvers would see it as a slightly oddly refitted case immediately) – just to look in keeping with the state of wear of the pistol.  It is interesting that all these Adams based pistols have the pistol on the side away from the hinges  – I guess because its easier for a right handed person to pick it out that way round and it shows the right side that usually has the patent etc on it. I’ve been discussing what makes an ‘authentic’ case for a pair of duelling pistols – I think I know and then I see one that claims to be original that has all the marks I had just decided mark  cases out as adapted boxes, usually cutlery boxes.  I tend to be suspicious of fancy escutcheons on the lid without a  handle , brass corners and baise carried over the inside lip, but I’ve seen all three on a late Mortimer box claiming to be original  – I suppose its perfectly possible that a gunmaker or later a client went to a cutlery box maker for a box!

I need an oil bottle and a turnscrew, plus a round box for spare nipples.

29th May – Had a day at Cambridge Gun Club with Bev and Pete – not sure that my shooting was up to my standard in Scotland, but maybe the Cambridge clays are more difficult!  Anyway the Beretta worked OK after Pete discovered that to hit the driven clays you actually had to shoot directly at them with no lead – I tried and got a full house – I don’t think its how I usually shoot them but it worked.  I have finished relining the original box for my Beaumont Adams revolver in maroon biase – which I know is not the correct colour for that date, but it looks good.  I used the traditional rabbit skin glue, which is actually better for the job than any modern glue – it sets quite quickly and you can soften it with a bit of heat or steam.  I’ll post a photo tomorrow.  I have a project to engrave a plate for a tropy for the Scottish National comp next year – will post details in due course.

27th May – Back from the Scottish Nationals M/L shoot at Leuchars – a 10 hour drive there on Friday and 8 back on Sunday – but a very enjoyable shoot although the afternoon ( black powder hammer guns so not too bad) was shot a ‘Scotch mist’.  I had a good day, and if I hadn’t changed guns between the M/L single and double competitions I might have done better – it took me a few stands to get my eye in each time I changed guns.  I almost made third place in the double percussion but lost out in the shoot off – we both got 4, then my opponent missed one and I missed two – end of story.  Shame as that was the only medal that didn’t come back to the Anglian Muzzle loaders!   Martin was shooting in his usual consistent way and Clare had  a good shoot. Bev said he had a ‘curates egg’ of a day and had trouble finding form, but he still beat me convincingly.  I was pretty pleased on the whole, as on some not so easy stands I managed  good scores – enough to keep my enthusiasm to improve going……   I decided to resist the temptation to shoot ‘gun up’ – i.e. with the gun in the shoulder when you call for the clay, which a lot of the better shots do, as it is liable to restrict my vision and mean I don’t see the clay coming, and on slower clays it gives me too much time to wave the gun in the air! plus it isn’t possible in game shooting.  I was tempted to use gun up on one fast clay that came  from the left, passed very fast close in front and quatered away right but held my nerve and, as Martin said, started with my gun sticking up in the air – managed to hit it several times..

Me, single barrel M/L comp.

It looks as if Bev is worried about his barrels coming off!

He did, however, win some medals , which is more than I did!

I got back my bits of steel that Allan Wellings had kindly ground off for me – a perfect finish for engraving test plates or making locks – I can’t wait to start on a project.  I may have a couple of  bits spare if anyone wants a 50 x 140 x 6 mm mild steel blank – email me.

23rd May  – I’m sorry for the gap here, but things got a bit hectic and I had to make several trips to London, one to the Bonham’s viewing.  There were a couple of things I thought it might be nice to have, always with the proviso that they looked like reasonable value.  I had my eye on a detached wheellock, a box of flasks and a cased Beaumont Adams pistol that had been completely refinished in a very dramatic way – as far as I was concerned completely ruining it as a collector’s piece.  I wanted it as I have a fairly decent one and was planning to swap it into the case and use the refinished one for shooting – I was niavely expecting it to go at the estimate (£500) on account of the abuse it had suffered, but there are obviously people out there who are not put off by refinishing because it made £1200 hammer price ( around £1650 to pay)- not much different from the price of a decent one.  I did get my wheel lock, not quite as cheaply as I hoped, but still OK at only 2 bids above the bottom estimate,  I had a couple of pokes at small pistols in passing, but they all escaped my clutches – on balance most guns  made somewhere in the range of the estimates, although a lot of the swords went below estimate. There were not many really nice pistols in good condition.   The box of flasks, of course, made almost twice the top estimate.  I did see a cased pair of  Mortimer pistols with the nastiest re-browning I’ve ever seen – a sort of salmon pink colour – glinting through was the most extreme and un- sympatetic recutting of engraving I’ve seen for a long time – fortunately I didn’t have a magnifying glass with me so I was spared the worst of the horrors (and they made £10K!!!!)  There is no accounting for people, as my Mum used to say….  (If you bought them, I didn’t mean it).  Tomorrow I’m off to Scotland to shoot in the national M/L competition.  I’m hoping that my improved form means I won’t be the worst shot there!  Some hope…..

18th – started to make the small jigs for sharpening the heels of gravers – it involved milling 3 mm wide grooves across a stainless steel bar,  Unfortunately my miller has too much play in the slides and the metal is on the tough side, so the cutter didn’t survive beyond the first one.  In my usual bodging way I found it was pretty quick to cut the slot roughly with a 1 m.m. disk in an angle grinder and then file it out, but it took me all the time I had available to make two.  It would be a simple and cheap job to put them out to someone with a cnc machine, but the turnover is not really enough to justify the setup costs, so I suppose I will just have to struggle on!

I tried to make up some rabbit skin glue to stick the lining on my pistol case, but put too much water with it, so will have to start again!  Next week is the Bonham’s Arms and Armour sale on Thursday – there are a number of possible interests, as I’m looking to extend my collection backwards in time.  I’m in London on Tuesday so I’ll go to the viewing in the afternoon, and see if its worth going for the auction, or whether to bid by phone, or just sit on my hands!   There is the rest of the enormous collection of Winchester lever action rifles for sale – you could probably pick up a good repro for a song…………

16th May – SATS exams are over – last one this morning – much to the relief of the children (and me, as it means I can have my mornings back).  I always seem to have several jobs on the go at once, partly because I like to leave them on the side to ‘mature’ and come back to them later with a fresh eye!  At the moment my engraving bench is occupied by the 4 bore Tolley Barrel, and I am part way through refitting a case for the Baumont Adams revolver.  I had to spend  today making up some graver sharpening jigs as I have a couple of orders pending – I made a few of the simplified 45 degree jigs, and tomorrow I’ll make a few of the 15 degree ones, which should be a little easier.  The 45 degree ones are a bore as I have to machine a 90 degree V slot in the top of a piece of hex bar, which involves tilting the head of the miller and  fiddling to get the cut in the right place – my miller is a feeble and rickety device so it is always touch and go whether things will turn out right – in this case not too bad, only one hiccough.

Today’s jobs in progress!

15th May  – More exams in school – I did the KS2 SATS first maths papers this morning – Arithmetic and Maths Reasoning – more tomorrow…..  I got a barrel re-engraving job to do while at the Northern Shooting Show – a 4 bore double Tolley  – the barrel is a little rusted in patches and is going to be struck off and re-browned when I return it.  I have tried to get a reasonably deep re-cut as its going to loose some metal on striking off – ideally when I’m re-browning them myself  I like to lightly recut the engraving before its struck off, then recut it again while in the white before re-browning – that way I can judge the finished effect.  In this case I’ve recut a little deeper as I can see some metal will have to come off.  If necessary I’ll have the barrels back in the white. Unusually for barrel lettering, the existing lettering made extensive use of a flat graver, and so isn’t as deep as that done with a 90 degree one – as usual ther first stage of the ‘re-cutting’ was actually cleaning out the rust, but this didn’t restore things completely as it sometimes does.   I will have to make a few more engraving tool sharpening jigs soon as I keep getting the odd order, and sharpening is a really difficult thing for beginners to master.   I’m busy refitting a nice original oak pistol case that will be perfect for my Beaumaont Adams 54 bore revolver – all the inside has been stripped out in the past, so I have a clean slate to work on.  I’m doing it in deep maroon baize as I have some nice very thin stuff from ‘Bernie the Bolt’, supplier of fabrics to re-enactors.  At the moment I’m considering what glue to use to stick the lining in with.  The quick and dirty way is to use spray photo mount if you can mask it well enough, but traditionally it should be an animal glue – I do have a jar of rabbit skin glue, so maybe I’ll do the job in the traditional way and use that…..  After that I fancy making a mahogany case for my Fishenden double carriage pistol – it will require a quite small but deep box.

13th May – back from Harrogate, where I had a very busy Northern Shooting Show.  It made me realise how integral the shooting sports are to the North of England compared to our namby pamby Southern counties!  It is a huge show and very popular – crowds surge in at 8 a.m. and it is busy all day until about 4 p.m.  I met lots of interesting people, including a number of friends who I only know at the show from past years.  Saturday was better than Sunday as people stopped to look and talk – Sunday seemed like a constant procession of people spending a few seconds and moving on.  I engrave screw heads as its easy and doesn’t require concentration, and give them to any children that show a decent level of interest – on Saturday I was giving them away as fast as I was doing them but on Sunday hardly any child qualified for one and I ended up with a stock for next time.  Today I was in school invidulating the SATS exams – it was an English paper and contained one bad mistake – treating ‘team’ as a plural, when it is clearly singular! tut tut – comes to something when an English exam contains gramatical mistakes…………………………………

8th May – I made a couple of Youtube videos today on stripping and assembling a flint lock – mostly because I felt guilty about all the equipment I’d bought to make videos and hadn’t really used – so the Great British Youtube watching public will just have to suffer!  (see a link on VIDEOS at the top of the page)  Talking of suffering, a friend rang me up in distress as he is quite ill, and asked me to pick up his gun tomorrow and get rid of it for him as he will never use it again –  I guess it comes to all of us in time.  I’ll put it on my license for a while and sort it out later.   I’m off on Friday and have a pretty full day tomorrow so I ought to be sorting all my engraving stuff to take to the Northern Shooting Show on Friday – at least I did manage to make 4 new gravers in case anyone wants to buy one.  I am optimistic that I’ll get it all sorted in time…………………………………..!

7th May again – I decided to start my case making by fitting out an original pistol case from about 1855 ish that is right for an Adams style revolver.  The case has been partially stripped out, so I just had to get rid of the remnants of the internal lining – stuck on with the usual animal glue so it is relatively easy to steam it and scrape it out – horrid sticky mess though.  The bit I find difficult with fitting/refitting cases is making the partitions – they are thin strips of wood (around 4mm thick x 45mm wide) that need to be chamfered to a fine 1mm edge at the top to wrap the fabric over.  I have yet to find a satisfactory way of putting the bevels on – using a low angle hand plane doesn’t get a very even result so I tried to set up my router table to do the job, but that didn’t do a very even job either.  Maybe I’ll try sanding the bevel on tomorrow – at least its covered by fabric!  When I come to making a new box there is also the problem of the lining strip that goes round the inside of the box – they have a slight chamfer at the top on the outside, and a steeper one on the inside and also a slight recess about 8mm down from the top on the inside that takes the top edge of the fabric.  The lining strips are very conspicuous as the wood shows above the fabric, and need to be made quite cleanly with sharp angles etc. so can’t be fudged.  Not sure how I’ll make them, especially the outside chamfer of maybe 5 degrees which is there to clear the opening of the lid.  I may try using my surface planer in some way with a jig, but handling thin strips of wood is very tricky, it might be better to clamp the wood down and use a hand router with an angled baseplate – maybe stick a soleplate on at an angle  and fix up some guides – I need to think about it!  I can at least temporarily screw the strips to a bearer as the holes can be filled and will be covered by the fabric………

7th May – Sunday morning AML shoot was good – I managed to hit half the clays, which was my target, as they are now quite challenging, although there was one ‘teal’  coming straight towards the muzzle of the gun that I think only one person managed to miss, and only once at that.   I have to correct my ‘tool porn’ post –  I said that there were over a dozen models of the expensive planes – actually when I counted it was 36!  And some hand saws at over £200 each – equipping your ‘tool porn’ workshop with fancy hand tools is going to cost you the price of quite a decent car – which I suppose is fair enough if you like that sort of thing!   I’m doing well filling the skip, and can now get to my woodworking machines – I’ve planed up some 3/8th thick oak to make a pistol box this morning, and fixed my big router back in its table with a car jack under it for height adjustment, so I’m now ready to start!  Now I need to decide what I’m going to box up!

4th May – I can now tell you with some authority that trying to load a flintlock in a hailstorm is no fun.  Its really difficult fishing the hailstones out of the pan before they wet the priming powder!  Apart from that, the ‘Have A Go’ day was good and the participants had fun – fortunately we had just about done the first session when the hail arrived, so we could retire for a cup of tea, and we had similarly just about reached the end of the second session when the lashing rain and howling wind overtook us and lunch beckoned.  My Manton flintlock was going off well – just one ‘flash in the pan’ and a couple of misfires as one flint was on its last legs ( my fault for being famously mean with flints), and one noticeably slow discharge.  We’ve got our regular 40 bird competition tomorrow so I’ll take a percussion double, maybe  the Venables. I should be spending time clearing things out at home as I have a 10 yard skip parked in the drive waiting to be filled with rubbish from my sheds and the house – so far its half full of stuff from the yard and one shed – it would be a pity not to use up all the expensive space…..

I had a look in the Axminster catalogue for a fine saw for making the dovetails – their catalogue always amuses me, I’m afraid I call it ‘tool porn’ for all the ridiculaously expensive cult tools, especially planes – you can pay up to about £470 for a plane, and then you can buy special fancy screwdrivers for working on it for about £25 each – you’ll probably need a set of eight to cover all the screws – oh and if you want the two alternative blocks to give you very slightly different blade angles they will set you back over £100. Now there are of course over a dozen different planes in the series, so you are heading for quite an expensive hobby, even without all the other fancy hand tools you will be needing – and I think you can even buy special bags to keep each of them in – truly tool porn!  Me, I’ll stick to my old slightly rusty Record plane (or more probably the old planer-thicknesser that I had to get the rust off the beds when I finally fought my way through to it yesterday), but they do have a basic saw for £13 that will probably do for the joints…………

3rd May – I seem to have been rather busy with school etc the last few days and the change of month passed me by!  I decided that it would be fun to try my hand at making reproduction pistol cases, particularly for revolvers as they are rather easier to make – they were mostly oak and the tops were often screwed on with small brass screws.  They also have a simple escutcheon on the lid that is not too hard to make as its circular.  The only problem is getting suitable stop hinges that only open to about 95 degrees.  You can buy them but they are expensive – I do have one pair on a rather boring cutlery box so I’ll use those.   I was going to try using a router and a jig for cutting the dovetails but the originals have very small wedges, smaller than any router bits. Anyway I watched a couple of Youtube videos of cutting dovetails and came to the conclusion that it wasn’t really such a big deal making them by hand, and they would be more authentic.  It struck me that there were two very different approaches to getting to be able to make passable joints – one can either start out very carefully doing everything as well as possible, aiming for a perfect result and taking a long time about it so that the first one eventually and with luck turns out right, or one can go at it fast, without worrying too much about getting perfection, but doing it in a fraction of the time of the first method, and then just doing it again several times, keeping the speed but getting better each time.  The second method suits my personality, and means that it doesn’t mattter if you make a mistake – you will have learnt for the next one.  Anyway my second and third attempts are shown below.   Tomorrow I’m helping run a ‘Have a Go ‘ day at Cambridge Gun Club – we will be giving each person 8 percussion shots and two flint shots – I think w’ll have 8 ‘customers’ each so thats 80 shots which is quite a lot with a muzzle loader.  I’ll use my Sam Nock percussion as it takes the same wads etc as my flint Manton.  Should be a busy day.  Then on Sunday we have our monthly shoot at Cambridge so its going to be a very black powder bank holiday w/e.  Its getting near to the Northern Shooting Show – I’ll be packing my kit into the Land Cruiser and heading North to set up my stand in a week- with luck it won’t be too cold as I shall be camping in it when the geat is out. Most of the MLAGB gang camp so we have a bit of a party on Saturday night.  If you come to the show, make sure you look me out in the ‘Artisans’ area.

The wood on the top one (third attempt) is a bit thick for a box so it looks wrong.  The bottom box is a real one that will have my Beaumont Adams in it when I’ve done the inside.

28th April – I’m sure I posted on here a couple of days ago, but must have forgotten to press the ‘publish’ button!  Put it down to age…..  I had a pleasant trip to deepest Norfolk to see a friend who has a nice collection.  I have been invited to go and photograph some of his guns for the blog, so as soon as I can find a couple of days free I’ll go.  The O/U is now finished – I reshaped the ramrod end as it didn’t rest easy against the barrel and rib, and it now looks comfortable!  I was looking through ‘The Price Guide to Antique Guns and Pistols’ by Peter Hawkins – its of course massively out of date (1977) so the prices are of historic interest only, but it has over 1000 illustrations and useful comments – Peter Hawkins was the Christies gun man before they gave up selling guns, so his observations are still valid.  I am amused by some of his comments on the aesthetics of  some lesser pistols!   I had a session of making cloth covers for any gun or pistol cases that don’t already have them, as they are handy if you pile up cases and try to pull ones out of the middle of the pile!  I need to shift some more of my collection to make room for new acquisitions – I am putting a cased pair of Liege pistols that Dick restored some time ago on the For Sale page.  Email me if you are interested.  I was looking out some locks for a YouTube video on lock mechanisms and found these three as a nice size contrast;-The biggest is from an East India Company wall gun of 1793, its 9 1/4 inches long.  The second is (probably) a bog standard India pattern type Musket lock, probably of the Napoleaonic war period ( I don’t have the musket it came off) and the little lock is from a fine silver mounted horse pistol by Barbar of about 1760.  All have in common a mainspring without a link, a frizzen without roller  and a frizzen spring held by an external screw.

24th April – I went into school as The Black Knight this morning, having put my suit of armour in the classroom under wraps yesterday – great fun with the year 1 & 2 kids (5/6/7).    I spent another few hours sorting the O/U pistol first bending the left cock to match the right, and then inumerable goes at filing a bit off the sear and putting it back and checking to see if the full and half cock poisitions of the cocks lined up.  I had made the new sear as a careful copy of the old one ( which was a bit bent and not working) but in the end had to file the nose down 1 1/2 mm to get the cocks to line up – ergo the damaged sear could not have been the right one?  Anyway I got them lined up to a pretty good tolerance – I then found when I put the locks in the pistol ( I’d been doing the lining up in a jig) that the new sear arm needed slightly bending to give a bit of clearance on the trigger blade. Once done the sear was hardened and then tempered at about 225 degrees C to take the brittleness out of it.   I just need to decide if I need to modify the ramrod, and we are done.  I had a look at the remaining Harding little pistol parts – the stock is in need on pretty major surgery – its one of those jobs where you think it might almost be easier to restock it rather than struggel to repair, but that is almost never a good option as any value in the pistol is much reduced compared to a careful repair.  I cleaned off the wood with paint stripper to see what was there and discovered that there were old repairs using panel pins – I need to get the furniture off and have a good look, but in the meantime here is a photo;-

22nd April – yet more lovely weather!  I sorted out the boat from yesterday and then remade the ramrod for the O/U pistol as it had been badly damaged – I bought a nice length of straight grained ebony about 30 mm square some time ago and cut some lengths into 12 x 12 mm for ramrods so I cut a bit off a long length for the pistol and turned it in the woodturning lathe – it was quite short, so no problem with whip – actually I was amazed at how strong the ebony was, I turned a bit down to about 1 mm diameter to separate it and it was quite difficult to break!  Anyway its all coming together now – I realised that before I can finish the sear to give the exact positions I need to bend one of the cocks slightly as it was at some time dropped on it, the bend is no problem as its only a few mm but it will make a difference to the sear.  I will heat it up before bending in case that turns out to be problematic too.  I was going to try to soften the little screw that is sheared off in the lockplate by playing a very fine flame on it – I have the perfect torch – a Turbogas 90 – that I had for lead welding, it can use a hypodermic syringe of 18 gauge for a nozzle so has an extremely fine flame.  Unfortunately it has run out of Oxygen, so I’ll have to wait while some comes care of ebay!  Oh, and I did manage to fit in an hour and a half of climbing (bouldering) this afternoon, so I should sleep well tonight! They are making all the climbs more difficult, or I am getting worse, I prefer the former explanation.

Here is the browned O/U barrel with the new ramrod.

21st April – another lovely day here! Took the dinghy to Wolverston and had a decent sail on the Orwell – extremely pleasant, just an adequate breeze for 4 in the dinghy without any gymnastics,   I didn’t have any time for anything else, but I was thinking about the problems with the internal lock parts of the O/U pistol – when I got it to sort there were a couple of bits of the bridles broken where they were thin round the screws, even though they shouldn’t come under any great stress.  I asked a materials scientist friend of Giles who was sailing with us about possible causes, and she offered to take a sample and polish it and look at it under a Scanning Electron Micaroscope to see what the structure is and look for any possible problems.   There is always someone in Cambridge who can provide expert advice on technical problems if you can find them!  I think all the bits of the pistol works have been hardened to an inch of their lives – one of  the screws was broken off in the lock plate and as there was nothing to get hold of,  I tried to drill a small hole through the embedded screw – my brand new HSS drills wouldn’t even mark it.  Screws are not usually that hard as it makes them too brittle, so I’m not sure what is going on.  I don’t know if I dare to put the whole lot in a furnace and temper them to dark blue to get rid of any brittleness.

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20 th April  I spent a happy 4 hours on the replacement sear for the O/U pistol, as well as getting the boat ready for a sail tomorrow – take advantage of the weather while you can!  For the sear, I milled a strip of spring steel to fix the main shape and then filed it – I am now at the stage of very cautiously filing the nose of the sear to set the full cock position – since the pistol has a lock on each side, its critical that the cocks are aligned at half and full cock or it looks like poor workmanship or a bodged repair.  The sear probably needs to be filed and honed after hardening and tempering to within 1/10 th of a mm.  I had a couple of problems with getting clearance for the sliding safety that was catching on the sear, until I discovered a drip of araldite on the safety from some crude previous repair!  I always leave small parts attached to the bulk of the metal until the last moment as it makes life much easier – After shaping the sear I welded the arm on and tidied it up.  It would all be so much easier if I had a working cnc miller!

New and old stacked – not a bad fit!

Final fitting and tidying up  to do, but more or less there, thank goodness!

19th April  I put the O/U pistol together and the right hand lock would not cock – on taking it out the sear fell out – half the bearing had broken off – this was the sear that had been welded in the past, and had a folded over tip I had to straighten out.  Not sure what happened to the metal here, but it clean broke off the thin bit of the bearing.  I guess I could get Jason to pile a bit of weld on it, or do it myself, but the nose of the sear is still a source of concern after it was straightened out, so I think its a case of making a new sear.  I’ve photgraphed the sear against a rule so I can work out the necessary two hole centres, one for the bearing and the other for the curve that fits against the tumbler – if I get those right and drill/mill my blank it should  fit when I attack the rest of the outline.  Its a job I could do without, but I don’t think there is any sensible alternative.   It won’t happen for a few days as the weather is so nice that I’m getting the dinghy ready to go sailing on Sunday on the Stour.

There is a small crack from the bottom just to the right of the bearing hole so definitely not worth trying to repair!

The arm was already repaired – I guess its just a bad piece of metal!

18th April  I finished the browning of the O/U pistol barrel – a nice even figure.  I have cleaned out the chequering a little, not recut it, just got rid of the ingrained dirt that always obscures it.  I also renewed the escutchon as the oniginal had dents and scratches that I couldn’t get out.  It is looking good.  I ordered some old Nettlefold woodscrews from ebay to engrave at the Northern Shooting Show where I’ll be doing my regular engraving demonstrations – I give engraved screws to children who show interest.  The seller, Tony,  rang me to say he hadn’t got the size I’d specified but as the length isn’t important he had others suitable.  We had a very interesting discussion about the uses of pre war woodscrews – he has a brisk business selling old stock to all sorts of restoration projects and reenactment makers – I’m his first screw-head engraver!  Anyway as I give them away to children he kindly upped the quentities he was sending – so I probably have a lifetime’s supply now.  I will engrave a couple for him – he said he will make a donation to a charity that makes prostheses for children  without any official funding  – have a look at http://www.teamunlimbited.org and donate if you feel inspired.  I’ll make a donation in return for all those extra screws too.   I finished the tumbler/sear/sear spring bits of the dog lock – enough to demonstrate how the horizontal sear works.  Shame I haven’t got the mainspring casting for it – maybe I’ll make one some day. ( the nail pivot for the sear is so that I can easily remove it to show the workings).

17th April – I made a ramrod for the Purdey Rifle – it needed something as it looked a bit bare without one. I didn’t have time to make a proper one out of the ebony that I have, so I made a simple one with a dummy instead of a worm.  I went to a re-enactors fair last year and there was a chap selling ash blanks for arrrows so I bought all of the straight ones he had and have kept them taped to a straight edge.  The nominal 10 mm ones fitted the pipes on the Purdey almost perfectly – I just needed to put the blank in the lathe and sand the inboard end down a bit to give a good fit, then fit the dummy end and the top end and colour the wood up a bit, and the gun looks much happier although its a nice rifle and does deserve better – I’ll get round to it when I have time to round off the ebony squares and can find my worm ends.   I’m rebrowning the O/U barrel again – I stripped the over browning off in the electrolytic deruster and then polished off the residue with 7000 grade paper.  Its looking good and I’m proceeding very carefully to avoid a repeat of the over browning.  I am fettling up a partial set of castings of an English doglock as a demonstration piece to show a lock with a horizontal sear – it took me a while to work out how the lock was supposed to function as it wasn’t immediately obvious from the bits I had – I have now got the sear working on full and half cock, and need to make a sear spring – its also missing the mainspring and the steel/frizzen/hammer or whatever you choose to call it.  Not sure if I’ll bother to make all the bits as I don’t intend to make a gun from it at the moment.

16th April – Busy day – I got out a couple of percussion rifles to see what I might put on my license and shoot at some point this summer – I found bullet moulds for my Staudenmeyer 30 bore – it takes a 34 bore ball and a 10 thou patch, and my Purdey that takes a 95 bore ball with a 12 thou patch. Anyway I did a bit of casting – the best accessory I’ve come across is the pourer designed by Jeff Tanner consisting of a small CO2 cylinder with the outlet hole cleared and a section cut off the top of the back, mounted on a shaft with a wooden handle.  Keep it in the molten lead and just pour it nto the bullet mould – keeps the dross out, and once the mould is up to temperature it gives a nice clean cast.   I occasionally get asked if I do gold inlay, so I thought it was time I had a go, so I splashed out on 2 inches of 0.5 mm pure gold wire – that was about £8, so £1 per quarter inch!  Anway I blew a bit of it on a test inlay 1 mm wide, which worked except that in punching it in I slightly dented the steel and didn’t quite get the groove I’d cut filled – there was not much surplus gold above the surface.  I have a supply of fine silver in the shape of vacuum gaskets so I decided it would be cheaper to mess about with that and save my remaining  bit of gold!  I did a quick test to see if the silver was soft enough (it needed annealing), using a script letter I had previously cut – and it worked – this time I had a decent excess of silver after I had punched it in, so it filled the cut properly.  I made the cuts with a number of cuts with the square graver to remove metal, then cut to the edges with the square graver canted to give a near vertical edge, then undercust with an Onglette as best I could.  I also nicked the bottoms of the grooves with the point of the square graver to give the silver some more purchase.  It looks possible, at least worth trying to do it properly!

Well, its a start!

14th April – I’ve been away for a couple of days sorting our cottage in Cornwall ready for letting via AirB&B – Mainly a new cooker and smarten up the terrace.   Back home I was looking through my bits and pieces to see what projects I could come up with.  I found a massive original East India Company flintpock by Moore (with replacement cock) that I was going to drop into my wall gun that had been converted to a punt gun.  I also have a set of original parts for a 1768 military pistol that needs a barrel and a stock and  few bits and pieces. Plus a set of parts for a pair of Wogden duelling pistols (minus cocksand stocks and a few bits) and a set of castings and wood for a double flint gun.  I ought to put some of the bits on my ‘guns for sale’ page so other people could have a go at making them up – I’ll sort through and see what I can find.  I’m still trying to get a cock for the other little Harding that almost matches my Post Office pistol.  I’m in communication with Jessica at the Post Office Museum, they have a little Harding pistol very similar to mine and I emailed to ask if it has the crown and broad arrow stamps on lock and barrel like mine. If not, they should aquire mine and have the real thing!  The reason I was rumaging was to find a set of doglock castings that I had somewhere, to use them  in a video – I found them – there are a few bits missing but there are enough to show the principle – so I started to file them up so I could make the bits I| have work enough to demonstrate the horizontal sear

10th April – I was doing my homework in preparation for making some videos on the history of antique firearms and came across a series of youtube videos – called Forgotten Weapons -from the US that describe some of the guns being offered by Rock Island auction house – mostly breech loaders but a few real antiques like the Lorenzoni and a couple of wheellocks. The videos are well made and informative so I’ll take what I can learn from them and not duplicate what they already do.  I have yet to see a video of anyone actually firing a Lorenzoni but there must be someone out there who has.  I do have a friend who has one in his collection but I haven’t so far managed to persuade him to let me fire it!!!!!

8th April – I ordered a 3 m length of 1/4 inch by 2 inch mild steel bar, cut into 300 mm lengths to use as trial plates for engraving practice.  A friend offered to surface grind them to get rid of the cold rolled skin that makes engraving them a bit like engraving a ploughed field although you can’t actually see the unevenness.  When they are ready I’ll cut them in half and put some on the ‘For Sale’ page.  I have a project for half a dozen of them – I want to make a set representing different vernacular gun engraving styles ( i.e. from guns that were intended to be used, not presentation pieces which I find altogether over the top).  I am fond of the late 17th century / early 18th century style – strawberry leaves and grotesque faces, but things went a bit quiet on the engraving front for a few years, then a rather loopy but quite sparse style came in towards the third quarter of the 18th century.  The last quarter of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th were the heyday of the Palmer style with running leaf borders and poor representations of birds and dogs with liberal additions of scrolls.  The second quarter of the 19th century saw a marked improvement in the technical aspects of gun engraving with Gumbrell and contempories which persisted alongside the heirs to the Palmer tradition, plus the introduction of all over simple scrollwork and a wide variety of border styles round locks with a range of finess.  By the late 19th century engraving had become almost the only  thing that distinguished the guns of the top gunmakers like Boss, Purdy and Holland, causing them to adopt distinctive engraving styles – at that point I loose interest!  Before anyone corrects me, I do realise that the above is a gross simplification, but does convey a sense of the progress of the art. See Beginners Guide to Engraving on this blog….  Anyway it will make a nice set of exercises for me!

7 th April – Sorry about the absence of diary entries – other work took precedence.  I browned the big o/u barrel – it was going nicely but a bit light coloured, so I used my ex PCB browning –  I must have swabbed it on too liberally and then wiped off some of the excess as it went very wrong – part of the barrel went quite black, some stayed brown with the twist pattern visible and some appeared to have lost most of its browning – there is nothing for it but to start again.  I will use the electrolytic derusting as that should remove most of the browning without taking any more metal off.  I may have to go over it with 2000 grit paper but will take care to avoid the lettering.  I am still busy with sorting out some patent work so it will have tobe put on hold for a week or so!  I feel stupid as I am perfectly aware that you need to put the browning on very sparingly – hardly wetting the surface at all.

3rd April – I was preparing the barrel of the big over and under flintlock pistol and decided that my expensive ( £25) 6 inch No 6 file was a bit dead so I remembered reading somewhere that you could revitalise files by putting them in dilute (10%) Nitric acid, so as I happen to have some Nitric Acid left over from my experiments with anodising, I tried it.  well, the file fizzed happily for a few minutes before I rescued it, and did seem a quite a bit better. so I put most of my 6 inch files in the acid for a few minutes.  They need drying and oiling afterwards as the surface is highly reactive.  Anyway,  I finished the barrel with 3 grades of wet and dry wrapped round a hard, flat object ( small sharpening stone)  – 600, 1000 and 2000 after the No 6 draw filing.  I’ve given it about half a dozen rustings so far, not letting any of them run too long, and its developing a good figure – those  classic flintlock over and under pistols usually had well figured barrels, and the two barrels were made separately and brazed together – I have a feeling that they matched up the two barrels at the joint pretty carefully to respect the twist pattern.

2nd April II – Yesterday I got a very nice 12 bore boxlock ejector by Askill for a friend, who was delighted with it – nice side by side shotguns can be had for a song as hardly anyone shoots them now.  I finished the engraving of Fred’s gun bits today – a few difficulties, like a screwhead that my normal gravers couldn’t mark – I had to dig away with the GRS pneumatic, and then only managed a few crude cuts – it wasn’t hard, just very tough.  Another one I had to engrave was dead hard, but that was Ok because it annealed OK.  I finished the false breech for a single barreled gun of 1770 style, based loosly on that of my Twigg single of about the same date – The metal was pretty horrible and part of it had to be done with the GRS, I am ashamed to say!   I’ve been stripping and fettling a heavy flintlock over and under pistol – one of the locks wouldn’t engage half cock, and then wouldn’t engage either bent.  stripping it revealed the tip of the sear bent into a nice U shape!  The leg of the sear had been welded, so the tip must have been annealed in the welding process and being quite thin, just bent right over.  Anyway I managed to heat it up to red heat and bend it with a fine pair of round nosed pliers until I could flatten it.  It was then heated to bright red and quenched and tempered so it is now working.  In stripping the pistol I had some difficulty in freeing the ‘nail’ in the false breech tang – in most guns it goes through the stock into the trigger plate, so is a ‘bolt’, but in this case it was just a woodscrew, which explains why it was really difficult to get out even when it had started.  ( loading these photos I realised I still needed to engrave the ‘flanks’ of the false breech as they shouldn’t be left plain.)

Obviously the screw is not the proper screw – its just to hold it for engraving!

2nd April – The blog has just passed 2 million visits in the  5 years it has been going – here is a snapshot at 11 a.m.

Online Users: 0
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Today: 93 475
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Last 7 Days: 1,313 9,010
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Last 365 Days: 96,261 693,216
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31 March – I had to make a new pair of nipples for the Venables as the originals were just too small to hold the standard caps tightly and I had a couple of ‘misfires’ where the cap had fallen off, so I had to pinch each cap slightly before putting it on.  Is a shame as the originals were ‘proper’ nipples with a small (about 1 m.m.) hole through a narrow waist in the centre of the nipple.  I made a video of the making, but the second one just didn’t go well!  I got too gung ho and tried to cut the titanium  too fast with my HSS tool – quite spectacular as the heat set light to the swarf coming off the cut and there was a very bright flash that burnt the tip of the tool away!  Not sure if I have that on video or not.  Anyway I eventually  ended up with a pair of nipples that are a perfect fit for the caps.  Then lawn mowing took over……………..

30th March – shooting at Cambridge Gun Club – with the Venables.  It obviously fits me as I only missed one clay in the first 8 but it was downhill from there as usual – still I do manage most of the ones that  simulate game!  I shot some ‘driven’ clays later with my big Miruku and that was OK ish so not too unhappy at the result!  There was a supplementary shoot in the afternoon with long range clays – 60 yds and up – I didn’t take part as it seemed a triumph of hope over expectation  – the best score was 5/13.  At that range with the average antique barrel I would reckon that at best you would stand a 50% chance of breaking the clay even if it was in the centre of your pattern as there are usually plenty of clay sized holes at that range.  I’ve now got all the bits for filming videos, although I’m having trouble getting my old camera to cooperate with the HDMI screen.   I’m trying to put together something on the history of firearms as an intro, but the trouble is that its very difficult to get hold of anything before about 1750 to film, and I don’t know anyone who shoots wheellocks, or Mingulet locks for that mattter.  Anyway I’m working on it, and on some more engraving videos.  I have been doing a bit of practice and I am beginning to think it might just be worth using special steel gravers – GRS sell some in what they call GLENSTEEL – I have one and as long as you don’t break the point it lasts much longer than my normal ones before it needs sharpening – the only trouble is that when the point breaks it usually takes of quite a chunk of metal and takes longer to sharpen as its harder. I have one single barreled false breech to engrave for Fred, so I’ll try and do a video of that – I may copy the false breech of my Joseph Manton Tubelock as its quite attractive and not too longwinded – to be decided, as they say.

29th March – I have thought of a great new business opportunity – selling newspapers from which every mention of Brexit has been expunged – I anticipate a brisk trade, although I fear there won’t be much left to read !  Had a pleasant morning discussing guns with a regular client who collected a pair of pistols that we renovated, and left a nice cased pair of 1785 ish pistols that need a bit of attention, and a hefty over and under flint pocket pistol of around 1810 or so that will freshen up into something better.  I didn’t get any time for engraving – I’m keen to keep my hand in and maybe do a couple more videos – I guess that ones of something being engraved are likely to be more popular than explanations!  I just remembered in time that I’m shooting tomorrow and that the Venables is a 14 bore and all my overshot cards are a bit small at 16 bore, so I had to dig out a 14 bore punch and make a few.  I will try the Venables, as I’ve spent so long doing it up that I need to get some use from it.  I think I have now sorted out resoldering barrels after three tries, so I’m quite gung ho about another try!

28th March – Almost at the end of another month!  I had another look at the Venables with a view to shooting it – it still has the nipples that I bought it with, and they have a fairly big hole right the way through.  I tried to fit the spare titanium nipples I have but they wouldn’t go all the way in – checking the depth of the tapped holes in the gun I think it is not that they are too long in the thread, but that I haven’t tapped them far enough up to the flange.  Its a problem because the dies always have a long taper on the lead-in and don’t cut right up to the shoulder.  I tried relieving the thread at the top but obviously not enough.  My die is ground off on the reverse side so that it doesn’t have such a long taper, but obviously not enough to do the job.  I would have a go at sorting the titanium ones, but tomorrow is a busy day and I’m shooting on Saturday – in fat I don’t know when I will be able to fit in next week’s shopping… maybe we’ll starve!  I’ve continued to sort out what I will need to do my videos of guns – I  am making some test runs to try out different lighting arrangements.

27th March – I survived my Ofsted interrogation so far, we have to return tomorrow afternoon to learn what the Inspector makes of our school!  I’ve put another screwheads video on youtube – and on the VIDEOS page here.  I’m just doing a few simple ones as practice for what I hope will be a series on the history of firearms.  We have an AML clay shoot at Cambridge on Saturday, I may just put the Venables on my ticket and try it, or I might follow my resolution and just stick to one gun,  my old Samuel Nock.  I have been a bit dissapointed at my shooting with my 20 bore hammer gun (when I give up on stuffing things down the barrel of the muzzle loader) – it has a very tight choke, but I don’t think that is the main reason – I have a feeling that it is a bit light and I end up waving it about in the air.  I might just take my big Miroku U/O and see if I can still shoot with that, it hasn’t had an outing for ages.

26th March – it never rains but it pours!  We learnt this evening that the school is to have an OFSTED inspection tomorrow, so governors have to go in to be quizzed by one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors about what we are doing to improve the school! I wish there was a simple answer to that, but I don’t expect repairing the doorbell will cut much ice!  My youtube videos are getting a few views, I’ve nearly done another one, but I find that I really need a decent microphone – is there no end to the expense involved?  They are relaying the road just outside our house through the nights this week, and at the moment there is an enormous machine that is shaking the whole house in a very disturbing way – no chance of sleep while that is going on 20 yards from the bedroom window, so not only do I have to face an OFSTED grilling, but have to do it after a sleepless night. Please excuse my somewhat negative post!

25th March – Did our STEM club at school – we were doing the experiment of inverting a glass over a burning candle – two competent scientists and we still couldn’t work out exactly what is going on – all the simple explanations on the web are clearly wrong, being far too simple – I think it is a number of processes going on simultaneously but we couldn’t work out any numbers.  The main problem is where all the oxygen ends up after it is burnt – it should be converted to carbon dioxide and take a comparable volume, but it doesn’t!  Puzzle…….  And while at school I was asked to take my suit of armour in and be a knight next term – makes a change from fixing their doorbell today!

24th March – I had a comment (see CONTACTS) from someone who took me to task for restoring firearms and for shooting animals.  As it’s the first time I’ve received such a comment I thought I’d reply via this post.  I support the right of my correspondent to hold whatever legal views she likes, and am more than happy to give my response in detail on this occasion.   My interest in restoring antique firearms is separate from my interest in shooting – in fact most of the restoration I do is of guns that could not be used, and would be unsuitable for any kind of sporting use.  Our cultural and engineering history has been intimately connected with firearms for the last 400 years – during that time they represented the only advanced mechanical systems manufactured in any significant quantities, and most advances in metalurgy and engineering were associated with firearms manufacture – two examples illustrate this, the first that around 7 milion examples of the Brown Bess musket and its derivatives were made to a broadly similar design in the years from1700 to 1830 while NO other engineering products even reached a thousanth of that output – giving rise to the concept of pattern manufacture and standardisation.  The second example is that when Newcomen invented the steam engine he was dependent upon technology developed for cannon boring to produce the cylinders. Guns represented the peak of both quantity and quality production and  are deeply embedded in our history – To ignore or allow such important artefacts to decay because of a recent cultural shift, however well meaning, would be to trample on our history.    As far as using  guns for shooting is concerned, most people who shoot do so at either clays or targets, not game, and as such enjoy a challenging and physical sport that harms no-one.  I defend my right to shoot game  – like the majority of the population I eat meat and don’t shy away from occasionally killing to provide some of that meat rather than sub-contract all the killing to others.  I am, as are my friends , always conscious of our duty to have regard for our quarry and to avoid wounding, and there are some aspects of game shooting, particularly when it doesn’t give rise to useful food, that I disapprove of.  As far as culling and control is concerned, in most cases shooting is widely regarded as the most humane method – think of more humane alternatives to shooting for deer or boar control.  One  large estate in Eastern England has been told by Nature England that it needs to cull 400  older head of deer a year to maintain a healthy population – I don’t know of any method more humane than (skilled) shooting to selectively cull such large numbers – perhaps my correspondent knows of a better way? Humans have removed the top predators from some species and we need to take on that role to preserve the health of the stock.  There are now supposed to be more deer in the UK than at any time in our history, and its likely to be true of wild boar within 30 years. Finally,  I challenge the assertion she makes that I have no moral conscience or compassion – it just may not align completely with hers, although I bet it does over the vast majority of issues!

P.S. I did a Youtube video on engraving screw heads – see VIDEOS at the top.

23rd March – I didn’t find the foresight of the Venables so I had great fun making a new one – very fiddly!  the hole appeared to be tapped 8 B.A. so I made mine that size although Dick said they were mostly 7 B.A.  Anyway the Venables is now complete and a very fine gun too!  I may replace one of my shooting doubles with it.  I’ve been planning a few more Youtube videos for the future – I’m told that things like watching engraving are popular, so I’ll do a few, but I really want to do some on the history of firearms – I’d like to  be able to show some of the splendid guns that various friends have in their collections – there is so much of interest in the history.

20th March – I bit the bullet and had a go at straightening the stock of the Venables which if you look back in the diary, you’ll see had a 3/4 inch cast off. First it is necessary to set up a jig to hold the gun (stripped of its trigger guard and trigger plate and locks) against a straight piece of wood that can act as the reference plane, packing the muzzle so that the centreline of the gun is parallel to the reference plane and clamping the muzzle to the plane and the bench so it can’t move or twist. Your reference  plane must be straight and rigid – my wooden plank was backed by a 1″ x 3″ steel bar that ensured it didn’t bend as the clamp on the butt was tightened. The stock is clamped to the reference plane with suitable packing in the lock area.  You can now measure the offset of the centre line of the gun from the reference plane and measure the amount of cast-off ( about 3/4 inch in this case).  I wrapped the lock area in aluminium foil to protect it from heat as I wanted to restrict the bending to the wrist area, and wrapped the wrist in a sheet of kitchen roll folded in half.  I poured a little very hot vegetable oil on the tissue and played a heat gun on medium heat on the wrist – it takes a long time for the heat to penetrate the wood, but eventually ( >3/4 hour) you should find that the butt will flex a bit, and its time to start gently tightening the clamp holding the butt to the reference plane and measuring the cast. Make sure you clamp so that the stock isn’t twisted. There is no need to rush this stage and force the wood as it is likely to spring back if it isn’t allowed to relax into its new shape.  The butt will spring back a bit when its no longer held by the clamp, so its best to tighten the clamp on the butt just a bit more than you want the evenatual cast off to be – I bent it to about 0 to 1/8 inch cast off and then went off and had lunch and did a few jobs so it had about 3 hours to cool  – when I unclamped it, it has a cast of around 3/16th to 1/4 inch – just perfect for me.  So I’ve now put it back together – the lockpockets were a bit of a tight fit as presumably the wood has changed shape slightly.  I was pleased to see that the finish of the stock is still perfect.The only bit of the job left is to find the nipples and the foresight bead….. I’m sure they were somewhere! – there is always something else to do to finish the job.

This is how it started out! It really is that bent.

Caliper set to offset of centreline so still about  1/2″ cast off

I kept the temperature to less than 100C – just takes time to work

Done -about 1/4 inch of cast off now – perfect for me.

19th March – watched bits of Holts sale on the web – I was right about the percussion guns being overpriced – lots didn’t sell and some just crept in over the line.  I didn’t buy – I was hoping the Fenton repro flint rifle (410) would go for near the bottom estimate as I wanted it to shoot but had reservations about the lockwork, which didn’t quite match up to the standard of the rest of the rifle – any way it just crept above my limit so I didn’t bid – I usually wait until everyone has had a shout before I come in – I always bid at Holts by phone as I feel it gives more control.    I picked out two other lots to watch, the Samuel Nock single gun (526) which had a perfect barrel, although I’m sure it was a Birmingham gun and I wouldn’t attach much weight to the Nock name on the barrel – there was no name on the lock – it made £800 – I might  have been vaguely interested at £700 but by the time you add the 30% buyer’s premium (Inc VAT) things get expensive.  My thoughts that the Pape boxlock was nice (1700)  were shared by a couple of other people, so it went above top estimate.  Pistols did a bit better than percussion long guns but the auctioneers were having to work hard to shift stuff.  The Unsold Lots sale will be bulging!   I filled in the time around the auction finishing off the false breech of Fred’s gun – I am reasonably happy with how it looks – I put a flower and foliage on the tip of the tang and then realised that traditionally the tang engraving has a cutout background so I dug it out.  My struggle with the metal of the false breech was real – the right side was soft, and the left side was a pig to engrave, so I resorted to the GRS gravermax for all of it.  If you look carefully you might see the difference between the engraving of the flower and foliage near the breech that I did by hand and the ‘assisted’ engraving of the rest.  It is almost impossible to reproduce the effect of hand engraving using an ‘assisted’ graver – but you would need to be quite used to looking in detail at old style engraving to know the difference.  But it explains why any traditional ‘English’ engraving done using a GRS on Lindsay graver or a hammer looks completely wrong to me – and unfortunately that is most of the ’19 century English’ stuff turned out in the States.

18th March – Don’t know what happened, I put up a post on my viewing at Holts but it didn’t get published, I must have forgotten to press the button. Anyway a few things of interest – lots of expensive percussion double shotguns – all the rage and some are definately overpriced, particularly if you want them for shooting.  The best bargain I saw was a single barreled percussion with a bore to die for  – I’d buy it but I have a couple already and am trying to slim down my collection.  I was tempted by a Pape boxlock ejector which was very sound and pretty but I’ve already got a gun lined up for my friend so don’t need another shotgun.  I do have one bid in, but you’ll have to wait til tomorrow to find out what it is/was.  I have been getting on with Fred’s engraving – I had another go at the false breech of the double 1795 gun – in the end I used my 1803 John Manton as a pattern.  The metal was very variable – one side of the breech end was like butter and the other side was very tricky – I ended up doing some of it with my GRS gravemax pneumatic graver – I am reluctant to use it because the engraving you do with it isn’t really right for the 19th century, but its fine for straight border lines.  I have to finish the tang off but overall I’m happy with it although at the moment I seem to be doing rather fine and delicate engraving – I’m not sure what has changed, or indeed if anything has!  I put my first cablesfarm YouTube video up today – graver sharpening, its not wonderful, but they will get better.  I am building up my equipment for making videos – I managed to get a nearly new £140 tripod head for £12 from ebay – it is quite time consuming making the videos but it will get easier…  I got caught at school today while running my club – could I come in for the next three Friday afternoons to work with one lad?  Welll yes…..    And another school puzzle that Dave and I are struggling with  – if you light a candle in a plate of water and invert a glass over it, the water will rise in the glass – why?  We reckon that the volume of gas produced  by combusion (CO2) is the equal to the oxygen (O2)  burned by Avogadro’s law, and the heat produced would have the opposite effect and lower the water level  – we don’t like any of the conventional explanations we have seen so far, including that from Harvard University.  We don’t buy into the heat argument as it doesn’t work the right way  and the burning oxygen doesn’t work because the CO2 is equal in volume ( where else could the Oxygen go?).  There are two factors that are not usually taken into account – since the burning process breaks down hydrocarbons water is produced as steam which should increase the pressure inside the glass.  The other factor to check out is that the carbon dioxide produced dissolves in water to a greater extent than oxygen, but not enough, we think. to produce the observed effect.  We plan to try with an oil film on the water to eliminate that possibility. Suggestions on a postcard…. as they used to say before email!

I didn’t get the lighting right!

15th March – Off to Holts to look at a few guns tomorrow – there is not much of great interest, and some seems a bit expensive.  Shootable flint and percussion sporting guns are now desirable as more and more people get into game shooting the slow way and the better quality percussion guns are rising in price somewhat, even without a ‘famous’ name.  I have been making a trial video of graver sharpening – not as bad as I thought it might be!  I have plans for a series for YouTube to drive traffic for this website – it will be interesting to see if more people find them than arrive at this website.  The first one is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mi4DuohCRLE

14th March – Some of the lads were shooting at Eriswell today (OAP  cheap day!) but when I saw the rain and wind I suddenly remembered all the other things I needed to do!  The Venables barrel turned out very nicely after its copper sulphate dip and five brownings with Blackley’s slow brown and one overnight browning with nothing, plus a good steaming at the end.  All the ‘rustings’ were stopped before it looked anything like rust – in fact the only way I could really tell anything had happened was when I came to rub off the surface with 0000 steel wool and there was some very slight roughness in the surface finish that went when rubbed lightly.  The photo below was taken hand-held – something I never normally do, hence the slight shake.   I went to see Dick as a colleague was bringing a 12 bore boxlock ejector for me to have a look at – I am trying to find a nnice one for a friend.  This one will, I think, do very nicely – its an Atkins Birmingham gun, nicely finished and with immaculate barrels.  My only slight reservation is that its chambered  2 1/2 inch and I  did want a 2 3/4 gun, but the this one will do fine as the recipient doesn’t shoot big loads.  You get such good stuff for almost no money in those side by side guns if you steer clear of a few overpriced makers.   I’ve done the first bit of Fred’s engraving for a gun he is making – a sideplate – I put on a simple border and copied (with a fair amount of licence) a ‘stand of arms’ from a pull he sent me of an original.  Mine is quite lightly engraved – I was using a little GRS C-MAX square graver in carbide instead of my normal 1/8 inch squares, and I think that made me a bit more delicate.  It was actually quite nice to work with, I might use it for a bit now, and maybe buy another one or two ( at £22 each!)  I have been sorting out stuff to begin making videos, and have added a new Canon M50 camera to my collection to keep by the microscope.

Poor photo but you can see the true damascus stands out well.

Side plate for a new flintlock in the style of about 1770 ish.

12th March – the day for tackling the Venables Barrel.  I cleaned out my derusting barrel tank (a half section of rectangular plastic ventilation duct) and put in enough saturated copper sulphate solution to cover a barrel (guessed).  I was unsure how long the barrel should be in the solution – I seemed to remember 2 minutes being given, but Angier in Firearms Blueing and Browning gives 45 minutes.  Anyway I put the barrel in and it was more or less instantly covered with a coating of copper all over.  As the copper is deposited because it is swapped with iron in the solution, quite a lot of iron was being lost by the barrel.  Seeing the rate copper was forming, I decided that the 2 minute option was the safest choice, and when the copper was brushed off and the barrel washed, the damascus was discreetly enhanced.  I’ve done two ‘rustings’ since, rubbing off the barrel well before thick brown rust is formed – in fact I’m rubbing off with 0000 steel wool quite early in the rusting when the barrel has just begun to look  changed – it seems to be working as I can see a decent pattern emerging.  I went climbing this evening and bumped into a couple of people I know – its a ver sociable sport – I should sleep well tonight!

11th March – Did my Stem club today – one lad ahd an experiment he wanted to do for his science project that he had got off You Tube, which looked dodgy to me – turns out that some criminal idiot is putting spoof science videos for children on You Tube – I’ll have to go in tomorrow and put the lad right or he will be in for a big disappointment – I’d like to get my hands on said criminal idiot………!  I did manage to help another child write a rather neat progam for teh microbit computer so not all gloom and doom!  I’m continuing to experiment in preparation for making videos – I got my expensive 60mm Canon macro lens back from the lab – its just the thing for filming engraving so I built a handy stand and had a tryout on autofocus – I’ve now got to maser the video editing and I should be away!  I need a quick way to show the tool tips at high magnification with good illumination – its quite difficult to see, even at x25 magnification in my microscope as the heels are only about 1/4 mm long.

Camera stand from a bit of tube and a 2.5 Kg gym weight

not sure why the turntable looks so bright – its really quite dull!

10th March – The Venables barrel is becoming a bit of a saga!  I’ve now taken all the browning off again, and am toying with the idea of giving it a dip in copper sulphate solution to give the damascus a bit of a boost – it slightly etches the steel and iron differently.  I’ll try to get it all finished and wrapped up this week!  I have been experimenting with making videos of engraving – I can’t use my microscope cameras as  neither are really good enough and the better of the two takes up one eyepiece of the microscope so I have to engrave one-eyed which I don’t like.  I find that I can fix my normal Canon EOS 760D with its 55 -135mm lens so it takes a reasonable video of engraving at a decent magnification, so I’m trying that – I just need to make a stand for it and learn to use a free video editor – VDSC.  I  want to make a few You Tube videos to complement this website – they seem to get loads of views so it would probably help get a few more visitors to the blog.  I am planning one on making gravers, one on sharpening and a few on looking at historic gun engraving and doing a few examples of classic bits of design.  It will help keep me off the streets, – I can’t give up climbing  thought as I’ve just bought a pair of climbing shoes and it will take me 23 sessions to recoup the investment compared to hiring the shoes each time!

8th – I continued to brown the Venables barrel and it was going quite slowly but I could see the true damascus pattern coming out, then, on the fourth browning it went a dark opaque chestnut colour and showed almost no pattern whatsoever – I’m not sure what happened, maybe I left it a bit too long before rubbing off the rust.  I tried rubbing it down with 5000 grit paper and 000 grade wire wool but it didn’t seem to do much.  The I tried the 000 wool lubricated with gun lube and before I had realised it, I’d rubbed almost through a patch of browning – I don’t quite understand why the gun lube suddenly made the wire wool bite, but it did.  Anyway I will take the browning back to a uniform level and have another go – what a  bore.  It has happened before to Dick with my Bales of Ipswich barrels, so I shouldn’t be surprised although I have never had any problems in 10 or more jobs I have done so far.   I was idly looking at a you tube on graver sharpening and came across the alternative sharpening technique of putting ‘parallel heels’ on  gravers.  The claimed advantage is that the graver isn’t so liable to throw up spurious  marks round the outside of tight curves as a triangular heel does.  In the parallel heel sharpening, the heels are  continuous surfaces of constant width ( 1/4 to 1/2 mm) parallel to the bottom edges of the main face, rather than small triangular faces.  The problem with parallel heels is jigging them to the right angle for sharpening as the graver needs to be held at a compound angle and its tricky to set up without a proper GRS setting jig that is very expensive and slow to use.  I have tried  and failed in the past to make a suitable jig – I’ll have to think about it some more.  It would be quite handy as it would be easier to control the heel cut as more metal would need to be removed.  Anyway something to think about…..   Here is a photo of the cast off on the Venables stock – it must be getting on for 3/4 inch and needs to be reduced to 1/4 or 5/16ths.  I have had to take off the furniture as the trigger plate runs into the bend in the stock and is currently inlet slightly off centre, so it will have to be adjusted after straigtening the stock.  I’ll have to make an adjustable jig and heat up the ‘hand’ to make it flexible – it can be heated with a hot air gun, a steamer or wrapping in cloth and pouring hot oil over it.  The first way runs the risk of overheating the finish on the wood and possibly charring it.  I’m not sure of the pros and cons of 2 & 3.  I can see that both could do some harm to the finish, I’ll probably wrap a hot oily rag round the stock to protect it and then use the hot air gun on the rag, being careful to avoid a fire!  I did watch Dave Becker do one for me (with a hot air gun) so I know it takes a long time to heat up and even longer to cool down – we shot at quite a lot of clays while waiting!  On the subject of the Venables, I ran some 6oo grit paper through the barrels with a plastic jag using an electric drill – I have a long fibreglass rod with an end to take brushes, jags etc and a 6mm hex on the other end – the fibreglass rod has a loose plastic tube slipped over it so it doesn’t rub the barrel and so you can hold it to guide it.  Anyway a few passes, the last with oil, put a half decent finish on the bores – not perfect but very good by the standards of  an almost 200 year old gun!

Yes, it really is that bent!

7th later – the number of visitors to the site has just fallen quite noticably – I wonder if its anything to do with the fact that I blocked a number of nuisance visitors a couple of days ago?  p.s – I don’t think that is the reason, I think it may be that the software has stopped counting some of the spurious attempts to interfere with the site as if they were proper visitors.

7th March – I’ve started rebrowning the Venables barrels – first washed in detergent and warm water, then chalk brushed on and left to dry, then rubbed off (wearing latex gloves) and then into the browning  – I have started with Blakley’s Slow Brown which gives a good colour, rubbing the rust off with 0000 wire wool, wrapping the wire wool round a bit of brass sheet to get into the angles along the rib etc.  So far I have done 2 rustings with the barrel hanging inside a 6 inch plastic tube on the back of the Aga with the base of the tube standing in a little warm water to speed things up.  Overnight I’ll leave it in the cool cellar to rust as it mustn”t go too far before its rubbed off.   After this rusting I’ll probably do one with my old printed circuit solution to give it a bit of a blacker colour –  I think a greyish browning  looks less like an obvious rebrowning job.  The darker colour can be enhanced by steaming the barrel between rustings – I’ll see how it goes before trying that.

6th March – A tiny bit of engraving today – a practice ‘stand of music’ for a butt tang base.  I also did a bit more cleaning up on the Venables barrel which will, I hope, be ready for browning before the end of the week – I will be glad to put that job to bed, then just removing some of the 5/8 inches of  cast off from the stock – unless of course anyone looking at this blog needs a nice percussion gun with that much cast off – its not quite a cross stock and I can’t think what shape one would need to be to fit it, but someone must have had it made like that – its fortunately  avoided the problem of having to have the locks made on a curve!

This is magnified about 4 times real size.

5th March – I did the ‘Extreme Earth’ presentation to the year 5 and 6 children at ‘my’ primary- I did volcanos, which partly involved the kids putting a little water and a fizzy tablet in old film canisters and putting the lid on quickly, then retreating to a safe distance!  Great fun was had by all.  It is lovely being involved with the school  – if I have lunch in school there are always children who come and sit with me and chat.  I think I get the best deal, all the fun and none of the hard work the teachers have to do!  I did manage to make a graver for someone who had found this website while looking for engraving bits – it is always surprising how many people come to the site for interests other than guns – like sailing or welders or Land Cruiser steering!

4th March – Busy at the lab writing up early marine heat flow instrumentation, and then at my school STEM club – tomorrow I am going in with a researcher from Cambridge to do a presentation on Earthquakes and Volcanos to year 5 & 6, which should be fun.  I had a few emails about using the electric cooker elements to solder barrels, so a bit more information might be useful.  The element I’m currently using is from the grill of an old cooker we chucked out.  The elements are made of an outer metal tube filled with a powdered oxide insulator with a solid wire heater in the middle.  They are all made straight and cold bent to shape afterwards, so can be straightened too, you just need to be very careful not to kink them or bend them too sharply – they will come out a bit wavy but with a bit of careful and gently straightening in the vice will just fit down a 16 bore barrel.  The need connecting via ‘ 1/4 inch Faston terminals using heat proof wire ( also salvaged from a cooker.  The elements run on mains voltage and will probably be 1 or 1.5 KW power – i.e they will draw 4.3 or 6.5 amps at 240 volts approx (use a 6 A fuse).  It is possible that the act of straigtening them may damage the internal insulation and give rise to leakage from the element to the casing, in which case DONT use the element – If you wire up the system according to my recommendations the electricity supply will trip out if there is significant leakage.   Please DONT try to use this barrel heating system if you are not confident with mains electricity – if you do try, make sure that the barrel and any metalwork around is bonded very firmly to earth on the electricity supply and the supply is via an Residual Current trip that trips at no more than 30 mAmps. Unplug before working on any part of the barrel etc.  Don’t follow my example if you are at all unsure – I have a (too) long experience of dealing with mains electricity – my first experiment was connecting a 3 Volt torch bulb to an unshuttered power socket at the age of 9 – my mother never found out what blew all the fuses (no Residual Current trips then!) and I sadly never found my bulb, but surprisingly I survived unscathed.  As a teenager I ‘invented’ the radio alarm using a large mains powered valve radio and a clockwork alarm clock with a pull switch with exposed contacts actuated by the alarm winder starting to turn – it worked a treat and woke me up extremely rapidly as I always reached out to stop the alarm ringing and put my hand on the mains (still no Residual Current trips – just as well or it would have tripped out the radio and defeated the whole purpose).  I don’t know if there was such a thing as a commercial alarm radio in the mid 1950’s but anyway I had one and it worked!   So if you are not very confident and experienced  with mains electricity stick to a gas torch for barrel soldering……  ( A Residual Current trip is a device that compares the current flowing in the live and neutral wires and trips the supply out if they differ by more than 30 mA due to leakage – they are, in theory, sensitive enough to trip and protect you if you become the circuit that the ‘missing’ 30 mA flows through – all modern domestic installations should have them fitted.)

3rd March – Barometer dropping like a stone and wind getting up =- glad I’m not at sea.    I have been doing a bit of practice engraving on and off for the last few days – actually its more a matter of graver destroying as when I get back to it I begin by breaking the points of my gravers with almost every cut because I don’t finish the cuts correctly with a flick out push, but lift them and leave the point behind – always gets me to begin with, so tonight I had 14 gravers to regrind.  I have a few bits of a gun for Fred to engrave – a butt plate tang and a breech block.  I’ve started on the butt plate trial design  – I wanted to do a classic scroll at the heel, with lots of empty space and then a ‘wheat ear’ pattern at the tip.  The challenge of the scrolls is getting them to look uniform in ‘texture’ and balanced in the space available  – I’m using a pretty tough steel for my test piece  (EN8) which contributes to the brakages but its good practice.  The pattern round the ‘screw hole’ is not really right, I won’t use it on the real thing, and I might change the scrolls for a ‘stand of music’.  I managed to more or less finish the little post office pistol by J Harding – I got the safety catch working and made a triangular ‘cover spring to go in the sear spring but I cheated and it relies on friction rather than a sprung detent as I couldn’t work out how I was going to make that on such a small scale – anyway it works fine.  I will have to make the mainspring a bit stronger as it won’t open the pan fully when you fire it off but otherwise it all seems to work and look good – the barrel is a bit pitted and I didn’t want to strike it down, so I have left most of the pistol more or less ‘as was’. I was going to finsih the Venables barrel bits, but went climbing instead and an now a bit knackered……….

1 March  – Time rolls on….   Dick came over to assist in soldering the Venables barrels together, which we did satisfactorily, although there are a couple of bits of the bottom rib that will need very localised heating to bed them down ( beware the effects of expansion when you heat the rib!).  The top rib was a bit of a mess as someone had had a go at refixing it and had filed some of the edges down in a wavy fashion – its a very light rib made out of  thin bent sheet twist patterned steel  –  so I tried to file the edges to a more or less uniforn taper before tinning them. I more or less succeeded, but the rib is now a bit low to line up with the breech block.  The rib is not perfect – it has a few left over dents  for instance.   The breech and muzzle are OK and the breech blocks fit OK so I think it will do – now it just needs the bore cleaned up and the outside cleaned up and the multiple oxide layers rubbed off with wet and dry paper.  Its a boring and dirty job, made slower by having run out of 320 grit paper.  Anyway I spent a couple of hours working up to 600 grit and its looking OK.  Its a horribly dirty job rubbing down, and I was trying to rise and bake bread  in parallel – I put some dark rye flour in the mix to disguise any dirt that may have transferrerd from my hands – its only iron, after all is said and done.  Anyway tastes OK!

Wired with soft iron wire and cut nails started.  You can just see the loop of the heating element ( old grill element straightened). The nails and wire needs adjusting as the whole assembly heats up, so as to keep the rib in contact with the barrel throughout.

Bit of extra solder fed into the breech.

I had to quickly clamp the muzzles together as they were opening up – the Vice grip is only very lightly tightened so as not to dent the barrels.  The element is only just long enough – the muzzle needed a bit of localised heating to melt the solder here.  The mains terminals are a bit exposed, but the whole assembly is properly earthed and on a sensitive earth leakage trip and is unplugged when working on it.

 
 

 

 Posted by at 9:30 am
Jun 242019
 

I acquired a couple of pretty little Continental pistols at various auctions – one was more than twice the price of the other, but I can’t see that much difference, perhaps I should be able to after further study! I’ll put up some photos as I decide what needs doing to them.

Top – Kuchenreuter, lower Pistoia barrel (Italy?)

The top pistol is signed I.A.Kuchenreuter on the barrel and has a {brass) poinson of a horse and rider. The Kuchenreuter family of gunmakers operated a large workshop in Regensburg (Germany) throughout the 18th century. This signature is possibly of Johann Andreas (1716-1795) or the younger Johann Andreas II (1758-1808), most probably of the former. It has several characteristics of Kuchenreuter pistols – the horseman poinson, the flattened butt, and the ears of the butt cap not extending up the butt as most did. It is a little unusual in having the barrel as a polygon bore of 7 sides but with no twist I can see. It’s a pretty little pistol and would have been light and handy to shoot. The butt has been cracked through and repaired – probably since the invention of effective adhesives. It is pretty clean and unrusted – I guess it has not been the subject of extensive restoration. Guessing a date is difficult without a feeling for German pistols – if it were English I’d use the curled back tip of the trigger and the lack of an outside support for the frizzen pivot and a basic (but sound) lock mechanism to put it somewhere in the second or third quarter of the 18th century – which would fit with the first Johann – I guess probably around 1740 – 1770 – but its German so I’m not confident of those dates! I am inclined to leave this pistol as it is — the repair of the butt is acceptable, and although its conspicuous, I doubt it can be truly hidden and attempts to undo it may well make it more difficult to join up in an invisible way. The rest of the pistol is OK, its authentic and doesn’t look messed about, which is the first criterion for restoration when something is in a reasonably acceptable condition, So no action required except perhaps a gently rub over with a cloth and some linseed oil! I might just clean out the bore as it looks pretty good and it would be nice to check if it has any twist in the polygonal ‘rifling’ – a bit like the Whitworth rifling!

Kuchenreuter
Kuchenreuter
Kuchenreuter
Kuchenreuter

Here is the Pistoia pistol;-

Pistoia is a town in Italy, NW of Florence, and supported a number of gunmakers and especially barrel makers – its reputation was at times equal to that of Brescia. The barrel makers of Pistoia used a gold stamp with crown above the word Pistoia as a mark – this pistol has a lion stamp below the Pistoia stamp which is presumably the mark of the individual maker. The barrel is inlaid with somewhat primitive inlaid silver patterns at breech and muzzle and at the step from octagonal to round – the lock is plain, although it may have had some light engraving at one point. The side plate shows signs of engraving on its tail, but the main part seems devoid of anything, although its a bit pitted. The surface of the lock and cock is a bit rough but not badly rusted – looks a bit like a crude attempt to clean it. The cock may or may not be original – its not a very elegant shape. There is no outer support for the frizzen pivot, and the lockwork inside is pretty primitive – there is no bridle, and the finish is much cruder than the Kuchenreuter above. It is possible that the outer finish was never particularly good! One might be tempted to think that the barrel was from good Pistoia makers but the pistol was made by a distinctly second rate gunsmith, quite likely not in Italy – maybe Liege or France? In terms of date I’d put it as a contemporary of the Pistol above. Unlike the pistol above, this one will benefit from a little attention. There is some rust around the frizzen spring so the lock will need to be stripped. The lock plate and cock look very dull and would benefit from having a bit of sympathetic surface finishing to match the rest of the furniture. The inlay on the barrel was almost completely hidden, but it just needed a little rubbing with solvent and tissue or very very worn 2000 grit paper to reveal it – there is a little way to go there. The woodwork is in keeping with the rest of the pistol – there is a chunk by the trigger that has been glued back on rather badly – I’ll have a look to see if that can be done better. A bit of work will have this looking pretty – thanks mostly to the Pistoia barrel!

Pistoia lock – a bit dirty, but quite similar although inferior – no bridle on frizzen etc….


P –more inlay
Inside before cleaning – lots of rust where you can’t see it! This is about as primitive as a flintlock can get- no bridle, no link on mainspring etc..

The lock of the Pistoia pistol was clearly badly corroded and has been cleaned off, but without stripping it. The surface is quite eroded and there is still a lot of rust where the wire brush didn’t reach. I have loosened most of the screws, and I’ll pop it in the electrolytic de-ruster for a few minutes and then take it to pieces. I have got a bit careful with the deruster after sending a sample of broken steel to be metallurgically examined – I am confident that the process doesn’t do any harm to sound metal, but I’ve has a couple of parts fall apart after de-rusting that had a lot of pre-existing internal faults and cracks and a high silicon and carbon content. It seems that its the internal cracks that are the problem – the nascent hydrogen released on the surface of the rusted item seems eventually to disrupt the cracks and cause them to propagate and break the part. I think its probably to do with the hydrogen affecting the growth point of the crack – that is a high stress point anyway. I’ll clean up the surfaces, but the lock face and the cock surface are diamond hard and I’d have to anneal them to be able to file them – I’m not sure its really necessary – I’ll stick to cleaning at the moment and see what a fine wire brush can do for them

 Posted by at 10:19 pm
Jun 242019
 

Here is a gun I picked up at a local auction that must have a story attached – perhaps visitors to the site could help me?  

  It has a P53 type lock externally marked LSA Co and 1868 with a strange pattern just visible in front of the cock – the lock is pretty pitted on the outside, but the inside is shiny &  good quality and carries a broad arrow mark and the name Barnett plus the stamp J.C. –  Barnett & Co made locks and barrels for the British Government  from about 1854(?)  It is missing its bridle (holes exist).  The barrel appears to be a musket barrel of about .630 bore (not the .656 that was used when Enfields were made in smoothbore), of length 33 inches, giving the gun an overall length of 48 1/2 inches (weight 7 1/2 lbs)  The barrel carries the stamped name  ‘MANTON & CO CALCUTTA’ as one stamp, followed by ‘& LONDON’ made of individual letter stamps.  It carries Liege proof marks – (no it doesn’t, they appear to be Birmingham post 1914 – more research needed- see comments). There is a bayonet boss in the usual place, and a foresight but no rear sight or any sign that one was ever fitted.   The trigger guard is stamped with the number 35110 and the butt (LH side) has 88 in one place and 77 in another.  The stock looks fairly like a normal P53 stock, although I’m not really familiar with them.  It has three old style barrel bands (before Badderley) – the sling swivel is on the muzzle one, the other swivel is on the rear trigger guard screw.   The ramrod is steel, and has a somewhat squared end with a slotted jag – no bulge – I can’t see a retaining spring in the stock.  Overall it looks ‘of a piece’ and not mucked about with in recent times.  The British were at pains to equip the Indian troops with guns that looked like Enfields but were not effective against their own weapons – this gun may have been made up or more probably imported by Manton & Co., Calcutta (at that time run by Wallis) using old British Enfield locks, or maybe old stock complete guns, with the barrels replaced by new smoothbore barrels to ensure inferior performance (and not capable of taking standard issue British ammunition!).  It would seem that this gun must be one of many that were issued, hence the 35110 stamped on the trigger guard.  Any thoughts gratefully received.

see comments for more information.

Looks a bit like an Enfield
The four dots on the cock appear in the lock pocket too. Looks like a ‘proper’ Enfield lock?
Manton & Co Calcutta & London – ‘& London’ is not part of the main stamp.
Liege proof marks
number 35110 – wonder where the other 55109 are?
Sling swivel is at back of trigger guard.
Old style barrel bands (3)

 

 Posted by at 9:33 pm
May 012019
 

This post is really for the development of a storyboard for a Youtube video that I am planning – I need to work through the history in a systematic way, so I might as well turn it into a post.

To understand the development of the flintlock in England and Ireland – Scotland went its own way and Wales was on the sidelines – we need to appreciate a some background details. The most important is that England and even more so Ireland, was for the most part a backwater in terms of firearms development for most of the time that flintlocks were in use. The main centres of firearms production and development were in continental Europe – principally France, Germany, Italy and Spain and the Netherlands (a Spanish territory for some of the time) and it was not until almost the third quarter of the 18th century, almost 150 years after the flintlock reached something like its final form, that England and Ireland moved towards the top of the league – a position they held throughout the last 50 years of the flintlock’s reign. The second factor to be taken into consideration is the function served by firearms during the period before the this change – this divides into military and civilian use. Military minds during the early life of the flintlock were for the most part conservative and saw flintlocks as both expensive and unreliable, and continued to use the ‘good old’ matchlock for many years, and when flintlock muskets eventually came into military use (1700) there main concern was that they should be easy to reload, rather than achieve any sort of accuracy. Civilian firearms were expensive, and the rulers of countries had no eagerness for their populations to acquire firearms, so firearms became associated with displays of wealth and as presentations and gifts between the aristocracy and royalty. Even where firearms were used for hunting or personal protection they were usually profusely decorated. Hunting in England was fairly undemanding of the guns, unlike Germany where hunting was taken seriously and in fact wheellocks remained in use through much of the early flintlock period. In short, there were, in the first 150 years of flintlock existence, no great drivers for technical improvement. Twe things changed that state of affairs, one was the development of twist barrels, and hence lighter guns, and better gunpowder that made shooting at flying birds possible, and the other was the change from swords to pistols as the preferred weapons for fighting duels. Both of these activities called for significant improvements in the design of flintlocks to speed up ignition, increase accuracy and improve the certainty of fire. These changes began to bear fruit around the 1770s, and English and Irish gunmakers were at the forefront of the resulting developments, establishing the English and Irish as world class gunmakers. The new emphasis on function rather than purely on form With the ascent of our gunmaking skills we were able for the most part to drop continental ideas of gun decoration for our own less elaborate and more sophisticated style.

Let’s look at the technical developments of the flintlock which developed from the earlier forms of lock that introduced the principle of flint striking steel, the Mingulet and the Snaphaunch locks, which here characterised by the ‘steel’, the surface that was struck by the flint, being separate from the lid of the priming pan. These and the early ‘dog locks’ that did combine steel and pan cover in a one piece ‘frizzen’ or ‘steel’ or ‘hammer’, all names used more orless interchangebly had the ‘sear’ or ‘scear’ moving hotrizontally to control the fall of the ‘cock’ holding the flint. Initially the sear worked through the ‘lockplate’ and intercepted the cock itself, later variations had a ‘tumbler’ fixed to the same shaft as the cock that was intercepted by a horizontally moving sear. The accepted definition of a true flintlock is that it has the steel and pan cover in one piece, and a vertically moving sear engaging in notches in the tumbler – always with the provision of two notches called ‘bents’, a ‘full cock’ bent from which firing could occur when the trigger was pulled, and a ‘half cock’ bent that prevented the trigger from releasing the tumbler by virtue of the shape of the bent. The true filntlocks was a French development of between 16 10 and 1615. The first flintlocks had the cock pivot shaft made as part of the cock, with the tumbler sliding on to it and fixed with a pin, but this soon developed to the pattern we are familiar with where the shaft is part of the tumbler and the cock is fitted to a square filed on the send of the shaft and held by a screw. The first major improvement (XXXX) was the provision of the ‘bridle’ that straddled the back of the tumbler and fixed to the lockplate so as to provide a second bearing for the tumbler shaft – this reduced the friction and wear in the lock enormously. At this point the initial development phase was complete, and in fact military flintlocks followed this pattern almost throughout the era of the flintlock. Around XXXX when the pressure to speed up the firing of the lock a link was introduced in better quality guns to eliminate the friction that existed as the ‘mainspring’ slid along the surface of the tumbler on firing (and cocking) – This small link effectively removed the friction and allowed faster action, but was too fragile ever to be incorperated in military flintlocks. A further source of friction existed where the tail of the frizzen moved over the surface of the frizzen spring as the frizzen was thrown back by the impact of the flint. Around 1770 a similar link to that used on the mainspring was introduced by some better quality gunmakers, but this was soon replaced by a small roller, initially fixed into the tail of teh frizzen itself, but later incorporated into the frizzen spring.

 Posted by at 11:32 pm
Apr 242019
 

 

27th February – I made a few more nipples yesterday so I have a bit of a stock, although some are a bit on the slack side – It would probably be easier to get a decent fit if I put a bit more of a taper on the slide when I did the final cuts – I’ll try with 3 degrees instead of 2 next time. I had an ‘order’ for two to replace a couple in a gun I sold some time ago – the old one were ones I had made of steel, presumably to my normal ‘small hole at the bottom’ spec but had opened up to being more or less parallel all the way down – they had seen quite a lot of use, but I hope the titanium ones last indefinately.  I also did a bit of touch-up engraving on a bashed about little brass pocket pistol – nothing special but the client wanted it refreshed where it had been filed off . Today I decided that I had to sort out how to make a decent job of resoldering the barrels of the Venables – I’ve made a number of half hearted attempts and I was reading an article in an old copy of Muzzle Blasts from about 1956 on resoldering barrels of a double rifle that gave me some ideas.   Apart from actually getting all the bits to fit together it is vital that the barrels are parallel in the horizontal direction although in a vertical direction they are ‘regulated’ to converge so they both hit the same point at about 25 yards to allow for the tendency of the gun to move right when the right barrel fires and v.v.  Obviously its more important with a double rifle and varies markedly with  the load, but still necessary on a shotgun,  The article mentioned having a steel plate to keep the barrels aligned,  I had been using a 3 x 1 inch bar as a base but had just used packing pieces to support the barrel to clear the ramrod pipes etc  which made life difficult as they kept coming out just when you needed them in place.  So I welded two plates to the bar to form a level base for the muzzle and the breech a couple of inches above the bar so that I can get to the underside of the barrel if necessry.  The plates have holes so I can wire the barrels down firmly to ensure alignment.  I checked that the tops of the plates are exactly parallel.  I have the electrical heater to fit inside the barrel, with a manual temperature control and Dick is coming over on Friday and I am absolutely determined that we are going to crack it this time – its quite stupid not to be able to do the job reliably – hence the new jig.  Its not in my nature not to be able to do something, after all there are hundreds of thousands of guns out there with their barrels soldered together…. I will get there in the end.  Tomorrow is the funeral of David Purr, a well loved village character who fabricated most of the steelwork needed in the village – his speciality was security gates and he made a couple of beacon baskets for the village – his legacy will live on for years – I shall miss Dave, he was a great help with lots of my over ambitious projects like my home made 4 wheel boat trailer.

24th February The unseasonably good weather had me out battling with the garden this weekend – I eventually got fed up with piles of sticks and bits of apple trees lying about from when I had to cut back trees for the neighbour to get at his roof so I splashed out on a cheap Mac Allister shredder from Screwfix (about £80) which turns out to be fantastic – it just eats anything less than 40mm diameter – almost literally gulping it down – and fills bins with chips that can go in the waste bin that is collected fortnightly.   I did manage to sneak an hour or two to make some titanium nipples – I do like working in titanium, but you do have to be careful to keep cutting or the surface hardens up and polishes so its difficult to get started again – I use sharp tool steel tools with some top rake.  The technique is to chuck the 10mm bar (Titanium T6 from ebay) and turn down 25mm to 8.50 mm then turn down 5.5 mm to 6.40 diameter, slightly chamfer the end and cenre drill a pip and drill a 1.2mm hole about 4 mm deep, then cut a 1/4 BSF (26 t.p.i) thread with the die adjusted to cut to the finished size in one pass as trying to recut only swages it.  I turn the die over – the other side is ground off so the thread runs to the surface – and cut up to the shoulder, then slightly undercut the shoulder with a parting tool before parting off  an  >11.5 mm length of the 8.5mm  section with the 5.5mm long 1/4 BSF  thread on it.   I then chuck a piece of 25 mm bar with a 1/4 BSF tapped hole in the end and screw the proto nipple into the bar tightly – I use the tailstock chuck to grip it and tighten it.  This is then faced off to exactly 11 mm from the face of the bar  and drilled  2.2 mm to a depth of about 13.5 to 14 mm, followed by the 1.2 mm drill to make sure it goes right through, leaving around 2.5 to 3 mm of the 1.2 mm hole at the end of the 2.2 mm hole.  I then use a radiussed tool to turn the nipple leaving about 4.5 mm of the 8.5mm diameter part intact.  The cross slide is used with a 2 degree taper to get a good fit for the cap – its very easy to make it a loose fit, beware – you need some fresh caps by the lathe to check.  One problem with Titanium is that it can be difficult to get very fine cuts as it burnishes, so try to get good control of the diameter as you converge on a good fit – its particularly difficult with the slide at an angle as the dials or DRO don’t give a lot of help.  I generally put the flats on with a file, as its difficult to hold the nipple for them to be milled (most of my cutters are not really sharp enough for titanium!)  I’ve been using titanium nipples on my Nock for some time and have probably put around 800 – 1000 shots through the gun without seeing any damage to the nipples.  Cutting the thread is quite hard work and even backing the die off  is almost as hard as cutting – I find it is almost impossible to make a second cut with the die as it is very stiff and removes no metal – it maybe that my dies are a bit blunt, but they work OK first time……  I always put the nipples in with a few turns of PTFE pipe tape as a gas seal but the titanium doesn’t seem to be affected anyway.

WARNING – Titanium swarf is highly inflamable and cannot easily be extinguished – you need either a special extinguisher or sand to smother it.  It takes a spark or serious heat to set it alight but then it is pretty much unstoppable, so don’t let swarf build up on the lathe – STOP  the lathe before attempting to remove it – it can be sharp.  Use a water based coolant if you need to cool the work, but better still use very sharp tools and fine cuts and DON’T LET SWARF BUILD UP.  ( I’ve seen the fire brigade called to a lathe fire with titanium – it was some years ago and WE had to tell them not to use water)

Nipple is screwed into bar to turn shape and file flats.

22nd February – getting ready to take my Flintlock John Manton and my Percussion S. Nock  to the Have a Go shoot I realised that I had overdone the re-work of the bent on the left barrel and it was going to be uncomfortably hard to pull off, so not good for beginners.  I manged to strip and re-work tumbler and sear and get it all back together in about 15 minutes and it now works fine. As I know its OK, I should take it all to  pieces and harden the tumbler – I think it’s too soft. A couple of AML members ended up having a discussion about cleaning guns (makes a change from BXXXXt  – as an aside, if you don’t think the EU is capable of making our laws, do you think that either hopeless mob in Westminster are really going to do any better? ) which is always guaranteed to bring out different techniques.  A number of my friends favour using a steam cleaner for the barrels, so I made up a probe from a bit of 7mm steel tube and attached it to my wallpater steamer.  I cleaned my gun ‘normally’, which some peple would call a bit ‘casual’, and then applied the steam cleaner, expecting a stream of dirty gunge to emerge as promised by the steam fanatics.  Alas, I ended up with a couple of cupfuls of water so clean that I could have made tea with it (I didn’t) and nothing came out of the barrel when I wiped it out that wouldn’t have come out anyway.   The essential part of barrel cleaning is allowing very hot water to flush out the muck – the stuff that will cause corrosion is basically all water soluble salts, and it is a basic truth of physical chemistry that things dissolve better in hot than cold water (except proteins) – once they are gone its mostly lead, which probably acts as a lubricant!  I do have a few barrels that come out really clean as they have been honed, but most continue to wipe out a bit black, and I don’t worry too much about it.

21st – One of the pleasures of running this blog is the emails I get from the many regular viewers with questions about their guns or repairs they need doing, or their interests in guns – although some of them do stop me in my tracks!  Some time ago I got an email with an attached photo of a pretty derelict flintlock pistol – the accompanying text asked me how he could convert the gun into an automatic pistol with a magazine that worked!  A bit disturbing to my equilibrium….  I have also had several emails from enthusiasts keen to make themselves shootable pistols  by the back door – I’m happy to reply with an email explaining what excellent accomodation Her Majesty is able to offer – an offer they are unlikely to be able to refuse if they follow their intentions.  I can speak with good inside information as I was for several years an independent prison monitor at Highpoint prison and got to know it well – in fairness to the prison you get three meals a day (budget for all three is £2.06) and heating, I do think some Old People’s Homes might be worse – units 6 & 7 for ‘good boys’  were quite acceptable.  It is possible to make yourself a pistol provided that it can pass certain conditions as specified in the Home Office Guidance on Firearms (see LINKS) and be classed as an INERT pistol – in essence this means that it is a reproduction of a pistol of not later than 1870 that cannot fire and cannot be made to fire with ‘normal’ DIY tools and skills as might be used for the construction and maintanence of the home That always seems odd to me – I don’t see where a cement mixer comes into making a gun work! I can offer only limited advice as to what that restiction might mean – for instance it is better to remove metal than to add it, so a 10mm slot milled from under the barrel from breech to near the end of the wood (leaving the barrel loops) and a chunk of bar glued in the barrel to restore balance is pretty difficult to put right,  but ultimately it is down to how the courts interpret it and there is NO certainty.  Better to start with all main metal parts from old guns so what you end up with is clearly a section 58 firearm restored – and keep well away from anything breech loading!

21st Re pistol below – another little detail that you can just see that confirms the butt as being wrong is that the trigger guard tang goes way too far down the butt to be right.

20th february – You are in luck – another set of gun photos for comment has arrived – a Twigg Pistol.  Lets have a look at what we can surmise about this… (We will refer to ‘British Gunmakers 1740 to 1790 by Keith Neil and Backs. for inspiration – rich in Twiggs!).  You may need to click on the images to get enough detail – back arrow to get back, logically enough!

Ok, what have we here? A ‘proper’ conversion from flint to percussion of a TWIGG flintlock pistol.  The signature is his second one, dating the gun to 1770 to 1775 or thereabouts.  The arrow points to a just visble set trigger adjuster – right for that time as is the safety (just?).  The pointed  tail of the lock is an earlyish feature too.

The engraving you can see is all from the date of conversion except the signature 

Looking at the whole pistol, and bearing in mind the fairly certain date of 1770 to 1775 ish, the half stock is wrong – at that date it would have had a stock running to the muzzle and no under rib.  Also the butt shape is probably wrong – it would have been  curled right round to past the vertical, or with a cast cap – you can jsut makeout that the tang of teh trigger guard goes too far down teh butt.    Barrel bolt in the  wood – has moved on from pins, but not yet escutheons under the bolt. ends.

Barrel signature is again TWIGG mk II and contemporary with the 177X date, The rest from the date of conversion?  But what has happened to the false breech tang?  UGH.

Not sure who the barrel maker was, possibly Twigg

Notice the metal insert as a bearing for the breech tang .

nothing noteworth here except the single lock screw – a useful dating feature.

OK, what did you get from that?   It all looks as if the lock, barrel, trigger  and trigger guard started out as a TWIGG flintlock of reasonable quality, probably an officer’s pistol.  The lock would have been plain and the breech would probably have had a plug with the tang on it rather than a breech and false breech with tang. The trigger and trigger guard look right and the set trigger is OK for the period,  The engraving added on conversion is quite rudimentary as if the engraver was not used to working on steel – it just doesn’t ring true to me.  The worst bit is the tang of the false breech, which looks as if it was executed by a child!   The big question concerns the stock – it was definately not half stocked when TWIGG made it, so that was a feature of the conversion – but is it the original stock?  The butt is the wrong shape for the flint date, and it looks a bit wrong for later pistols, but it looks ‘of a piece’ with the pistol in other respects.  My guess is that it was restyled on conversion – obviously the chequering would then date from conversion or probably even later – it looks very sharp.  Difficult to put a date on conversion but obviously it served at least 50 years as a flintlock – maybe an 1828 -1838 conversion date?   What is particularly interesting about this pistol is that details were changing rapidly at about the original date of manufacture  and by about 1780 things would look quite different – examples are that up to about 1775 locks were held on by two screws (this pistol has one) and by about 1775 Twigg had started to use the shell carving  on better guns and pistols.  In 1780 the barrel bolts started to have silver escutcheons and  roller frizzons came in – so lots of changes and aids to dating or just more confusion?  (Read the book mentioned above for more details or see the GUN DATES page on this blog!)  I’m sure I’ll get some idea from observers of this blog, and I expect I’ve missed a few essential things – I haven’t spent much longer looking at it than it has taken me to completer the blog, and I obviously don’t have the pistol to hand, so please forgive any errors……

19th February – I had another look at the troublesome left lock on the Samuel Nock that keeps dropping to half cock when the right barrel is fired.  I didn’t think there was much wrong with the bent in the tumbler and think that the problem is the old one of the sear arm touching the wood of the lock pocket – the sear arm does seem a bit close near the edge of the lock so I filed a little off the arm (it was a bit thick anyway) and carefully eased the lock pocket.  I tried to check if that was effective, but with no-where handy to fire the gun it is difficult.  To be on the safe side a slightly reshaped the bent so it has a little more engagement – I noticed that I’d just about got through the case hardening on the bent.  I’ll check it out when I next go shooting, and if its OK I’ll re-harden it – I might have overdone the engagement.   I am helping at an AML ‘have a go day’ at Cambridge Gun Club on Friday – probably a corporate ‘do’; but I’m not sure – I just turn up with a flintlock and a percussion and let the punters have a go – luckily under the auspices of the MLAGB so its insured.   I managed to finish the sear spring of the little post office pistol – very fiddly as I’d run out of Oxygen for my very tiny torch and had to use a kitchen blowlamp for heating and bending! Still its done – its looks in the photo as if  the spring sticks too far back, but it is the perspective and it does just fits the lock pocket – just as well as I have no intention of making another in a hurry!  I have now got to adjust the mainspring and fit the safety catch.  I ought to make the cover spring detent for the slider to finish the job off……….

The sear spring doesn’t really stick out like that – its perspective!

18th February – Today was the last day for exporters to ship goods to China to arrive before Bxxxxt, from today anyone shipping to the Far East  for the next 40 days will have no  idea of the rate of duty they will have to pay to land the goods!    I had a further email related to the Joseph Manton guns I put on the blog recently, pointing out that the New Zealand gun 6031 had been made with gravitational stops (I missed them), which were on the same Joseph Manton Patent 3558 of 1812 as the water drains, also with an addition to the lock to sound a musical note when the trigger was pulled!  (No know examples exist, not surprisingly!). Interestingly the replacement cocks used on conversion had notches for gravitaional stops, and so must be Joseph Manton cocks.  I still think it unlikely that Joseph Manton did the conversion as it is too rudimentary for him , but whoever did it had access to Joseph Manton cocks – possibly off another conversion job?  It raises the interesting question of whether these cocks were chosen to retain the gravitational stops ( which were not much liked by shooters as they were prone to stick and also prevented you from taking overhead shots) and the stops were removed at some later time, or it was just chance that the converter had a pair to hand that had the stop notch and just used them, while removing the stops at the same time. Or maybe I’m just wrong and it was a conversion by Jo Manton?  The barrel incription  ‘New Improvements by His Majesty’s PATENT’ should refer to the features of the 1812 patent so I had another look at 5692 – it has new later locks on conversion so is unlikely to carry  signs of gravitational stops, but although it has been rebreeched I might expect to see a plugged slot in the trigger finial if it had the water drain, but the finial is intact, so I don’t think it originally had drains……..  Always more questions than answers in this game.

6031 showing stud filling gravity stop pivot, and notch in cock for stop.

An 1816 pellet lock converted to caplock – plate 108 in the Manton book – the light blob is the gravity stop counterweight.

I started to try to sort out who made what in the way of detonator/pellet/patch/tube/cap locks in the period from about  1809 through to about 1830 when caplocks were pretty established |(except for later tubelocks) but I don’t have any good source books – Winarts Early Percussion Firearms is mostly about American firearms and isn’t really clear about who was making what and when – I’ll need to keep at it a bit longer but if you know any good books let me know….

16th February – Shooting clays at Cambridge Gun Club today with the Anglian Muzzle Loaders.  Bit of a revolutionary shoot – all simultaneous pairs.  I got off to a bad start as my Sam Nock hadn’t been fully cured of its habit of dropping the Left cock when the right barrel fired – I did spend some time looking at it and reshaping the full cock bent as best I could without softening the tumbler but all I had suceeded in doing was to make the left cock slip into the half cock bent when the right barrel fired – at least that didn’t produce a nasty recoil and waste a load!  Anyway I soon learned to shoot with the left barrel first, and only had a couple of shots where I forgot and pulled the wrong trigger.  I like sim. pairs and given the gun problems that cost me a clay or two, I was not althogether unhappy to score 19/40.  I’ll have to do the full cock bent properly, which really involves annealing the tumbler and reshaping it and re-hardening and tempering it.   My inbox continues to get emails about Joseph Manton guns of the same era as Derek’s.  I had a nice string of photos from New Zealand of a converted Joseph Manton double shotgun Serial No 6031 from  1813.  This one has been converted by drum and nipple, keeping the original lockplate, which shows what the locks of 6592 and the gun that lock 7006 came from must have looked like with their earlier style of (simpler) engraving. As with the others, lots of ancillary details are right for the date, the barrel has the Joseph Manton New Improvements by His Majesty’s Patent wording, (1812-1816 ish) and it is interesting because it has the elevated rib on the barrels (more pronounced than in 5692)  he patented.  It doesn’t have gold or platina stamps on the barrel, but there isn’t room. It also has the rain water drains that collect any water from the barrels & frizzens and drain it down through the breech plug and out through the tigger finial – another patented feature – its nice to see those features, it was a ‘top of the range’ gun with all the latest bells and whistles !  The cock is interesting because I think it belongs to a pellet lock or patch lock – variations of percussion ignition that filled the gap between the Forsyth invention of 1807 and the general acceptance of the percussion cap in the mid 1820s.  The spring on the outside of the cock was designed to enable the ‘plug’ of the cock to be removed and replaced with a new precharged plug without the need for any tools.  Later similar cocks (eg that on 5692) were used for caplocks but generally lacked the spring as they were not intended to be changed often, just as a replaceable hammer.  The conversion wouldn’t have been done by Manton as he always made new locks and re-breeched barrels, but  probably by a provincial gunmaker.  Maybe the cocks were a pair he had lying around, so he just replaced the plug with one designed for caps?

No 6031 – Cock fitted on conversion was originally  pellet/patch cock?

Notice the very small front trigger – rather extreme for that date but probably a choice by the buyer – maybe a crude modification –  difficult to judge from the photo?   Compare with 5692 below.

You can see the Patent water drain above the drum & nipple, and you can just see it emerging from the trigger guard finial in the photo below.

.

 No proof marks (not uncommon) but WF barrel maker’s mark, possibly William Fullerd.

14th February – In London yesterday so didn’t do much useful stuff and this morning I had to  finish off my patent review, but I did manage to weld up a new side screw for a pistol – the old one had lost part of its head, but outside the slot. anyway a new head was made and engraved and butt welded onto the old screw so that I could use the (odd) thread.  I had an email about the Manton I had put up onSaturday.  Turns out that he has a right hand  Joeseph Manton lock – without a gun – that is very similar except that it has a different bridle and a very long sear nose.  His has serial No 7006 and the Manton Supplement book lists a separate Left hand lock with the same serial number.  The one I put in the blog  has a date 1812 of original manufacture (as a flintlock), and this one the serial number belongs to 1816. Its not quite clear if it was a pellet lock originally  (it is just about possible in terms of timing & Keith Neil lists the L.H. lock  as possibly pellet lock), although I  suspect that it is like mine, this lock was made as a conversion from flint. Anyway  very interestingly it has an identical sliding safety in front of the cock which I think belongs closer to 1660 than to 1816.  I might speculate that this lock was one of a pair with the one in the book that were made by Joe Manton to convert a flintlock Joe Manton No 7006 to caplock within about 6 – 10 years of its original manufacture  and as sometimes happened the old lock and breech etc were retained and its been converted back and the caplock locks discarded.  Any ideas welcome – join in the fun of speculating!  The secret is not to believe too firmly in your guesses!

Here is the Joe Manton 5692  I showed on Sunday.

 No 7006 – I think it was made as a caplock because it has ‘Patent’ on the lockplate which is taken as indicative , as does the one above.

Look at the extremely long nose on the tumbler- it looks from the geometry if the cock needs to come back a long way to engage the full cock bent?

I am a bit thrown by the safety slider, which I have only seen on rifles from around 1850 – 1860.   It is, nevertheless, strange that two very similar locks should turn up with that safety

11th February – Went indoor climbing in Cambridge this afternoon, so am too tired to attend to the blog – sorry!

10 february – A nice gun for you today!  Derek brought a gun that belongs to a friend of his for me to cast my eye over, so with his consent, I will put a few photos on the web and we can enjoy a little specualtion about the gun together!

It’s a high quality percussion gun signed Joseph Manton on locks and barrel and with the serial number 5692 on the underside of the barrels, the breech block, the inside of  both locks and the tang of the trigger guard.  By the Manton book that serial number belongs to 1812 ( this gun is not in the book), still in the flintlock era although coming up to the tubelock and pellet lock transition period before the caplock, which this is by the usage in the Manton book.   Its about 22 bore double with 30 inch barrels but without the elevator rib that Jo Manton patented before this date (? or a small one?).  So it looks as if it is a conversion involving new locks and new breeching, or that it has been renumbered or is from a period later when his numbering MAY have gone haywire.   There are a lot of interesting clues in the gun if you can bear to go through them;-

1) It has the cocks with removable hammers – a follow-on from pellet locks and used around 1828.

2) What are those sefety catches in front of  the cocks doing on a shotgun?  (they engage in a slot cut in the back of the cock when its at half cock  – I think they are a later feature.)

3) If its a conversion the ‘bolsters’ on the barrels above the locks look odd??

4) In addition to the sliding safetys on the cocks there is a grip safety – but it is engraved John Blisset Patent even though Jo Manton claimed to have invented it. There is a burr at the backof the slot that suggests it may be a retrofit. I can’t see manton putting a grip safety with someone elses name on it!

5) The barrel wording is ‘Joseph Manton’s New Invention by His Majesty’s PATENT’ – a form of words that he appears to have used between 1812 and 1816 and not at any other time?  It may have a slightly elevated rib – Manton’s most recent Patent – I don’t know what constitutes ‘elevated’.

6) The numbering on the barrel looks as if it may have been restamped after previous numbers were dressed out – possibly also the numbers on the breech plugs. One breech plug is a bit misaligned.

7) It has two sets of CP proof marks on the barrel – one set looking as if they have been dressed down.

8) Everthing looks OK from on top although the breech plug doesn’t align perfectly with the rib – but the engraving is continuous across the joint.

9)  The locks have the number 5692 very clearly stamped on them.  The trigger guard tang also has the number 5692 engraved on it and looks original.

10) The locks have the classic Joseph Manton ‘sea monster’ engraving by Gumbrell that was seen on his guns around 1820 – 1828?  Oviously the front safety catches were not intended when the locks were made and engraved.

Now we can begin the speculation if you are still with me!

A good point to start is the locks –clearly made by Joseph Manton around 182X (on grounds of percussion caplock, engraving and style)  or so and clearly numbered for 5692 and so intended for an 1812 gun of his.  The locks have the sliding safety catches which can’t realistically be contemporary with their manufacture(?)  but almost certainly a later modification but are unusual on shotguns, being much more usual on rifles, (and introduced at a later date then the 1820s? – maybe 1830 – 1850?).  If he had wanted to put a safety catch on a gun in 1828 he would almost certainly have used one behind the cock intercepting the tumbler not the cock itself as on pistols of that era.    Joe Manton didn’t make very many rifles.  When you add in the grip safety, which looks like a retrofit on account of Manton claiming to have invented it and it having another gunmaker’s name on it (grip safetys were not in fashion for long as they are pretty unreliable)  The grip and cock safety together might suggest that it was possibly converted from a rifle (unlikely) but more likely that it had a very cautious owner at some time – possibly at conversion but probably  some time after – possibly in two phases, grip safety and then sliding safety.  The condition of the blueing of the sliders suggests that the gun wasn’t used much if at all after they were fitted ?   The gun has not had a lot of wear at any time – maybe some prior to conversion, but relatively little use as a percussion gun as there is almost no corrosion around the nipples or the breeches.

The stock and furniture seem OK for 1812, and the number 5692 on the trigger guard tang is almost certainly original so I’m inclined to put it all down as original – the engraving throughout is consistent in quality and design and could date from a few years earlier than the Sea Monster lock engraving.

The barrels are interesting – the signature etc is right for the serial number date of 1812 ( used up to 1816). There is no gold or platinum stamp on the breeches, but they are very small and maybe not wide enough to take his stamp.  It looks as if they have been struck off and renumbered and rebrowned and reproofed but I believe that the gun has been untouched in the same family for many years and it is quite possible that the work was done when the gun was converted or when one or other of the safety devices were added – it is almost certainly not a recent rebrowning.  While it is possible to speculate that the gun was at one time a rifle and has been rebarreled, one would have to allow that the present barrel was contemporary with the original 1812 date or else re-signed in perfect imitation of the earlier form.

My current guess is that the gun was built as a flintlock 22 bore shotgun in 1812  and carefully converted by Joseph Manton to caplock in about 1828 (say 1825 – 1830).  At some point it was owned by a hyper cautious owner who had the safety grip added – maybe by John Blisset himself ( he became Blisset and Son in 1867).  It is possible that being very cautious the owner had the barrels reproofed at that time or they may have been done at the time of conversion, although Manton did not always send guns to the proofhouse  – he preferred his own hydraulic test.  I incline to think that the sliding safety is somewhat later than the grip safety ( I’ve only seen it on guns of 1840 to 1860) and so may have been added later.

So its tentative history ( a guess!) ;

1812 made by Joseph Manton

1828 ish  converted by Manton to caplock

1830 ish  grip safety added – ?by John Blisset? (probably before 1840?)

(1840 -1850) ??  front safety catches added  and reproofed(?)

I’m sure I’ll be proved wrong – I will take the gun to Geoff Walker at  ‘The Flintlock Collection’ as he knows his Mantons much better than I do.

Things to check include any date for Blisset’s patent for the grip safety, and a more accurate date for the sliding safety in front of the cock – all these things had a relatively short period in fashion and can be useful for dating, although occasionally clients demanded out of fashion features.

8th February – I visited the London Proof House yesterday as a guest of the Gunmaker’s Company who still run it, having been established in 1637 for the purpose of regulating the gunmaking trades in the City of London and a 10 mile radius thereof.  The present building was occupied in the mid 18th century and is virtually unchanged – it is on Commercial Road a stone’s throw from Aldgate East station and surrounded by high rise flats on 3 sides.  The site is pretty small, the largest space  being taken up with the dining room where the liverymen of the company have their magnificant lunches.  The work areas, which are responsible for the proofing of  the guns made in London or brought into the UK, plus many military weapons (although those are mostly proofed at the maker’s sites by personnel from the Proof House).  What I found astonishing was that the total space taken up by the working part is less than my own workshops! And its all distributed in a warren of passages too.

It seems incredible that they do all the proofing so close to the City, with all the transport to the site, and all the costs associated with London premises.  I can see that they would need to maintain a presence somewhere in London as they are a London Livery company but to me its incredible that they don’t move the gun proofing bit to an industrial site somewhere.  Anyway it was an interesting visit and I enjoyed the lunch and the booze……

4th February – Having trouble with the dates again – last 2 entries were actually 3rd!  Oh well, worse things happen at sea!   I did my STEM club at school today but most of the children weren’t in a mood for concentrating – funny how some weeks they do and some they don’t.   I have been keeping an eye on which posts on this website get the most traffic – there are lots of visits to ‘guns for sale’ which makes me think I ought to put a lot more stuff on there – maybe time for a sortout!  I have been hoping that the Mortimer flint repro would sell as I want it off my certificate so I can put something else on.  I’ll have a look next week when things cool down a bit.  I’m at meetings all Wednesday and in London on Thursday and Friday including a visit to the London Proof House which promises to be very interesting.  Before then I have to sort out the cock of the flintlock that Dick has re-squared- he ran out of gas so I am having to silver solder it for him.

4th Feb Update – did a bit of work on the Harding Post Office pistol safety catch today (workshop was up around 25C!) – I couldn’t see a good way of making a 1.5mm wide slot through the inside bolt for the tongue of the external slider – my mill is nowhere near good enough to use such a small cutter, so I decided to mill a groove in a strip of metal and silver solder another piece over the top to complete the slot – worked a treat…   And it all fitted together after a bit of filing – you can’t see the silver solder line.  As before I left the part attached to the strip of metal until the last minute as its much easier to handle that way.

Strip with milled groove and piece silver soldered on top.

Shaped bolt still attached.

The bolt fits neatly over the tab on the slider – it will need pinning.

Safety slider is now engraved.

4th February – It continues cold, although I did get the indoor workshop up to 25 degrees C yesterday by  burning wood at a rate of knots for 6 hours.  I need to do a bit of TIG welding but by Argon has run out – annoying because it has leaked out of the cylinder – I’ve not used much in two years but its empty so I’ll have to change it.  I couldn’t do that with the loan car as it wouldn’t fit in. but I’ll take it on Tuesday.  I got some parts from Fred in the US to engrave for a gun he is making, so I’ll have to do a bit of design work.  I have the Post Office pistol to finish making the safety catch parts for, and the Venables barrel to re-do, plus a bit of silver soldering for Dick on a flintcock to fix a disk for a remade square.  I have converted Dick to using Bev’s method of re-doing the squares in cocks by milling out a hole and silver soldering in a disk.  My method is to mill a stepped hole so there is some depth location when it comes to the soldering, but Dick has done a plain hole – We shall see if that works as well.  The advantage of the stepped hole is that you can have a smaller ring of silver solder on the cock face so it doesn’t show round the cock screw but get an increased area for the solder as you can make the back mill of greater diameter.  Anyway we shall see which is best….  I mentioned that my Nock had fired both barrels together on the shoot –  I’ve had this happen before but there is usually a slight lag between the two shots as the second hammer doesn’t come down until the recoil unlatches the sear.  This time I didn’t notice a lag, and all the other guns said there was only one report – they were expecting me to fire the other barrel at the bird.  I was surprised to find that both barrels were fired when I looked at the locks – so I’m not sure what happened, although I’m pretty sure both barrels were loaded and capped to start with and both empty at the finish.  Had it been a flint gun I might suspect a ‘flashover’ but not on a percussion gun….. mystery!

2nd Febuary – Got my Land Cruiser back from the body repair shop thank goodness ( I had a little disagreement with a driver who did an emergency stop in the outside lane of a dual carriageway for no reason) – driving round in a loan MiniCooper in the snow and ice isn’t my cup of tea!   Had to take a couple of days out from gun playing, partly because the workshop is freezing and partly because I have to do a bit of sorting out for a US patent case that I’m a consultant for – which does mean I get paid!   I had a look at the catalogue for the March Holts sale  –  it reinforced my feeling that reasonable percussion doubles that might make good shooters are about as rare as hen’s teeth – prices continue to rise and there is now not a lot of difference between a decent percussion and a usable flintlock!   Both are pretty thin on the ground in that sale – lets hope Bonhams come up trumps.

30th January – Back from a ‘last of the season ‘ shoot courtesy of Bev – things get a bit scrappy at the end of the season, and shoots usually want  to thin out the cock birds, so this was a ‘ see what comes up, but hope its mainly cocks’ sort of day!  In fact cocks were pretty thin on the ground – more importantly also in the air – so it was mostly hens that were shot.  It was one of those days when its so nice to be out in the country – cold day but warmed by the sun and little breeze – that the size of the bag is a secondary consideration for any sensible gun.  We managed 30 for 8 guns, which is fine although one or two guns didn’t see much action.   My Sam Nock double fired off the left barrel when I shot the right – a habit it had when I first got it and which I had eliminated by reshaping the bents – I had a careful look at them under the microscope and they look fine – I thought that perhaps the sear arm was a bit near the wood in the lock pocket so I have done a little reshaping of the sear arms but I can’t see anything else wrong. Our next clay shoot is simultaneous pairs, so I will need that aspect of the gun to be 100% by 16th Feb!  I also  tightened up the barrel bolt that wasn’t holding the barrel tight – I used the corner of a chisel to prise out the pin retaining the bolt, and bent the bolt slightly down in the centre so it pulls the barrel down onto the stock better. Yesterday I started on the safety catch slider for the Post Office pistol – I took a chunk of 8 mm EN8 and cut out a tab of about  the right size on one end so I could work on it and have a decent bit to hold in a vice.  I milled the rough blank – slightly oversize and still attached to the chunk – and filed it to fit, only separating it from at the last minute to shape the knob.  It looks fine, or will do when I’ve engraved the slider – now to do the internals.

26th January – Just got back from the climbing wall with Giles and a couple of his friends – its difficult enough to keep up with 20 somethings without ending the 2 hour stint by all trying to climb as many of the fairly easy climbs in the room as possible in ten minutes!  To say I’m k*******d is an understatement!   And I had managed to make 24 jars of marmelade in the afternoon.   I’ve been wondering about the cock we put on the little percussion saw handled pistol as I wasn’t sure if we had got the correct shape and neither was the owner, but I had a quick look through the last Bonham’s catalogue and low and behold there was a saw handled pistol, albeit a boxlock, with a very similar cock profile – I made a quick overlay to check it out.  I’m still not quite sure we got the right cock but it matches others used!

Click on the photo for a better view, back arrow to restore.

24th January – I have ‘pruned this post to cover just 2019 – the contents from late 2018 are in the new post ‘ Blog September to December 2018‘ – it makes it easier to scroll if the post is kept a manageable size.

24th January – Switched back to my little Harding Post Office pistol.  I needed to remake the square in the cock as the cock was from another pistol.  As mentioned I decided to bore out the tumbler hole in the cock and silver solder in a disk and put the square hole in that.  The cock was Araldited to a scrap of wood and centered under the mill/drill and a 6 mm end mill put through – the square on the tumbler is a 5 mm diagonal, approx 4 mm square.  I then dropped an 8 mm end mill into the back of the cock 1.5 mm deep, and turned up a disk to fit the two milled holes with about 0.2 mm proud on the back surface and a 3.5 mm hole in the centre to start the square from.  I had intended to put the square in the disk before fixing it in the cock, but there is no way to hold it so I silver soldered it in place with ‘easy’ silver solder paste that melts at 650C (dull red heat).  I then filed up the square hole very carefully to fit and , I thought, in the right orientation – but it turned out to be about 10 degrees from where I wanted it, so I just heated the cock up  to dull red and turned the insert with the end of a screwdriver to the correct angle.  That all went well so I worked on the sear to get it all aligned as I hadn’t done the final shaping until the cock was on.  I am not sure that all the parts I had were from the same pistol, and the shape of the full cock bent was a bit too ‘re-entrant’ for the motion of the sear and you couldn’t fire the lock – so the bent had to be opened out a bit.  All done so I tweaked the mainspring and hardened it and tempered it to blue – and then broke it while clamping it to put it in place!  It was my fault as I couldn’t find a small mainspring clamp and used a mole grip too near the ‘elbow’ and overstressed it – another job to do, although I might just try welding it.

The cock is actually stopped by the step hitting the edge of the lock as it should be, but the ‘chin’ of the jaw is a bit close – the cock needs slightly reshaping, although I’ll have to be careful not to loose the square insert if I heat it to red heat….. 

23rd January – Amongst other things I had a go at sorting the percussion pistol with the extreme full cock position and overbent spring.  I’m not sure what has been done to the lockwork but it is not right!   I did manage to get the full cock a little better by honing the sear slightly (.25mm off) – I didn’t like to take too much off as it alters the geometry and, with the fly or detent, it might not work.  I took off the bridle as the lock was very stiff, and found that the inside tumbler pivot had been peened over so that it was a tight fit in the bridle – I couldn’t see any reason for that so I filed it off and punched it out and adjusted the fit – – while it was in pieces I also ground down the pillar on the mainspring so that it isn’t overbent at the full cock position.  Although it isn’t perfect, it now cocks and fires  much more smoothly.  I’ll add a photo when I can get access to the website editor on my main computer – \i’ve had a couple of times when it  won’t let me get into the editor and I have to resort to the laptop, which hasn’t got my photo library on it’s hard Drive.   I was going to put the little Nock pistol back together, but somewhere between my workshop and Dicks we have mislaid the sear.  I Araldited the cock of the Post Office pistol to a piece of wood in preparation for milling a disk out of the back……..  If you think I have too many jobs on the go at once, you are right!

22nd January – Meetings in school took up 5 hours, but I did manage to make a graver sharpener for a customer.  I did design a sharpener that would do both the main 45 degree face and then could be turned over to do the 15 degree heels, but it needed rather a lot of parts and was fiddly so I am making them as two separate  tools.  They are not really economic to make as I have to turn and drill and tap each part separately and there are a lot of parts.  I could save a lot of time if I made batches but I usually have to get them out of the door in a hurry so make them individually.   If I could sell in quantity I could easily get them made by the 50s at an economic price, but that number would last at least until I am pushing up daisies – even if I outlive my mother who died at 98 – a good age!  Just in case you think I was shirking on the tax, any moments I  could fit in went that way……….

21st January – My apologies for no gun stuff today!  Mondays is Bullard Archive and STEM club.  The STEM children are getting their act together a bit – last week was a bit of a rabble.  We are building prototypes for a weather station for the school – the anemometer worked – now we have to fit a digital readout to it using a BBC Microbit computer.  Plans are in hand.

I have to report that my tax is not getting done very fast…………

19th January – As expected, another day pushing pieces of paper around the desk and searching for lost bills and invoices –  I’m relieved to see that there is now a £1000 tax free allowance for online sales, so the few little bits and pieces I sell from the shop on this website don’t get taxed and don’t have to be declared!   I picked up a copy of George Orwell’s Animal Farm with a child friendly cover and started to read it, thinking it was a child friendly simplification but realised that actually the book is the full adult one and  so unsubtle and simplistic that you wonder why it ever became famous – but I suppose times change and we  just expect better now.  I packed up after one page – doing my tax didn’t seem so tedious after that……………..

19th 18th January  – I got a bit confused about the date – I have just started wearing a watch again and it’s got the wrong date – it’s a day fast.  I gradually built up a pile of Casio F-91Ws – cheap plastic watches – with broken straps but still working, so I got round to ordering 5 new straps from Cousins at £1.25 each – I now have 3 wearable ones, and a couple of straps left over – Tom has one that needs a strap, and I’ll no doubt need another some day. As expected I spent most of the day trying to make sense of my accounts for the tax man – I had an accountant to chase/bully me into getting everything I need, but she retired this year so its down to me!   I did get down to Dicks to take the inlaid little pistols so he can finish them off and we had the usual cup of tea and a chat about work in progress.  I have the little flint post office pistol to make the safety for and fix the cock and get the spring to work, plus I think I need to have a go at sorting the laid back cock of the saw handled pistol as it offends me!   The Post Office pistol needs its replacement cock fitted, which involves completely remaking the square hole for the tumbler shaft – there are 3 ways to do this – 1) weld up the hole and drill and file a new hole, 2) mount up the tumbler on the lathe and drill out the shaft (after annealing it) and silver solder in a new shaft and put a square on that, or 3) drop and end mill in the back of the cock and silver solder in a disk and put the square in that.  2 and 3 do allow some fiddling with the orientation of the cock before final soldering, which is useful. 1) is quicker.  I have used 1) – most often, and 2) before, but drilling out the tumbler is a lot easier on a full sized gun – I’m not sure I fancy doing it on this little pistol.  I haven’t tried 3), which is Bev’s favourite, so I might try that this time.  2) would be difficult with a anything with a fly or detent, as well as a small pistol.

17th January – Had a shoot on Tuesday which didn’t go according to plan as the birds didn’t play ball!  As the season goes on they get more wily and the stupid ones get culled, so the keepering gets more difficult.  The first drive, which should have been good, produced nothing – not even the usual early exit of blackbirds etc.  The poor keeper was tearing his hair out by the end, although there were a couple of passable drives for some guns.  A couple of guns didn’t have any luck at all and in the end the bag was half what it was supposed to be, which in any case was very modest.  I guess I can’t complain too loudly as I got my fair share of what there was to get and enjoyed the day out in the country.  Ah well, its all part of the game!    I came back feeling half dead and for the first time in my life I just sprayed my gun liberally with WD 40 and left it for the morning, for which I feel ashamed!

13th January – We had the monthly Anglian Muzzle Loaders clay shoot at Cambridge Gun Club today.  Bev insists that I post that I shot very well (for me, that is). I surprised everyone, myself included, by being ahead  after the first 16 clays =  two stands, but alas it didn’t last, and I didn’t manage to connect with many of the long range targets – by common consent they were out to 50 or 60 yards  and being carried rapidly downwind, and by the time we got to the driven stand I’d lost concentration a bit, but still my best score in ages.  It augers well for a game shoot on Tuesday, and I’ve just got invited on  a ‘Cock Day’ for the last day on the season, which will round off the game year very nicely.  Don’t expect much gun stuff over the next two weeks as I have got to struggle with my income tax return for Jan 31st!

11 January – Interesting little problem – Dick put a replacement cock on a percussion pistol in the correct orientation for sitting on the nipple when the tumbler is down and the spring is almost at the edge of the lock plate, and it all works but the cock is very far back in the full cock position – it all works but both the half cock and full cock positions seem a bit too far back.  The tumbler and sear all seem to be undamaged and original and it has a ‘fly’ or detent on the tumbler that works OK .  The only things I can see wrong are that the link on the mainspring has been brazed and the mainspring short arm has a very long ‘stalk’ that rests on the bolster, so that the mainspring is overfolded in the full cock position – it only just gets that far.  I can’t see what is wrong – the square on the cock could be a little out but not enough to cause the problem, and the link might be wrong, although neither would affect the cock position.  Given that it has a ‘fly’ it is not possible to move the bents in the tumbler although it might be possible to shave a bit off the front of the sear.  I guess Dick and I will have another think together!   I managed to find an hour to solder the top rib on the Venables and it’s on pretty well – there is one small gap on one side but that is where the rib was previously filed down too much and it doesn’t touch the barrel – to have put it in contact with the barrel would have involved bending one side of the rib down by almost 1 mm, so best not attempted – it will be fine as it is, I hope – the rest is very solid.  I do rate resoldering barrels as my unfavourite – job I’ll do it for my guns but not for others!

 Position with cock on the nipple – it looks very upright!

Half cock.

A very laid back full cock – the mainspring is struggling!

10th January – I was helping a friend with an early spring clean and we found a cartridge bag which turned out to contain 50 12 Bore Bismuth cartridges on a peg, then we found another 25 in a bedroom, and 25 more in a cupboard, making a total of 100.  While I don’t shoot live quarry with a breechloader very often, I can use the No 5 bismuth shot in a muzzle loader and can then shoot wildfowl if the opportunity arises.  I had a quick look at the price of Bismuth shot on the web and it looks as if buying cartridges and recovering the shot is somewhat cheaper than buying loose shot by enough to be worth while – plus its much easier to get hold of cartridges than shot.  The only downside is that you have a whole lot of primed, damaged cases – or perhaps I can find a way of unloading them so that I can use the cases for black powder cartridges, which I do use for hammer gun club shoots.  Bismuth is supposed to be as soft as lead and OK for Damascus barrels, muzzle loaders etc.  It’s slightly less dense than lead, 10 instead of 11.7 gm/cc so you need to go up a shot size to give a comparable range and penetration to lead, and you therefore end up with a somewhat less dense shot pattern, so you need to shoot within sensible range limits to give clean sure kills.

9th January – sorry for the gap in posting but more urgent duties took precedence – I actually managed to spend yesterday morning soldering the barrels of the Venables and thought I had done a good job, but after it cooled down and I cleaned it up on the fine wire wheel I spotted about 4 inches near the breech where the top rib hadn’t been in contact with the barrels on either side.  I’m not sure if the tinning was OK or if it hadn’t taken, I tried to heat up the rib to fix it but stupidly overlooked the fact that the rib would expand and bow up as it was fixed at the breech and further down the barrel.  I will now have to do a proper job and unhitch the rib right down to the breech so I can relay it properly.  Fortunately the breech remains silver soldered together so it shouldn’t all fall apart if I heat it up.  Just have to make sure the under rib and the loop for the barrel bolt stay in position.   Not sure when I’ll be able to do that job as I have a raft of stressful jobs eleswhere to attend to…  I’ve been trying to get down to Dick’s all week to take a bit of welding for Jason and collect the last lot.  Jason is our expert TIG welder – much much better than I am.  He really enjoys the challenge of the very fine gun work and would like to give up doing ‘bog standard’ speciality welding and take up gun repair!  Not sure the market is big enough unless he does modern stuff – we only have about 1/2 an hour a week of work for him. It’s definitely time I got a few jobs out of the door – I’m beginning to loose track…………………. Oh, and Fred ( see engraving Fred’s guns ) has got another one for me to do sometime – I will have to spend quite a while getting back into the swing of it as I haven’t done any significant amount of engraving for a year or so.

6th January  I bought a copy of Ian Glendenning’s 1951 book ‘British Pistols and Guns 1640 to 1840’ not remembering that I had a copy already – its long book (in shape) and only fits in my bookcase on end so you don’t see the spine and I had overlooked it.  It is, however, an exemplary book for beginners as it is a very succinct guide with a brief history and much more comprehensive descriptions of typical pistols and guns than is usually found in books.  Its a shame that photographs were not easier and cheaper to reproduce in 1951 or it would be better illustrated but it does contain a lot of line drawings of decoration. It has a brief history of developments, a comprehensive glossary, decent descriptions of pistols and guns in the author’s collection and a list of known makers.  It’s a very good second hand book to buy if you only have one book and want to put a gun or pistol of that period in context, and much cheaper than almost any other decent gun book.  If you want my spare copy for £25 including UK post, please email me – first come first served.  It’s probably slightly wrong in one or two aspects – I don’t agree with his analysis of the ignition from flash pan to chamber, for instance, but overall its pretty sound.

5th January – My calor cylinder in the shed ran out so that has put paid to finishing the Venables barrel until I can get heat back on.   I got a flintlock pocket pistol by Nock today to sort out.  It is in good condition overall but the ‘action is at fault’ as the auction houses put it in catalogues.  The mainspring has some brazing on the hook end so has probably been repaired, and the sear isn’t holding.  It was sent already stripped down – looking at the action was made easy because the side plate had been removed and you can see the engagement of the sear with the cock – the cock fulfils the role of tumbler as well as cock in that type of pocket pistol.  The cock bents are in perfect condition, the problem lies with the sear, which is an extension upwards of the trigger – it isn’t hardened like the cock bents, and so the tip  has got worn or broken away for about 1 1/2 mm. It rather looks as if someone used brute force to fire the pistol when the sear was very firmly in the half cock bent and sheared off a chunk of the sear – or possibly dropped the pistol on its cock when it was a half cock…… The sear is a bit wider than the cock, so its left a bit of the original sear sticking up either side of the worn gap that corresponds to the cock – the photos tell the story – the sear needs building up to the profile of the two bits that stick up either side – I checked by offsetting the cock and using one of the bits as the sear, and it functions properly.  It can either be done by silver soldering in a piece of steel between the remnants of the sear, or welding more material on, which will inevitably destroy the original profile.  I’ll think about that choice, both will work but the weld may be stronger?

As usual, click the photos for a better view, then the back arrow to return…

a chunk is missing out of the middle of the sear leaving a ‘horn’ either side

The sear, with worn down bit in the middle.

The cock bents are perfect.

2nd Jan 2019   I started to put the ribs on the Venables barrels – at least I got as far as tinning the ribs and lands on the barrels – I’ve probably been far too generous with the solder but I don’t want to have any more false dawns! I will probably go over it again and try to thin down the tinning to a more reasonable level or it will create loose blobs of solder within the voids under the top rib which will rattle around when the gun fires!  I’m in school tomorrow as part of a pre term planning session to see what science is planned. On Thursday I am helping take all 100 odd children to the Pantomime in Cambridge (as one of 15 adults I’m relieved to say).

1 January 2019    Happy New Year to all our visitors, especially the faithful followers!   I’ll be back soon – just got to do our New Year’s Party with breakfast for about 70 people and then I can think about doing things again!

 

 Posted by at 11:30 pm
Mar 202019
 

Here is a post copied from the diary on reducing the 3/4 inch cast off on the 14 bore Venables of Oxford percussion sporting gun to something I could shoot with – around 3/16″ to 1/4″. It was a pretty straightforward operation, the effort goes into jigging it up properly before you begin so that you can control the bend to get the result you want, and so that you make sure the bending takes place at the wrist and not into the area round the lock pockets. The gun needs to be held reasonably rigidly so that clamping the stock doesn’t shift the whole gun. The secret (if there is one) is to heat gently and for a long time. I used an industrial heat gun and its easy to scorch the wood or damage the finish so I kept it on its low setting. The heat takes a long time to penetrate to the centre of the wrist, which is where you want to concentrate the bend. I wrapped kitchen foil round the lock area to protect it from heat, and wrapped a folded sheet of kitchen paper round the wrist and poured hot vegetable oil onto the paper, I played the hot air gun on the wrist from a few inches away and topped up the oil from time to time. Eventually you can feel that the butt is getting a bit ‘limp’ and you can begin very gently to wind in the clamp holding the butt to the reference board – be careful that you are not bending the reference board – mine was backed by a 1″ x 3″ steel bar so I could clamp it to that.

The wood will tend to spring back when the clamp is released, so it is probably safe to go 1/16th 1/8th inch beyond what you want to achieve and leave that in place while the whole lot cools down. This is when you really want to leave it for a considerable time to cool – two to three hours minimum or preferably overnight.

20th March – I bit the bullet and had a go at straightening the stock of the Venables which if you look back in the diary, you’ll see had a 3/4 inch cast off. First it is necessary to set up a jig to hold the gun (stripped of its trigger guard and trigger plate and locks) against a straight piece of wood that can act as the reference plane, packing the muzzle so that the centreline of the gun is parallel to the reference plane and clamping the muzzle to the plane and the bench so it can’t move or twist.  The stock is clamped to the reference plane with suitable packing in the lock area.  You can now measure the offset of the centre line of the gun from the reference plane and measure the amount of cast-off ( about 3/4 inch in this case).  I wrapped the lock area in aluminium foil to protect it from heat as I wanted to restrict the bending to the wrist area, and wrapped the wrist in a sheet of kitchen roll folded in half.  I poured a little very hot vegetable oil on the tissue and played a heat gun on medium heat on the wrist – it takes a long time for the heat to penetrate the wood, but eventually ( >3/4 hour) you should find that the butt will flex a bit, and its time to start gently tightening the clamp holding the butt to the reference plane and measuring the cast. There is no need to rush this stage and force the wood as it is likely to spring back if it isn’t allowed to relax into its new shape.  The butt will spring back a bit when its no longer held by the clamp, so its best to tighten the clamp on the butt just a bit more than you want the evenatual cast off to be – I bent it to about 0 to 1/8 inch cast off and then went off and had lunch and did a few jobs so it had about 3 hours to cool  – when I unclamped it, it has a cast of around 3/16th to 1/4 inch – just perfect for me.  So I’ve now put it back together – the lockpockets were a bit of a tight fit as presumably the wood has changed shape slightly.  The only bit of the job left is to find the nipples and the foresight bead….. I’m sure they wee somewhere! – there is always something else to do to finish the job.

This is how it started out – 3/4″ of cast off!

Caliper set to offset of centreline so still 1/2″ cast off

I kept the temperature to less than 100C – just takes time to work

About 1/4 inch of cast off now – perfect for me.

 Posted by at 4:29 pm
Feb 102019
 

A nice gun for you today!  Derek brought a gun that belongs to a friend of his for me to cast my eye over, so with his consent, I will put a few photos on the web and we can enjoy a little specualtion about the gun together!

It’s a high quality percussion gun signed Joseph Manton on locks and barrel and with the serial number 5692 on the underside of the barrels, the breech block, the inside of  both locks and the tang of the trigger guard.  By the Manton book that serial number belongs to 1812 ( this gun is not in the book), still in the flintlock era although coming up to the tubelock and pellet lock transition period before the caplock, which this is by the usage in the Manton book.   Its about 22 bore double with 30 inch barrels but without the elevator rib that Jo Manton patented before this date (? or a small one?).  So it looks as if it is a conversion involving new locks and new breeching, or that it has been renumbered or is from a period later when his numbering MAY have gone haywire.   There are a lot of interesting clues in the gun if you can bear to go through them;-

1) It has the cocks with removable hammers – a follow-on from pellet locks and used around 1828.

2) What are those safety catches in front of  the cocks doing on a shotgun?  (they engage in a slot cut in the back of the cock when its at half cock  – I think they are a considerably later feature.

3) If its a conversion the ‘bolsters’ on the barrels above the locks look odd??

4) In addition to the sliding safetys on the cocks there is a grip safety – but it is engraved John Blisset Patent even though Jo Manton claimed to have invented it. There is a burr at the backof the slot that suggests it may be a retrofit. I can’t see Manton putting a grip safety with someone elses name on it!

5) The barrel wording is ‘Joseph Manton’s New Invention by His Majesty’s PATENT’ – a form of words that he appears to have used between 1812 and 1816 and not at any other time?  It may have a slightly elevated rib – Manton’s recent Patent – I don’t know what constitutes ‘elevated’.

6) The numbering on the barrel looks as if it may have been restamped after previous numbers were dressed out – possibly also the numbers on the breech plugs. One breech plug is a bit misaligned.

7) It has two sets of CP proof marks on the barrel – one set looking as if they have been dressed down.

8) Everthing looks OK from on top although the breech plug doesn’t align perfectly with the rib – but the engraving IS continuous across the joint.

9)  The locks have the number 5692 very clearly stamped on them.  The trigger guard tang also has the number 5692 engraved on it and looks original.

10) The locks have the classic Joseph Manton ‘sea monster’ engraving by Gumbrell that was seen on his guns around 1820 – 1828?  Oviously the front safety catches were not intended when the locks were made and engraved.

Now we can begin the speculation if you are still with me!

A good point to start is the locks –clearly made by Joseph Manton around 182X (on grounds of percussion caplock, engraving and style)  or so and clearly numbered for 5692 and so intended for an 1812 gun of his.  The locks have the sliding safety catches which can’t realistically be contemporary with their manufacture(?)  but almost certainly a later modification but are unusual on shotguns, being much more usual on rifles, (and introduced at a later date then the 1820s? – maybe 1830 – 1850?).  If he had wanted to put a safety catch on a gun in 1828 he would almost certainly have used one behind the cock intercepting the tumbler not the cock itself as on pistols of that era.    Joe Manton didn’t make very many rifles.  When you add in the grip safety, which looks like a retrofit on account of Manton claiming to have invented it and it having another gunmaker’s name on it (grip safetys were not in fashion for long as they are pretty unreliable)  The grip and cock safety together might suggest that it was possibly converted from a rifle (unlikely) but more likely that it had a very cautious owner at some time – possibly at conversion but probably  some time after – possibly in two phases, grip safety and then sliding safety.  The condition of the blueing of the sliders suggests that the gun wasn’t used much if at all after they were fitted ?   The gun has not had a lot of wear at any time – maybe some prior to conversion, but relatively little use as a percussion gun as there is almost no corrosion around the nipples on the breeches.

The stock and furniture seem OK for 1812, and the number 5692 on the trigger guard tang is almost certainly original so I’m inclined to put it all down as original – the engraving throughout is consistent in quality and design and could date from a few years earlier than the Sea Monster lock engraving.

The barrels are interesting – the signature etc is right for the serial number date of 1812 ( used up to 1816). There is no gold or platinum stamp on the breeches, but they are very small and maybe not wide enough to take his stamp.  It looks as if they have been struck off and renumbered and rebrowned and reproofed but I believe that the gun has been untouched in the same family for many years and it is quite possible that the work was done when the gun was converted or when one or other of the safety devices were added – it is almost certainly not a recent rebrowning.  While it is possible to speculate that the gun was at one time a rifle and has been rebarreled, one would have to allow that the present barrel was contemporary with the original 1812 date or else re-signed in perfect imitation of the earlier form.

My current guess is that the gun was built as a flintlock 22 bore shotgun in 1812  and carefully converted by Joseph Manton to caplock in about 1828 (say 1825 – 1830).  At some point it was owned by a hyper cautious owner who had the safety grip added – maybe by John Blisset himself ( he became Blisset and Son in 1867).  It is possible that being very cautious the owner had the barrels reproofed at that time or they may have been done at the time of conversion, although Manton did not always send guns to the proofhouse  – he preferred his own hydraulic test.  I incline to think that the sliding safety is somewhat later than the grip safety ( I’ve only seen it on guns of 1840 to 1860) and so may have been added later.

So its tentative history ( a guess!) ;

1812 made by Joseph Manton as a 22 bore flintlock shotgun

1828 ish  converted by Joseph Manton to caplock

1830 ish  grip safety added – ?by John Blisset? date based loosly on level of wear. & reproofed?

(1840 -1850) ??  front safety catches added  and reproofed(?) Not much used thereafter?

I’m sure I’ll be proved wrong – I will take the gun to Geoff Walker at  ‘The Flintlock Collection’ as he knows his Mantons much better than I do.

 Posted by at 10:32 am
Jan 242019
 

Here is the diary:

30th December – Nothing much to add – cleaned up the workshop a bit which took all the time I had – I did find a little book  from 1941 – a handy guide to Enemy Weapons with brief instructions so that they could be pressed into service by the British if needed…….

Its complete – someone has ticked off most of the weapons so presumably they had absorbed the information, or maybe actually handled the weapon.

I’ll probably be arrested for putting it on the web!  I might just compound my sin by scanning it and putting the whole thing on the web sometime. I like the instruction that it shouldn’t fall into enemy hands – did they think the enemy didn’t already know about the weapons they used?

29th December – One party done – 23 members of the family for a sit down lunch – lovely to see them all every year.  Now back to normal for 24 hours, then another prep for the next party!  Managed to get a visit to the climbing wall for another bouldering session where I met an old college friend who, like me, is a climbing geriatric – he has been climbing for many years, I’ve done it three times and am told that my technique is rubbish, but I did manage to do a grade 4 and 5 climb today in spite of that.  I found time to start on the mainspring for the little Harding pistol  – I had a strip of 2 mm thick spring steel and cut out a profile with an angle grinder and annealed it in the furnace  then put in the hairpin bend in about the right place – note the tab which will eventually make the pin that goes in the hole in the lockplate – best not to make it too small at this stage as you don’t know how the bend will turn out.  Heat to red heat and bend at 90 degrees then hammer a bit flatter and eventually almost close up the joint ( keep heating it up between stages). it’s then shaped a bit more and the thickness and width tapered and  then you can file down the pin so that the ‘elbow’ just clears the protrusion on the nose of the lock that holds it in place.  I had to heat and bend the pin very slightly to get the spring to lie flat.  I then opened up the spring a little and heated the the end that rests on the tumbler ( there is no link on this pistol) and bent it to shape.  Having got the shape of the end more or less right, I annealed to by making a hollow in a pile of wood ash and heating the spring with a butane torch, then pushing the ash over the spring to slow down the cooling.   After polishing it I was able to offer it up in place – it looks reasonable, but may need a little more adjusting before it is finally opened up a bit and hardened and tempered, of which more later….  I think it will be OK, if I’d had a slightly thicker spring steel I might have preferred to make it 2.25 mm thick, but I think it will do – I do have to put a dab of weld on the top arm so I can file up a little wedge to go into the small indent on the underside of the lock ledge.  I can then finish the sear nose and get on to the cock.

26th December  Pheww……  Christmas is passed, now just 2 big parties to organise and run in the next week – but at least we had today to relax!  We even managed to go to the cinema and see ‘Mortal Engines’ which seemed rather like the last Star Wars film I saw, lots of shootups and clever cgi.  Anyway I did manage to get more done on the sear for the Harding pistol – it just needs to be finally adjusted after the mainspring and cock have been sorted.  I rather like fiddly machining, although I’m prone to being a bit careless at the last moment and taking off too much metal somewhere. I just about got the sear OK, – the arm that intersects the trigger plate was welded to the sear itself rather than machined as one piece to save more machine ops, and I left the joint as a fillet.

There is a bit of a puzzle with the works of this pistol that I can’t get my head round at the moment – the bridle appears to fit perfectly on the lock plate – the 2 screws, tumbler and the peg are in perfect alignment, and the tumbler seems right.  The puzzle is that the lock plate has a slot for a sliding safety catch and the tumbler has a slot into which a catch would fit at half cock – all as it should be to work with a small part moving inside the V of the sear spring, with a cover spring with a pip to hold the catch in either position.  All as I would expect – But the puzzle is that there is a slot in the bridle that doesn’t quite align with the slot for the catch in the lockplate, and a additional hole in the bridle that doesn’t coincide with a hole in the lockplate, and anyway is half obstructed by the tumbler when its on full cock  – so what are  the slot and the hole in the bridle for – they would appear to get in the way of the sliding safety and tumbler ?  Any ideas or photos would be appreciated;-

25th December 00:12 hrs    Happy Christmas, and thanks to all the followers of this blog who have contacted me over the past year – have a good day, and may Father Christmas bring you something special, or, more likely if you are like me, you’ll have to buy it yourself if its in the gun line!

23th December – I couldn’t keep away from the workshop and came across the little pair of rubbish pistols I had bought at too high a price, and thought they deserved a bit of attention as at least one is restoreable.  The first problem was fixing the stock – the muzzle end was cut away so I needed to splice on a bit of matching wood, glue up a crack down the middle ( partly covered by the patch wood) and then patch a couple of small holes with instant glue and sawdust, then steam a few dents out and colour up the patch.  That is all going well so the next problem is the cock, which isn’t the original one – its a casting and is stamped on the back with initials and the date 1969. – it had never been fitted to this pistol as the square is completely out of alignment with the tumbler.  I cleaned up the cock and recut the engraving and filed it up a bit to make it look a bit less like a casting – the next job is to fill up the hole in the cock and weld it all up ready for a new square to be cut.  I’ll fill up the hole with a square plug of steel with a pilot hole drilled in the middle, and weld round it.  I’ll need to get a sear that fits and make or find a mainspring, plus all the bits of the safety catch that locks the tumbler in half cock position.

De-rusted and ready for restoration.

The wood of the patch is a little light but it will colour down OK

Cock stamped 1969 – with plug to block the square.

22nd December – I had another session of ‘Bouldering’ with Giles this afternoon (see diary 17 Dec.).  I managed a few of the third grade climbs but found that after a few climbs  I didn’t have the strength in my arms to do overhanging  climbs – I’ll have to ask Father Christmas for some weights!   I was reading a copy of ‘Muzzle Blasts’, the American magazine from 1968 and was amazed to see that the US Senate was considering legislation to require a State licence in order to transport any firearm in an automobile through that state!  In some states it was apparently already an offense to have a firearm anywhere in a public place or in a vehicle except in the local hunting season.  Given that level of proposed restriction its not difficult to see why the NRA so vigorously defends the freedoms it eventually won from excessively restrictive laws.  The UK may well find itself in the same boat in the next few years if there is a change of government, and in the event of a ‘no deal brexit’ transporting guns through Europe may well require permits from every country transited!  There are currently government proposals to prohibit the instruction of under 18s in the handling of air weapons on private land or ranges, which would be loose one of the main opportunities to train youngsters in the safe handling of guns of all types – I guess you and I know that few people with any land will take any notice, meaning that those without are being penalised again!  There is also pressure to get some kind of regulation of antiques, at least of obsolete calibre breech loaders.  See the latest copy of Black Powder’ for the battles being fought on our behalf by the BASC, MLAGB, Sir Geoffery Clifton-Brown and others. If you are not a member of either organisation, please join as they are doing a fine job defending all aspects of out hobby……….  Oh well, moan over, and by the way, have a Happy Christmas, that is, if the drones don’t get you…. and I’ll try to find something more interesting to blog about in for 2019!

21st December – Looking over my stock of unfinished projects to see what I can do to escape from Christmas!  I have a set of parts for a pair of Mortimer dueling pistols that were machined up by an ex. Purdy gunmaker – its not a complete set, it needs pipes and cocks and one false breech, and the cast trigger guards that I have with it are too narrow to do the job properly.  I think I’ll have to prioritse finishing them sometime but I won’t start till I have all the bits ready.  In the meantime I ought to finish putting the ribs on the Venables barrels – the only trouble with that job is that it probably ought to be done in the rough workshop which has no heating to speak of – still its not that cold at the moment…

20th December – I found my Hutchinson Dueler that I’d ‘lost’.  when I went away in the summer I found it lying around after I’d put the other guns I had in the house into secure storage – so I thought I’d better hide it, which I did rather successfully, because I have been unable to find it since!  Anyway today I was clearing out a part of my workshop and found it behind a large box.  It was about the third gun I bought in the early days and I had some of the work on it done by Dick and the barrel struck up and the name freshened by a professional engraver.  It was in fairly good condition except that the cock had been broken and repaired very badly by brazing so that it was not really possible to re-weld it – I had a copy of a cock from my very similar Edwards duellers, both Dublin, both the same era and very similar in engraving. That was before I regularly posted stuff on this blog so there is no post – I will put up some photos, mostly of the finished job. See new POST

18th December – One more screw to make today – a side nail for the duelling pistol – one was worn but OK and the other was a bit too far gone around the turnscrew slot.  I was going to make a complete new screw but I couldn’t find a thread that would work  – neither 2 BA or 10 UNC would cut the mustard.  Fortunately the thread on the existing nail was OK, so that gives two possibilities – weld up the head slot and file and recut it, or graft a new head onto the old stem.  Welding up the head slot is dodgy if you are an indifferent TIG welder like me, but I know I can make a reasonable fist of welding the stems of side nails and similar size screws.   I turned up a new head with 10mm of shaft and cut the appropriate length from the top of the existing screw.  A slightly precarious jigging of the parts and a dab of weld fixed it and I could then weld round it.  Of course the old metal had a fair bit of carbon, but I managed to do a strong weld using piano wire filler rod.

The head was then shaped a bit using a drill and file and the slot cut with a slightly ground 12 inch hacksaw blade,  brushed on a fibre wheel, given a quick reverse electrolysis and engraved to match the other nail and re-brushed. Then  case hardening with Blackley’s colour case hardening powder followed by quenching, then a wire brush and a short rusting with slow brown.  Overall effect is satisfactory!

 

Re-heading a nail by welding on a new head.

 

The nail on the left is the new one.

17th December – bit tired today as I went ‘bouldering’ with Giles yesterday in Cambridge.  I had seen it before when I went with the children from school for their activity week, but hadn’t really tried it.  Its basically free climbing on a wall  4.5m high with hand and footholds without a rope – if you fall you have about 500mm deep of soft flooring to absorb the shock.  The holds are coloured and each colour defines a climb, graded according to difficulty- I managed the first two of the 8 grades – above that the handholds are less positive and my grip isn’t up to it yet. There are lots of climbs at each grade, including overhangs, so lots of things to try and scare yourself with!  I only found one of the second grade that I couldn’t do, and I think I must have spent well over an hour without repeating any climbs – great fun… see photo (not the Cambridge wall).   I did a bit of work at the Bullard Archive this morning, photographing old equipment, since I seem to be the photographer in view of the number of photos I take for this blog!  I had a little session of lathe work this afternoon, having measured and planned the screws I need to make to restore the duelling pistol I’m working on.  I keep a supply of old screws to try in holes if I have to make new screws, and also thread gauges if I need to check a thread. The table of thread sizes I compiled is invaluable for finding a match – its on this blog on the USEFUL DATA page in downloadable form. I have most small taps and dies, except not a very good selection of  Metric sizes like M3.5 and M4.5 . Most threads of British or Irish guns turn out to be replaceable with either UNF or UNC threads ( or 1/4 BSF for nipples – not the same as 1/4 UNF! ) so those are my ‘go-to’ threads.  I needed a screw of about 4.5 mm diameter for the tang screw at 32 t.p.i  – I took a chance on No 10 UNF which should be 4.82 mm diameter but tightening the screws on the die holder cut a perfect 4.51 diameter thread. I did the checking and sketch the screws needed while in my warm workshop and then migrated to the freezing shed where my lathe is, taking cards with sketches on.  I managed three screws in a short afternoon including simple engraving and aging, and also finished off a replacement blank for the link I have to remake.

 

 

 

15th December – I finished the link today, only to find that its really still a bit short for the mainspring I want to use – I think I may have mis-measured somewhere along the line – not to worry, its the first one I’ve made and I now know I can make them pretty quickly – I left the pins on that one a bit big too, so I’ll make a better job next time – I didn’t bother to finish it once it more or less fitted as I could see it wasn’t going to work….   I think the technique will work for links with two pins as the tumbler end pin can be silver soldered in if necessary.  I’m also going over the ribs of the Venables to make sure they are properly tinned, and I’ll do the barrel some time but the main heating element is set up in the shed and its freezing in there!  Anyway here are some more photos of the link…

 

Complete disk 1/16th inch thick as a blank for the link

 

Hacksawed, ground and filed to shape – its not quite long enough!

14th December – I started work on sorting a lock for a client – it had a home-made mainspring and a short bodged link between the claw on the mainspring and the tumbler.  My first job is to make a new link – this lock has a screwed pin as the pivot in the tumbler, so there is only one end of the link that needs a permanent pin fixed through it.  This opens up a neat way of making a replacement.  First I hacked out a rough disk of steel from a sheet of 8 mm EN8 steel with an angle grinder and Araldited it onto the face of a piece of 1 1/2 inch bar that I’d faced off in the lathe.  A couple of hours on the AGA top hardened the adhesive, and I was able to turn the blank to about 35 mm diameter and then turn off the face 3 mm deep leaving a 2.0 mm peg sticking up in the centre.  putting the whole caboosh on the AGA hotplate didn’t quite destroy the glue bond but a few minutes with a kitchen blow torch finished the job.  I now have to re-chuck the bar and skim it flat and put a 2.1 mm hole in the centre, and glue the disk on, then face it down so the disk is 1.55 mm thick and also leave a 2.00 peg in the centre – then I just have to cut out and file the link to shape and drill the hole for the tumbler pin.  I’ll have to be careful to make sure I get the disk thickness right.

 

The link is too short – a poor replacement at some time…

 

 

One side of the disk faced off.

13th December – That work on the AGA didn’t achieve a solution! it went out overnight due to overheating and cutting out, and I had another couple of hours trying to get it right.  Its a delicate system, quite simple in principle but dependent on the burner and the reservoir being exactly at the right relative levels relative to each other. I’m not sure that even now I’ve got it right – the trouble is that it takes around 6 hours to cool down enough to work on and 6 hours at least to get back to working temperature.  Anyway I did get to post the gravers and make a graver sharpener for a client, and I also found a decapper for another client – I have to say that the retail sales figures for cablesfarm.co.uk have taken a big upturn – that is, from about 1 every 3 months to 3 in a fortnight! maybe its people stocking up on Christmas presents or as a precaution against a hard brexit!   I did get to go to the school for their Christmas lunch and I even dressed up a bit – went into the little ones classroom as the were being fitted with paper hats, and they all wanted to try on my top hat.  I now have a pile of gun stuff to do and its getting near to Christmas panic time in cablesfarm – I can feel the pitch rising, so I’ll have to make myself useful to avoid a meltdown!  A correspondent pointed out that the photo of the funeral reminded him of a sketch from Monty Python – it reminds me of a sketch that they could have made,  but not the famous (totally tasteless) one they actually made.  I’m sure I’ve seen a scene of a group of pallbearers struggling across rough ground somewhere though……….

13th December – I realised why I hadn’t got much done yesterday – I spent 2 hours struggling with the AGA which had gone out while we were in Wales. There is a major problem with AGAs with the the old style wick burners using modern oil with biofuel added as they clog up with sticky soot – this time it lasted only 6 weeks or so since I scoured it out thoroughly.  ( Actually looking back over this blog I see that I cleaned it on 12th Sept, so actually 3 months, not so bad, but still not ideal!).   Anyway its now playing up and tripping the overheating sensor and turning itself off, so another session this a.m. trying to fix it – while I have a heap of other jobs waiting!  I thought you might like this photo from mother in law’s funeral while you wait for more gun stuff!

 

12th More –  Managed to get two gravers made – doesn’t seem much for a day, but I did have a visit from a collector/dealer who bought a revolver case from me and left a couple of pistols that need a bit of work.  One percussion pocket pistol just needs a cock – I only have long gun cocks in my spares box but I’m hoping that Dick can come up with something, otherwise its a bit of a hacksaw and weld job – amazing what you can do with a bit of brute force and ignorance!   The other one is a flintlock – it needs the usual clean up and the woodwork patching and sorting and probably a couple of screws made – as regulars will know that is one of my favourite jobs – it is also due a barrel re-browning.   To give you some idea of costs, the flintlock will probably cost around £300 to £350 to sort  – and it should add about £500 to the value – obviously we don’t often do work that costs more than the added value, although occasionally people want antiques restored for sentimental value.  I reckon making a simple screw if I have a die for it is around £20 to £30 with the head engraved and coloured down.

12th December – back from the Welsh funeral – wonderful way to go – the sight of the coffin being carried up a steep muddy track and across a bumpy field to be buried in her field was very moving – bit of a struggle for the guys carrying it though.  Anyway back now and a list of jobs to get out of the way before Christmas – make a couple of gravers, revisit my designs for sharpeners and make one for a client, fix the two locks – make or find a tumbler link and last but not least finish the barrels – they are beginning to haunt me!

8th December – Had a good clay shoot today – something must have changed in the way I’m shooting, although I can’t think what, but I did much better than usual with my usual Sam Nock percussion double – long may it last… Unusually for me I had a ‘misfire’ and some trouble unloading the barrel, but I think I made a mistake when I probed the barrel with the loading rod and in fact it wasn’t loaded at all! – we all make silly mistakes at times but its much safer to assume a gun is loaded when its not, than the other way round. After unloading the other barrel and tipping out the powder I fired off a cap – this showed that even after unloading and inverting and tapping the gun, quite a lot of powder remains adhering to the inside of the barrel – judging from the muzzle flash.  I  did know this from a previous occasion when I had loaded directly after tipping out the powder and suffering a very hefty wallop on firing……….  We had our Anglian Muzzle Loader’s Christmas Dinner (at 4 p.m., normal time for a cup of tea and a crumpet!) and raffle – I put in a de-capper and a worm for a loading rod – I was planning to offer to tap the recipient’s loading rod to take the worm, but I’d chosen to put a 9/32 x 26 thread on it as that seemed to be the most common thread on older cleaning rods, and it was picked up by someone who was looking for a worm for a cleaning rod that fitted it.  The decapper went to a good home too – there can’t be many percussion shooters in the area who don’t have one of my decappers, I’ve made so many!

 

Sandra, our very efficient AML scorer and button pusher!

7th December – signed on today to find the WordPress software that powers this site was due for an update, which included a new editor, so now I’m not sure quite what I’m doing – so far it doesn’t look that different so maybe I’ll be able to manage!   If you are thinking of setting up a website and want a DIY job, go for WordPress with Wordfence to guard it from rogues!  Without them I wouldn’t be running this blog.  I’m off to Cambridge Gun Club for our monthly shoot and Christmas Dinner tomorrow – muzzle loading shooting involves a comprehensive list of equipment, most of which has to be carried round from stand to stand.  I have a leather ‘bum bag’ with a waist strap that sits in front, it has wads and cards and spare caps and the unloading worm  end for my loading rod.  My capper is on  a chain and holds about 20 caps – its one of the Ted Cash ones from Kranks and works well.  I have a large shot flask on a strap hanging at my waist that will just about do 40 shots at 1 1/4 oz.  My powder flask can sit in a coat pocket or on a table if there is one. My loading rod is leaned against something handy for clays, or fitted into a tube that is stuck in the ground for driven game shooting.  Remembering all this paraphernalia is challenging, and its not uncommon for someone to get to the first stand and realise that they haven’t brought their loading rod from their car, or worse still, at all.

6th December – I did one of those daft jobs today that takes longer than its really worth, but sometimes one has to in order to get a project finished- the pair of cased pocket pistols I bought as a blog project needed new screws for the backstrap/tang, and the steel inserts they went into had got damaged when I had to drill out the screw.  So I made a couple of screws, and matching brass inserts to Araldite into 5 mm holes where I had drilled out the inserts – it turned out that 7 B.A. was a good thread size that I had a tap and die for – I have a more or less full set of B.A. and UNC & UNF but am a bit short on Metric threads in the smaller sizes.  By the time that job was done the morning had gone…. Anyway the little pistols are now together and working fine, so I’ll put them on the ‘for sale’ page.  I also cleaned up and tinned the top and under rib of the Venables (again!) and made a new heating element by straightening out an old grill element and bending it into a ‘hairpin’.  Unfortunately it turns out to be a bit short – I think it will work with the Venables barrels which are only 26 1/2 inches long, but only just!  I have got a couple of storeage heater elements that are 650 W each so I will straighten them and use one for each barrel – I’ll need some ceramic connector blocks to join them, the grill elements come with ‘faston’ tabs.

Used grill element – it does work but its a bit short.

5th December – I took the pair of London locks over to Dicks and we tried to find a pair of springs to replace the rather poor ones that someone had made for them – I hoped Dick would take on the job but unfortunately he is already overloaded, so I’ll have to have a look at it – we found a couple of springs that might fit, but we will probably have to find or make new tumbler links – luckily the links are fitted with a screw onto the tumbler so don’t need a through pin both ends, which reduces the work a bit.  The locks need a bit of welding as one cock is very loose on its square – someone had put in a couple of bits of metal as packing to stop it wobbling around!  Also the step in the cock that should act as a stop by hitting the top edge of the lock is not making contact – the cock is being stopped by the tumbler colliding with the bridle, which is not right!  I’ll post some pictures. I’ve derusted the little pocket pistol ( called C51 in my list for some reason)  and it doesn’t look quite as bad as I expected!  I am now tidying up the butt and re-sinking the escutcheon that had ended up standing well proud of the surface.    The little cased pair of pocket pistols is having the butts oil finished – it needs a couple of small screws made – I think 7 B.A. is about right and I have the taps and dies for that…….

(C51) Definitely worth the effort derusting it !  Its a good example of a very cheap pocket pistol of around 1850ish.  The engraving on the boxlock is what I regard as the most rudimentary engraving possible and is a strong signal to me that it was cheap, although the butt is better than most cheap pistols.  Note that the pistol is shown at half cock, in which state it could possibly be carried with a cap on the nipple without the cap falling off – maybe if one felt in imminent danger?  You certainly couldn’t put a cap on the nipple at half cock.

4th December – Busy today buying a Christmas tree and other chores – household duties piling up as the season approaches and we have a family funeral on Monday (not mine, you will be relieved to hear).   A new viewer of this blog expressed some surprise that it had a quarter of a million visitors over time, until I explained that I couldn’t distinguish between 250,000 different people visiting, and one person visiting 250,000 times, given the information my computer logs – I probably could do it if I downloaded each day’s visitor’s IP addresses and  correlated them but I’ll just assume that it has about a hundred regulars at most and lots of casual hits!  What I do know is that on average visitors click on around 3 or 4 posts each time they visit

3rd December – Sorry about the gap – don’t know what happened to the time!   I got set up for soldering the ribs on the Venables on Saturday – carefully tinned all the surfaces and put the heating element in and started to warm the barrel and I thought I had the bottom rib settled in place  and the solder melting when all the lights went out leaving me in total darkness at the back of a very cluttered shed!  Turned out that an electrical leakage in the heating element was tripping the electricity, so that was the end of that for the time being!  Sunday in daylight I had the idea of making sure the barrels which I had previously carefully earthed were not grounded, and letting them float at whatever voltage the leakage generated – all I had to do was the switch off the power at a double pole switch before touching the barrel!   That worked – I had a voltmeter on the barrel and it wasn’t above about 50 volts so no problem……  Anyway  I thought I’d got the ribs soldered on BUT no such luck – there wasn’t enough solder and most of it was dry joints so off it has come again, and I’ll try again with more solder on the joints – I had tinned them all but I’d wiped the tinned surfaces with a tissue and not left enough solder on them.    I had a couple of late London locks to work on because they don’t spark up as the mainsprings were too weak.  Actually they will take a bit more sorting out!  I’m still trying to work out the recent history of the locks – both springs appear to be much narrower than any I’ve seen before, one is certainly home made, and one link is wrong.  They are from the period when main and frizzen springs were made very strong to speed up ignition, so its a bit of a mystery…    I tried to get the little pair of pocket pistols done – I made a new screw for the butt under tang – No 8 UNC – and aged the head by reverse electrolysing and then browning tit – looks fairly convincing.   I’ll get them together shortly – I have to sort out screws for the top tangs, they are tapped into metal inserts in the wood of the butt, which appears to be ebony – class pistols!   I have started to de-rust another little percussion pocket pistol from my bits and pieces box – not sure this one is going to amount to much, but we shall see……………

Very rusty and basic pocket pistol (C51)- lets see what we can make of it!

29th November – Back from a marathon session of auction watching at Bonhams!  What is to report?  I guess that the general view was that prices were ‘soft’ when compared with a few years ago.  Not much surprised me – there were as usual one or two things that went well above estimate but nothing that got applause from the room, and a lot of the small pistols that went within estimate or just one bid above.  A pair of silver mounted pistols from 1650 (estimate £6000-9000)  made £13000 (Hammer price)- I think that old stuff –  i.e. up to mid 18th century –  is undervalued compared to the mass of late 18th through early 19th century firearms, just on the basis of the quantity that is out there.  A pair of nice Scottish pistols of good quality by John Murdoch of 1760 also made over the estimate,  again no doubt due to the scarcity of  such good early stuff.   Most small tap action pistols didn’t shine – some were unsold, but a pair by D Egg made £5500 (Hammer price) on an estimate of £2 -£3K.  The hammer price has a 25% buyer’s premium plus VAT on the premium meaning you pay 30% more than you bid – I’m used to it and plan carefully, but it used to get me in the very early days – I’d think I’d got a bargain, only to find when I went to pay that it didn’t look so great, even though I did know about it, its just psychologically difficult to include it while bidding, which is of course what all auctions trade on!  By the time a dealer has added on a reasonable margin, minimum 25%, probably up to 100% or more (no names, no pack drill, but you might know who I’m referring to!), things are getting expensive.   One thing that is interesting is that mid and lower  priced cased pairs of pistols often don’t fetch as much as you would have expected them to fetch if sold either uncased or as single pistols, especially if you add on the value of the case, flask and accessories.  One dealer who bought one cased pair said he would split it up to get more for it.  I was annoyed at myself for not bidding higher on a box of flasks, but you can never know how far the other bidder would have taken you unless you try!  I had intended to bid on some pistols for restoration on the blog but they just crept out of my top prices.

If you are wondering if  I actually bought anything or just spent my time writing down the prices things made, I did – I bought a nice cased Pryce and Cashmore Daw patent pistol, and , on the spur of the moment, I bought a ‘small’ double barreled flintlock pistol of 18 bore by Fishenden of Tunbridge in rather good condition – except for 3 small dings on the barrel that must have been made after it was re-browned as they could easily have been reduced in appearance by a little filing of the raised bits thrown up by the dents – I might have to do it!  Anyway it is otherwise in nice condition.  I think I’m going to try to make up  cases for all my pistols as near as possible in the style of originals – not by way of faking but just because they look so nice in a case!  Oak pistol cases should be easy as the top and bottom are screwed on with small brass screws.   A couple of pistols like ones I have got made cheering amounts – a Remington o/u Derringer in poor condition made £450 hammer price – mine retains most of its original finish……

Fishenden of Tunbridge 18 bore Pistol

26th November – I had a school visit this morning and my STEM club in the afternoon, so didn’t do much to the barrel except clean up the surfaces that the ribs will attach to. I checked that the breech blocks still fitted perfectly together, so I must have got the barrels joined in exactly the right orientation – that is a relief!  Here are a couple of photos of the setup – the red arrow points to the K type thermocouple that monitors temperature and can control the heater – it is covered with a bit of glass wool in use so that it picks up the barrel temperature – I also have an IR thermometer that gives spot temperatures so it is possible to control the heat and thus hopefully get the soldering right.  I’ll buy some lead free solder paste for the ribs.  I’m off tomorrow to view Bonham’s Wednesday and Thursday auctions.  There are very few percussion or flint sporting guns in the sale – a few large bores but very little of interest to the low budget shooter!  I will look at a few percussion and flint pistols to see if anything is worth fettling, and I’m tempted to look at percussion revolvers although the piggy bank is pretty empty!   Even if I am not seriously buying, I’m always interested to watch the auctions as it gives a good idea of the market and who is buying.  I have a feeling that Bonhams is normally the hunting ground of dealers, whereas Holts has more collectors – I know that the saying in the trade is ‘ buy at Bonhams, sell at Holts’  and I suspect that there may be some truth in it – one difference is that Bonhams will often sell below the bottom estimate if there is little interest in a lot, whereas Holts almost never does – in all their auctions I’ve only seen it happen a couple of times – Holts do have their on-line unsold lots sale as a backstop.  Anyway I’ll report back………..

Without additional heat from a torch, the element only gets the barrel up to just above 280 C – the melting point of tin.

Make sure you earth everything including the barrel!

Dick bought a straight element, but you can straighten curved ones if you can’t get a similar one.

the weird colour is due to the lighting in the shed – in this case an LED bulb – I’ve toned it down from deep yellow!

25th November – Started putting the Venables barrel back together today.  I set up Dick’s 2 KW ‘hairpin element on the controller for my furnace, so that I could control the barrel temperature using a probe, so that it didn’t overheat.  I wanted to start by silver soldering the barrels together at the breech and muzzle, and decided it needed one small packing piece between the barrels in the middle as they were quite easy to bend  and I was worried that when I came to put the ribs on they would force the barrels apart – the packing piece was about 1.5 mm thick since the barrels are a bit flared – properly referred to as ‘swamped’ for some reason.  I needed to get the temperature of the bits to be joined up to 680 C – the melting point of ‘Easy’ silver solder – which is actually about dull red heat – the element only raised the temperature to about 300 C (so no need for the controller at this stage!), which will be enough for the tin solder that I’ll use for fixing the ribs themselves, but I had to use a small gas-oxygen torch as well to get the areas to be silver soldered up to the extra required heat.  Anyway it all seemed to work out OK and I now have the barrels firmly joined in a way that will allow me to get them hot enough to re-fix the ribs without the barrels coming apart.  I now have to clean them up and re-tin the margins where the ribs will touch.  I’ll need to wire on both top and bottom ribs and solder both together.  The standard method is to tie soft iron wire round the barrels with the ends twisted together with pliers, and drive cut nails as wedges to hold the ribs- they can then be tightened up as the wire expands on heating – I also have half a dozen small ‘vice grips’ modified to clamp ribs in place.  The ramrod tube with the hole for the bolt needs to go on at the same time, and it probably a good idea to fix the other pipes at the same time.  Refixing barrels is about the worst job there is on guns, particularly on old guns where the metal surfaces that the ribs touch may be pitted and hard to clean – I wish I had a minature sand blaster, then I could mask the strips off and clean them thoroughly.   I’ll be interested to see how well this one goes – it would be good to have a reliable method!  I’m already thinking about lapping the barrels – again, it would be really good to have a setup that would let me lap barrels easily.  I guess that the soldering of the ribs will have to wait a week as I’m in London most of the week at Bonham’s sales – if I can manage to find time and internet access I’ll post reports!

24th  November –  I realised I needed cufflinks for a black tie dinner shortly, and I had lost one of mine so I thought I’d buy a cheap pair and construct my own with the bits and some nice Quorn Hunt buttons I have.  In the end I found a cheap pair in the keycutting/engraving shop for £11.99 – the assistant asked if I wanted them engraved (machine), and I said I did hand engraving myself – she asked if I did commissions as they occasionally got asked for hand engraved things… anyway it made me think it would be fun to engrave the plain ones I’d just bought in the style of an early 19th century gun lock.  The link blanks were a treat to engrave, being thinly plated copper – I might even be tempted to do their engraving after all!  I’ll get another pair when I go past again as I’m not particularly happy with the second one (not shown here!).  Maybe I should take commissions  for Christmas presents! I wonder if the gold plating would take – the decapper I plated wore/rusted through very quickly but I’d only put a gold wash on it.

 

Here are 5 motifs from the end of the 18th, beginning of the 19th century gun locks – bird, flower, fence, plant and sunburst – they are about 1/4 of the size they would be on a gunlock – about 1 cm square.  They are in typical William Palmer style .

23rd – We did pass 250000 visitors!  I did a little prep on the Venables barrels but decided that I needed an infra red thermometer as mine had disappeared to Gile’s flat!  As usual I got escalated into buying the most expensive one that Screwfix had – it does infra red up to 1000C and also had a K type thermocouple for contact measurement, so I should be able to get the silver solder temperature right without overheating the barrels etc.  The cheaper infra red thermometers only go to 300 – 500 C.  I did some more work on the small pair of pistols – I had to drill out the screw in the tang and in doing so I enlarged the hole somewhat – it was pretty rusted up and the screw fitted into a steel insert in the butt that was completely rusted to the screw.  I tried to weld up the screw hole, which should have been an easy job, but my foot pedal control on the welder had got out of adjustment and was on full power all the time, so that more or less destroyed the tang before I had a chance to take my foot off the gas!   Anyway I fixed the pedal and welded a new tail on the tang, filed it up and engraved it, then matted it down by ‘reverse derusting’ it which pitts the surface slightly.  Now have to sort out the insert in the butt, make a new screw and adjust the hole  in the tang…. a stupid amount of work for a couple of errors!

23rd – November – some time today this blog should reach a quarter of a million visitors since it started!  Amazing for such a minority interest site….

22rd November – Great game shoot in Hertfordshire – 4 cracking drives with lots of very well presented pheasants in nice varied country.  When we arrived at the first drive it was raining, but it stopped by the time we had got to the pegs and was cloudy and a bit chilly but not uncomfortably so.  As usual our overall shots to birds ratio was excellent at about 2.3:1, which is much better than the average breech loading shoot  – discussing it over lunch I reckon its because the keen Anglian Muzzle Loading game shooters shoot clays and game with equal enthusiasm, and thus shoot all year round, whereas breech loaders tend to shoot either clays or game, so the game shooters in general don’t shoot as much as we do.  Anyway I was pretty pleased with my shooting for a change – I don’t think I quite made it to 2.3 :1 but I think I was better than 3:1 and I got 11 pheasants. I’ve cleaned up the Venables, its now a question of tinning the barrels for the ribs and silver soldering the breech and muzzle together.  I discovered today that the Venables was put into Holts by a friend of mine, so I could have bought it off him and avoided the buyer’s premium if only I’d known!  Next week will be busy as I’m planning to go the Bonham’s sales on 28th and 29th – not that I can buy much but its a good way of keeping an eye on the market.

20th November – I cleaned up the little pair of pocket pistols – stripping off the butts  so the rest could go in the deruster was tricky as the screws were stuck fast.  Going round the heads with a modelling knife point broke the outer rust layer and lets the release oil soak into the joint, but I still had to use heat on one top one, and one top one just wouldn’t budge as the head was too far gone so I had to drill it out – slightly enlarging the hole in the top tang in the process, so that will have to be welded, filed and coloured up.   I put the rest of the pistols in the derusting bath without taking anything apart – they have cleaned up well on the outside and although I can’t get at the inside to brush the loose rust off, I’ll probably leave it as it all looks fine and works well – a touch of oil is all it needs.  I managed to unscrew one barrel with my hand, the other I can’t shift at the moment – not sure whether I’ll bother.  I had to go out so I left one of the derusted pistols without wire brushing or oiling it – you can see that it looks rusty, but all that brushes off.   I took the Venables barrels over to Dick’s to use his U shaped heating element to take the barrels apart.  I’m glad I took them apart as they are a mess with rust and poor soldering – the bottom rib was not well attached and there were a lot of shims between the barrels that were not properly fixed – it looked like a botched job.  The barrels were joined at the breech by what looked like brazing but it came off and didn’t look as it had made a proper joint.  Anyway now to run the through the de-ruster again and then clean them up and tin them along the rib edges.  I saw a lovely job of barrel assembly and blacking at the shoot on Sunday, but it had cost £500 and  that is just too much for the value of the gun, so I’ll do it myself with Dick’s help.  He says that soldering barrels together is the worst job he had to do – actually he hasn’t done any since I last did one with him last year.

You need to break the rust seal round the screw head and dig out the slot, then add penetrating oil and use a well fitting turnscrew.

I left this to dry after derusting as I had to go out – it looks worse than before but it will all brush off….

Here it is after a brush on the fine wheel – the nipple looks a bit short!

18th.  I had a game shoot on Friday – I didn’t hit much – some days you draw the short straw, but its all part of life’s rich pattern!  Clay shoot today in our black powder hammer gun competition – I was shooting my William Powell  gun made to Westley Richard’s 1874 patent with the ‘crab knuckle’ joint and bar in wood lock – it always gets admiring comments whenever I take it out – it has been rather over restored with blackened hammers (wrong!) but it still looks stunning if you are not a pedant!  I finished off in the afternoon re-shooting some of the same clays with my little side by side 20 bore Beretta hammer gun of 1955 vintage – I did slightly better, approaching 50%!   Next week I need to tackle the barrels of the Venables with Dick – I saw a beautiful job of refixing barrels today, but at a cost of £500 – that would make the gun too expensive, so I’ll have to do it!  I’ve been poring over the Bonham’s catalogues for 28/29 of this month – such a lot of things one could buy if one had money to spare!

15th November – More Land Cruiser expenses – the calipers were seized on the inside cylinders of both front wheels – anyway the front end is all done now – it had a fairly low mileage for its age so I guess these are symptoms of it standing around rather than working hard.  Definitely put paid to buying anything at Bonhams, although the catalogue for the sale on 29th arrived today –  they are selling the collection of a Canadian ‘Wild West’ fanatic – he had around 130 assorted Winchester underlever rifles and repros thereof – Winchester kept making special editions for various event and anniversaries etc., and he obviously felt obliged to buy one of each. I can’t imagine a more tedious collection!   I fixed the lock of the coachman’s pistol today – it turned out when I had got the cock close to the lock that there was a bit of play around the tumbler/cock joint, so I had to apply a little weld to build the tumbler up, which of course messed up the threaded hole for the cock screw – but I was able to tap it out again to a decent state.  I turned up a new cock screw with UNF No 4 thread ( .112 OD & 48 t.p.i.) – I turn up the thread diameter and thread it, then turn the shank to the OD of the head and part off enough for the head – I have a number of 25 mm cylinders tapped for different thread sizes, so I can then screw the thread into a cylinder and turn the head.  I then cut a slot with a section of 12 inch hacksaw blade that has had its sides ground down.  After polishing on the fibre wheel ( still in the cylinder) it is removed and heated to red heat and dipped in colour case hardening powder a couple of times, then dropped it in water – colour is then restored by heating to a grey blue colour which also tempers it.   Unfortunately the first one I made had the thread too long and it pinged off somewhere while I was trying to shorten it and I couldn’t find it – so had to make another.  I reckon it takes  30 ish minutes to make & finish a screw, 10 minutes more if it is engraved, less if I’m making a batch……

14th November – My Land Cruiser went in for MOT today – the front tyres  failed as they had perished – never heard of that on a normal vehicle – it usually happens on trailers that don’t get much use, they were not even particularly worn either – plus it needs new disks and pads – oops, bang goes the chances of buying anything at the Bonhams auction on 28th – just when I had arranged to go and spend a couple of days in London staying with my daughter so that I could ‘do’ the auction properly!  I just hope its back by Friday as I have a shoot (again). I had a go at soldering the fillet into the Venables barrel and tinning the rib.  It is difficult to get the tin – used as solder as its stronger than lead-tin -to stick to steel, even with flux.  One problem with tin is that it has no transition state between solid and liquid, and the liquid is low viscosity so it won’t bridge gaps – just runs through, whereas tin lead has a bit more of a semi liquid stage.   Its a bit like welding aluminium, which also goes straight from solid to low viscosity liquid so you can end up with a great hole where you thought you had a weld if you put in too much heat.  I did manage to get the edges of the rib all tinned so I just have to do the same to the barrel and join them.   I’ve put a few pictures of the pocket pistol on the GUNS FOR SALE page – its in nice condition, almost worth finding a box for it.  I got the lock of the Little pistol I had cleaned up back as I’d sent it out before I’d finished fitting the cock back on properly!  I have to make a new cock screw too as the ‘original’ has almost split in two at the slot – I had a look in the books for a pattern for it and found a photo in ‘Great British Gunmakers 1740 – 1790 by Keith-Neil and Back.  Its a good reference for photos of guns and pistols from that period and has the perfect matching photo – a coachman’s pistol by TWIGG of 1760 (see below fig 100).  I hadn’t really registered ‘coachman’s pistol’ as a type, but it makes logical sense for those dangerous times.  The choices for a cock screw  of that period on plain pistols appear to be a domed plain screw or a flat headed screw with slightly tapered sides – a bit later and fancier and it would have been a shallow dome with a very thin rim, still probably plain, but soon being engraved… or at least so it would seem. Of course you always have to be wary as its always possible (likely?) that cock screws have been replaced with the ‘wrong’ pattern. The existing cock screw appears to have been an approximation to UNF 4,-  O.D. .112 inches, and 48 t.p.i. so it will be easy to make one – I think probably the flat shape would be most suitable.

Most things are similar – the ramrod pipe is a bit more elaborate on the illustration and the fore-end is a slightly different shape, but not much else – both are by TWIGG and have his first signature, (c 1760)  so it will do as a model for the screw!.

13th November – I took the Venables barrel over to Dick for his opinion on whether it needed to be taken to pieces – his view was that the bottom rib was OK and it would be a bit of a fuss to put it all together.  I remain to be convinced, but I will probably put the top rib on, which I should be able to do without disrupting the joining of the barrels, and then see if I can get the bottom rib off and back on without them coming apart.  The barrels had an 8 inch long fillet in the top joint near the breech that wasn’t properly soldered in and was stopping the rib fitting down on the barrel – Neither Dick nor I had come across such a thing before, and I suspect that it was part of a botched repair when the rib came loose (see photo a few back).  I might put a bit of it back as it will help to keep the barrels together at the breech if I do take off the  bottom rib.  I ‘borrowed’ some pure tin solder from Dick as ribs etc were always fixed with tin, not tin lead solder.  I bought a small pocket pistol from Dick that he had cleaned up –  it is quite a tidy little pistol, and unusual in that it has an attached stirrup ramrod  – very handy.  Anyway it will go on the GUNS FOR SALE page as soon as I can find a few moments to do it and to take a few more photos – let me know if you are interested.  I also have the cased pair of pistols below to clean up – they will probably go for sale too – little pistols are really popular now – long guns take up too much room for most people.

12th November – I de-rusted the barrel of the Venables to remove the rust that was lurking under the now removed rib.  The process left the barrel looking really good – you can still see the rather nice damascus pattern, but it now looks as if it is just an old finish and hasn’t been rebrowned.  If I wasn’t going to have to make a bit of a mess cleaning up the barrel to refit the rib etc. I’d probably be happy to leave it.  I noticed that a bit of the under rib is lifting, so I don’t think I can leave it, which means a complete strip down of the barrels to their individual parts ( 2 barrels, top rib, bottom rib in 2 sections, 2 pipes, muzzle fillets,  pipe for bolt.)  Dick says it is not difficult to refix the barrels together – I have done it once ( on the Perrins restoration) but it was a bit tricky.  He did say that it wasn’t overly expensive to get it done by Ladbrooks, so I might explore that option as they could be lapped at the same time.    I had a visit from a friend/collector yesterday and got a small pair of inlaid pistols to fix, plus I bought a pair of pocket pistols in a case that I wanted so that I could do a ‘typical’ restoration for this blog.  They are nothing very special, but they are a pair which is not common, and ‘as found’ and fairly rusted and the case is quite pretty so it will be a useful job for the Blog when I’ve finished the Venables.

If you click on this you’ll see that there is quite a decent pattern visible after de-rusting. There is a bit of corrosion under the rib but not enough to cause concern in terms of strength.

Pair of pocket pistols for restoration  – it will be interesting to see how they turn out!  Someone must have had fun doing the box.

11th November – I knew it would happen soon – that I’d get the urge to do something to one of the guns that is sitting round the place waiting patiently for attention!  In the end it was the Venables double 15 bore percussion that I’d bought at Holts with a sprung rib at the breech end but otherwise a nice gun.  I kept walking past it until this afternoon when I picked it up and decided that I would do the job properly, take out the breech plugs and remove the top rib completely to see what else needed doing.  Getting the breech plugs out of a double is always a bit fraught as you have to hold the tubes tightly in a lead lined vice while you put a pretty massive force on a 2 ft long wrench. You then risk breaking the barrels apart, although in this case I may end up taking them apart anyway  With a double gun you don’t have much room around the hook of the first plug out as the hook of the second barrel gets in the way so as soon as it moves you have to change tools ( in this case to a big ‘vise grip’).  Fortune was smiling – my breech plug spanner fitted perfectly with a little filing, and the first plug came out easily – I suspect it had been removed recently.  The second was still in tight and needed quite a bit of heat to shift it ( I did check the barrel wasn’t loaded!), but in the end it came out OK – at least you can use the long wrench for all of that one.  I then ran the butane torch down the top rib and detached the 2/3 that was still attached.  The rib was hiding a fair amount of rust, and wasn’t particularly well stuck on  anywhere.   Now that I can see up the barrels properly, I can see that the bores are pretty good, so I will probably send them to Ladbrooks to be lapped when I’ve put them together (or perhaps have a go myself?).  I now have to decide whether to take the bottom rib out to get rid of any rust there, or to leave it so that the alignment and regulation of the barrels is retained.  I’ll probably derust them as they are now so I can see how much the rust has eaten into the barrel before deciding whether to strip the barrels down to the individual tubes.  I think someone had started to do the rib before, but hadn’t managed to get the second plug out, so had given up and put it in the auction.  I’m more than ever convinced that it will be a fine gun when finished – it will be quite handy as the barrel is short for a percussion gun (27 inches) – I suspect it has been shortened, although given the very clean state of the bore, not for the usual reason of getting rid of a thin muzzle.  Anyway gun work is on again!  P.S bits are currently being derusted at 2.6 amps so I’ll leave them for an hour or so – it will, of course, destroy the browning, but cleaning and re-soldering the rib would have done that anyway.

Barrel with RH hand plug removed and LH plug started – it was held vertically in the vice to get this far. The long wrench is shown – larger cutouts fit single barrelled breech plugs – the barrels are still joined although it looks as if they are apart. (sorry about the photo, hand held, poor light and in a hurry)

Barrel and rib – the rib is very thin and it and the barrel are quite rusted on the inside surfaces.  I’ll derust both and see if the bottom rib needs to come off.

The Venables of Oxford before I started messing about with it – beautiful stock…

9th November – My STEM club children did their presentation to an assembly today which was great fun – they presented their ‘cookie alarms’ – amazingly all 8 alarms worked!  Now we have to think of projects for them for the rest of the term!  I was looking through a blog that had an argument about how much one should restore antique guns.  One school of thought says that one should try to return them to the state they were when new – by if necessary doing a complete refinish.  They compare antique guns to old cars and watches, which they claim are always restored fully, including repainting and re-upholstering, and add to their argument by conflating ‘patina’ with  ‘rust’.   Their argument fails on several counts, firstly because the purpose of restoring old cars and watches is to be able to use them for their original purpose, even if only occasionally, whereas very few old guns are ever shot, even once for a test.  The same argument applies to watches.  The main argument against trying to recreate the original finish on guns is that it is not usually possible to do so without destroying something else.  With cars the paint is a superficial layer that can be removed and replaced without any damage to the underlying structure, whereas removing the ‘patina’ to generate a surface smooth enough to refinish back to the original standard will inevitably degrade the engraving, and it is virtually impossible to recut a whole gun decoration without loosing part of its essential character.  At that point it is really easier to start from scratch and make a new ‘antique’!  Some parts will inevitably be worn in such a way that they can’t be returned to original condition, so there will be a mismatch at the end of the process.  The other fallacy is the claim that fully restored cars and watches are more valuable than ones in good original condition – they are not by a long way!   Guns, cars, watches – a full refinishing may hide anything  and if the purpose is to have something to display rather than use, that should be a warning to would be purchasers that all may not be as it seems.  My approach is that with guns of poor quality or in poor condition there is very little to loose by doing whatever restoration is necessary to make something worth keeping for posterity.  For mid range value and condition I would try to restore functionality by doing any necessary mechanical work and  cleaning off all surface rust – either by gently mechanical means or electrolytically if there is enough rust to warrant it, which process leaves its own quite acceptable finish that requires no further treatment beside oiling.  Repairs to the wood depend on the extent of any damage – structural cracks and missing wood need to be attended to,  extensive denting may with advantage be steamed out after which some refinishing will be necessary.   High class guns have a higher threshold before interventions are acceptable, and will probably be restricted to restoring mechanical function and repairing major defects.  The most common refinishing is re-browning of barrels, which seems to be something done for/by collectors almost as a matter of course.  The metal from which barrels are made is soft and liable to corrosion and marking and scratching whereas most of the rest of the metalwork is hardened and more protected, so barrels are almost always in the worst condition of any part of the gun and can really drag down the appearance, so its understandable that they get re-browned.  I suspect that it may not have been uncommon for the barrels of guns to be re-browned occasionally while they were in service for the same reason – evidence for in service re-browning comes from the wear often seen in the lettering on barrels.   It’s certainly a common re-finishing operation and if done carefully probably doesn’t detract from the value, although a gun with a good original finish will always fetch more.     Descriptions are something else that is fought over.  I guess ‘original’ is the key work – if it is unqualified it should mean that all the parts are original, and the appearance of the gun hasn’t been changed – i.e. reconverted to flint.  Where the finish is original throughout this would be noted as ‘original finish’ or something similar.  Where barrels have been re-browned this should usually be indicated, but isn’t always obvious.  My take on re-browning barrels is that you shouldn’t aim to get them back to ‘shop’ condition because they will then show up the rest of the gun – just just to create a compatible and discrete finish without to much shine.

8th November – I just got the  Bonham’s catalogues for the next sale on 28th November – what a treasure trove of stuff, there are two large  quality collections up for sale.  It strikes me that many of the serious collectors in the business are of a ‘certain’ age, and that there may not be so many younger collectors waiting in the wings to pick up the spoils – my guess is that a lot of the good stuff will go overseas, probably to the US where there is more general interest in these things and the currency is favourable. I know of one or two good collections that are bound to be on the market within the next few years.  Anyway in the meantime the really desirable guns are the rare pieces and fine, preferably cased, pistols in really good condition, and I expect the run of the mill stuff to go for reasonable prices!  I don’t know if that will turn out to be the case – we shall see, but the estimates don’t look excessive!  Given the impending legislation on ivory it will be interesting to see if the pair of ivory handled pocket pistols sell.

6th November – Dick has been relining a gun case for a  Joseph Manton percussion gun,  I gave him some green biase that was a bit bright (from Bernie the Bolt) – I had faded it down using dilute bleach when I used it, but he used too much bleach and it went a bit grey .  He then tried a hot wash in the washing machine on the remainder of the cloth, which gave a decent result, but by that time he had not got enough left to finish the job, which means raiding my stock again!   I’m still fixing up my internet wiring under the floor etc – I got a new crimper but the cost was nearer £50 – still it works and I can remove the patch cables that were running round the house in an untidy and conspicuous way…..   I will get back to some gun work shortly but its so cold in the workshop if I’m not moving that its only worth starting when I have time to get the woodburner up to temperature and let it warm up the room.

5th November – Here are some photos of the 4 barreled pistol I did some work on for Dick for a client – I engraved the barrel tang as it had been welded – I forgot to take photos of the finished job but here are some of the pistol – Dick had stripped the lock down to repair so I didn’t have those bits on hand to photograph.  It has an indistinct name on the lock that could be HUNT  – its not very clear overall  but the N and T are fairly clear and most other possible names don’t fit – the initial letter definitely had a straight vertical line in it!.  Hunt appears several times in the list of Birmingham and Provincial makers – the most likely being Joseph Hunt, gun and pistol maker of Bull St Birmingham 1766 – 1774, or Robert Hunt listed in Rotherham in 1783.   I would date the gun from around 1780 on stylistic grounds and based on photographs of broadly similar 4 barreled pistols that are dated to around that time by Keith Neal.   Probably they ought to be called Volley guns as they were incapable of firing individual barrels.  The 4 barreled assembly unscrewed as one and left a small single powder chamber in the middle that was linked to the barrels by 4 groves in a rim round the mouth of the powder chamber – I’m not sure how closely the breech fitted to the barrel – maybe there was a gap for the expanding gap – there wouldn’t have been any powder on the barrel side of the connection. I would guess that the pistol used a very small charge, as the barrels don’t look as if they would stand much pressure.  I’m not sure what the pistol was loaded with or how – the normal single barreled turn-off pistol has a powder chamber and the breech end of the barrel is slightly larger diameter than the bore, so the balls are held captive and also serve to retain the powder  until fired – handy for a pistol likely to be carried around far more than actually used.  The volley pistol has no such bore enlargement at the breech, so nothing to stop the load coming out of the muzzle – perhaps it had wads down the barrel to hold the load in place? (answers on a postcard please!)

4th November – Fantastic shoot yesterday at Sotterley near Beccles – we have been very lucky with the weather this year, and apart from the need to add a layer from time to time as winter approaches its been gloriously sunny most times.  The bag was around 120 birds for a hit ratio  of 1 for every three shots on average, which is excellent – few breech loading shoots manage to better that.  We were double pegging ( 2 guns per peg to give reloading time) and 14 guns in all.  I shot my Nock double – I’m used to it and it is reliable – misfires are very few and almost always ‘finger trouble’ rather than a failure of the equipment.  Anyway a really good day, although it has to be said that on the last drive of 7  I saw more foxes (1) than game birds (0)!  I had a question from a fellow muzzle loading shooter concerning a John Manton single barreled percussion gun – the lock had to be removed before the barrel could be disengaged from the false breech because the side nail (screw that holds the lock on) passed through the breech block.  It was normal for the locks of quality flintlocks to be removed when cleaning the gun as priming powder residue is very corrosive and could penetrate into the inside of the lock or at least get into the edges. Both John and Joseph Manton cased their flintlocks with a place for the locks to be stored out of the stock.  This was done for guns where it was physically possible to get the barrel off without removing the locks, although it should be noted that on some flintlocks, including some Mantons, the frizzen fouls on the barrel, particularly where the breech is recessed in late flintlocks, and it is advisable or even necessary to remove the locks before removing the barrel.     The Mantons continued to case percussion guns with detached locks, quite possibly because the early caps of fulminate or chlorate were very corrosive and the same precautions were necessary as with flintlocks.  I am not sure how common the through breech plug side nail was, but I’ve seen it before.  It was probably more common in pistols without a false breech- I seem to think military pistols, but they are not really my thing!.  The gun described to me fits with an illustration in the Manton Book facing page 41, which illustrates a single barreled gun serial no 9689 of 1828 – i.e. an early percussion gun and specifies that the side nail passes through the breech plug.    For my sins I’ve been trying to wire up some network cables in the house, but the connnectors (RJ45) have proved difficult to crimp onto the end of the cable – my first problem was that the connectors obviously didn’t match the cable – in fact I’ve no idea what they did fit, and my second problem , after getting the right connectors,  – more difficult to spot – was that the crimp tool I’d bought on ebay wasn’t crimping properly as it had a slightly faulty casting for driving the contacts into the wires – thus wasting at least 3 hours more of my time!  Ah well I’ll have to shell out £35 for a decent tool – I should have learnt by now never to buy cheap tools – although my experience of buying cheap Ebauer power tools from Screwfix has been uniformly good – not that they get much work.

31st October – I bought back a little 4 barreled pistol to do some engraving on for Dick.  I have been having a discussion about the Warner Civil War Carbine of 1864 with someone who also has one sans breech block – I realised that although there are a couple of photos of the Warner on this site, there is no proper post, so I’ll have to do one.  The Warner is one of dozens of designs for a breech loading Carbine for the Union side in the American Civil War.  When the war started the army of the North was quite small was armed almost entirely with muzzle loading percussion guns, there was no one obvious choice of arm, and the manufacturing facilities didn’t exist to produce a single design in large quantities.  The union thus gave our orders to a number of would be manufacturers of various designs  to produce samples for inspection, so be followed up with orders for a modest quantity with the promise that if the Carbine was satisfactory the Union Armouries would take as many guns as the manufacturer could turn out.   The result was a proliferation of new designs, of with around a dozen made it to the production stage, of which the Warner was one.  After a bit of a fuss it did get a patent, although not for the features that had originally been claimed!  In the end the only features patented were the semicircular bottom to the chamber and the use of a firing pin without a return spring that used a chamfer on the breech to move the firing pin out of the fired position, a feature that partly led to the eventual downfall of the design.  The main reason the gun failed in service wasn’t really the fault of the Warner gun, but was due to the tendency of the rimfire cartridges to burst at the rim due to faulty metal cases – this produced a number of problems – in the beginning it invariably blew the (Snieder tyrpe) breechblock away – that was mostly cured by drilling a hole in the bottom of the chamsber to relieve the pressure, but finally it was binding of the firing pin when a burst occurred that jammed the gun – all because Warner wanted to use a ramp on the breech to retract the firing pin instead of a spring like everyone else.  I guess if you think about it, a Snieder like sideways hinged breech block can never produce and sustain as tight fit on the head of the cartridge as a cammed bolt, so will always be more prone to rim bursting in a rimfire cartridge than bolt guns.  Photos and a new post will follow…….

e28th October – Yesterday at Homerton College Festival for 250th  anniversary doing engraving demonstration – mostly screwheads.  I’d forgotten that the Cambridge liberal academic community on the whole didn’t really like guns, and had taken a few to display, but they hardly got a glance, while my engraved screwheads attracted a lot of attention.  I gave them out as ‘rewards’ to those children who showed real interest, of which there were a fair number.  I’d made some little oak blocks to mount them in, and gave some to the really really keen kids!   I decided to use the Amscope microscope I bought some time ago  – I bougth it in the mistaken belief that it would allow me to have a digital camera displayed while I engraved – it turned out that to use the camera you have to divert the image from one eyepiece, so not a lot of use to me.  Anyway my little pen sized camera stuck on the side of the microscope sufficed.     The Amscope actually worked perfectly well, and at about £450 is a good buy for an engraving microscope – just make sure you get a useful stand with it.  See blog post on engraving setup for more…..

I finished off the Twigg pistol – it all went together OK – I didn’t dare to bend the trigger guard to be a perfect fit as it had an incipient crack and would probably have broken if any strain was put on it.  The tumbler welding worked well, and is perfectly aligned and is strong enough for the intended purpose – if you look down this blog you’ll see that the square had broken off, and a new square had been tapped into the tumbler but was free to turn relative to the tumbler.  I put a few dabs of weld around the joint – it was clear that the tapped hole had not left much of a wall thickness in the bearing part of the tumbler but the pistol isn’t going to be shot so great strength is not an issue and it all filed up and fitted OK with the cock in the right alignment.  If it had been a gun that was likely to be used for shooting I would have used a different approach, and annealed the tumbler, drilled a hole right through it and made a new  tumbler axle with the square on it and silver soldered or welded it in place and then re-hardening and annealing it – a lot more work that wasn’t justified in an old pistol.

Lug soft soldered onto the trigger guard – it widens at the base to give strength, I didn’t want to silver solder it.  The guard is riveted to  the finial and I didn’t want to solder over the rivet so the tab is displaced a bit.

Finished pistol – minimal repairs to preserve as much of the original appearance and patina as possible – the cock screw needs colouring down as I reshaped it a bit – it now looked too like a machine screw! 

25th October – I made a brass tab to solder onto the trigger guard of the flintlock pistol I have to fettle – it all soldered together well and is now ready for the final installation in the pistol- I left a flared end on the tab so it has a decent surface area to soft solder as I didn’t want to heat the trigger guard up enough for silver solder.  Photo tomorrow if I remember before I fix it in place!

24th October –   If you are in Cambridge this Saturday come along to the College in Hills Road – I’ll be in the Senior Combination Room with the other local crafts – and introduce yourself.

Busy today – remove the breasts from yesterday’s bag for the freezer – we have a good supply of game for the winter and will no doubt add to that from future shoots – nice warming game casseroles on the menu!  Some venison would be a good addition, I do fancy a bit of deer stalking!  I am also beginning to think a wild boar shoot in Poland would be quite fun.   I  finished the little addition to the escutcheon and a couple of screwheads for a gun Dick is repairing ( see photo).  I offered to do an engraving demo at the Homerton College 250th anniversary on Saturday, and said I’d bring along a few antique guns that were (a bit) relevant to the 250 yr history of the college.  I hadn’t realised that this would involve the college in telling the police and receiving a list of frankly over the top conditions, including that my flintlocks should be ‘deactivated’ by removing the flints!  This is not a legal requirement since none of the guns require a license, but who would argue?  Fortunately most of the public events I do don’t attract such ad hoc rules.  Anyway I will mostly be doing an engraving demo, which requires I ship in a whole lot of equipment, tables, turntable, microscope, stool etc.  I usually just engrave screw-heads as not requiring too much concentration so leaving me free to talk – I have 20 nice big 1/2 inch old Nettlefold steel screws from ebay that I have polished up. This time I have made some wooden blocks to mount them in, which I’ll try to sell to raise a bit of cash for buying bits for my STEM club at school – the kids seem to eat batteries, buzzers and reed switches and sticky tape at the moment.  I also have a project to engrave the Homerton Coat of Arms on a piece of brass sheet I have cleaned up – fortunately it appears to be quite tractable so I’m optimistic that I can engrave it more easily than the dog-disks I usually buy.  Probably not a good project for a public session though.

I got given tweed shooting suit – circa 1958 – today, and it fits me almost perfectly so now I’ll be able to hold my own with the toffs on the shoots for the rest of the season  – I fully expect my shooting to improve with the new addition, although obviously an over and under would be totally inappropriate – I think our next club shoot is hammer guns so I might take my William Powell – reasonably in keeping, although probably it should be an Army and Navy or some such. Come to think of it, a shooting suit is probably a bit over the top for a club shoot, and I wouldn’t want to be a laughing stock…………

I didn’t do the Griffin, just the B.  The Griffin is also big in the Homerton Coat of Arms.

23rd October – Fantastic day’s shoot at Glemham Hall kindly organised by Bev (thank you!) – lots of walking – we all got to walk up a drive behind the beaters, and several standing drives, over pasture and rough ground so a nice change from standing in a long line in the middle of a crop field.  A decent breeze  aided things, and I had some good drives – in the end I got five birds, which was a fair score for me – the average bag per person was about 7.  I treated my son Tom to the shoot too, as he was down from St Andrews – he too enjoyed it.  We had a team of pointers doing the flushing – beautifully trained, they were all either field champions or on the way, and much of the pleasure of the shoot, especially for the walking guns, was seeing the dogs work – sort of makes me wish we had a dog, but I don’t think it would fit in with the family life we currently lead – in fact it would need a pretty dramatic change – one day perhaps….   We’ve now cleaned the guns and packed things away so I can slump til bedtime, having used up all my spare energy.

18th October – I’m off tomorrow to Norfolk to visit a very keen collector of flintlocks – might take a couple of guns to see if he is interested – part of my ‘divestment program’ – I have a few strange things that could find a more appreciative home!   I have a game shoot next Tuesday , muzzle loading of course  – they seem to be coming thick and fast at the moment – I feel a bit bad about the extravagance!  I was trying to work out why I can shoot the two types of clay that I can hit and not all the bulk of them – the common feature of the ones I find relatively easy is that they are going vertically, either up or down so I don’t need to separate how far above or below the clay I shoot from how far in front – it all gets subsumed into the same guess!  I did find yesterday that I could shoot crossers from the high platform when I was looking down on them, so maybe my problem is just shooting above or below, and if you mostly miss that way, you never home in on the right lead to give?  Maybe I ought to have some coaching!

17th October – Really good morning shooting clays at Eriswell with Clare and Jan, a friend over from Holland, despite the fact that it started off with light drizzle – not exactly ideal for muzzle loaders.  Clare wanted to concentrate on the ‘Driven’ stand – clays coming towards you off a tower that simulate driven game birds but we had to fill in time before it became free, so I did my usual erratic shooting at ‘crossers’.  Things looked up when we got on the driven stand as they are one of the two types of clays I can get a reasonable hit rate on ( the other is clays dropping out of the sky!).  So unusually for me, I was able to hold my own….  It’s a relief that I can shoot these simulated game clays as it means I’m reasonably OK on real game!  Towards the end of our morning’s shoot a breech loading shooter came over to see if he could use the driven range after us , so Clare gave him a go with her single percussion, (hit) and I gave him a go with my double (2 hits) so Clare tried to seduce him over to the dark side (as in blackpowder muzzle loaders) – it may even work, he was pretty interested.  I took the Venables of Oxford for Clare to have a look at, but the rib is now hanging off so I can’t put that job off any more – not my favourite job, and it will entail rebrowning the barrels after resoldering the rib – resoldering the rib will involve taking out the breech plugs,  which itself can be a pain…  Ah well, it was something of a bargain so I shouldn’t complain.

13th October – I should be at the AML Big Bore shoot tomorrow, but something unexpected came up so I probably won’t be able to get out my 6 1/2 bore Gasquoine and Dyson live pigeon gun – I will try to pop over at the end of the shoot to deliver a few bits.

I’m busy painting and re-glazing a sash window that my friendly carpenter/joiner built to replace a partly rotten one – He replaced one 23 years ago but didn’t get round to doing the other one that needed replacing, although he machined up all the timber for it – despite having built and fitted French doors and re-roofed almost half the house in the interim, he somehow hadn’t got round to making the window in spite of periodic reminders until last week, when he had a spare day or two between jobs. So its been in the job queue for 23 years – He bought his son to help – he now works with his father but hadn’t been born when the job was put on the queue!  The sashes are large and have old  Victorian wobbly glass  – 2 panes to a sash – they are at the very limit of the size you can buy in Polish handmade glass and thus difficult to source, and are pretty expensive so there is a high premium on not breaking them in removing them from the old frames and fitting them into the new ones. They are now out and cleaned up and the frames primed and undercoated so its time to putty the glass in – care needed!

11th October – very enjoyable shoot yesterday in brilliant sunny weather with very light breeze – perhaps not the ideal Partridge weather as they tended to fly very low so that it often wasn’t safe to shoot.  Still we all had fun and a reasonable bag.  Its very early in the season and most of the pheasants were too immature. Anyway, I collected a very early Joseph Manton double 22 bore shotgun converted from flint to percussion with drum and nipple in a reasonably competent manner – but certainly not to Joseph’s standards, so presumably by a second tier gunsmith, and probably after it had passed out of its original ownership.  The serial number is 331, which puts it at 1791 and is the first double flintlock listed in Keith Neil’s book, although I think several early ones have since come out of the woodwork. It belongs to the period when the front trigger was a lot smaller than the rear one.  The gun looks ‘of a piece’, although the trigger guard shape and the sling fixing behind the trigger guard ( without a matching fixing on a ramrod pipe) don’t quite fit in as they look a bit rifle-like.   The locks are of high quality inside and the engraving good – the screw holding the false breech has asymmetric  engraving matching the engraving on the tang, which is unusual.  The bores are pretty good, but the barrels are quite thin at the muzzle.   The escutcheon has initials with a crest above, but I can’t read them.   Many old guns one sees have a ‘mystery feature’ that you can’t explain and which leaves a question mark hanging in the air – its part of the charm of collecting – in this case its the missing muzzle end sling eye – I can’t see any trace of where it was, although I’m quite prepared to accept that a shotgun in 1791 did have a sling fitted.  It has been suggested to me that this gun would be a perfect candidate for a re-conversion to flintlock –  but I would resist the temptation – its an early Joseph Manton in reasonably original shape, and as such is fairly rare – re-converting it would turn it into a lie, and my view is that it would be ethically wrong.  It will clean up quite nicely as what it is, and could possibly make a  shooter.  I think it is for sale, so drop me an email if you are interested.  I’ll put more photos in the post ‘Joseph Manton 331’.  I brought it back to photograph and show to a Manton specialist, but I don’t think I’ll buy it as I have enough doubles!

8th October – My little STEM club this afternoon – real buzz, bordering on chaos!  All the cookie jar alarms mean that the room is full of little 9 Volt buzzers going off all the time – why do I do it?  answers on a postcard please ( but not sent to me!).  I decided to strip the Twigg pistol and have a look at it in detail – I’d already got the tumbler out, so here is a picture of the neat repair to replace the sheared off square.   Getting the trigger guard off pistols of that age is always tricky because they are held in by pins through the wood that are usually rusty, and if you knock them out carelessly they will take out a chunk of wood with the pin and leave a messy hole.   The pins are invariably put in from the left side of the gun/pistol  so you need to knock them out from the right side.  To do this you need a small pin punch and a tack hammer – its fairly easy to take out pins that emerge from a flat surface – you just need to fold up and hammer flat a piece of lead sheet to 5 mm thick  and put that under the pin so it supports the wood, then tap the pin out – the pin will make a hole through the lead, which will support the wood – in this case it worked just fine as you can see for the front trigger finial pin – in this pistol the pin didn’t do anything as  the tab had broken off the back of the finial.  The pin holding the back of the trigger guard was a bigger problem as the grip is curved so its difficult to support the wood around the pin as you knock it out – in this case it was complicated because there appeared to be two pin ends on the right side of the butt.  I shaped up a lead pad and found the right pin, and that one came out OK and released the trigger guard – previous disassembly had damaged the wood a bit, but I managed not to make it worse!  Both wood and the back of the finial were coated in epoxy glue but seemingly without any contact between them – I need to clean out the slot for the tab I’ll put on the finial as its filled with epoxy. Not sure whether I can get away with soft solder for the tab, or whether I need to silver solder it – Silver soldering might alter the patina – I’ll think about it…………………………………. ( just had to break off to take my bread out of the oven!)

The pin is coming out very cleanly, thanks to a lead pad.  The potential for damage is considerable!

This pin also came out fairly cleanly but had been rather crudely knocked out before when the front finial  was glued in.

The trigger guard is backwards – just to confuse you!

7th October – We have now agreed the work to be done on the Twigg pistol, so that can start.  I spent an hour today clearing out the drain from the kitchen sink and water softener – I mention this because it was interesting – the drain where it goes into the gully was bunged up by soft white ‘rock’ that looks to be calcium (carbonate?) based – the water softener works by ion exchange,  it exchanges the calcium ions in the incoming water for sodium ions and traps the calcium ions in the resin, then when it back flushes to recharge the ion exchange resin it must flush all the calcium ions from the resin and replace them with sodium ions – so the small volume of flushing water must contain all the calcium from the much larger volume of water softened.  What the chemistry of the formation of the deposits in the drain is, I don’t know  but it accounts for the amount of calcium …  Next week is busy, I have a shoot on Wednesday, so a very early start to get there by 8:30.  I think I have everything I need – I have No 6 shot, although I hear that most of my shooting friends have now changed to No 6 1/2 shot, which corresponds to a metric size (not sure what) – presumably when we leave the EC we will not be allowed to use metric measurements any more………

5th October – Sorry, bit of a gap while I attended to school matters and did some work on a couple of windows.  I got a nice little pistol in the post today to be fixed – not that it has much wrong with it – its an early flintlock pistol by TWIGG, first signature and first finial design, but very plain, although none the worse for that, and well made.  Probably made between 1760 and 1770 but I am uncertain what to call it.  The barrel length is 7 1/4 inches, a bit small for a normal holster pistol (typically 9 -10 inches) or an officer’s pistol ( not sure if that description works as early as this anyway).  Maybe a small coach pistol, or one to have about the house in case personal protection was needed?   Anyway its a pretty thing and has had very little wear over the years – it looks ‘of a piece’ and pretty genuine – if it were percussion it would be in the age of sticking spurious names on guns and one might suspect it was a ‘fake’ but 1770 is a bit early for that sort of thing.  At some point the square broke off the tumbler and the cock fell off – someone carefully tapped a hole into the tumbler and screwed in a piece of metal and filed up a square on it – the only problem is that they didn’t provide any way to stop the thread unscrewing, so now the cock moves independently of the tumbler – it will need brazing or welding…  Also the tab on teh back of the trigger guard by the finial has snapped off, letting the trigger guard hang loose – I’ll have to drive out the pins securing the trigger guard and bit of the tang, and silver solder the tang back on. There is a little bit of surface rust around the top jaw etc, and behind the frizzen spring that needs cleaning off, but other wise it is best left pretty well untouched.  I really like this sort of utilitarian pistol – nicely made but not for show.

 

1 Oct – Another month…. Getting to do some gun work would be a great luxury as I seem ridiculously busy on other things – today I was working on the Geophysics Archive followed by my Stem Club – we have 11 very enthusiastic kids all making alarms to fit on to cookie jars etc…   Tomorrow is again busy with meetings but on Wednesday I will reward myself with a couple of hours clay shooting in the morning to get my eye in for driven game – update – ( post script…no I won’t, I think no-one else is going!) – my next shoot is on 10th. After that I have a school meeting at 1300 hrs of all the inconvenient times! I’m shortly due to get a pistol to refurbish – details will follow…..

30th September – Had a very nice email from the owner of the Martini Henry (see below) saying how pleased he was, and that he never expected the chequering to turn out so well!  All credit to Dick.  I had a recent email from the US asking about calibers  of percussion rifles – a quick look at Donald Dallas’s 2003 book  ‘ The British Sporting Gun and Rifle’ has interesting details.  In the early days of percussion, sporting rifles fired mostly cloth (or occasionally fine leather) patched round balls.  Since the grip on the rifling was minimal, basically limited to the patch thickness, it didn’t take much to cause the ball to strip from the rifling and fail to spin properly – so it was not possible to accelerate the ball sharply or to achieve high velocities if you wanted to benefit from the increased accuracy that the rifling should in theory provide.  Thus you were limited to effective ranges of 50 to 100 yards at the most.  Much of this difficulty was caused because the rate of twist of the rifling was carried over from flintlock rifles, where the acceleration was much more gentle due to the slower burn of the powder resulting from flint ignition.  Had a slower twist been used, it might have been possible to use higher velocities.  In fact experiments with smooth bore muskets showed that there was little to be gained by rifling below 50 yards.   Once shaped bullets were introduced the ratio of mass to drag improved, so the bullets held their velocity for longer, and the longer contact of the bullet walls with the rifling meant that higher initial velocities were possible using bigger charges.  A further improvement was the principle of the Minie bullet with a conical hollow in the base and a wooden or clay plug in the hollow that expanded the skirt of the bullet on firing, and got a better grip on the rifling – later found to work quite well without the plug. The main benefit of this was in the military because it allowed bullets with more windage, that could be more easily loaded when the barrels began to get fouled.    Simple conical bullets allowed ranges of 100 to 300 yards.  The next big jump in velocity came from using keyed bullets with deep grooves that had a large resistance to stripping – examples being the Jacob’s patent arms made by Daw, and the Express rifles of Purdey using belted ball bullets.    A couple of rifling ‘inventions’ along the way were significant improvements – in large measure because they tackled the problem of rifling fouling – they were Lancaster’s oval bore rifling, which is what it says it is, and Whitworth’s hexagonal rifling.  All the improvements made it possible to shoot at ranges up to 1000 yards, allbeit with cleaning of the barrel between shots.   An interesting instruction with a Purdey 50 bore rifle No 3852 of 1844 from Dallas’s book gives the charge for a round ball of .453 cal as half a dram of No 2 powder with a stout linen patch, and of a conical bullet  for the same rifle as 2 drams of No 6 powder with a thin cambric patch and the hollow in the tail of the bullet filled with grease – quite a difference.  The same sights were marked  50 & 100 yds for the ball and  100 & 150 yds for the bullet – illustrating the much greater drop on the ball.

26th September – The Martini Henry stock and fore end are now finished and dispatched, see below.  I haven’t had a moment to do any more gun stuff as school things have been pressing  – I have a new group of young children ( 6 -9) in our STEM club and Dave and I are having to reset our complexity index many steps lower.  The trolley is now complete and I’m getting some of the BBC microbit computers sorted out as they seem just the job for the kids.  Plus a a couple of school meetings this week, and two next week – being a school governor is a fairly big commitment but pretty satisfying.

I can’t claim any credit for this chequering – Dick is the expert!

23rd September –  Spent today building my ‘cupboard on wheels’ for the STEM club – its amazing how much 3 sheets of 12 mm ply weigh – it will be a struggle to get it out of the workshop but will tidy up all our stuff at school.   I had a look through the visitors to the website yesterday, and there were dozens of visits from different cities in China that didn’t seem to do anything, just make 2 quick visits  – they seemed coordinated too as they all did  the same thing over a short period  – something suspicious no doubt!  Anyway today they are not doing it.  I get between 250 and 300 ‘proper’ visitors a day, who on average click on about 6 things, which for a small unpublicised specialty website I reckon is pretty good.  It certainly generates a few inquiries and the occasional restoration – If you do want to know about a gun or pistol email me (see CONTACT) and attach a few photos from different angles, including one of the whole thing and one of the lock etc.   I can often give you general information on non specialist stuff and have a fair idea of auction prices for common types of gun and pistol (not military though!)

22nd September – I finished repairing the surface of the Egg stock  which looked very poor as the fairly thick varnish had come off in patches allowing oil stains to form.   I steamed the wood and got rid of some of the varnish and some of the dings, then wiped over with shelac and put on several coats of ‘slacum’ ( linseed oil, driers and a little beeswax).  I didn’t want it to look too re-finished, just not quite so pock marked, and it seems to have worked.  I can now put that job away as I’ve done the case and the stock, although I did notice that the loading rod in the case is not quite long enough for the barrel – but I don’t suppose anyone will notice.   Dick has now finished the Martini Henry stock so I will collect it and take some photos before returning it.

21st September – a day of relative quiet!  My STEM club at the junior school starts next Monday and I’ve been politely told by the teaching assistant in the classroom I use that I can’t leave our bits and half finished projects around the classroom all week. As she seems quite adamant I think I had better take notice, so I designed a trolley to hold it all that  can be wheeled into a store room, assuming there is any room there.  Anyway I worked out the I could make it from 3 sheets of 12 mm ply and have given Ridgeons a cutting list, so tomorow I’ll see how many of the 20 specified cuts are in the right places!  I went to Dicks to see how he is getting on and he sold me a nice overcoat pistol that will eventually appear on the website – it will be cleaned and repaired so nothing to show here!   He has been doing some re-chequering on the stock and forend of a Martini Henry, which has taken him an age and is very well done – looks fantastic – I  will have to pack it up and return it to it’s owner.  I don’t understand how Dick did it for what he is charging – I keep telling him to count his hours on jobs and charge a fair rate, but he won’t learn! ( he doesn’t look at this website, or any other!)  I took over some baise for lining a Joseph Manton percussion double case as Dick thought his was too bright – I have a few meters of various colours – some lovely thin burgundy stuff that I long to make a  case with.

19th September – I’m afraid that the last couple of days talking to groups of schoolchildren as part of Cambridge University’s  Physics at Work event has left me with little energy for going into the workshop and doing anything to guns in what is left of the evenings!   So far I’ve talked to 24 groups (20 minutes each) and I have another 12 tomorrow – my voice is just about hanging in there… Gun stuff will appear in time.

17th September – Back from a cracking day out  ( now where does that come from ?) at Bawdsey with a super group of people on my first shoot of the season after Partridge.  Nice breeze meant fast birds and great fun was had by all – 73 birds for about 240 shots by 8 guns – a fair ratio by any account.  I managed to stretch my supply of tubes for most of the day but had to borrow a few just in case.  Tubes for the tubelock guns are precious as each is handmade by us and it’s quite a lot slower than reloading black powder cartridges – I can make about half a dozen tubes an hour if I concentrate.  My gun has now been cleaned  – the composition in the tubes is highly corrosive and the lock(s) need to be taken out and washed and scrubbed to remove all residue.   We had a reporter from the Shooting Times and a photographer, so expect a feature on muzzle loading game shooting in the mag in a month or two.  Everyone who is involved with the shoot in any way is always impressed by how good humoured and relaxed we are about our sport – unlike a number of groups shooting breech loaders!  We always enjoy our shoots whatever the bag, and always have a modest impact on the estate.  I can see muzzle loading game shoots being on the increase – we just need to find a good way to initiate others into the skills needed to transition.

16th September – I’m of to my first shoot of the season at Bawdsey tomorrow.  I gather we will have the press there, so best bib and tucker ( whatever that is)…  Two of my friends are shooting tubelocks, and I thought that out of solidarity with them I should do the same.  I only have a single barreled gun so no ‘left and rights’ but at least it takes away the indecision about whether to reload after firing one barrel of a double or to wait for the next bird.   I will take my Nock double percussion in case I can’t hit anything with the tubelock – I haven fired ti for a while and its a bit high in the comb so I’ve had to add a butt pad which makes it a bit long but at least brings the gun up in a reasonable direction.   I’ve made a batch of decappers to take as I usually  give a few away at shoots…..  news of the shoot later!

12th September – I got the information on the Irish Registration act from an old copy of Classic Arms which was a magazine devoted to antique firearms, around 1990 – I ‘inherited’ a pile of old magazines from my father, which I rediscovered recently and an slowly working my way through.  As well as the Classic Arms, which was an impressive UK publication full of adverts from dealers and detailed articles by many of the authors of ‘standard’tbooks on particular subjects, I have a pile of copies of ‘ The American  Rifleman’ of various dates, the earliest from 1945, and then some from the 1960s.  All these old magazines have  excellent articles on old firearms – the American Rifleman  is of course mostly current guns and is interesting because the earliest copies cover the period after the war in Europe was over but before the Japanese had surrendered. I was interested to note that the supply of guns and ammunition had halted during the war and was only just coming back in 1946 – there was strict price control on guns and ammunition – basically limiting the price to that before the war. Manufacturers were allowed to charge 9% more but the extra had to be absorbed by the dealer and not passed on to the end customer – if anything was available anyway – supplies of copper and lead were restricted – one doesn’t think of America having that sort of restrictions!.  There were loads of advertisments for ex military arms of every nationality, and dire warnings about using Japanese rifles with  American high velocity ammunition.  There was an official way that troops could bring back a ‘souvenir’ weapon with official blessing, but nothing with a barrel less than 18 inches long.   You could pick up a working Webley Mk 4 revolver back in the States for $14, which was probably less than a fiver!  The 1990’s UK mags covered the banning of handguns and were full of anguished debate and hand wringing – I fear we may have a repeat coming soon…….    I didn’t do much gun work today as I had to service and clean the AGA (cooker) – its that time of year, but I engraved a few decappers this evening.  Out of interest I cut through  the box section of the other trailing arm of the suspension unit from my boat trailer – this was the one that didn’t fail on my trip, but you can see that it wasn’t far off.  Of course it look OK from the outside!

11 September – I was wrong about the Irish Firearms registration act being 18th century – it came in in 1843 and was repealed in 1846  – it is thought that about a quarter of a million guns may have been registered – the registration ID consisted of 2 letters for the county and a (usually) 4 figure number stamped on the barrel or occasionally on expensive guns, in a more discreet place.

11 September – I ordered a new capper from Kranks as I’d lost my old Pedesoli straight capper in a field somewhere last season – the guy at Kranks said the Ted Cash inline capper was better so I ordered one.  It’s different in that the spring is short and you push the caps down with the knob – it has a crafty loop that holds the knob back while you feed in caps – it claims to be patented but I can’t see what or why – I’ll have a look later as all US patents are now on the web.   Anyway the problem with both the Pedesoli and the Ted Cash cappers is that they don’t hold enough caps and are too fiddly to reload with cold hands in the middle of a shoot.  I modified my last one with a bit of brass to form a slide to feed the caps down and it worked very well, so I thought I’d do the same for the new one – its just a small brass bit soldered on by the loading hole with a groove shaped to fit a cap – seems to work well.  I find you need a small 1.6 mm pin on a chain as some caps fall over in the groove and need to be prised upright – don’t put force on the compound or they will go off!  I thought that it would be better to hang the capper off a ring on my new block as the loop on the end needs to be free to hold back the knob.   I always carry a decapper and a small pricker made of 0.7mm steel wire to clean out blocked nipples.

Ted Cash capper from Henry Kranks with Cablesfarm modification.

Cablesfarm decapper – customised version in gold – don’t ask,  you can’t afford one!

I carried on cleaning the Turner – it all went in the deruster and then had a good brush down on the fine rotary brush.  I coat all the surfaces with ‘Metalguard’ which forms a very thin anti-corrosion layer over the metal – especially useful on the inside metal surfaces as there was a fair amount of internal rust – a lot adhering to the wood that had to be carefully scraped off so the furniture bedded properly.  Anyway  I stripped off the lock workings and cleaned each part – derusting actually gets to all the surfaces so its just a matter of cleaning them – on the wheel if they are big enough to hold safely ( I have spend enough of my life looking for little bits that have pinged off when I’ve been brushing them !),  The ‘fly’ or ‘detent on the tumbler designed to block the sear from entering the half cock bent as the cock falls is a particularly fiddly little part that is only too easy to loose.  Once re-assembled the pistol doesn’t look much different, but is in a much better state to weather the next 100 years.

Its been derusted and the  rust will now just brush off but you can see how much there was.   Arrow points to the ‘fly’.

Stripped and cleaned externally and internally.  There was a lot of rust under the furniture and the furniture now fits better  – click on the photos and you can see that the finial is a better fit than in the unrestored photo.

10th September – Quite busy on the gun front!  I had a commission for  five individually named decappers, and after a bit of hunting around I found some spring steel strip that was suitable although it needed annealing.  So that is now done – I gold plated one for a friend for fun- the process is SO easy (see post Gold Plating).  I must make another combination field tool consisting of a brass ‘hammer’ for chipping flints and a short wide turnscrew for the top jaw screw to complement my percussion decappers.   I collected the ‘central fire lock to engrave a new cock screw- it is certainly a weird thing – like nothing I have ever seen before! (see below).   Dick received  a sawhandled flintlock pistol ( duelling/officers) with a .57 bore and heavy barrel to be restored and passed it to me to derust and clean.  Locks signed Turner, and a very faint DU1049 on the barrel – that was a mark introduced in the 18th century (?) in Ireland to control guns – they had to be registered under pain of a considerable penalty.  From the DU mark I assume that the maker was G Turner of Dublin.  Given the Irish enthusiasm for duelling pistols, I assume that is what it was intended for.  The pistol is in reasonable but worn condition and is a good example of many such.   The issue here is how far to go in stripping it and cleaning it.  If the fit of wood and furniture is good, there is a danger that it will not be as tight after work.  On the other hand there is the possibility that there is significant rust behind the iron furniture that is pushing it out of the wood.  In this case I could see that the edges of the trigger guard were rusting and the finial was raised.  It is usually necessary to remove the cock from flintlocks to get surface rust from behind it and give a uniform finish, and the same goes for the frizzen spring.   In this case I took all the furniture off ( very carefully, but fortunately the screws all came out easily and no damage was done.  I haven’t stripped the ‘works’ off the back of the lock, or taken off the frizzen yet, but that may follow after derusting, which works just fine on assemblies.  I have removed the mainspring as I am a bit careful after a couple of springs fell apart in the derusting bath!  It will all go in the derusting bath except the mainspring.

Weird or what?  Bentley’s Patent percussion axial fire lock, full cock…… 

Turner of Dublin   (DU 1049) before restoration

Back of trigger guard – you could say this is more conservation than restoration!

Stripped – it turned out to be easy to remove all the furniture without damaging any screws.

8th Septemeber – I did the ‘Have a Go’ at CGC yesterday, with my Nock double percussion.  I took my Jackson Central Fire patent double intending to use that, but the geometry of the cocks in relation to the nipples is constrained by the fact that the nipples exit into the centre of the chamber, hence central fire.  This leaves very little room to put the caps on the nipples.  I realised as I was getting ready for the clients to arrive and capping off the guns that I would have a difficulty capping while someone else was holding the gun, and quickly swapped to my usual double, the Samuel Nock.  I saw a very interesting Central Fire percussion double a couple of days ago – the nipples didn’t just exit into the middle of the chamber, but were also aligned along the axis of the barrel so it was a true central fire – this led to a really neat cocks that were scultped into the action, and when cocked did not protrude above the action body – I’ll try to get a photo shortly, I had never seen anything like it! I can’t remember the maker, but need to find out!

6th September – I fiddled around this morning filling a couple of gaps in the Egg pistol’s woodwork around the lockpocket – I haven’t managed to get rid of one visible rise where a knot goes through the wood, maybe a bit more work.  As I lay in the dentist’s chair for an hour this afternoon I kept thinking how nice it would be to have all her tools in my workshop- when I said ( in an odd moment when I could speak) that I’d love to have them at home, she said she wished she had them at home too – not sure what she would do with them – by then I couldn’t ask and relaxed back into contemplation – very restful….  Tomorrow I’m doing another ‘have a go’ shoot at Cambridge Gun Club – almost out of shot and wads but I think I can wing it – not sure how many others are helping out, but I probably won’t do more than 30 shots so I’ll probably manage.  I’m tempted to take my 20 bore breech loader for a bit of fun afterwards, but perhaps I should stick to the one muzzle loading gun for the shooting season.  I still can’t be sure which gun fits me best – cetrtainly NOT  the Venables, and today I had a bit of a problem when try mounting guns because I couldn’t stop my left eye being very dominant – I’m sure I’m usually right eye dominant or neutral !

4th September – I very reluctantly decided today that I wasn’t going to go to the Sandringham Game Fair next weekend to do my engraving demonstration as I have too many other calls on my time at the moment – I spent 4 hours this morning being ‘trained’ on safeguarding as a school governor – I have to say that it was very poorly presented and about the most inefficient knowledge transfer I have witnessed in years!  How a school can’t manage to work out how to communicate knowledge defies belief but there it is.   I took the Joseph Manton and case to Dick’s to get his view on relining the case, and met a good friend and very knowledgeable dealer of good guns who recommended selling the gun and case ‘as is’  separately to get the best return on the basis that the most likely purchaser of the gun would want it to shoot and would therefore have little use for the case.  I must say I find it annoying to have to keep a gun in the locked cabinet and the empty case elsewhere, so I can see his point.

3rd September -I finished the middle compartment for the Egg box today – its a bit of a tight fit but I think it will be OK .  The mystery of the breech block I couldn’t engrave is solved – although the person who made it hadn’t hardened it, the material he used had been ‘pre treated’ – which means heat treated and tempered/annealed, so no wonder I couldn’t engrave it.   I need to make some more de-cappers, for which I need 1/2 x 1/8 spring steel strip in an annealed state, but I can’t find any on the web.  I’m sure when I last made some I found it easily, but I am not sure now where I got it from.  In the end I ordered some nearly the right size from Kevin Blackley, but I’d prefer to find a supplier of  bigger quantities than 12 inch lengths.

2nd September – Went to a historic re-constructors event at Quy – lots of tents selling everything medieval and groups of reenactors camped around – I always love those events as everyone is so committed to their particular period or activity, and always enthusiastic to talk about it – thank goodness for enthusiastic people who actually do things!   I bought a few ash dowels (intended for arrows) that will make simple ramrods when I can’t justify the work of a full ebony rod.  I was pleased to see ‘Bernie the Bolt’ had his stand – he sells all kinds of fabric for historical costume that he has made up and dyed to period colours.  He’s a good source of baize for lining gun cases as he sells a woolen cloth woven and dyed in Yorkshire in good colours for gun cases.  I have used it and it is a reasonable substitute – its actually slightly too thick but will do – it is woven at about 450 gm/sq m whereas the guy on the stall said it should really be about 250 – 300 gm/sq m. for gun cases.  He said that the mill would make the lighter material but wanted £13 per m ( 1 m wide) by the bolt and they couldn’t see any profit in it, since he sells the heavier stuff at £15 per meter (Dyson sells both thick and thin but no weights given, at £16 per foot).   For gun cases £15 per m is nothing, bearing in mind how much work goes into using  1 meter of cloth on a relining.  The case I have to reline came with the cloth from a billiards table, but looking at it it is much too thick and won’t bend over the top of the partitions, so I bought 1 m of a very dark green that I think will do much better.  I started to make up a quick and dirty ramrod for one of my old shooting guns out of a new arrow blank  as it looks a bit bare without one – I’ve given it a dummy brass end and will fix it up with a horn tip.  When I have worked out the technique for rounding and tapering the ebony squares I have, I’ll make a better one!

1 September – another month gone!   Had a mixed day at Cambridge Gun Club – in the morning I couldn’t hit anything – the couple of clays I did hit were when I fired and was pretty sure I wasn’t on target.  I was trying my Venables, but I’d forgotten that it had a lot of cast on the stock – almost 3/4 of an inch.  I realised that I’d been making a mistake every time I tried a gun to see if it ‘came up’ well for me – I’d done it with my eyes open and that  forces me to put my head in the best position so I think the gun fits perfectly as long as the comb is not too high – I realised the proper way to try a gun for fit is to hold it in the normal position just before mounting, and close your eyes as you mount, then open them to see if its right – doing that with the Venables showed me that I’m probably shooting 20 or 30 inches to the right of where I think I am, enough to put a target outside the shot pattern.  In the afternoon I reverted to the good old Samuel Nock and was back to my normal hit one miss one routine, except for ‘crows’ and I wait for those to get falling properly and can normally pick them off.  Anyway it was a very useful shoot as it saves me from the mistake of taking the Venables on a game shoot.   I came back with a couple of jobs, a new breech block for a double percussion gun to engrave, and a case to remodel inside and reline.  I am not sure if I can engrave the breech block as it seems to have been hardened and tempered, or to be made of a high strength steel on a hard state – I will try with the Gravermax on the underside, but I’m not hopeful…..  Anglia Muzzle Loaders goes from strength to strength, its almost embarrassing – every month or two a new face appears – existing members are just not dying off fast enough to keep the population stable ( as one of the older members perhaps I should take note!)   Bev had a problem with a new lot of OB priming powder that didn’t work – the company makes Swiss O.B. in two grades with the same name and only a difference in how the label is put on – one works and is the proper one, the other clumps up and is useless.  Heaven knows why its made or sold – anyway there is more on the MLAGB blog.

31st August  –  I had to tackle the big Yew bushes in the front garden today – they are about 20 ft high and needed trimming all over so I ended up at the top of a 16 ft ladder using a hedge cutter with both hands – I didn’t fall off…..   Looking at the case for the Egg duelling pistols I realised that it couldn’t have been a flintlock case as there was no-where for the frizzens to go, so as its a very close fit I came to the conclusion that it is original to the pistols – don’t know why I didn’t realise that before, but I think when I was a greenhorn someone told me it was the ‘wrong’ case….  I am not sure why the middle compartment is missing, the lining shows where it was, and looks as if it got ripped when the compartment walls were removed – the pistols should just fit with the compartment in place.  Or maybe the compartment fell to pieces – several of the bits of the dividers are coming adrift.  I decided that I will replace the central compartment and fix in place the rest of the dividers so that it is tidy. It would not be sensible to reline the whole case as it would then be difficult to be sure it was originally for the pistols.  I checked through my supplies of biase for lining the new dividers, and found a good green that is probably a fair match for the original lining colour but is slightly too dark for the current state of it.  I thought as an exercise I’d try to make it match in colour and texture (it is a bit thick and has a bit much pile).  A sample came down in colour nicely after an hour or so in domestic bleach, and shaving the surface with a razor and rubbing with coarse sandpaper followed by a quick flash over with a flame got rid of the excess pile, so now I just have to hope that the process works on a piece big enough to do the job!

The ‘aged’ biase is on top – the top streak was undiluted bleach!  Click to view.

I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that the woodwork on the unrepaired pistol is too marked and will need to be refinished – no doubt it is a shellac based varnish and with luck I will get away with just a very light steaming to raise the marks – the important thing is NOT to round off any sharp corners by rubbing things down too vigorously.  Here is the problem, the other side is visible in a previous photo.

Most of the damage is to the varnish!

I’m shooting at Cambridge Gun Club tomorrow – and I’ll take  my ‘spare’ percussion doubles to see if I can sell any!

30th August – I seem to be back in the gun tinkering business again!  I’m sure those visitors to the site who have faithfully stuck it out all summer will breath a sigh of relief!  I cleaned up the other Edwards as it looked worse once I’d done the first!   I am now struck by how damaged the wood is – maybe I won’t be able to resist refinishing it lightly?   In the course of getting the cocks and frizzen etc. off I used my two favourite disassembly methods to good effect  – if a screw is reluctant to come out, don’t try too hard to unscrew it, especially if the head is a bit mangled – instead tighten it very slightly if you can – a very tiny movement will be enough to break any sticking, and the screw head will probably be perfect for use in that direction – once you have a slight movement, some WD 40 or equivalent, or better still a little acetone with a touch of oil will help as you work it back and forth until it becomes easy.  The other trick is releasing the cock from the square on the tumbler  – lay the lock face up on your thigh and using the largest pin punch that fits the square, tap smartly with a light hammer a few times and the cock will gradually come off – I know it sounds improbably but it works for most things that need driving out with a pin punch!

Having finished with the Edwards  I looked at another cased pair I have that needed attention – a pair of percussion back action lock duelling pistols by D Egg – they too came form my father’s collection and were rather sad as one pistol was broken through the lock area, and someone had attempted to glue it rather badly and  had then lost the lock. I got Blackleys to make a set of castings from the good lock and freshened up the engraving and got DIck to fix the wood and make up the lock castings (it was in the early days and I wasn’t confident I could do it).   Anyway at some point I looked at the pair as  possible shooting pistols, but Dick hadn’t finished off the lock action fully and the sear caught on the half cock notch when the cock was let down.   Its one of those faults that one comes across from time to time in locks that don’t have a detent to lift the sear over the half cock bent.  The remedy is usually to reshape the half cock bent, and possibly refine the full cock bent a little. Fortunately the tumbler hadn’t been hardened so I didn’t need to anneal it.  To get the sear past the half cock notch, the notch needs to be shaped so that the end of the sear is deflected outwards as it passes in firing, which in order to get a secure half cock notch means that the sear needs to slide into the half cock notch without being lifted at all.  None of the standard files are suitable for shaping the half cock notch as it needs a true knife edge – I have a very fine flat file that I’ve ground off to leave a fine edge on one side.    Anyway I managed to re-work the half cock notch and polish it all up and harden it – and it now works a treat…….

The  Eggs are interesting – they were obviously good quality pistols and, replacement lock apart, are in reasonable shape. They are in a case that was obviously for a pair of flintlocks that has been crudely modified for the Eggs – it would be natural to assume that some collector put them in a box he happened to have BUT both case and pistols have the crest of the Earl of Sefton ( Liverpool) and the case has a Liverpool ironmonge’s label, so it looks as if they were put in the current case by the Seftons – one can imagine that the Earl might have been a bit strapped for cash but wanted to upgrade his flintlocks for the latest thing in percussion, so he traded his flintlock pistols in and put the new pistols in the old case, having removed the central box as there wasn’t room for it.  Or maybe William Drury did it for him and put his label in the case?  Anyway both case and pistols obviously belonged to the Earl at some point, so you can invent you own story!

They just fit, but only just!

 Posted by at 9:49 pm
Dec 212018
 

Here is a fairly typical Dublin duelling pistol of around 1780 to about 1795 (?), quite well made and now fully restored and looking very fine.

before restoration showing repaired cock
A little unusual in that the lock is fixed through the lock plate into the side of the false breech with one short screw and with a hook on the front end.
Another unusual feature is that the frizzen is connected to its spring with a link, not plain or a roller as was common later.
Nothing unusual here, nice bridle and very short link. The spring is not original, but that is common as springs often broke in use – this one is abit soft – I might try to get it more balanced with the frizzen spring., which is OK
 Posted by at 12:11 am
Dec 062018
 

Here are photos of a pair of pocket pistols I bought as a project for the website – they are now completed and for sale – see FOR SALE page.

 

as bought

Derusted electrolytically and allowed to dry – the rust is loose!

Quick brush with 3 thou wheel

 

New tail to topstrap.

 

Topstrap engraved to match

New screws for topstrap/tang

 

A couple of coats of ‘Slackum’ oil finish and they are done!

One butt has a trap for caps, the other is a later? dummy.

 Posted by at 9:00 pm
Nov 102018
 

 

30th August – I seem to be back in the gun tinkering business again!  I’m sure those visitors to the site who have faithfully stuck it out all summer will breath a sigh of relief!  I cleaned up the other Edwards as it looked worse once I’d done the first!   I am now struck by how damaged the wood is – maybe I won’t be able to resist refinishing it lightly?   In the course of getting the cocks and frizzen etc. off I used my two favourite disassembly methods to good effect  – if a screw is reluctant to come out, don’t try too hard to unscrew it, especially if the head is a bit mangled – instead tighten it very slightly if you can – a very tiny movement will be enough to break any sticking, and the screw head will probably be perfect for use in that direction – once you have a slight movement, some WD 40 or equivalent, or better still a little acetone with a touch of oil will help as you work it back and forth until it becomes easy.  The other trick is releasing the cock from the square on the tumbler  – lay the lock face up on your thigh and using the largest pin punch that fits the square, tap smartly with a light hammer a few times and the cock will gradually come off – I know it sounds improbably but it works for most things that need driving out with a pin punch!

Having finished with the Edwards  I looked at another cased pair I have that needed attention – a pair of percussion back action lock duelling pistols by D Egg – they too came form my father’s collection and were rather sad as one pistol was broken through the lock area, and someone had attempted to glue it rather badly and  had then lost the lock. I got Blackleys to make a set of castings from the good lock and freshened up the engraving and got DIck to fix the wood and make up the lock castings (it was in the early days and I wasn’t confident I could do it).   Anyway at some point I looked at the pair as  possible shooting pistols, but Dick hadn’t finished off the lock action fully and the sear caught on the half cock notch when the cock was let down.   Its one of those faults that one comes across from time to time in locks that don’t have a detent to lift the sear over the half cock bent.  The remedy is usually to reshape the half cock bent, and possibly refine the full cock bent a little. Fortunately the tumbler hadn’t been hardened so I didn’t need to anneal it.  To get the sear past the half cock notch, the notch needs to be shaped so that the end of the sear is deflected outwards as it passes in firing, which in order to get a secure half cock notch means that the sear needs to slide into the half cock notch without being lifted at all.  None of the standard files are suitable for shaping the half cock notch as it needs a true knife edge – I have a very fine flat file that I’ve ground off to leave a fine edge on one side.    Anyway I managed to re-work the half cock notch and polish it all up and harden it – and it now works a treat…….

The  Eggs are interesting – they were obviously good quality pistols and, replacement lock apart, are in reasonable shape. They are in a case that was obviously for a pair of flintlocks that has been crudely modified for the Eggs – it would be natural to assume that some collector put them in a box he happened to have BUT both case and pistols have the crest of the Earl of Sefton ( Liverpool) and the case has a Liverpool ironmonge’s label, so it looks as if they were put in the current case by the Seftons – one can imagine that the Earl might have been a bit strapped for cash but wanted to upgrade his flintlocks for the latest thing in percussion, so he traded his flintlock pistols in and put the new pistols in the old case, having removed the central box as there wasn’t room for it.  Or maybe William Drury did it for him and put his label in the case?  Anyway both case and pistols obviously belonged to the Earl at some point, so you can invent you own story!

They just fit, but only just!

29th August – I was thinking about a possible article for Black Powder on the ‘morals or ethics’ of restoration and looked at some of my guns that might be interesting to consider.  I alighted on a cased pair of Irish Duelling pistols by Edwards that belonged to my father and which I had never touched – I thought they might benefit from a light clean and a quick check that there was no rust causing problems, although they are in basically sound condition – the only problem is that the case has been relined and the case lock messed about with, otherwise they are pretty good.  Anyway I took out the lock of one to strip enough to clean off the external faces and parts, i.e. cock, frizzen and frizzen spring. to do that I took off the mainspring to get at the frizzen spring fixing and surprise – there was a roller on the end of the mainspring. I’ve taken a few locks apart and I thought I’d seen most variations of lock, but this is a new one on me.  I guess it was a transient feature between plain springs bearing on the tumbler, and the later and ubiquitous link.  I was in two minds about remaking the side nail as the head was pretty mashed up – anyway I’ve mislaid it so that decides it for me – sweeping with my magnet hasn’t found it!

29th August –  I came across an original Curtis and Harvey powder tin that was full of powder – much as I’d have liked to keep it in its tin, I was responsible and decanted it into a plastic container and put it in my approved box!  While I had it out, I thought that it would be interesting to compare the grain sizes of powders, and as I have a whole lot of different powders I took a set of photos under my microscope and here they are….

As usual, click on the photo for a clearer and bigger picture…….

The powders are, as labelled, Swiss OB, No 1, No 2, No 4, TS2, Curtiss and Harvey No 4, Czech Vesuvit L.C. and a miscellaneous powder I was given as a priming powder which turned out to be useless – its grain structure is like coke, see last picture which is an enlargement.  All the other pictures are at the same scale – 5 m.m. across the photo.  I think I still have more powders in my box ,  Farquarson & Nobel No 2 – but I’ll find those later.  The photos appear to show that the Swiss powders & the TS2 and C &H have quite uniform grain sizes while the Czech powder is much more mixed in size.  As shooters of muzzle loaders will know, the grain size controls the ignition speed because the grains burn through relatively slowly compared with the speed of propagation of the flash through the interstices  – so bigger grains mean slower  burn – hence OB for rapid flash for flintlocks priming and Swiss 4 for rifles where you want smooth acceleration down the barrel to avoid stripping the rifling.   The Czech powder in much cheaper than the Swiss and is used in percussion shotguns although it isn’t as fast or powerful as Swiss No 2, the alternative which is invariably used in flintlocks.  Presumably the slower ignition of the Czech, which has a relatively fine grain size,  is due to its composition, and possibly that the mixed grain size means it packs tighter and doesn’t allow the flash to propogate through the charge as well ?  On the evidence of grain size alone, one might expect Czech to be comparable with Swiss No 1 – which is used in pistols as it gives fast burn suitable for the short barrels of pistols, but clearly other factors are at play here.  It would be interesting to sieve Czech and compare the fine fraction with maybe OB and the coarser with Swiss No 1 or 2.

28th August – I was part of the MLAGB ‘Have a Go’ stand at the Fenland Country Fair  yesterday, & it was manic!  Sunday was pretty dead by all accounts  (I was elsewhere ) so everyone came on Monday, and 6 of us were flat out from about 10 a.m. until 4 p.m giving people a go with our guns – I took my little percussion single barreled Nock which people all love – its a small gun – 5 1/4 lbs and 13 1/2 inch pull but it seems to ‘come up’ right for everyone – keeping the charge low 2 1/4 drams and 7/8 oz is fine for adults, and probably about 1 1/2 to 1 3/4 drams and 1/2 oz for children and I didn’t get any complains as long as I got people to hold the gun properly  into their shoulders, and not just the heel.  I took my single barreled ‘Twigg’ flinter as its very reliable and is a classic long barreled gun of around 1780.   We had a couple of traps set up for going away birds and  a few people did pretty well – one young girl ( 15 ish ) had never touched a gun before but hit her 3 clays in great style like an old timer!  My son Giles had never touched a shotgun before ( you might wonder why – he never had any desire to ) brought his girlfriend and had 2 shots and broke clays on both, a hidden talent!  At the end of the day  I’d collected tickets from around  70 shots (about half with the flintlock), used two flasks of powder and got through one flint.   Saturday is our Anglian Muzzle Loaders monthly shoot so I’ll go to that – I have decided that I have accumulated too many double percussion guns, so I’ll offer them to members of the AML first, then put them on this site  – I’ll get rid of the Samuel Nock and the Egg plus the 8 bore single wikldfowl gun, which will leave me with two, the Jackson and the Venables.

26th August – Just driven back from a family party in Wales in the most horrendous rain, so I feel a bit washed out!  But no time to relax as I’m on duty on the MLAGB stand at the Fenland Country Fair with my guns and some pistols to display by 8:30 a.m. tomorrow morning- fortunately its only about 10 minutes drive away from home.  Today must have been a washout for them, and I’m concerned that the ground will be so waterlogged that they won’t let anyone drive onto  the showground – which means I’ll have to carry all my stuff right across the whole ground. We’ll face that when we come to it.   I’ve had a correspondence with a collector/dealer about descriptions of antiques and restorations thereof – which has got me thinking about coming up with a sensible set of descriptions that cover most degrees of restoration – I’ll keep thinking about it in odd moments and when/if I come up with any ideas I’ll try to produce something useful…..  In the meantime I’m up to my neck in other things……

23rd August – Back from my sailing/camping trip to the Blackwater Estuaety and the Colne.   Had an interesting diversion on the way to launch at Tollesbury Marina, planning to arrive at about 4:30  to launch around 6 p.m on a rising tide.  Half a mile from the Marina (literally) there was a bang and a scraping noise form the trailer…..

…and a friendly native brought me my wheel…

Not much chance of putting that back, or of going anywhere soon, or so you might think – But, wonders of the internet, I Googled  ‘Trailer parts near me’ which came up with Indespension in Colchester  8.8 miles away as the crow flies – a quick telephone call had them in their stock room with a measure, but we couldn’t be sure any would fit, and they closed in 45 minutes…..  A very rapid dash got me there 15 minutes before they closed, and we sorted out a pair of new suspension units and hubs which they kindly greased and assembled for me, and even gave me a couple of pairs of latex gloves so I could fit them without getting my hands dirty!  I still didn’t know if they would fit the trailer, but they did, and I was able to replace the broken unit – I  had a socket set in the car that for some reason has two 13 mm sockets and 2 ‘drivers’  so I was able to undo the rusted nuts and bolts with a bit of effort…..  And I managed to launch by 8 p.m. on the top of the tide…..  Well done Indespension, and all for a cost of £157.00 including VAT!  The wonders of the internet!  And I had a good couple of days pottering about in the boat…………….

20th August –  The shooting season is almost upon us – I have a few shoots (muzzle loading only) lined up and I’ll be at the Fenland Country Fair on Bank holiday Monday – I have been press-ganged into the ‘have a go’ squad as we will be a bit thin on the ground, so I won’t be doing my engraving.  I will however be at Sandringham Country fair a fortnight later with my full engraving setup and display, and I look forward to meeting old friends and new at both events.  If you have any antiques in need of restoration bring them along,  and if you are a watcher of this site, make sure you introduce yourself!

19th August – I finished the tent for my dinghy, so tomorrow I am setting off on the first stage of my plan to sail round the world – the first stage being about 5 miles up the Blackwater estuary!   I thought I’d post a photo of our amazing crop of tomatoes – 3 plants growing in a growbag on the woodstore roof.  I set up a very cheap watering timer about 6 weeks ago and they have not been touched since – I think this is the first time either Penny or I have got anything edible to grow, so its a red letter day!   I thought I’d better include something to do with guns and engraving just to keep some semblance of focus to this blog – I came across a small piece of brass that I’d used used for practice when I first tried engraving some 55 years ago!  As you can see, its fairly basic scroll stuff, and I guess is still the pattern I default to if I’m not trying to do anything in particular.

 

I did this in about 1959!

 

17th August – Spent another whole day waiting in for a promised delivery by TNT – that is two days I’ve wasted because of them in the last week.  I’ll have to hunt round and find where on the web to leave a negative review!    In my frustration I played around with recutting the chequering on an old shotgun fore-end from Dick’s scrap box.  I have some proper tools for cutting 24 lines per inch, but they aren’t perfect for recutting – but I did make a tool some time ago out of a cheap plastic handled crosshead screwdriver with the end bent and ground down.  It has a curved ‘keel’ ground to a 60 degree edge, and a sharp slanting cutting face – it is ideal for recutting as you can use the ‘keel’ to follow existing lines or mark new ones, and when you have got the mark it leaves in the right place you just tip it up a little and it cuts as you move it forward. If there is any existing groove the keel will follow it.  I did have a problem on the fore-end where there was a gap without any trace of the old chequering and I didn’t manage to fill it in very evenly, but its not too bad.  I now need a better cutter to widen the cuts and even it all up.

16th August – I’ve been busy making a tent for my little dinghy so that I can do a short camping trip before the summer ends, but today Dick rang and asked if I had any chequering tools as his were blunt.  At the time I couldn’t find the odd one or two unused ones I had somewhere, but this evening I found a couple of 24 lines per inch cutters and had a go on a scrap of old gun stock – my tools are 24 lines  to the inch, so quite fine.  I wouldn’t say that my first effort was perfect, but it would pass on casual inspection.  I don’t have the proper tools for doing the edges – old shotguns have a fairly wide convex groove as a border, so I might make try making one some time.  Anyway, that is another skill that I can spend some time working on this winter!  I’ll post a photo of my effort some time.

13th August –  Yesterday the little o/u pistol was collected by my friend and client  – I let it go with reluctance as its such a beauty – I showed him teh Venables 14 bore but wouldn’t let him buy it!  I did persuade him to sell me a little pair of Belgian percussion pocket pistols that need quite a lot of restoration done as they have rusted.  I normally steer clear of foreign stuff as it was not popular here, but times are a’changing as they say, and I needed a straightforward project for the blog as I’ve been a bit distracted lately.  I haven’t actually got these pistols yet, or for that matter seen them in theflesh, but when I do I’ll put photos up.

 

Goodbye –  you don’t see many as nice as this!

11th August – The mystery of the Yamaha F4A outboard deepens!   I put it all back together – minus the back cover – and ran it with the pipe that connects the thermostat housing to the exhaust junction and carries the hot cooling water from the engine  disconnected at the connection to the leg.  The engine was running with the leg in a tank of water in neutral at ‘trolling’ speed.   With the thermostat in place a few drops appear from the pipe when the engine is cold (it needs to leak s bit to get the hot water to the thermostat), and as the engine warms up the flow  gradually increases and a thermometer shows the water at around 60 degrees C or so, which is about right – but then the pipe starts to spit steam and after a minute or so it is just a stream of steam with no solid water and the engine get very hot.  With the thermostat removed there is  a strong continuous flow of water from the pipe and it  doesn’t get much above 40 – 45C and the engine stays reasonable cool.  I checked the thermostat before and it meets the specs exactly, so what is going on?  The tell tale is showing good pressure on both tests….

When running with the water coming out of the pipe rather than into the leg, the leg gets quite hot from the exhaust  but that isn’t a factor in this problem.  In all these tests there is a very strong stream coming from the tell tale hole by the inlet to the engine.   Anyway I have left out the thermostat and plan to use the outboard to see if it overheats in use – of course I’ll reconnect the pipe to the leg to cool the exhaust and put on the covers.   Mystery…………

Good tell tale flow and good cooling flow  when no thermostat is fitted

9th August – Having said yesterday that it was too nice to be indoors, I got my comeuppance today as it rained all day non stop and is still raining.  I did a few vaguely gun related jobs- making some felt sleeves to keep my antique pistols from getting damaged.  I was hoping to  do some work on the dinghy in preparation form my little trip, but that wasn’t possible.

8th August – The number of visitors to this site has jumped to about 500 a day – and it seems to be genuine visitors rather than bot attacks, which is nice.  I haven’t got back to gun work yet – its really too nice to be indoors, so I got back to trying to fix my Yamaha F4A  outboard that was overheating last year.  We failed to notice that there was no cooling water coming out of the tell tale outlet, and the engine overheated, so I stripped it down and found the water pump absolutely solid with salt so I replaced all the parts of the pump and cleaned out and replaced the thermostat – it all seemed fine and water flowed out of the tell tale but it still got far too hot.  I took the head off and checked & cleared all the water cooling passages, which were pretty clear anyway, and then had to wait while I got a replacement head gasket.  I put it together today  but fortunately didn’t put all the cowling back on as it was still overheating, although this time there was a very strong jet coming out of the tell-tale hole, so there was obviously adequate pressure from the water pump.  Nothing for it but to take the power head off the leg to look at the only bit of the water path I hadn’t checked – but no sign of any problems there.  Now that is all a bit of a mystery, so I went back to the thermostat that I’d replaced and checked it in hot water – it opened fully by 70 degrees C, which is what it is supposed to do.  I put the thermostat housing back on without the thermostat and could then blow easily through from the water pump inlet  to the water outlet into the exhaust path so there can be no obstruction in the entire water path in the engine.  That really doesn’t leave much that could be wrong!  I am now waiting for a new gasket  to put the power head back on the leg and I’ll try again.  One useful thing I did learn is that the telltale outlet is right by the cooling water inlet to the engine, so it doesn’t show if water is flowing round the engine, only that the pump is working, and the tell tale water never gets more that luke warm, so as a check its rather limited.  My only possible thought is that there was an air lock in the path to the thermostat housing so that it never got heated enough to open – anyway my only idea at the moment is to try it without the thermostat in place…………………..  I’ll be back with more on this, I would like to get the outboard working as I want to go off in our 16 ft dinghy for a few days while the weather is good………………………

5th August – back at last after our sailing holiday – altogether a good time was had by all.  Only one gale and we were safely tied up in Stornoway for the day – we hired a car and did a tour of Harris, which is not difficult as there are not that many roads!   Mostly sailing  required 4 layers of clothing, but the wind dropped almost every night so no tense nights worrying about anchors dragging, and it was often possible to eat in the cockpit in the evening (thankfully midges don’t make the journey out to the boat!).  We even had one whole day then it was possible to wear shorts and a tee shirt, which is almost unheard of in those parts.  We got the hang of sailing the boat better, mostly because Giles had done a bit of yacht racing and was good at sail trimming, so we had some exciting fast reaches at 8 knots plus in winds to 25 knots.  We explored a few new anchorages and discovered a couple of  very pretty lochs to overnight in.   Now back to ‘real life’ or what passes for that here!  I’ve forgotten everything I knew about guns and engraving, so it will be fun picking it up again………………

Quiet evening in Loch Shell, Lewis

25th July – Greetings from the Hebrides, where it is about 14 degrees C and alternating between 20 knot winds and calm, with rain and drizzle thrown in for good measure, while me house sitters bask in 30 degrees and swim in the pool!

Alongside in Scalpay Noth Harbour, Harris

Motoring in the rain!

20th July  We have nearly reached the end of school term and our house guests/house sitters will shortly be arriving so we can hand over and disappear for a sailing trip round the Hebrides.  Until then I am pretty busy on work, so there won’t be much on the blog,  I’m afraid, unless I can persuade the sitters to give an account of their time in the house – they certainly won’t be doing any gun engraving as my collection is currently in storage – and I’ll try to sell a substantial chunk of it before I take it back as I have run out of space!  I’ll try to put some pictures when we do eventually get away, but mobile reception is a bit flakey in the Outer Isles, and our target this year is St Kilda, which I’m certain doesn’t have any.

18th July A very pleasant afternoon with a couple of friends for lunch and a bit of gentle muzzle loading clay shooting in their garden – we had a very nice Egg double 11 bore tubelock sans ramrod that was quite heavy and of around 1840 – 45  vintage.  This was the second phase of popularity of the tubelock after the first Joseph Manton 1818 tubelock patent flurry of guns – it is always assumed that the second phase of popularity was predicated on the craze for live pigeon shooting and the big wagers involved, on the premise that the tubelock was slightly faster ignition than the caplock.  The bore is a hint that it was a live pigeon gun as it was the maximum allowed bore, and most sporting guns except wildfowl guns were smaller bore. Plus it doesn’t have a ramrod.  It was one of a pair of guns without the numbers 1 & 2 to distinguish the guns and that is possibly a clue as sporting guns were usually carefully individually marked.  Unusually the tubelock had a number of misfires, which we put down to faulty tubes – I didn’t make those tubes and I’ve never had a misfire in the few hundred I’ve made.  I took my Manton Flintlock and we got it to go from a noticeable delay to pretty fast by tweaking the priming – our American friend convinced me that it was faster with about 1/3 or  1/4 of the priming powder (Swiss OB) than I had been using – great discovery given the price of Swiss OB.  I’m almost out of OB as I seem to have mislaid my pot of it – possibly I lent it?  I think I’d been adding more priming in the mistaken belief that it made the gun go off faster.  We shot the Venables for the first time – it seems to shoot as a percussion caplock would,  All in all I managed to bag a few clays with all three guns.

17th July  I have been trying to ‘invent’ new designs for border engravings, but its turning out to be more difficult than I imagined – I thought I’d do a rope, but getting the shading to look right is proving tricky – I’ll post a photo when I get a bit nearer a solution.  I had the last STEM club of the term – the oldest children – year 6- are going on to secondary school so next term there will be new members and we’ll have to start again with cutting up cardboard boxes and using masses of sticky tape and hot (warm) glue guns and lolly sticks etc.  So Dave and I will have to rack our brains to come up with suitable projects that include the above!  I’ll miss the year 6s – they were great. We are shortly off to Scotland and sailing, so I am getting ready for the house sitters to take over – I am relieved that they are staying because the thought of coming back after a couple of weeks and finding the swimming pool a stagnant green puddle is not at all attractive!  I hope they get on all right with the cockerel – nasty piece of work!    I got invited out to lunch and some gently muzzle loading shooting tomorrow  so I might take the Venables and see if it shoots as well as it seems to handle – and maybe the Manton flintlock to see if I can get the ignition up to speed – it was a bit slow last time, although I have to admit that it is other people who really notice – I am maybe too slow myself to judge the ignition speed of a flintlock unless it is really noticeably slow. Tomorrow I also have  a visit to school to meet the teacher responsible for Special Educational Needs children as that is my governor responsibility – in total that means I will have made three visits this week and  a similar number last week – in fact every term-time week – the holidays will come as a bit of a relief.

16th July – another sunny day!  I don’t know how long it is since we had rain, probably about 4 weeks and counting… Coincidence or what – just as I finished typing that sentence Penny called out and said that it was raining – but you can be sure it won’t be enough to soak the ground!    I went over to see Dick today to see the progress on jobs. – We have a small problem – the double barreled ‘foreign’ pistol was stripped by Dick but neither he nor I can find the small parts from the inside of the locks – I’m pretty sure I only took bits that needed engraving, which I’ve returned in the box they came in but the ‘works’ have proved elusive – both Dick and I have searched our workshops to no avail – really strange because both of us have several of sets of bits at any one time and always keep them separate and in boxes or zippy plastic bags.  The annoying thing is that if you make a new set – possible but tedious – you can be sure they will turn up just as you finish the last part!

15th July – I saw several interesting guns people had bought to show at Rugby yesterday, including a fine underhammer percussion rifle by W Parker.   One shooter had a problem with his percussion shotgun – the cock wouldn’t pull back from the fired position as far as half cock so a couple of us had a look and took out the lock, whereupon it became clear that the problem was that the nose of the tumbler was  hitting the mainspring claw/ tumbler link and preventing the tumbler from rotating any further.  It’s unusual to see clearances here of less than a couple of m.m. , but the gun looked original and had been shooting perfectly well.  The problem appeared to boil down to the link being effectively too long – the top joint of the link onto the tumbler appeared to have bit of play, but not really enough to cause the problem.  I had a spring clamp in my car and took out the mainspring, which revealed the problem – the link had started a crack just at the joint between the flat part and the cross bar that engages with the claw on the mainspring and had allowed the rod to move so as to effectively lengthen the link and cause the interference seen. (see photo – of a different lock).  It will be a tricky job to weld it, but another member took it away to fix as its an ‘up North’ job.  I had a look at a few locks from an assortment of guns and couldn’t find one where the clearance between the tip of the tumbler and link/claw was so small -before the crack opened the clearance could only have been a few tens of thou! –  you meet something new every day in this game!   I stupidly didn’t photograph the  broken lock, so here are some photos of ones I have to hand that illustrate the site of the problems

This is a lock from my Samuel Nock percussion 14 bore  gun. The arrow illustrates the closest point as the cock is pulled back – as you can see the sear hasn’t reached the half cock bent. On the broken gun there was a collision between tumbler and spring and link at this point.

A lock from a John Manton & Son 1852-5  percussion double showing the point on the link that had started to crack on the Rugby gun – if it hadn’t stopped working because of the interference, the link would have failed shortly anyway.

14th July  – At the Horley Wood Helice shoot today – fantastic weather, with enough breeze to stop us all frying in the sun.  The Rugby club is one of only 5 in the country to have a helice layout – as I’ve probably explained before, the principle is to simulate the old sport of live pigeon shooting matches without any loss of life, either the shooters or the targets.  It is laid out like the old live pigeon shoots with 5 traps in front of the shooter, loaded with orange winged clays that fly, and have a knockout white centre that falls free if hit (with a little luck).  There is a small fence around 2 feet high in an arc around the shooting position at about 30 yards(?) distant – the ‘clay must be hit so as to separate the white centre, which must hit the ground inside the fence to count as a kill.  We allowed the clay to bounce over the fence and still score, but I think some rules say it must finish up inside the fence.  The fun part is that the traps spin up the clays and oscillate from side to side and up and down so that the shooter can’t anticipate which trap will fire on the ‘pull’ ( the use of that word signifies the pulling of the string that opened the trap over the live pigeon) or the direction it will take.  the spinning orange part is a propeller and can describe a whole range of different paths with changes of direction during flight.  Scoring a hit is a mixture of good shooting and luck in getting an ‘easy’ bird (in truth none are that easy). As muzzle loaders are not as fast as breech loaders, and we are not experienced helice shooters, we only use the middle 3 traps, which makes it somewhat easier,    It is so different from ‘normal’ clay shooting that all the winners were shooters who didn’t normally figure as winners in conventional clay competition, and many of those who are normally good  didn’t shine……

For the benefit of those there, some of whom read my blog, here are a couple of photos;

20 bird shoot – so only 8 out of 28 hit half or more of the birds well enough to score – there were a few near misses too.

The ‘bird’ is just below the wind turbine blade.  The trap on the left has just fired hence it shows black.

As in any muzzle loading event, it takes time to load and shoot 560 shots, so there is a little time to relax 

13th July  Missed out on the restoration & engraving for a couple of days –  I had a look at the two little pistols Dick has restored – they look very good now.  They will in due course be collected when the owner gets down off his combine!  I bought back the frizzen of the Blair and Sutherland that I had asked Dick to make a better fit to the pan as it was so hard the file wouldn’t touch it – the beauty of having an electric furnace handy means just dip it in scale inhibiting paint (Brownells) and hang it in the furnace and set it for 900C then turn it off and let it cool ( it cools at a reasonably slow rate as the bricks are quite good insulators).   I am off the Rugby for the Helice tomorrow – I got out the Gasquoine and Dyson 6 1/2 bore live pigeon gun  to see if I could mount it but the stock is too high and I can’t get my head down on the stock – given that live pigeon guns were made to shoot high, adding the extra from my eye being above the line means I don’t think I could hit anything with it – so it looks as if it will be the old faithful Henry Nock single 14 bore.  the load is limited to 1 1/4 oz and 3 drams, which is quite enough for its 5 1/4 lbs weight.  I’ll take the Venables of Oxford to show off my bargain!   I’m busy preparing for sailing in Scotland- we have a large table piled with food, and I’m sorting out navigation software for my mobile phone – there is a group of enthusiasts who have been surveying small locks around the West coast of Scotland using a rubber dingy equipped with GPS and an echsounder, because a lot of the Official Admiralty charts are based on surveys that were done in the 19th  or early 20th centuries and the positioning of small features like sharp rocks is not always perfect.  Anyway I have purchased the amateur charts (Antares charts) and they look pretty good, although they only cover a handful of possible anchorages in the Hebrides.  I have also been fretting over the swimming pool so that the house-sitters can keep it sanitary – if left un-dosed it goes a horrible green colour and heaven knows what nasties lurk within – probably kill anyone who ventures into the water instantly.  I got a floating gizmo that holds clorine tablets that dissolve slowly, but finding the right settings to maintain the level steady is taking a while.

10th July  I finished my black powder box and filled it and photographed it for the Firearms dept – hope they like it!   One anomaly in the instructions seemed odd – if you don’t keep the box in a secure place (whatever that is) then it must have secure hinges and hasp and padlock.  Nothing about fixing it down to anything, so presumably its Ok to pick it up and run away with it.  You could probably get in fairly fast using the saw blade on a proper Swiss Army knife – they are vicious.  The more detail you try to put in regulations, the more holes you create!  I engraved the breech block of the pistol – I did the false breech earlier – see photo.  The whole thing is now complete as far as my work is concerned, with the possible exception of a few screwheads yet to be made.   I was given an old lock, which was obviously rather crude, or possibly early, as there is no bridle on the tumbler – see photo….

Breech block of ‘foreign’ pistol.

Gash lock I was given. – The mechanism is pretty crude – there is no bridle supporting the tumbler shaft – this is probably a function of it being a trade gun rather than on account of its age, although the ‘banana shape of the lockplate  is a somewhat early feature.The cock looks a bit too unrusted compared with the rest of it so is probably a replacement.

9th July I took the bits I had engraved to Dick’s so he can get on with fitting them to the wood – the butt cap fits on to a chunk of what looks like ivory that forms a white (now varnished brown) band above the brass cap.  Not sure if it is ivory, but the pistol predates plastics…  I now have the barrel to put a bit of decoration on the rib on the breech block  – probably nothing else, I’ll see how it goes I might be tempted to try a silver inlay.  The barrels are very light – the muzzles look like  typical shotgun muzzles in terms of thickness, and the breeches are a bit thicker, but not much, plus the barrels appear to be slightly swamped (i.e. have a ‘waist’) although it isn’t true swamped  in that the barrel never gets thinner than at the muzzle – just looks swamped when you view along the barrel.  Anyway for a pistol we reckoned it had a very light barrel.   I’m going to have to have a better system of keeping track of which bits of which guns I have, and which bits Dick has – it hasn’t been a problem before – we both have ‘systems’ that usually work, but today we were not sure who had all the ‘works’ from the pistol locks.  I am sure that Dick had stripped them, and I only took the bits that actually needed engraving, but he thought I have them!  We both have workshops full of stuff, but actually both of us are quite careful about keeping track of bits so it is unusual for us to misplace things.  My black powder box is pretty near completion – just need a strong point to secure it to an eyebolt. Now I have to photograph it for the Firearms & Explosives person.

 

Its difficult to know where this pistol came from – the chequering is fairly coarse and the shapes are not English – the ivory plug is unusual too! 

Very light barrels of around 18 bore – must have used quite light loads!  

8th July – I fixed up an automatic watering system for the tomato plants (3) which live in a grow bag on the roof of the log store – they get through about 8 litres of water a day in this weather!  I am amazed that a little plastic part run on two AAA cells can turn on and off a full water supply at 5 Bars pressure!   I made a garden gate (its a weekend and time to catch up on domestic jobs) out of a couple of old table tops I had collected from a skip in a University lab – they were covered in dirty hardboard but made of solid pine – they were quite narrow and on the underside has a groove along one  edge and a couple of holes for ink wells with ink soaked in all round – took me back to my first school were we had to use ‘dip pens’ to write in copybooks – it probably gave me a love of graphics and script writing, not that I’m very good at it – maybe my early education wasn’t rigorous enough. ( that all makes me sound like someone out of Dickens or a TV historic play).  Anyway a very solid gate now hangs in the garden, and a bit more old junk has gone from the shed…..  I eventually found the trigger guard – it was in the cellar with my derusting kit – logical – I just forgot to look there.  Anyway that is now done, plus the brass butt cap.

I went for a classic scroll here – I used the gravermax as the metal was a bit mixed – not as easy to control as push engraving….

but it has to be quick – the job is taking far too long for any sensible added value!

7th July – Shades of 1976!  I remember an aerial photo of my auntie’s farm taken that year – a house in a sea of completely parched fields.  My quest for the missing trigger guard got pretty frantic, especially when I realised the brass butt cap was missing too. I even had Dick searching his workshop in case I’d taken them down with the other bits of the pistol to show him.  They were of course where I had put them – down in the cellar next to the derusting tank!   No time to actually DO anything by the time they were found.  My blackpowder box turns out to be a fairly tight fit on my modified plastic bottles – I should have made the spaces 5 mm bigger, but it will just fit them.  I’m sorting out bits and pieces for sailing – things have moved on from the days when you needed dozens of paper charts at about £ 8 each – I just got all the UK charts in digital form for up to 5 mobile phones for £25. which is a bargain!   Very handy for use on deck – you need to put your phone in a waterproof bag, but that isn’t a problem.  I still like a few paper charts for planning as it helps to be able to see the detail and the big picture in their proper relation at the same time, plus I love ‘walking’ the dividers across a chart to measure distances/times – so quick and immediate.

6th July.  I have now finished all the bits of the double pistol, except the trigger guard, which I have mislaid!  I had it on my engraving bench and looked at it in preparation, but it had evaporated!  The fact that someone dished me up an oversize gin and tonic at 6 p.m. hasn’t helped the search!  I’m sure it will turn up somewhere!  I’m reminded that next Saturday is the Helice shoot at Rugby, when our gang will try their hand at this fantastic clay shoot – regulars on this site from last year will know that the traps throw flying ‘clays’ from random traps in random directions in imitation of the 19th century s’sport’ of live pigeon shooting.  I do have an original live pigeon gun by Gasquoine and Dyson (see post) – like a lot of the early percussion live pigeon guns it is large bore – 6 1/2 and like all live pigeon guns, it was made without provision for a ramrod as all loading was at tables and supervised to make sure the loads were fair. Live pigeon guns were usually made to shoot high as the birds were always rising when shot.   Although it is a big bore, mostly the guns were not overly heavy and shot moderate loads of 1 1/2 or 2 oz of shot (later 1 1/2 was the max. allowed and the big bores were dropped).  The other large bore guns that you find were wildfowling guns which were typically much heavier – 12 lbs not being unusual, and would have loaded heavy powder and shot charges – 3 oz and 4 or 5 drams of black powder.  While many of the live pigeon guns were of high quality and finish like mine, the wildfowling guns were  usually plain and strictly functional.  I will have to think about which gun to take!

5th July – I found an offcut of 6mm ply in the recesses of the shed that was big enough to cut the partitions for the black powder box from, so that is now done and awaits hinges and hasp – I might go mad and buy some intumescent  strip for the lid – about £12.  It is recommended in ER2014 but not obligatory.  I finished off the two lock plates that had been ‘engraved’ by a madman – I had to follow most of the existing pattern as some of the cuts were quite deep – anyway it looks passable now – the leaves sticking out are strange, but they were quite deeply cut so it was not possible to ignore them.  Anyway it looks a lot better and I eventually followed a suggestion for a border from Dick, so I did a wiggly line, which is very quick to do and looks the part.  I shudder to think how long I’ve spent on them so far – I have the rest of the furniture to sort now- its in the derusting bath.  I did most of the second lock with the Gravermax  as it gave me slightly more control in the difficult parts of the metal – around 30% of the surface.

Slightly unusual design, it would probably have been better to make new lock plates, but that would raise the price of the job considerably and it is a collector’s find so its quite nice to keep elements of the original;

 

4th July – back in school for a 1 to 1 session with a young lad.  We succeeded in programming the robot vehicle to follow a line but dodge round an obstruction and carry on following – we got  it to do 4 laps of an obstructed circuit.  I have now glued up the black powder box – it is designed to hold 16 bottles of 500 gm each and is effectively made of  24 mm ply, so its pretty hefty, even empty!  I now have to get some 6 mm ply for the internal divisions – I have a full sheet in the shed, but it is so deeply buried and  such a struggle  to find space to cut it up (by hand) that I may just go and see if I can pick up some offcuts in the timber merchant.  I’ll then need hinges and a hasp and some means of securing it in place.  Then I can retire my old box.   I spent a good part of the day engraving the junk locks (see below) the metal is horrible and I’m getting through gravers fast – I won’t be able to put off a sharpening session much longer.  I’ll post a  photo shortly – it is very difficult to get something that looks reasonable when so much of the original ‘engraving’ is still there. the pre-existing stuff really defines a pattern unlike anything I’ve ever seen on a gun or anywhee else for that matter – heaven knows who did it, or why!  Last chance to bid on Holts sealed bid sale – I couldn’t find a lot to get excited about, but I did stick in one bid, so we’ll see if that works.

 

3rd July in school a couple of times today – my STEM club was very quiet as its a ‘move up day’ and my seniors had gone off to their next term’s schools for the day.   I decided that it was almost impossible to buy 500ml antistatic bottles – almost because it is possible to buy wash bottles at about £8 each – so I cut all the old 1KG black powder bottles I had at 125 mm from the base and cut the skirt off the top at 20 – 25 below the corner and then split up the corners of the top a little to make it easier to fit the top over the base – I then stuck the two together with black silicone sealant.  My stock of empty bottles was good because several years ago I’d bought a 12Kg sack of BP and asked the AML members for spare empty bottles.  Anyway I now have 10 antistatic bottles that I hope will satisfy ER2014.  I bought a sheet of 12 mm ply and got it cut into three strips – I decided to make the box out of two layers of 12 mm ply instead of 18 mm ply as it will be easier to get good overlapping joints and its a lot cheaper – around £25 a sheet for shuttering ply with one good face.   So far I’ve cut the pieces and glued the two layers of  all the sides together.  I am hoping that my construction method works – I’ll post the evidence when it is put together.

Looks a bit wonky, but who cares?

2nd July.  I recut the trigger guard of the rifle – its always difficult to decide how much I’m going to do – this one was quite pitted – probably deeper than the existing engraving over a lot of the surface. so to refinish the surface to get rid of the pitting would probably have obliterated all of the original engraving and I’d then have to recreate the original (without really knowing what it was!).  I settled for refreshing as best I could – its often difficult, as in this case, to make out what the engraving represents, so you have to recut the clear original cuts, getting finer and finer as far as you can follow, and hope that something recognisable will emerge from the  recutting.  In this case a stag’s head emerged with scrolls on either side.  You can now ‘read’ the engraving much better, without it looking too brash. Interestingly the deeper cuts appeared to be done with a chasing tool and hammer, which is quite unusual in my experience on an English gun,  the fine lines were, I think done with a push engraver.   Dick has a strange foreign pistol that had the crudest engraving you can imagine – the owner wanted it ‘tarted up’ to look more like an English pistol – it has a short double barrel that actually could be English – the rest might be a trade gun decorated by an amateur.  Ive now put that to bed, I hope ( photos below)

The initial state of the trigger guard – its quite difficult to make out the details – electrolytic derusting cleared out the hard rust, which makes it easier to recut.  As always, part of the difficulty of ‘reading ‘ the engraving is that the rust comes up flush with the surface, so you don’t see relief or shadows.

It is now clearer although the photo doesn’t show the middle bit well as there are no shadows 

I’m supposed to turn these into something respectable!   The tail is too deep to ignore, but I’m tempted to file out the nose engraving as it is only on one plate.

The pre-existing ‘engraving’ if it deserves that name makes it difficult to deviate as most of the cuts on the tail are too deep to ignore.  So I just work with what is already there- recutting lines and adding shading and changing the overall shape with additions. – I’ll put a pattern in the border round the lock at some point.  

 

 

1July.  Another month gone….  I went sailing in our 16ft dinghy today as it was such a perfect day!  I had an amusing encounter where I pay to launch the boat – last time I said 16ft as the length and they said lets call it 14 ft 6 inches as that is cheaper, so I agreed.  This time I said 14 ft 6 inches and they said lets call it 3 meters as that is cheaper – presumably this will continue until the boat has infinitesimal length and costs nothing – or is 3 m the minimum cost?  Watch this space to discover….   The owner of the rifle reminded me that I was also going to recut the trigger guard – I’m afraid it has slipped my mind, so that is something to look forward to.    I got a letter from the Firearms Licensing people for Bedfordshire ( our licensing is now joint)  telling me the  latest storage regulations for Black Powder and asking for photographs of my box etc.  There is a bit of a problem here – while the maximum contents of the box has increased to 15 Kg ( I think 10 Kg is the max on the license) it still has to be stored in 550 gm max  per bottle and the bottles have to be plastic / polythene or paper or cloth and the plastic must not ‘induce static electricity’.  All my BP comes in 1 Kg antistatic bottles of which I have plenty but it is nigh on impossible to buy 500 ml antistatic (usually black) plastic bottles anywhere on the web.  Since you need to leave 30% space above the bottles the box gets a bit ridiculously high if you just half fill the 1 Kg bottles, which is presumably perfectly legal – you can’t count the 50% space within the bottle towards the 30% either.  So I am in a bit of a quandary – I am thinking of cutting the existing bottles down and gluing them back together, or using sticky tape.  My current box takes 500ml poythene bottles but it looks like I’ll have to make a new one – heaven knows where it will fit in the house!  Here is the extract from ER 2014  – I’ll try to track down the full thing when I have time..  On second thoughts, keeping the BP in paper bags of 500 gm is obviously quite legal and much cheaper ……………………..  Suggestions welcome!

click here for ER2014 summary:-  Black Powder regulations

30th June – I picked up the barrel of the rifle that I engraved the patch box for from Dick today – he has done a nice job of browning it – a good chestnut brown – he struck up the barrel a little to get rid of some of the small scale pitting, but didn’t take it too far so that it looked as if the barrel had been worked over.   There is no engraving on the rifle at all, although it is a nice quality piece – it is thought to be  outsale from Joseph Manton very late in his career – it is a little unusual that it is unsigned, un-numbered and without a barrel makers mark, as its a decent quality Birmingham proofed gun.  Dick and I had a mutual ‘senior moment’ when putting the backsight back – we couldn’t remember which side the folding leaf was normally on – we did get it right as I checked on my Purdey rifle when I got home.  I had to take out the foresight and file it down a bit as it didn’t fit very well. Anyway its ready to go back to its owner, which is more than can be said for the little pistol Dick is STILL working on – it must have taken the best part of a week to do – far more than the pistol is worth!    I’m going to have to have a try at shooting the Venables – it seems to fit pretty well with its 3/8th cast off.. I do have a problem that I always think almost any gun I pick up fits me, unless the comb is too high for me to see down the barrel rib, in which case I can usually shoot it with a leather butt pad fitted. The secret with the leather butt pads is to cut shims from old cork table mats and use them to adjust the length of the stock.  I’m sure that they can’t all fit but I need an ‘expert’ to look and see what fits – the problem is that I shoot equally erratically with them all.  I was thinking to go sailing tomorrow on the Stour by Ipswitch – its tidal and you can only launch and recover from a trailer when the tide is more than half up, so at the moment its only possible to fit in a good sail on alternative weekends, and so far it hasn’t worked out.   Our plastic bag containing 30 tons of water in the back garden is getting lots of use in this hot weather- more swimming so far this year than any  years for quite a while………………………

The ramrod is with the owner.

Twist has come out very well – it isn’t too shiny, so looks in keeping with the rest of the gun.

28th June – A busy day what with meetings and a visit to my lovely dentist – I did have time to make the second titanium nipple for the Venables.  Making them out of titanium is a pain as the metal is so tough.  It is OK to turn with a sharp tool but you do need a sharp tool if you want to take a very fine cut – it works best with reasonable cuts.  I drill a 1 mm hole in the bottom of the nipple but you have to proceed very carefully and clear the drill often – the second nipple has a 1.1 mm hole as the 1 mm drill  sheared off in a failed attempt!  The main hole down from the top is 2.3 mm to within 3 mm of the bottom so the 1 mm hole is about 3 mm long – they seem to work with those dimensions  The worst bit is cutting the thread as the die only seems to cut on the first pass (with difficulty and a lot of heat but maybe the die is blunt), and any attempt to resize the thread with a closed down die gets no-where, it just compresses the thread, generates a lot of heat and is a difficult to back off as it is to cut – but you can cut decent threads on the first pass if you get the die right. I have a die with the top face ground down about 1/2 mm so it cuts further up the nipple as breech block threads are rarely relieved at the top.  One problem is that titanium is pretty resistant to filing – at least with my less than perfect files. and you have to remember that the fine swarf will burn with a lot of heat and is very difficult to put out – don’t use water, use sand or a purpose made extinguisher.   Why do I bother to use titanium?  Well it is very tough, won’t corrode or shatter, doesn’t need heat treatment – but mainly for the challenge – & I happen to have a bar of 12 mm titanium courtesy of ebay!  Most nipples in late percussion long guns turn out to be a pretty good fit to 1/4 UNF which is 28 threads per inch.  You sometimes need to open up the die to the maximum extent if thread is very loose or worn, or you can recut to 9/32 UNF which is also 28 t.p.i. – I have recut without annealing the breech block.

You can see the rib lifting – its been resoldered badly.  Click on the photo to see the damascus pattern clearly.

27th – quick trip over to Holts to pick up the gun I bought last week.  It is everything I expected and more – its difficult to see how it didn’t sell for  more than the cased Manton and Mortimer which were no where near as good a quality.  It is London proofed, and is obviously quite late – I think Venables didn’t start until 1846 – the wood is superb, it wouldn’t be out of place on an expensive modern Purdey or H&H, and as fresh and crisp as if it had just been re-stocked by a good stocker – although why anyone would bother for a percussion gun that wasn’t by a well known maker I can’t think – anyway I think it must be original.  The barrels are a nice true Damascus, not twist and the top rib is pretty, although it needs refitting as its a little raised – the bores are about the best I’ve seen in an antique gun that hasn’t been lapped, and the insides of the locks are perfect except for a couple of very small patches of rust.  The engraving on the furniture is top quality and all matching, including that on the butt plate, which is the first I’ve seen that has no rust on it. The only anomaly is the trigger guard that is like a rifle one, but probably an owner’s choice…. What’s not to like!  I now need a case for it, and a powder flask to go with my lovely shot flask.   I have started a new post for the Venables as I have taken lots of pictures, but here is a taster….  Oh, and I decided the Venables needed new nipples so I thought ‘how neat to make them out of titanium’ – which I did but I think the one I finshed is a tiny bit too long in thread and won’t screw right in.  I’d forgotten how difficult it was to cut threads on titanium with a die.

26th – slight falloff in visitors to the site as others are lazing in the sun? ( I spent 4 1/2 hours in school so earned my swim!) Looking more carefully in The Powder Flask book I find that my flask is made of Britannia metal, an alloy of tin 85%, Antimony 10%, Zinc 3% and copper 2% or some very similar composition, and that the ‘hallmarks’ on my flask are standard Dixon marks for Britannia metal flasks – not sure of the dates – here is a photo of the page from the book showing what they should look like – it matches. Now I need to find a gun of matching quality – it would do superbly for the Harkum that sold at Holts as the shot flask was the only item missing.   I’m off to Holts tomorrow to pick up my Venables – a friend is livid as he booked a telephone bid on 3 guns ( including the Harkum) and wasn’t rung so missed them all at less than he would have been willing to bid…..  I usually leave a contingency bid on stuff I book a telephone bid for in case, but I have always been rung.  I guess there is always a fear that the auctioneer will be tempted to run the bidding up to the contingency bid ( my contingency bid on the Venables was £750 but I got it for £420 so quite a risk).  While I’m up at Holts I will have a look at the stuff in the sealed bid sale as there are a few junk guns I might want.  Somewhere along the line I’m after a single barreled wreck with a 3 stage twist barrel big enough to cut down for a barrel for my Mortimer pistols – that way they will be proper twist barrels, which they would be if I used modern barrels.  I have one already that is just big enough and long enough in the octagonal section.  Having considered both Birmingham and Holts last sale I see the pistol market buoyant, the smaller the better but not Liege, long guns not so buoyant – in both cases the name is a disproportionate factor, probably justified in flint guns but less so in percussion as designs were getting more standardised and, in late percussion often came from Birmingham.  I have always been amused that a turnoff pocket pistol made and engraved in Birmingham is worth twice as much if the name on the side is NOCK or whatever, as compared to one with e.g. BLOGGS, given that neither Nock nor Bloggs ever did more than hand over the pistol to the customer, probably as a freebe on a large purchase, probably still in the bag it came in from Birmingham.  Cased ‘duelling’ pistols by well known makers tend to have silly prices attached, but beware my comments on June 24th on re-conversions.  There are some lovely guns about but  they stand out a mile from the run of the mill stuff and are worth paying for, and there are always the odd bargain to be had if you look carefully – I reckon I’ve found two in the last couple of weeks, but I’ve looked at several hundred guns and even more accessories to find them. Don’t be tempted to buy the sort of junk I used to bid for – it just clutters up the place and you feel bad about it every time you see it!  Good hunting…………………..

James Dixon & Son

From the Powder Flask Book by Ray Riling.

Britannia metal flask

25th June – Too much lazing in the sun & swimming but better make the most of the weather, which will worsen when the school holidays starts and also when we go off on our holiday!  I  had three school meetings today, so I needed the swim….  I got the charts of the West Coast of Scotland out today and started to work out possible routes and anchorages – we’de like to make a dash for St Kilda if we can – its been a target for several years and the weather has never been stable enough.  St Kilda is out in the Atlantic and doesn’t offer much shelter from swells so it can be an unpleasant anchorage if there is any strong winds further out in the Atlantic, which there often are.  The distances on the West coast of the Hebrides can involve a long day’s sail and we don’t normally sail at night as we don’t have enough crew to manage where much navigation is involved and there are no light buoys for entrances into lochs etc when you get there.   As always with sailing, its a matter of getting the right wind and tide.   I polished up the silver(?) shot flask – it really needs a posh cased  silver mounted gun, or at least a pretty fancy one to justify the flask – I guess its fairly late – I must look it up in ‘The Powder Flask Book’ by Ray Riling…… I find that the full name ‘JAMES DIXON & SON’ was used from 1833.  Both shutter arm and flask nozzle are marked ‘Z’, which ought to tell me something  but doesn’t!

25th June – Here are a couple of pics of the flask I bought yesterday  – at the moment the shutter assembly is in the derusting bath.

The shutter arm is stamped ‘JAMES DIXON & SON  SHEFFIELD’ 

The second from the right looks like a British hallmark, not sure about the rest! Suggestions???

24th June 2 hour drive to the Birmingham Antique Arms Fair. ( I’ve done too much driving in the last week or so)..  Overall impression, mostly military stuff and swords, quite a lot of noise and people, many of whom were more interested in a football match that seemed to be going on somewhere else, which I assume involved a team from England.  Lots and lots of pistols of all sorts, but very few long guns except military rifles -one exception of note – George Yannegas showed me a minature Whitworth Target Rifle cased complete with all its accessories and in mint condition – he has of course tried it out.. SO if you have a handy 10 grand it could be yours.  Certainly better value than some of the cased pairs of duelling pistols at astronomical prices – I’d want a lot more than was on offer if I was going to part with £29,000!  Even the cased percussion duellers were above £10K….   I did see a few dodgy guns, in fact I probably thought some perfectly genuine ones were dodgy after seeing some of the offerings.  Kevin (Blackley) told me that about 25 years ago a certain West Country ‘restorer’, now deceased, had admitted to reconverting over 1000 guns and pistols in 5 years, and he is presumed to have done but reconversions for the next 20 years…    No wonder he got so good that its almost impossible to distinguish real from fake.   I didn’t buy any guns but I did pick up a rather nice high quality shot flask for £70 – I thought it was German Silver, but when I got it home it appears to have hallmarks, and so might actually be silver, although they don’t quite correspond to any in my reference book.  I kick myself for not going through his stock for a matching powder  flask!  Anyway I’ll have to find a test for silver…. I’ll post a photo tomorrow.  I got a book on Continental flintlocks and their decoration as I thought I ought to have it to extend my reference library, although I have to admit that I dislike the more elaborate continental carved steel guns – My Barranechea  (Eibar) in the Catalan style is about as far as I want to go in my collection.  Oh, and on the way back an accident on the A14  added an extra  half hour to the journey after I had stopped off at Kettering Hospital to pick up my brother and take him home to Corby.  Very frustrating waiting while they discharged him, everything seemed to be a slightly disorganised  and inefficient process carried on by cheerful and helpful staff who were lovely – just wholly inefficient at executing a process – I think that must be the state of the NHS – cheerful inefficiency.  It certainly looked as if all the managers sat in offices well away from the nitty gritty of the action, while there is no-one effectively managing processes on the shop floor. Of course I might well be wrong – I only heard how it took about 8 hours to discharge him when it should have taken 30 minutes to an hour at most….I waited 1 1/2 hours after he was supposed to be ready to go….

 

23rd June… CGC was hosting the Army and RAF cadets National Clay Championships, with teams from all over the country from the West country to Scotland – we were offering shots with percussion and flintlock guns at £1 per shot (50p to Help for Heros) which just about covers our costs – CGC pays for the clays and gives us free cups of tea but it is tiring – more or less non stop for 6 hours without a break, a couple of cups of tea and a burger on the go ( wouldn’t be allowed if it was a job!).   Great fun though – the cadets love firing the old guns, especially the flintlocks, and a few of them managed to break clays with a flintlock, which is reckoned to be difficult even with some practice.  I was using my single barreled ‘Twigg’ (possibly spurious?) which as usual performed very well – I had one ‘flash in the pan’ misfire out of about 20 shots as the touch hole got bunged up as I had got lazy about putting the wire through it between shots.  The lock is very kind to flints, and sparks well, although it has a very strong mainspring and frizzen spring and no frizzen roller – one might expect it to be hard on flints for those reasons.  I had my little Henry Nock single percussion 14 bore – its a good gun for small shooters as the pull is only about 13 1/4 ins and the gun weighs 5 1/4 lbs, but it ‘comes up well’ on most people.  With a normal load of 2 3/4 drams and 1 oz it has a bit of a kick so I cut the load to 2 1/2 drams and 7/8 oz which was better.  At 2 3/4 drams and 1 1/2 oz it kicks like a mule but I don’t use that load on ‘have a go’ shoots – in fact I only used it once on a shoot by mistake as I picked up the wrong shot flask!  We were using Vesuvit powder in the flintlocks & percussion as Swiss 2 is a far too expensive for a have a go shoot !   Pete was using his Pedesoli reproduction Mortimer flintlock, and had reliable shooting, although he did shatter a flint for one misfire. I took him the shot belt I had made, which was much admired.   Off to Birmingham tomorrow – 2 hour drive there – Dick was coming but has too much work on – partly because the little pistol is taking so much time to sort out. Now I must finish cleaning the two guns – I have done the barrels but they need oiling and putting together.

22nd June… Such a nice day I spent a while just sitting in the sun, then having a gentle swim in the large plastic bag of water in the garden – 30 tons of it!  Its 10m long so its just big enough to get a bit of exercise.  I was relaxing in preparation for a busy weekend – tomorrow I am going to Cambridge Gun Club where we are offering a taste of muzzle loading clay shooting to the CCF cadets as part of their shotgun day.  I get asked to do it as I am one of the few who shoot flintlocks, and they are always popular as the flash is quite spectacular and it makes a good video.  On Sunday I’m off to the Birmingham fair at NEC to see Kevin Blackley and get a few bits.  I just learned my brother is in Kettering Hospital so I’ll kill two birds with one stone and call in and see him on the way back – perhaps the idiom  is inappropriate in the circumstances!   I did find time today to drill and tap a 9/32 BSF hole in the end of my long loading rod and make a new charge removing screw with 9/32 thread so that I have the means to unload my long barreled ‘Twigg’ flintlock – my normal cleaning rod isn’t long enough.  I have found it very useful to have a screw that can be put in the end of my loading rods – especially for game shooting as it saves carrying a sectional ‘cleaning’ rod.  It could be neater, but it was made in a hurry.

Piece of wire from a shelf support bent round an 8 mm bar, ground flat and then soft soldered to a brass boss. I’m always impressed when a knurling tool manages to run in sync with the diameter of the workpiece!

21st more…  Just caught the sale of lot 1502 ( blog pasim)  – I thought if by a fluke it went at or near the bottom estimate I just might not be able to resist, although I’d have to sell my soul to the devil to pay for it – assuming he doesn’t already own it.  In the event my judgement of the beauty of the gun was shared by several far richer people who eventually pushed the price up to 4 times the top estimate – £20K – I don’t think the devil would have taken my soul in part exchange at that price!  So all done and dusted and I’ve packed the Purdey foreend for dispatch.   Dick is trying to sort out one of a pair of tiny percussion pistols – the trigger guard strap was broken and the body had been botched, so its turning out to be a horrendous job to get it to function – we didn’t price the job to cover having to re-invent the interior, which is what it amounts to, but you win some (not many) and you loose some (too many). Having finished the fore-end engraving I’m casting round for the next job…… Maybe sort through my mail……Pay some bills….. Fix the Outboard…Mow the lawns…..

21st June – Watching the Holts sale online – I hope you will forgive me for not sharing my bid intentions with the world last night – I had 2 targets,  a nice double 14 bore percussion by Venables of Oxford (£300-500) that had an almost mint bore and very nice wood, and a Greener that needed a bit of TLC.  The Venables looked like it was rather underpriced at estimate 300-500, the only thing against it was that the rib had been very crudely re-attached ( easily fixed),  but I would have been prepared to go well above the top estimate to get it – in the event I had a telephone bid and  got it at £420 hammer price, so pretty happy! I’ll have to try it and if it shoots as well as it fits me, I’ll retire one of my existing doubles, its very reassuring as it means that decent doubles can still be found…..  The Greener was not such an attractive proposition, I’m not really a Greener fan but it looked like a restoration opportunity – in the event I ducked out at £600, which I thought was a lot compared to the Venables!   I’ll watch 1502 if I am in, although I do have a meeting at 1700… I hope I’m not tempted……    I finished the Purdey fore-end….

I guess I’m happy with that – in the end it was mostly done with the Gravemax on acount of the curvature! 

Bottom one is a pull of the smoked part on cellotape.

21st June – At Holts today to look at one or two guns in the auction tomorrow.  Obviously the star attraction for muzzle loading shooters is the Harkam in its original pigskin lined case with all its original bits – the full works, except it’s missing the shot flask.  It was difficult to see if it had ever been shot.  In reality its probably not of much interest to shooters because it is so good that it would be a sin to use it, which is a change from my usual stance that guns are meant to be shot! A lot of the attraction of this one is that it is so perfect, so shooting it would take the edge of it!  Anyway it is probably a bit pricey for most of the shooters I know (estimate £4000 – 6000 – my guess around 5500+) . The dog of the lot has to be the Nock 7 barreled gun, whoever did that to any gun needs to be strung up and banned from ever going near a gun again – and the estimate? £15000 – 20000!  Some mothers do have ’em…..  I wouldn’t give £2000 for it if I had money to burn!   Owning it would reduce one’s street cred to zero!  I think my favourite gun in the whole auction has to be lot 1502, the Dickson 16 bore non ejector skeletal round body gun – it is SO elegant and makes the usual run of overpriced Purdeys and H&Hs and Bosses look like double decker buses alongside a sports car.  If I had 3K to 5K kicking around I’d be in there like a shot – I did have a look but unfortunately I don’t seem to have enough to hand!  It will probably go for at least 6K and on top of that it needs restocking as the wrist is rather fragmented- another £3500 or so – Oh well…..  One can dream….  There were a couple of cased late percussion guns of  slightly dubious origin (?), a Purdey and a Mortimer – I base my judgement on the lock engraving, both have very similar engraving that symmetrically fills the lock plates, and the names are put just along the top edge as if they are an afterthought – look very like good quality bought-in Birmingham guns, either retailed by the signed makers or just spuriously named. There were a number of  other cased percussions, a couple of John Mantons, one OK ish, one not so clearcut.   Nothing really stands out.    The lesson as always is that there are a lot of dubious guns around – caveat emptor.    I drove via the Blackwall tunnel, and had a dodgy moment as to whether my Land Cruiser needed to pay to go in the Low Pollution Zone – it would appear from the website that it doesn’t, although my old one did. I do have to pay the ‘naughty boy’ charge in addition to the congestion charge if I go in the city.  After 2019 I’ll have to pay to go anywhere near London, which fortunately I don’t often do…

The ‘Purdey fore-end is going slowly, I may finish it later tonight although I don’t usually carry on after about half past midnight……..which is only 10 minutes away…..

We’ll see what tomorrow brings………………

20th June – Getting back into my stride – STEM club at school – the latest project is to get the keen ones to program the robot to dodge round a bit of ‘wall’ across its path – going well!   Apart from that and a school meeting I am trying to get ahead with the Purdey engraving on the new fore end.  It is taking forever to do all the little scrolls, and it is so easy to slip on the curved surface – I’ve tried putting in the main scrolls with the GRS Gravemaster pneumatic tool – in general I much prefer ‘push engraving’, but the Gravemaster has its used, particularly on curved surfaces as it requires almost no force to drive it through the metal and there is therefore much less chance of a slip.  If I was a professional, and used to the pattern I would presumably be able to bang it out in a fairly short time, but I guess it will actually take me a day or so to complete it – I’m probably about half way through now. I will probably go down to Holts tomorrow, if I can face another few hours of driving after Scotland…………

As on the original, there is no attempt at precise symmetry, just a general aim to follow the same general pattern and keep the balance of  cut and uncut metal about the same over all the surface.

18th June – Apologies for leaving my regulars without their daily update!  I’m back from Scotland – sadly neither Tom nor I carried off any trophies from the Scottish National Muzzle Loading Clay Championships on Saturday – the only things we did carry off  were six soaking wet guns (and two soaking wet shooters). I am afraid that we ducked out of the last competition ( double hammer gun) so that we could rush home and try to sort the guns before going off to the dinner – they were beginning to get marks and in danger of starting to rust as water had penetrated round the locks of some of them, and the slips they were carried  in were also wet inside.   Anyway we managed a preliminary clean and got back to the Guardbridge Inn in time for the celebratory meal.  On Sunday we visited ‘Scotland’s Secret Bunker’ a few miles from St Andrews.  Built originally in the 1950s as an underground RAF radar tracking station it was later designated as the seat of government and control in the event of a nuclear attack, with the ability to function in lock-down sealed mode for a month!  It is built on two floors about 60 feet underground and could probably support around 100 people, so as you can imagine, its huge!  The control rooms are recreated with sounds of announcements and warnings etc so it’s all very atmospheric – there is quite a lot of old technology around – back from the days when machines spewed forth punched paper tape – I still have a few rolls of tape – my first computer program in 1966 was on punched tape, and I built a Mass Spectrometer controller that output its data in that format, although pretty soon computer programs were printed out on punched cards the size of  postcards with one line of code on each card. A  small program gave you a pile of cards from about 3 inches high and a bigger one about 2 feet high ( of course you couldn’t actually pile them that high).  The delight of the punched cards was that if you dropped the pile on your way from upstairs in our building to the computer in another building the cards & therefore the lines of code got muddled and could not  be put back in order as they were not numbered – about as much use as a book if you cut each page into individual lines and jumbled the whole lot!  The neat thing about my first program on a ‘proper’ computer – it calculated the shape of a weighted  wire towed through the water – was that chunks of it were still incorperated into other people’s programs 30 years later!   I had a good run back from St Andrews today – 8 hours from door to door including a stop for lunch – I was very lucky, on the way there I passed a 10 mile queue of almost stationary traffic coming the other way, and coming back I passed a 5 mile queue!   I had another go over the guns when I got back – my little Nock had started to get a bit of rust round the muzzle, and they all got a bit of TLC.  All my slips got damp and although they were dried on radiators overnight ( Tom has central heating, of which I strongly disapprove) it is almost impossible to dry the muzzle ends as they are encased in vinyl and too small to allow effective circulation.

I’m afraid I have no photographs of the shoot – I forgot to take my proper camera, and in any case it was too wet to use it……………

14th June. Another lovely day, but the forecast for the shoot in St Andrews on Saturday is gloomy – rain all day – but that is par for the course up there! I’m hoping I have everything lined up to go!  I’m borrowing the shot belt I made for Viking to ‘test’ it as I don’t want to deliver an untested item – I fixed the broken spring on the ( Irish pattern) nozzle by cleaning it up and soft soldering it in – seems to work. I was looking through my collection of old shot flasks and realised that almost all my old flasks have the seams breaking down so they leak – I’ll have to make some new bodies for them.  I’ve now lost one of my loading rods – why do I keep loosing things!   I’m kept quite busy by this blog, answering queries and fixing things, which is interesting but all takes time.  Dick is busy working an the small pair of pistols that have occupied him for too long!  The bottom strap was broken and a poor replacement had been silver soldered in, which is always bad news as it means you can’t make a good weld repair without getting rid of all the silver solder and that is usually easier said than done. anyway as that repair was finished it became clear that the action could not possibly have worked as it was, so Dick has had to do a bit of milling to get the cock spindle in the right places and  sort out the tumbler bearings.  They will look beautiful when finished – and may well be for sale – we already had one person interested!

13th June..  I was sorting out the Parish Council email accounts this morning to comply with the Data Protection stuff ( I host their website and email for historic reasons) – it made me realise that I probably need a policy for this website, so I made one up.  Since the site doesn’t put cookies on other peoples computers it isn’t very onerous – the notice at the top of the page should suffice, and I’ve put the Wordfence notice in a new page called GDPR just in case.  Wordfence is based in the US and IP addresses etc are sent over there so it is responsible for that side of things, fortunately.  It all makes work for the working man (or woman) to do, as the song goes…..   I got the pulls from the action body of the Purdey for which I have the fore-iron to engrave, so I am able to start that job. As usual I started with a trial of the Purdey scroll pattern – actually there are several variations of the small scroll that are cut differently and give a slightly different overall impression.  After I had put a decent surface on an annealed piece of steel I did a first trial – the challenge is to get the right balance of cuts and highs.  Since I only had pulls of the action body, I took pulls of my trials to match.  This Purdey engraving uses cutout background and outlines to leave the desired raised shapes, as distinct from my normal engraving where the lines are the picture -called  intaglio.  I did a trial on my test piece, took a pull, cut out a bit more around the desired shapes and took another pull ( after getting rid of any burrs with a  fine wire brush wheel) – and then once more.  Here are the results, with the pull of the action body.

There might be a bit too much cut-out in 3 ( white areas are cutouts), but 3 is certainly better than 1.

 Posted by at 9:49 pm
Oct 112018
 

Here are some photos of the Joseph Manton double 22 bore ‘fowler’ of about 1791 converted from flintlock to percussion by the drum and nipple method to a reasonably high standard.  It looks as if it had quite a lot of use as a flintlock but not much after conversion. Therefore probably not an owner’s favourite gun converted for continuous use.  It is unlikely that it was converted by its first owner, as there would have been more than 35 years between original manufacture and conversion. It is one of the most elaborate straightforward drum and nipple conversions I’ve seen’

The scroll engraving on the toe of the lock is from the conversion.

The sling eye is just off the photo , mounted in the stock.

Shame it has lost a bit of its gold poinson.  Note the False breech pin engraving

 

Initials surmounted by an unclear crest above.

 Posted by at 10:14 pm
Aug 082018
 

We did our annual yacht charter in our ‘usual’ boat Velella ( from Spirit of June Yacht charters) to our old haunts around the Minch.  We had hoped to go through the Sound of Harris and then try to get out to St Kilda, which is about 40 miles out into the Atlantic, but the anchorage there is not brilliant, so it requires a settled weather window to make the trip and we had just missed one.  We did try to go but there was an unsettled forecast and when we went through we realised that the seas on the West coast can be much more inhospitable in windy weather than in the Minch , so we took the prudent  option and came back!  The East coast of Harris and Lewis is a wonderful cruising ground and we  explored some new places before scurrying into Stornoway to disembark one crew member and shelter from the only gale we had.   We have now learnt that if we are in Stornoway for bad weather its very cheap ( £35 inc from 4 pm on Saturday to 9 a.m on Monday) to hire a small car and see the island.  After Stornoway we had a super sail over to the mainland and found a lovely anchorage in Enard’s bay – Loch Saliann.  We stayed one night in Lochinver on a pontoon – not a great destination but its mainly a fishing port.  Good places we liked – Loch Restol, Harris, although we had to leave very early as its only accessible near the top of the tide.  The top of Loch Seaforth, Harris/Lewis  was peaceful although we did have another yacht anchored half a mile away, which counts for crowded in those parts!  Loch Shell (Lewis) is a favourite, although we found the holding at the head of the Loch a bit soft and moved to a bay on the South side opposite the inlet with houses.   Our trip was unusual in that, gale apart, almost all evenings, nights and mornings were calm, and we never once had a disturbed night, or the need to get up to check the anchor was holding.  Although it wasn’t particularly hot in the first week (the cabin heater got used in the evenings), and it did rain a bit, we had a fair number of meals in the cockpit, and it was voted our best Hebridean holiday yet.

 

If you go sailing in this area, you will no doubt listen carefully to the (Met Office) Inshore weather forecasts from the Stornoway Coastguards on VHF.  Our experience is that if you take the wind forecasts too literally you tend to be over cautious and don’t go anywhere – The really  useful information is the sea state as that has a bigger impact on what its going to be like sailing.  I find that using the Windguru website ( when you can get mobile coverage, which is more often than you would think) gives a better and more detailed wind picture – the Inshore forecast only seems to give the top gust speeds as the wind speed, whereas Windguru lets you see both steady wind and gusts, which is a much better guide to what the sea will be like.  Having said that, we do take notice of gale warnings from whatever source!

Facilities continue to improve in the North West of Scotland and the Isles – since we were last there new pontoons have been built at Scalpay North Harbour  and East Tarbet ( both lots of space), and the number of pontoon berths in Stornoway has been increased, although they were pretty nearly all taken when we came in for the gale.  In spite of that, its still rare to find other boats in the quiet anchorages, although the visitor moorings that are sometimes provided do get a few visitors.  The leisure boats around are a mixture of foreign boats – mostly French Dutch or German with the occasional American boat, with some visiting boats from England and  a fair number of local boats, with of course a few charter boats like us!  In fact, although we saw a number of yachts about, it was mostly the same two or three doing roughly what we were doing.  If you like solitude, go soon as it is getting more visiting and locally based yachts each year!

 

Loch Sailinn, Enard’s bay, Sutherland – a bit south of Lochinver.

Head of Little Loch Broom – a quite anchorage although not particularly well sheltered.

Velella alongside in Scalpay, Harris – there is water and electricity and there will be WiFi soon, we were told.

Quiet anchorage in Loch Shell looking North – ideal in winds from the South – not so good in North winds,

 

One way to steer – proof that sailing drives you mad?……..

Not every day was sunny and dry – many were damp in patches – notice the lifejacket – Giles had been working on deck.

 

 Posted by at 9:59 pm
Jul 172018
 

 

12th June.. I have been a bit slack on the blog!  I had a 3 1/2 hour very intense meeting on Monday that left me a bit disinclined to do much except swim up and down, after which I just slumped!    Today I did a bit of sorting out of shot, wads and cards and powder for the trip to Scotland.  As I’m taking 4 muzzle loading guns I though I ought to check which wads I needed for each, which led to sizing all the bores – of course no two guns are the same actual bore, whatever their nominal bore is, anyway I managed to cut it down to 2 sizes of wads, conveniently one size for Tom and one size for my guns.  Tomorrow I must make sure the right guns are on my certificate!  This blog is obviously being found by lots of people as I’m getting a steady stream of photos of guns and pistols to identify.  I live in hope that I’ll discover a priceless antique gun for someone, but at the moment its rather at the opposite end of the spectrum.  I did my STEM club with Dave today, but there was a football match on and we only got two kids, so they got on and built a robot while Dave and I programmed our line following robot to skirt round an obstruction – we got about half way there in 45 minutes!

10th June… I did say that the weather encouraged sitting in the sun rather than working away in the workshop! …..So we went to an Elderflower party today, a friend’s family has been holding one every year for the last 50 odd years to make elderflower wine, which they consume in some quantity. Around 30 people spend a few hours collecting flowers and getting the heads off in order to make 20 gallons of wine (it used to be much more) to last the year. After the work some of us played a game of croquet – it looks like a nice gently, very English, very genteel way to spend an afternoon.  In fact it is about the most vicious game of skill and tactics imaginable – winning is more about scuppering the opposition than getting ahead – in fact getting an early lead isn’t necessarily a great help as I found out to my cost, since if you manage to hit an opponent’s ball you get an extra turn, thus if there are no opponents balls near you, you miss out!  Anyway (son) Giles  beat me ( that’s his inheritance down the drain!).   The number of visitors and visits to the site continues to increase, which is nice – so far in the last 365 days there have been over  100,000 visitors and 670,000 items viewed – obviously a lot of those are regulars who get counted each time they visit – its a shame the software doesn’t analyse visits in more detail, but I think you have to pay if you want more detail, which of course anyone making money out of a site would do.  I sometimes wonder whether there is any way I could ‘monetise’ the site, but actually I’m happy to do it for fun, and I do get some interesting work from time to time, and make new acquaintances and friends, so I’ll carry on for a bit longer!

9th June later…  Shooting at Cambridge Gun Club today – our 1/2 oz of shot competition.  No compromise on the difficulty or range of clays, and the hit rate was a little down on some normal shoots but still good – I did my usual mediocre shooting, but was reassured that several others got the same score!  After lunch I switched to my little 20 bore Beretta hammer gun and  did somewhat better – I am resolved to go and practice properly until I can shoot a bit better.  I have in mind to try an interesting experiment, as I think that one often knows before one pulls the trigger that it is going to miss.  My competition would work as follows – unlimited clays, but fixed number of shots allowed –  score 0 for any clay you don’t shoot at, -1 for any you shoot at and miss, and 2 for each clay you break with the first barrel, or 1 if you break it with the second barrel. I reckon this would concentrate the mind!   So a top score would be 40 and a lowest  score would be -20, if you hit half the clays you score 20 and hitting 7 (1 in 3 shots) scores 1 .   I now need to find someone to try it with.  It could of course be a bit more expensive if you aim to shoot the ‘normal’ number of shots, but it might work with say 20 shots, using a very limited number of traps, say 5 hits at each of 4 traps……..   I took the Manton back to its owner who was well pleased – I forgot his slip, which I found on the peg when I got back – I’m very good at labelling slips and ramrods when I have guns to work on, as they are easy to mix up or mislay, I just forgot to look behind the door!   Pete asked me to tap a hole in a cleaning rod to take the ‘normal’ brushes etc., but that seems to have opened a whole can of worms – The tap I have used is a 9/32 x 26 BSF but that actually cuts too tight – the web suggests 9/32 BSB ( brass thread ( similar to BSC cycle thread & always 26 t.p.i.) but I only have the BSF  in 9/32 and that appears a bit smaller than the brush threads – what I thought was going to be a trivial job becomes a lot more involved – but then these challenges are what makes it interesting………………………

9th June – Back from 2 days in Norfolk at an outdoor activity centre with the year 5 & 6 children from the school I’m a governor at.  Great fun and the kids had a good time and were very  well behaved!  The activity centre was based around an 1898 house designed by Edward Lutyens so I had great fun poking around and trying to work out how the house had been originally before it was altered in several waves – first in WWI as a convalescent home for soldiers, then back to being a private house, then the activity centre, which retained quite a lot of the old furniture etc in the ‘public’ rooms, including about 10 years of Hansard containg every word spoken in Parliament during that time – covered one wall!  I could have spent the whole time reading MP’s speeches from 1975!  Anyway back to real life – in particular our annual recession shoot, in which we shoot clays using 1/2 oz shot load – its not as bad as you might think…. anyway I’d better load up and head out…..

5th June Dick and I spent an hour together getting the locks of the Manton to fit – I had fitted new springs and Dick had re-fixed the ‘rims’ of the lock pockets that were a bit broken away. You may remember that we had found that the locks and barrel were original Manton, but had been grafted into a different and older stock at some point. We had two problems – 1, the springs were slightly bigger in places than the previous ones and so we had to adjust the german silver reinforcing sheet at the top of the mainspring slot, and second that the lock front extensions didn’t fit between the barrel bolsters and the edge of the lock pocket, and were opening an old crack in the woodwork  – presumably the cause of the previous damage around the locks. Unfortunately the rim of the lock pocket under the mainspring was already very thin, so no room to cut more away – I realised that the reason the numbers on the inside of the lock above the mainspring had been half filed away was a relic of previous attempts to solve the problem.  Anyway we filed the bolsters on the barrel down a bit – luckily the breech block was only slightly hard. Anyway judicious filing got it all together, and we filled the crack with a shim of walnut verneer and refinished it.  – Job done and ready to go…..   Now I’m off to Norfolk with the Yr 5 & 6 children to an activity centre… I’ll report back……..

4th June – Didn’t manage much today – just finished off the cartridge loading so I now have 100 Black Powder cartridges for Scotland.  I promised to make another shot belt for a friend, and started on that – I think its going to be a bit smaller than mine, which is a bit heavy when full – for game shooting you don’t need a lot of shot and the less you have to carry across ploughed fields the better!

4th June – Excuse the absence yesterday, as I said, sitting in the garden took priority!  Today a meeting all morning in school prevents the garden sitting, and anyway the weather isn’t so appealing!  I have now managed to make 75 cartridges towards my 100 total so nearly there.  The rifle is now getting the oil finish on its stock augmented as it was a bit worn, and I took a photo of the patchbox in situ – I think it looks the part, but these things are always subjective!

It’s in the process of having its oil finish restored – it has the smeared on flood coat waiting to gel and be rubbed off, so looks a bit of a mess!  

2nd June.  I put the patchbox lid in the rifle and it looks good – the toning down of the colour works quite well – I coloured it lightish straw on the AGA hotplate, then rubbed it over with 7000 grit paper, then gave it a rusting with my browning solution – that went rather too well so I rubbed that partly off with 1000 grit and finished with 2500 and 7000 and polished with 0000 steel wool.  It doesn’t sound like a recipe for success but it worked – I did think at one point I’d have to start again, but it came good!  Photo soon!  The annual trip to Leucars to shoot the Scottish National Muzzle Loading Championships is the w/e after next so I thought I’d better start loading the annual bag of black powder 12 bore cartridges – Tom shoots there too using my guns as he doesn’t have a certificate in Scotland.  (He’s in St Andrews so dead handy and my B & B for the w/e) so I need double rations for the hammer gun competition.  I usually take my Bacon patent antique  bolt action double for him, and use my Westley Richards 1874 patent hammer gun by William Powell, of which I am very fond!  Anyway 100 cartridges should do – I got a couple of bags of capped cases at the Northern Shooting Show – its as cheap to buy new capped cases as to buy the caps and use reclaimed cases, even if its not so environmentally friendly – not that shooting clays scores high on those stakes anyway…  I’m getting through the restoration jobs on my list, thanks to help from Dick – I’ve now got the forend iron of the Purdey to engrave, but I’m waiting for pulls of the action body so I can line up the scrolls. After that I’ll have to find some of my own jobs to do!  Things usually quieten down in the summer as I find its rather nice just to sit in the garden and read the paper………………….( weather permitting)…

1 June – I had an email from someone who had come across the post on the Land Cruiser steering lock problem on this site and had a similar problem.  I was able to get out my pile of bits and work out how to remove the broken bit of the lock bar – and send him some pictures.  That post gets quite a few visits – If I can be bothered I can review all the traffic to the site on a daily basis, it also tells me which are the most popular posts, and I can see where all the attempts to crack the site are coming from.  I don’t look very often – I just keep an eye on the number of visitors and visits.   I finished the patchbox lid and I’m just colouring it up – its not too bad considering how difficult the metal turned out to be – I couldn’t get consistent cutting, and the inclusions didn’t help, in the end I started to use the GRS gravermax air driven graver, which I don’t use often, as it ploughs through most things without discriminating and if you are not careful it goes very deep.  I forgot to take a photo before browning so it will have to wait!

Dick got carried away with the Manton stock!  He needed to sort out one or two problems, including all the cracks around the lock pockets and then decided that he would have to refinish it.  In stripping it he uncovered some intriguing history – while the locks, breech plug and barrel are original Manton as far as we can tell, they have been fitted into a different stock at some point – probably a long time ago.  The evidence for this comes mostly from the photo below.  It looks as if the stock originally had locks with a different shaped tail (almost certainly older) and the cutout for the fence behind the false breech shows that has been changed.  There is a plate (German silver?) screwed in under the breeches, presumably to reinforce that area, and it has a notch cut out for the lug to take the end of the short top arm mainspring that was  fitted to the gun as found. The fixings of the plate are not symmetrical- suggesting it wasn’t done by a gunsmith..  The lock pocket of the stock has the correct cutout for a long top arm spring.  Confirmation comes from the matching number engraved on the tang of the trigger guard – it is not very carefully positioned or executed and doesn’t come near the rest of the engraving in quality – it can’t be original….   The original stock was from a good quality gun, possibly even another Manton and has the original furniture and breech block, Probably percussion as there isn’t a cutout for the cock to hit the top edge of the lock – but it might be for a flintlock with a French cock….. The stock was presumably made for a long top arm mainspring, and the Manton locks will take either – I guess when the swap happened the Manton locks had had long top arm mainsprings, as had the stock, and the locks were modified by the fitting of a small lug on a peg to catch the end of the short top arm.  The stock has been neatly extended and the joint covered with chequering.

31st May  Out a.m. but this afternoon I decided that it was time to bite the bullet and get on with the patchbox lid – you can walk round a job for just so long and you get nowhere.  Anyway I looked at my designs and decided to go with more or less what I had already tried.  The lid had lots of flecks in the surface that I thought were the orange peel marks from cold rolling, but they seemed more  like little pits of corrosion – anyway it cuts OK in places but seems to have some inclusions that occasionally make it difficult to cut smoothly – anyway I’ve got most of it roughed out ready for the details and shading – I’m going to leave a space in the middle that would fit the oval, but probably not cut it.  I’ll try to get it finished tomorrow with luck.  I need to visit Dick and get tht Manton stock back before the weekend so I can take it back to CGC ant the muzzle loader’s shoot.

30th May – Still trialing the engraving for the patchbox lid – I needed lots of engraving practice as I’d been a bit lax recently!  I finished trying my original idea for the lid, and for fun engraved the oval ( done very quickly and carelessly!).  I put the lid in my furnace to ‘normalise’ it as I wanted to make sure that it was in the annealed state – an hour or so at 910 C and a very slow cool.  When I looked at the existing top to the patchbox (see below) I realised I’d been copying the lock engraving – the lid is slightly different in feel and some of the cuts are different – possibly a different engraver or in different frame of mind.  In particular the top isn’t symmetrical and is more open, so I am having a bit of a re-think – my efforts are not wasted as most of it is very similar.  I changed my tactics with gravers today – when one got a bit blunt I sharpened it instead of changing it for a fresh one – it seemed to work better, possibly because all my gravers are different lengths and it saved continually changing my hold.  Mostly I can get away with just touching up the heels.   The over and under pistol barrels came good – in contrast to the Manton barrel they only needed about 5 brownings – there isn’t a lot of figure in them, the twist is a bit indistinct – I don’t think its a function of the browning process  – just how the metal is, but they are a very nice chestnut brown – very discrete.  It’s possible I could have brought out the figure more my etching the barrels in copper sulphate solution before browning them, but I can’t see a distinct enough twist to be worth the erosion of the metal.

 

I think its too fussy – even without the oval &  hasty lettering – I’ll re-think a simpler, more open design…….


The barrels have twist figure, but its not well enough defined  to come through the browning strongly. 

30th May – This blog has now passed 200,000 visitors since I started it!   Amazing.    Started to brown the two o/u pistol barrels, must order some more browning solution!   I’m still trying out my ‘Gumbrell’ style engraving – the trouble is that the more I do, the more I adapt it to my own preferred style!  I have to keep reminding myself to go back to the original and check how it was done!  Anyway I started on a trial layout for the actual engraving on the patchbox lid – I took it to Dick to show him and he thought it would pass muster – see comments below photo;-

 

I didn’t finish the scroll on the right as its clearly too big for the space.  Not sure what the oval is for, but it fills the space!  I’d probably leave it out on the real thing!  I’m reasonably happy with the scroll on the left  – but doing 4 matching ones will be a challenge!

 

28th May – The bag of water in the garden continues to grow!   I am still trying to get my head round the Gumbrell engraving on the Rifle – the only way to see how its done is through the microscope, so I took a series of photos using my camera eyepiece and built up a partial mosaic of the ? Gumbrell engraved (?Joe Manton) rifle, the late percussion Joe Manton shotgun and my last attempt at something similar – its pretty instructive! Some bits are  not visible to the naked eye – like the cross shading on the shadows on the rifle ( you’ll need to click on each photo to see them in detail) ;-

This is the ?Gumbrell rifle engraving I’m trying to copy for the patchbox lid….

 

 

This is my second attempt – I don’t yet have the correct pitch of shader to put in the parallel lines, mine is too fine -it just looks like a smudge!

This is my first attempt – before I’d done these photos!

 

This is the Manton engraving – quite different cutting although the overall style is similar – the overall effect id much heavier. 

27th May – What a beautiful day!  We decided to put our old above ground swimming pool up – its just a giant bag of water really – about 30 tons of it so it takes a while to fill!  Its over 10 years old so lets just hope it doesn’t have a leak in the bottom!   I was playing with my microscopes to see which I was going to keep on the bench – the Am Scope does need a 0.75 Bartlow lens to reduce the magnification somewhat so you can see more of what you are doing – as it is, the maximum field of view (on lowest magnification) is 28 mm wide, whereas my Wild it is 52 mm.  You can get one from ebay or from AmScope for around £30 – my Wild uses one – I found a close up lens from an old Canon camera that was  about 0.7 and works very well – I had to make some plastic brackets to hold it as the screw threads are not compatible.   I finally tackled the second Manton lock spring – I’d found one for the left lock that fitted exactly, with a long top arm – the locks will take either a long or short top arm spring – I guess they were modified at some point to take the more modern short top arm spring.  I couldn’t find any springs that fitted exactly, and the nearest I could find was a fairly modern short top arm spring.  Fitting it required the peg hole that locates the spring to be moved a couple of mm.  Positioning the peg hole is critical as it governs the angle that the link on the tumbler takes, and therefore the position of the spring relative to the bottom edge of the lock when the hammer is fully down on the nipple – if the spring peg is too near the hammer, there may not be  clearance for the link to move to full cock, if its too far away the spring and link will try to overlap the edge of the lock, but hit the wood.  Anyway I plucked up courage to mark and drill a 2 mm hole into the lock plate – not quite right through – luck was on my side and it came out perfectly. I was worried that the lockplate would be too hard to drill but it was OK.   So the locks are back to working!  I still don’t understand how the original springs came to be so defective!

The position of the spring peg hole in the lockplate controls the resting angle of the link, – the spring mustn’t be near the edge of the lock plate or it will foul the wood.  This lock now has a spring with a short top arm – at some time I think the locks were modified to take these more modern springs by the addition of the small stop that holds the end of the top arm  – its is just pegged into a hole in the lockplate.

This lock has a long top arm spring as I had one and it fitted exactly – this style of spring would have been fitted to the locks originally.  In this photo the spring is too low and overlaps the bottom of the lock and so would foul the wood, but as soon as the hammer was fitted it comes to rest on the flashguard and stops the tumbler before the spring gets as low as in this photo.   I had to grind down the lump on the top arm as the spring needed to go up to allow the gun to reach full cock but when I took this photo Dick still had the hammer so I didn’t know if it would all work.

I am still playing around with the rifle patch pocket engraving – or at least trying to crack the engraving on the lock so I can make an approximation. I was trying to get a good black and white image  as its is less confusing and I can the see how its done. I’ll have to spend an hour or two with paper and pencil…..

26th May  It’s half term next week so I have the week to myself!  I knocked up a quick headrest mount for the new Am Scope microscope so I could actually use it, and did a bit of playing – it seems to be fine – the zoom is handy and has a bit more magnification than my Wild when flat out, which is really good for checking the sharpness of my gravers – I’m not sure which one I’ll use in the long term, but I’ll keep both on my bench for the moment while I give them side by side tests.  I suspect the new eyepieces will win the day because I can keep my glasses on, which saves a lot of troubletaking them on and off and getting oily fingermarks all over them.  I’m still trying to work out how the Gumbrell engraving was done, and develop the organic shapes – unfortunately I’m a pretty poor artist, and have to do everything the hard way, but I will get there.

The stand is very good – except that used at right angles to the bars it rotates rather easily about the main post.

The head rest support fits into the camera tube mount – it is a ‘quick and dirty’ job to get it working made from a bar of acetal – I should probably make an aluminium one and anodise it as I did last time. 

25th May  In school much of the day – a bit frustrating as we needed to use the smart board for software programming but had to move to the hall which doesn’t have one, but we coped!   I got the Am Scope trinocular microscope today – Its pretty nearly as good as my Wild/Zeiss one and very good value for money – the stand is more versatile and the eyepieces allow the wearing of glasses as the eyes can to be some way back from the lenses – the only trouble is that your head is then ‘waving about in the breeze’ and you really do need a firm headrest like the one I made for the Wild. (see DIY Anodising post and the Engraving Setup post.  The trinocular facility is not as useful as I hoped as it involves switching out the left eye path when you want to use the camera, and the camera is much magnified relative to the eyepiece so you only see a small part of the field of view – I don’t think this is just a function of my camera, but I probably need to make some experiments – the camera I have that fits the new microscope doesn’t appear to have a proper video feed and the frame rate is very slow so  it doesn’t work for ‘action videos’.  But as an engraving microscope it is just fine – a slightly more convenient size than the Wild as its shorter from eyepiece to objective, and handy to be able to keep my spectacles on, and the stand is very good with a double arm slider – and its zoom rather than switched magnifications.  I haven’t fitted a light to it yet – the camera ring light I use on the Wild is too small to fit the ‘nose’ of the new microscope. I expect an expert would find the optical quality inferior, but for engraving I challenge anyone to find much difference – and all for £422.38  including carriage from the UK so no VAT or duty to pay – whats not to like ( AmScope x7 – x45 trinocular zoom microscope with dual arm stand) ? – & I can swap the eyepieces with the Wild and wear spectacles for that now…..  I’ve now got the Purdey foreend to engrave with fine scrolls and the patchbox cover to engrave with Gumbrell large scroll.  The Purdey engraving is not particularly fine and once I get the details sorted in my mind it will be no problem, – however the Gumbrell engraving ( see below -click on the photo for much better view)  is a  whole other ballgame – he was about the best engraver in Britain as the time and his work is technically challenging, whereas the Purdey is, relatively speaking, just hacked out!  So I’m spending a lot of time looking at the Gumbrell lock and trying out different bits of the pattern – its all leaves and plant scrolls with subtle interplay of light and shade – the cuts range from deep to very fine tapered cuts, all with perfect sweeping curves.  I am having to revisit tool sharpening to get fine enough cuts without throwing up burrs . I have been lamenting for some time that I haven’t had much engraving to do – now I am revelling in a real challenge – I did a bit of ‘Sea Monster Gumbrell engraving once but never really cracked it, so now is my chance to raise my game!  I’ll post photos when I get a bit further along the learning curve- assuming I do, but at the moment its a bit primitive- just as well I annealed a couple of test plates!

24th May  GDPR comes into force today, whatever that means!  I have to sort out the Parish Council website as I host it for some obscure reason – actually I’m told that GDPR is being misinterpreted by many organisations as it really only applies to marketing – the rest is to do with Subject Access Requests.  I bet you are none the wiser- me neither!   The good news is that the Manton Barrel is put to bed – it eventually got a decent brown – i deliberately didn’t strike it down to smooth bare metal as I didn’t want to take too much off the barrels and anyway I didn’t want it to look all shiny and stripy as if just rebrowned – it now looks very comfortable and mature, like the rest of the gun!   Dick is working on the stock, and then I just have to pop in the replacement spring in the right lock – it means drilling another hole for the spring peg as its annoyingly about 2 mm away from the existing hole – I went through all Dick’s boxes of locks and springs but there was a distinct shortage of right hand springs, and all the ones that he had were worse than the one I’d picked out already.  I will try to get away with a blind hole for the peg – I can’t see it needs to go right through the lock plate, but if it doesn’t work as a blind hole I can always drill it through.  I’ll have to plug the existing hole, but that is not a problem – contemporary repairs often moved the peg hole.  I got a percussion rifle today to rebrown and engrave the replacement patchbox lid.  It was suggested by previous owners that it was by Joseph Manton but from his late period and was un-named and un-numbered.  It is certainly of a high quality,  it is late, so it is possible it comes from a ‘fire sale’ of stock.  In favour of the Manton theory is the quality (although by then he didn’t have all his own quality workmen), the tail of the trigger guard that I’m told is characteristically Joe Manton, and the engraving which matches that on a number of his guns post 1820 ish, presumably by Peter Gumbrill who later worked for Purdey after he set up on his own.  Gumbrill stopped working about 1850. The barrels were proofed in Birmingham. I love these mysteries – you keep hoping for the definitive clue…..

 

Superb Peter Gumbrell (?) engraving ( click photo for better view, then <- )

favourite Joseph Manton trigger guard tang.

Lock in perfect -as new- condition with ‘fly’ or detent as was normal on a rifle to stop the sear slipping into the half cock notch if you merely squeezed the trigger ( as you are supposed to with a rifle) – Shotguns rely on a more vigourous trigger pull to avoid this problem.

24th May  – I didn’t get anything at Bonhams, the cheap 14 bore gun went for one bid more than my bid but I didn’t really want it.  The cased pistols both went well above my bids – one for twice what I bid and the other telephone bid I took up to my spending money limit but the next bid got it – you never know how far the other bidder is prepared to go!  Anyway my general observation that pistols, particularly small non military pistols are hot property held true!  The Joe Manton flint/percussion gun made 15000 GBP, which after the premium and tax takes it to almost 19K!  Still it was a very unusual piece, and if I had that sort of money I’d want it in my collection.   I did a bit of engraving on one of a pair of little pistols that had been extensively repaired – good to get the tools out, although the metal was horrible – bits of old hard metal, bits of new soft metal and bits of filed up weld metal – in the end that job got through about 20 gravers!  I actually have one very fine graver from GRS that really stood up to it for a lot longer than most of the others, so I must try to get a couple more.  Oddly it doesn’t shine so much against my normal HSS ones for softer metals.  Still browning the Manton barrel – about 10 rustings down and still the steel is more or less untouched!  How many more will it take?    I got a percussion rifle to sort out this morning – a very nice clean and elegant un-named gun.  I have to re-brown the barrel and also engrave the (replacement) patch box cover.  AT the moment the cover appears to be cold drawn steel that has been partially hardened – it will need annealing before I can engrave it.

22nd May  – Off to Bonham’s viewing today, which involved enduring a moderate amount of rail chaos – all manner of excuses were posted on the boards – I think they have a random excuse generator in their system – I saw’train in the wrong place, no driver, signal failure, breakdown’ – I didn’t see ‘engineering works’ for which be thankful….   Anyway Bonhams was its usual friendly place – part of the attraction is the social aspect!  I met up with a friend who had flown over from the US to to look at a gun and we had a good chat – we’ll meet up again in November on a muzzle loading shoot.  There were a number of fairly OK percussion guns at reasonable estimates, but I have enough- no more room in my cabinets for long guns!  Nothing spectacular, although I left a few bids at around the bottom estimates just in case – I might set up internet bidding, although I did fix one telephone bid – you can’t book a telephone bid on any lot that has a lower estimate of less than £500.   There was one gun that I fancied – a Joe Manton ‘switchable’ flintlock and percussion gun – and  I wouldn’t have minded the cased set by Smith of a gun and a rifle – fitted with nipples for Imperial caps, which Smith favoured – all well more than my pocket money these days.  The pair of Barbar silver mounted pistols at 12000 to 15000 look quite similar to mine, only unfortunately quite a bit nicer!   The Manton barrel continues its browning – its becoming clear that the sections of twist the barrels are made of – they are coils  about 9 or 10 inches long –  don’t all match, either along the length or from side to side – I’m not sure if this is an artifact of the stage of the browning, or more probably of the construction  If its built-in then I’ll go for a a fairly dark browning to hide the differences.  All will be revealed…  I have been practising my Purdey engraving – when you look in detail at the fine scrolls they are fairly simple cuts and not especially finely executed. but very clever in achieving the visual effect – looking at them with x25 magnification allows you to see exactly how the engraver made each cut, so that you can truly copy it – its one of those situations where the outcome is more than the sum of the parts so  fairly crude cuts will work as long as the balance of light and dark and the overall impression are right.  Anyway a bit more practice is called for….  Over to Dick’s tomorrow to pick up a mainspring for the other Manton lock and collect the little pistols that need the engraving touched up…..

I haven’t cracked it yet – I need a lot of practise with paper & pencil first to get it right

21st May – got yesterday’s date wrong – my watch has skipped a day!  The Manton barrel is going quite well after its aborted browning – I am convinced that the twist on the two barrels is slightly different – we will see when it is finished.  I tried out ‘normalising’/annealing a couple of test plates – at least one is EN8 – I sealed them in a stainless/titanium envelope made from sheet from Brownells, and one was also coated with anti scale paint – I wanted to see if I could anneal without generating scale.  I used my little furnace ( see post) and cooked them at 910 degrees C for an hour, then let them cool very slowly by feeding in a little power from the auxilliary supply until they got below 400 C.  The bare one didn’t scale, and the paint is still on the other one so I guess that is clean too.  I just tried engraving a straight line across one plate and cuts much better than before, so I’ll anneal all my plates from now on.   I talked to a knife maker at the Northern Shooting Show who wanted to do engraving on the scales of his knives , and, since he has a real need, I suggested that he could justify buying a suitable microscope at the start.  I always have a bit of trouble with my separate camera when doing demonstrations of engraving as it gets knocked and doesn’t give a very clear picture – anyway I thought I’d buy a cheap(ish) trinocular microscope to see if the cheap microscopes were any good, and so that I didn’t have to disassemble and cart my good one to shows, and had a camera that showed what I was actually doing – I might even be able to shoot videos, which would be good.  I managed to find a new AmScope x7.5 – x45 trinocular microscope on ebay from the UK substantially reduced  price so I bought it!  Tomorrow I’m off to London to view the Bonhams auction – not sure if I’ll buy anything – probably not but its nice to look and I can see various friends!

20th May – bit of a disaster with the browning of the Manton barrel – I wasn’t having much luck in the cellar with Blackleys slow brown so I gave it a coat of mine and shifted it up to the kitchen next to the AGA and left it for a few hours.  Nice deep reddish brown colour BUT a patch were I hadn’t put on any of my brown looked very pale and with sharp edges  AND in a few places the rusting had got too vigorous and had raised some rough patches that I couldn’t remove with 0000 wire wool or a brush – it needed 3000 grade paper to get them down and that left patches – SO back to square one – chuck it in the derusting tank and then work on it with 1000 grit, 2500 grit and 000 and 0000 wire wool – so now we are back to the start – no damage done.  It has never happened to me before, and I don’t know why it went wrong this time as the rusting hadn’t been too vigorous -maybe my solution is really too strong – I’ll dilute it some more – when steamed it tends to give a very black colour.   While waiting for the derusting etc I started to tackle the outboard motor that was overheating last year.  I had done the bottom end and water pump last autumn, so I decided that there must be a block somewhere in the cooling galleries of the engine – I stripped the engine and took the head off – there was some salt and crud in the passages but not enough to stop the flow – anyway I’ve cleaned it all out and will get new gaskets from the friendly chap in the Isle of Man – would be good to go sailing next w/e if this weather holds – I need a new number plate for the trailer – I have a spare outboard if the Yamaha isn’t finished.  I’ve started to do a bit of practice for the Purdey foreend engraving  – I picked up an old practice plate that had been heated on one corner and realised that the corner was much softer to engrave compared to the rest.  The material is bright cold rolled mild steel ( probably EN1 or EN3) but the cold rolling process toughens it up considerably so its much harder to engrave than soft gun parts.  I have more or less run out of test plates, so I’ll order some more EN1 in 30 x 6 mm and then anneal it in my furnace before flattening the surface and getting a good working finish for practice plates.  Metals4U gives you 10 free cuts and then 50p per cut, so a 3 m length can be cut into 150mm plates for £4.50 which is not bad, which adds up to about £2.50 per test plate.  I might get them surface ground again, but I’ll try for a finer finish than last time as I had to do a lot of work on the surface before I could use them.

19th May – More school today – a visit to see how the school is doing with its maths progress.  The children in the top class had made  cards and presents for Dave and I for doing robotics with them – really touching!   I went shooting this morning – it was meant to be a ‘have a go’ session that we run for the Cambridge Gun club for corporate groups, but the group had cancelled and they had forgotten to tell us, so we got a free mornings shooting as a compensation.  I took my flintlock and am sad to report that I couldn’t hit anything with it – well, actually one clay!  It was firing a bit slow but that isn’t an adequate excuse…   I swapped to my percussion for the last few  shots and was back in my usual somewhat erratic form – bother, I was hoping I had got somewhere with the flint – I did better last time.   I’m still browning the Joseph Manton barrel – its being very slow but I think its getting there.  One lock still needs a mainspring but I think I’ll go and have a poke through Dicks box again to see if I can get one that fits without having to drill a new hole for the peg.  I picked up a handful of mainsprings with a short top arm – as from modern locks – and they are all more or less identical – just about 1.5 mm too long between peg and claw.   Apart from cleaning the two guns, all I had time for was sharpening the 15 gravers that I bought back blunt or chipped from the NSS.   There is another Anglian Muzzle Loading shoot on Sunday but I don’t think I can face using the flintlock as its just too depressing!  I’ve got to ship some engraving bits to Australia, but unfortunately they have to be picked up and its not easy finding a day when I am in.

18th May – A morning in school invigilating the dreaded SATs exams!   Dick has finished the Manton hammer and made a new nosepiece, he didn’t have the rest of the gun and didn’t know which way up the nosepiece opening should be, so they need unscrewing and changing.  He has, as usual, made a fantastic job of copying the good hammer – I just need to engrave a couple of lines to frame the chequering on the spur and it will be a perfect match when its coloured down.  The barrel is coming along well after about 4 or 5 brownings – I guess it will take 10 or so.  Now I need to replace the mainsprings with the ones I found in Dicks junk box – he says he found another box of springs if I want another poke around – and to think I used to make them….  Dick will do a bit of work on the wood round the lock pockets,  I cleaned up a couple of pistol barrels that need rebrowning – I hope I got a reasonable finish – I refuse to strike them down to the bottom of the pits as that will seriously remove metal.    I talked at the NSS to a gunsmith who wanted a Purdey replacement foreend iron engraved – I have never done any Purdey style engraving, or indeed any modern style engraving but I said I would have a go!  Probably regret it!  I had a look at some Purdey foreend that Dick has, and looked on a couple of auction websites so I have a fair idea what to do…   I’m off to Cambridge Gun Club tomorrow as we (Anglia Muzzle Loaders) are putting on a ‘have a go’ event for CGC and I am needed on account of not many people have flintlocks and are familiar enough with them to let them loose on the public.  For the first time I actually checked my flints and replaced them BEFORE starting to shoot – this is probably a big mistake and I probably ensured that they won’t spark well!

You have to admit, that is a pretty good copy!

A couple of barrels to rebrown so that they don’t look rebrowned!

An old Purdey forend – most are not quite so closely worked – I will see what I can do!

17th May – Back in harness, so to speak.  I have finished preparing the Manton barrel (and unscrewed the foresight) and put on the first browning which went quite slowly but looks very promising now I’ve rubbed it off with 0000 wire wool – I will probably make a warm box as the cellar really takes too long – I can do pistol barrels on top of the AGA  in a tub but long gun barrels need some better method than hanging them in the cellar.   I am now preparing the barrels of a pair of over and under flintlock pistols – they are slightly pitted (as are almost all antique barrels even when the rest of the gun is immaculate) and needed a gently rebrowning, but it would not be appropriate to strike them off to get rid of all the pits – I have run them through the derusting tank to convert all the red rust in the pits to black and wire brushed them – I then work on them with 400 grit paper on any bad bits but mostly with 600, followed by 1000, then 3000 and 000 wire wool. It’s fiddly because there are ribs between the barrels and a rib underneath and each has two right angled edges to be cleaned out.  I run them under my fine wire wheel (0.03 wire) to brush the grit and dust off between grades of paper.  The engraving on the barrels looks fine and isn’t even filled with rust, so just a very quick going over to clean it out before browning.   I spoke too soon about filling my shooting calendar for next season – I got another lovely invitation today that I can’t miss.  The only problem is that its on Penny’s birthday and I’ve already ducked out of a party and a May Ball for the Scottish shoot – I am expecting the divorce papers any minute………………………………………………….

16th May – Bit of a surge in visitors to the blog – I gave out about 50 cards at the NSS so I guess some new people are looking – Welcome if this is your first visit – hope you enjoy the site.

16th May – Busy trying to sort out my ‘clean’ workshop, which is anything but.  I’ve now got a bit more swinging room around the microscope, although the support for the microscope will still get in the way, but it only blocks an angle of about 10 degrees so not too bad.  I had invitations to another two muzzle loading game shoots next season, which just about fills my shooting calendar!  I think I now have 7 lined up – they are getting more and more popular as people get a bit jaded by the big bag breech loader shoots – It’s going to grow significantly as a sport – we are already seeing a steady increase in the numbers shooting clays with muzzle loaders.  At the moment its difficult for newcomers to get into the muzzle loading game shoots as only a few people are organising them and they always get filled up quickly with  the ‘regulars’.  It can’t be a very attractive commercial proposition for the shoot, as the bag is much smaller than for  ‘normal’ shoot, and hence the gross take is a lot less –  having said that, the shoots I go on all seem to be very popular with the keepers. I am going to see how well I do with a flintlock next season, as its getting a bit common using a percussion gun – nasty new fangled things!  Checking my calendar, I’ve had to duck out of a birthday party and a May Ball to go up to Scotland to shoot the National ML championships with my son Tom, but it is great fun, even if I don’t hit much – Tom and I are about equal as he only shoots once a year and I am a lousy shot anyway.  Last year I missed the Samdringham Game fair, which I love, but this year I should make it.  I probably won’t be at the Fenland Country fair – its my least favourite as its only 10 miles from home so none of the fun of camping there!  I popped over to see Dick and look at the hammer of the Manton he has been filing up – Jason did a splendid job of welding – much better than my welding – so that is almost done – I just need to brown the barrel now.

16th May – Back from Harrogate…  The Northern Shooting Show was pretty hectic viewed from behind my engraving bench – not sure of much that went on outside a radius of about 15 ft!  Lots of interest in what I do, particularly in engraving and re-engraving antiques, and I am sure a lot of work will come my way as a result. I came totally exhauseted after talking all day for both days!  People seemed to like the assurance that I understand the importance of not over restoring guns, so I am becoming ‘The Ethical Restorer’!  Quite a good strapline…    I did get to wander round on a short lunch break – its an amazing show, I’m not sure in our urbanised south of England you could put on a big show that had Shooting in the title, we just tag guns onto ‘Country Fairs’!    Several of the enquiries that I had related to restoring the engraving on barrels, and I have a couple to do already, so while I have my microscope etc all packed up from the show I have decided to re-organise my engraving bench so that there is room to swing a barrel – this means extending the bench and cutting away the bottom part of a set of shelves, so that is today’s job – I do have a couple of pistol barrels and a double shotgun barrel to re-brown, plus a few other bits and pieces, but I do want to get the bench sorted so I can get all the boxes off the floor and have room to move!

10 May – A website regular emailed me to say that he did his browning on the back of his AGA so I thought it might be worth a try.  I’ve been browning the little pistol barrel hanging over a jug of water in the bottom of a steel barrel about 2 ft high in the cellar so I just took it up to the kithen and perched it on top of the cover of the AGA hotplate and wrapped a piece of silvered bubblewrap round it – that really turbocharged the browning and finished it in one go – beautiful!  Thanks Chris.  I can probably get each rusting done in a couple of hours like that – now I need to sort out how to do the same for a long gun barrel.  The little pistol is now together and looks superb – I wish it was mine.   I’ve now loaded up my truck with all the stuff for the Northern Shooting Show – I’d forgotten what a long drive it was until I did a reccy on Google maps – about 4 hours.  I’ll have to get there in time to build my setup and display – it takes a while to get the microscope set up with the turntable as the field of view needs to be aligned with the centre of the turntable an perpendicular to it or I keep loosing the object as I rotate it, which of course I have to do all the time as you can only cut in a very limited range of directions.  The NSS opens at 8 every morning so its an early start, although I only have to travel from where we camp on the shooting line to the show hall.  I haven’t been able to get a map of where on the site the MLAGB stand is going to be, or how much space we will have  so I’ll have to play it by ear.   I’m still not quite sure what to take in the way of guns – I’ve been asked to take some pistols for the main display and I’ll take a couple for my own display of restored things, and my restored Lancaster oval bore as that is my best bit of restoration so far.

Here is the little pistol – I can’t claim any credit for restoration – it is entirely original!

9th May – Sorting out labels for the NSS – I’m still browning the little barrel and it still has some way to go, I’ve lost count of how many brownings its had but judging by the number of wads of used 0000 steel wool lying about on the bench it must be around 8 so far – I’m still using Blackley’s slow brown as I don’t want to make the finish any blacker at this stage by using my solution with copper in it.  I nipped over to Dicks to have a look at the Manton hammer – it is looking good, a little bit more work needed.  As I expected Dick has had to file through the weld I put on the front of the spur in order to match the existing one, so he will take it to Jason for a bit of delicate welding – probably a bit fiddly for me to do.  He found a chequering file to cut the spur surface, so that will match the existing one, I’ll have to do a bit of engraving around the chequering but it should be good.  I must get on with the Manton barrel smoothing with 600 grit paper, then 1000 then 3000 ready for browning.

8th May – Spent most of the day sorting stuff to take up to the Northern Shooting show on Friday  – as well as all my engraving stuff, microscope, power hone, lights etc I had to sharpen about a dozen gravers and find my microscope camera etc.  I have 2 tables & trestles plus mounted photos and bits for a display of restoration to sort out, plus a notice or two about restoration as I haven’t got any.  Clare emailed me this evening to bring some pistols for the main MLAGB display – so that is another thing to sort out  – I seem to have mislaid my Colt Navy that I usually take – probably gave it to Tom – it was a bit ropey… I did wonder about getting some section 7 pistols for my collection – it stops rather abruptly after the Adams and associated  percussion revolvers – apart from a couple of little rim fire .32 Smith and Wessons which are as common as dirt.  I carried on browning the little pistol – still some way off, but I’ll keep at it.  I did a bit of cleaning up of the Manton barrel – that will brown nicely when I get round to it.  Dick says he has nearly finished filing up the hammer spur and reckons it won’t need any more welding, which would be good. I’ll probably go and see it tomorrow – he is quite excited because he has just got another dog so I”ll be shown that too – another black lab bitch that was rejected as a gundog!

7th May – went to Dick’s to show him the Manton and hand over the filing of the hammer spur to him – he has a better eye for shape than I do and is better at filing – he did a proper apprenticeship while I am just a bodger!  He was as amazed as I was at the nature of the surfaces of the break in the Manton springs  – I can’t believe they were the original springs.  There is a bit of a mystery there – if you scroll down a bit and look at the two photos of the lock you will see that the top arm of the mainspring rests on a little ledge on the inside of the lock plate, and on the outside there is the end of a pin where the ledge is fixed through the lockplate – this seems to me to be a bit unusual as the top arm usually rests under the thick piece of the lock that rests against the barrel – i.e. its normally quite a bit longer.  It looks like the lock may have been modified with the ledge added to take a replacement spring – The springs with the short top arm are now associated with ejector springs.  Anyway at DIck’s we sorted through his collection of mainsprings – he has lots of ex Purdy ejector springs and various assorted springs including a number of mainsprings recovered from old percussion guns.  We managed to sort out half a dozen possible springs – they are almost an exact fit, except that all bar one has the peg that locates  in the lock just about 1.5 mm to far towards the muzzle to fit directly – I did contemplate filing off the pin and welding on a built-up peg, but I’m not sure if that would be strong enough, so I’ll probably do what an old gunsmith would have done and drill a new hole and plug the old one – I might just try a blind hole.  I’ll then have to block the old hole, either welding it or, more authentic, riveting in a bit of steel rod. Anyway its good to know I won’t have to make springs from scratch…   Browning of the little pistol barrel is being slow – Dick complained that the last pistol he browned took him 15 rustings, so I shouldn’t get depressed as I’ve only done 4 so far.

Obviously the ones with red clay are the originals –  the right hand lock on the right.   The peg on the RH  original lock is further from the ‘elbow’ than it is on the LH lock

This is the best fit spring  for the LH lock – it may be a bit short, causing it to hang down below the lockplate, but I can’t be sure as Dick has the hammers and they form the stop.  This spring is more traditional and rests on the main bolster, not the pegged in ledge arrowed.  Most locks had the bolster extending further forward?  The photo also shows the line where the flashguard is joined into the plate rather than being integral. 

6th May –  I got my microscope camera rigged up today and took a few photos of the broken springs – it works very well but needs to be in place of one eyepiece so you can’t use the microscope while the camera is in place.  Anyway you can certainly see why the springs fell apart – its just difficult to see how they ever held together!  I tackled the job of welding the replacement spur on the hammer of the Manton.  I could not see how to get a weld across the whole face of the joint, and the lump I welded on is somewhat oversize so I tacked it in place – it took a couple of goes to get it aligned right. Now it needs shaping, and if that gets near to taking away the weld I’ll just go in a bit deeper with the weld – I’ll just have to make sure that there is always enough weld left somewhere to hold it all together.  I’m browning the little barrel but its being a bit recalcitrant – I had to hang it in a bucket over a jug of hot water to get it to rust today.  I get the urge to try my browning solution on it, but I’ll keep going with Blackley’s for a bit.  I’ve been in correspondence with a friend from the AML who is browning a barrel and not getting a great deal of joy after half a dozen rustings – he has now added some dilute copper sulphate to his bottle of Blackley’s Slow brown to emulate my used printed circuit etching solution – signs it might help.    I’m off to the Northern Shooting Show on Friday so I have lots of things to sort out.  I will be doing engraving demonstrations and  giving engraved screwheads to small children as usual, but I thought I might make a change and do a static display of restoration equipment, parts and tools and a job in progress ( I have lots!).  I’ll take my power hone for sharpening this year as I get through the gravers at a rate of knots – I made another 4 this afternoon – I usually sell a few at Harrogate.  I bought a very cheap belt sander and some silicon carbide belts which is ideal for preliminary shaping of the points, and other shaping jobs as it doesn’t heat things as much as a grinding wheel.  I mean to get a coarser diamond hone disk but the 80 grit ones are very expensive, and anyway I need a new 260 grit wheel at some point.  All these tools cost a lot.  I am doing a quite few restorations for friends and via the blog but I have to work out costings each time and don’t always get it right so I thought I’d try to make a price list – at least with a range of prices for each job so people could judge whether it was economically viable to do a particular piece of work on their gun.

 

The delamination emerging top right in each of these two photos is visible along the top of the spring surface as a crack.

Above are the two parts of  one mainspring – all sorts of faults are visible, including a slightly rusted surface from an old crack and  several delaminations.    I really find it difficult to believe a spring can be that bad!  I’ve seen a fair number of breaks in mainsprings before and always look at the surfaces under the microscope but usually they are clean uniform surfaces – sometimes with a rather large grain size. These look as if they are original, so its difficult to see what happened to them – unless it was the effect of a damp atmosphere.

This spring has flaws too, not quite as obvious in the photos, but both broke – the red is modelling clay.

I hope that the metal I’ve welded on is large enough to make the spur- its quite difficult to judge – we shall see!

 

5th May  – Had a bit of a problem today – I was derusting a pair of percussion locks for a job and after 10 minutes in the derusting the mainsprings both broke!  I knew that some very high strength modern steels suffered from hydrogen embrittlement if subjected to a very long  derusting electrolysis, but I’d never had any problems with mainsprings in dozens of derusting so I was a bit concerned to say the least.  When I looked at the spring breaks under the microscope at x25 the answer was obvious – both had longitudinal cracks and delamination and  corrosion around around the area of the break  – the gun had been stored in a damp place and it looked as if that had somehow badly affected the spring – maybe it was held together by rust, and derusting it just let it fall apart.  I wondered if the mainsprings might have been replaced with very inferior ones at some time as some of the faults looked as if they were the result of poor manufacture.   I can usually weld mainsprings using piano wire as filler but in this case it would be pointless as there is too much amiss in the surrounding metal.  The springs would have fallen apart as soon as the gun was used so its just as well to sort it now.  I’ll try to get some castings from Kevin, or failing that I’ll make a couple of springs myself – its a bit of a pain to make the hooks for the link, but it can be done!  I started on browning the little o/u pistol barrel – first coating it in a slurry of chalk and water that I left for about 16 hours and got this effect;-

You can see a fine twist appearing, I then cleaned the chalk off and gave it a rusting with Blackley’s slow brown, but so far it hasn’t really got rusting going – I suspect that the cellar is actually pretty dry today, although its usuallly quite damp and things rust easily.

 

5th May – Busy afternoon at school.  I cleaned up the little over and under flintlock barrels ready for browning and they are now sitting in the workshop coated in chalk to  remove all traces of oil – it also starts off the etching process – I can already see a beautiful twist coming out.  I started on the hammer of the Manton caplock – I ground off the ragged break and welded over the joint area to give a sound base for welding on the extra metal that is to be shaped into a new spur for the hammer.  I’ll leave the metal well oversize so I don’t have to get the alignment perfect – I’ll tack the piece on and then undercut the rest of the joint so that the weld penetrates towards the middle of the break, otherwise its not going to be strong enough.  I’m running out of Argon so I’ll shortly have to make an expedition to get a refil – last year I changed from a rental to a half sized bottle on a refill contract – the big bottle lasted 4 years but this one must have leaked as its only been in use for a year.  The owner of the Manton wants us to do the complete ‘breathing’ so I’ll start with the derusting over the weekend.

I hope the piece of metal I cut from a little set-square is big enough!

 

3rd May – Pleasant day shooting at Eriswell – I did manage to hit a few with the flintlock!  emphasis on few…   At long last I got to fire at a pattern plate – the Manton flintlock was a fairly even pattern at 20 m and covered 30 inches fairly evenly but was a fraction low.  My 20 bore Beretta has choke on both barrels and threw a very good pattern of about 20 – 24 inches centered on the target – not too tight, so I feel more confident that when I actually manage to point it at the clay, it will break it!  A friend asked me to fix a Joseph Manton he had just purchased – the spur of the cock had been broken off.  I bought it home and checked it out against ‘The Mantons’.  It is a caplock of around 1827 to 1829  made my Joseph Manton & Son a year or so after Joseph had been declared bankrupt for the first time in 1826.  He had been forced to sell his premises and had managed to get an advance of £750 and set up in business again at Mary Le Bone Park House – New Road – London for a couple of years before moving to Holles Street in 1829 or thereabouts  – a truly irrepressible man.  He was not able to keep his full staff and had to outsource some work, but overall this gun is of decent quality.  My friend’s example appears to be genuine and original and ‘ticks the boxes’, but is in need  of a little tender love and care to restore it to its full potential (& value – anything by Joseph or John Manton is sought after).   It has the classic caplock hammers with detachable face, and short, square nipples – it is interesting because the flash guards are morticed into the (flat) lock plates – see arrow on photo – I assume this was original.  The serial number is 10121  and the barrel was bored by Thomas Evans (TE) and has faint proof marks.  The barrel address is Mary Le Bone Park House New Road London.  Apart from the broken spur and missing insert it just needs tidying – there is a bit of split wood round the lock pockets because the edges of the locks are quite badly rusted and the expansion has cracked the wood in a few places – the barrels need a bit of attention – derusting (as do the locks) and very gently rebrowning.  At the moment I’ll just sort out the hammer spur and any engraving that needs replacing on the repaired parts – the owner will probably want to do the rest…..

You can see some of the rust that covers much or the lock edges. 

Interesting that the flash shield is morticed in to a flat lockplate  rather than made as part of it as in most guns.

Quite a rare Joseph Manton with this address – he was only there for a couple of years.

 

 

2nd May – The 8 bore is back together – the browning worked well for the muzzle half of the barrel but there was not much pattern in the breech area – that section of the barrel was quite clearly much more homogeneous  – it can’t have been made using twisted iron and steel or it would have more figure – I guess it was mostly steel.  Anyway it now looks pretty good – I might try a photo later.  I had a visit from a collector dealer who brought a cute pair of percussion pocket pistols to be ‘breathed on’  One has the bottom tang poorly repaired, and  a bit of the butt to be fixed, and the other has a chipped flare to the cock mouth.   We took them to Dick to do the breathing, along with a pair of Joseph Lang 12 bores that need a bit of TLC but nothing major.   I got the little O/U flint pistol back from Dick to be rebrowned.  I’m off tomorrow to Eriswell to shoot the John Manton double 14 bore flint gun, and perhaps a few shots with the 20 bore hammer Beretta if I need a break from the effort involved in loading the flintlock   I had a careful look at the Manton with my visitor, and he wondered if the stock had been swapped – it is possible as there is a slight misfit in the area of the false breech that I had to sort out when I got it – I’m pretty sure the locks, barrel and breech block belong to the proper Manton as they are all correctly numbered, but from the on it could be a bitza – I am not particularly concerned as I didn’t pay anything like the price of an original Manton.

 

Much improved, and not looking as if it has just been rebrowned – which is the aim.

1 May – another bit of browning T+Bs+Bs+Ts – its getting darker but the pattern is being obscured over some of the barrel – there never has been any significant pattern in the thick material of the breech, which was obviouly not just a continuation of a  simple twist – I tried just steaming the breech end and now I have just put browning on the bit that doesn’t show very much twist at the breech – I used my browning for that as it was a bit light for the last foot or so.

1st May – Another month gone!   I’ve done a couple of brownings of the 8 bore barrel so far with quite encouraging results – I keep a note of what I do so that I can compare results, a T for a browning with my solution, a B with Blackleys and a lower case s when I steam a browning after rubbing it down with 0000 grade steel wool. At the present rate I think 6 brownings might be enough – I can fit in about 3 a day if I’m here most of the time.  I do them in the cellar, which is quite damp  but not particularly warm,  13.7 C at the moment – fine for red wine!

This is the result of T+Bs in my simple code system – the twist is beginning to show nicely – the steaming brings it out more – it doesn’t take much – just pass the barrel back and forth over the spout of a kettle a few times ( beware burning yourself, you need long wooden handles in the breech and muzzle)  – somewhat easier on the AGA compared to an electric kettle.

This is the first browning with old printed circuit etchant – the blue seems to be due to the copper in the acidified ferric sulphate solution

29th April – I ordered some sets of honing stones from Zoro UK – I got 3 sets (different grades) of 3 stones (most hones work in threes not two like mine) that are 100 x 9 mm and one set that is 51 x 7 mm  – and all for the price (about £21) of one pair of Brownells 19 mm stones with the postage.   We shall see if I can devise a suitable holder.  In the mean time I am pressing ahead with the rebrowning of the 8 bore.  I turned up a couple of bits of wood as bungs in the muzzle and breech, sealed with shellac, and scrubbed the barrel with detergent and water and then painted it with a slurry of chalk and water to lift any remaining oil.  I’ll probably give it a coat of my browning solution first as it contains copper and probably etches the surface better than Blackleys – then I’ll change to Blackleys, although I don’t have much in stock and I have the little pistols to do.  I seem to have lost the last bottle I bought – things disappear!   I’ll make up more of my solution when I can find a good bottle, I have a jar of strong used printed circuit etching solution that has been used, diluted at least 10:1 it works fine, and is probably OK at 20:1.

 

28th April – I carried on honing the 8 bore barrel – I spent a long time with the 150 grit stones – at first the muck that flushed out was mostly rust colour, but it gradually changed to  a greyish brown as I wore down the rust patches and got rid of most of the worst roughness.  The barrel got a lot smoother but you could still see a number of imperfections that were obviously left over from the  original boring – a few marks along the barrel and some ripples.  I stopped the 150 grit when it looked reasonably clean and switched to the 400, which did a reasonable job of refining the surface and flushed grey, but the stones wore out very quickly and unevenly and I had to unrivet them and swap them end for end.  I did get a reasonable finish so I swapped to the 500 grit stones which did get a better finish although they wore down quite quickly.  I stopped at that point – the almost shiny surface actually showed up the irregularities  more, but the finish was smooth and you can see that there is very little in the way of pitting – the barrel is obviously well able to stand the sort of loads it would originally have been used with – maybe up to 4 to 6 drams and 2 1/2 oz of  large shot. I rate the honing a partial success –  I realised afterwards  that the finer hone stones were cutting with the back corner, presumably the arm was interfering with the floating part – so that it was polishing into the depressions instead of taking off the high spots – it does mean that all the rust has gone and the barrel is smooth and nothing is lost as I can always go over it with a longer & or flatter stone.  But I will have to think about a new holder, especially if I want to do smaller bores than 8 bore!  So now I have to brown them a nice dark colour. When I’ve done that I’ll do the pair of O/U pistols and the little O/U ( all flintlocks).

Here is a photo of a nice Irish Duelling Pistol circa 1780 by Hutchinson of Dublin – it was on my FAC for a while and I have shot it.  This was one of my first restorations – the cock was broken and had been brazed, and needed the wood sorted and the barrel browned.  I had a pair of almost identical pistols by Edwards of Dublin so I got a new cock cast from one of the Edwards cocks – my guess is that the engraving on the Hutchinson and Edwards were done by the same Dublin engraver because the cock matches the lock tail engraving perfectly.  For historical accuracy I still have the braze repaired cock for the pistol.   I’m very fond of this pistol as it represents the peak of elegance of the duelling pistol – no half stocked pistol can ever look this elegant, and percussion pistols don’t do much for me!  You don’t need to pay a fortune for big name duelling pistols to get a thing of beauty, although even this one will be worth a lot more now than the £700 I paid for it!

27th April   Had a great hour this afternoon teaching a group of 10/11 year olds about programming robots – I just wish the boys would show as much interest and concentration as the girls!   I fear that when the male culture that has successfully kept women at bay for hundreds of years  finally crumbles, men are going to have to up their game to stay in contention!  I finally got my kit of honing stones from Brownells yesterday – all their stuff is shipped from the US and only ordered once a week, so  the normal delivery is around 2 weeks.  I hadn’t ordered a holder for them because I wanted it to work on an 8 bore and the holder said it was good up to 12 bore.   Looking at their photo I figured I could make one – I had a long fibreglass cleaning rod with a hex shank to fit a drill and a 9/32 BSF hole in the other end so I copied the general shape of theirs, turning a boss with 9/32 BSF male ends and milling grooves for the stone arms – I wasn’t sure how they applied tension to the stones, but I found that I could make an adjustable system using O rings ( I have a box with an assortment left over from various jobs) – one to hold the tails in and several in a groove to pack out the stones to the required pressure.  I slipped a piece of plastic tube ( 15mm water pipe) over the fibreglass to protect the barrel and am using WD40 as a lubricant.  And it works just fine- somewhat to my surprise – although its going to be a long job even with the 150 grit stones – at the moment it seems that most of what comes out is rust, but the bore is showing signs of getting better – we shall see after another hour or so with the battery drill.  I was going to mount the barrel in the lathe and run the rod straight up and down  but the fixtures for holding the barrel in the lathe would take too long to make, and this is easier, plus I have the speed control in my hand on the drill.

26th April – Driving much of the day – first to Norfolk to lunch with a keen collector, then over to Holts to take a couple of 12 bores to put in the sale.  I hadn’t really looked at them before, but when they were properly looked at it was clear that both were very loose in the action –  rattling when shaken, and the Jefferies had been reproofed in 1993 but the barrels were down to 13 thou in places.  Not yet at the stage of being dangerous to shoot, but not very encouraging – we left them for Holts to see how to sell them.  I always enjoy having a poke round their premises – this time all the ‘Grown ups’ were off round the country on a valuation week drumming up new business, but the remaining crew were as friendly as ever and we had a look at some pretty unusual things – they had a Nock 7 barreled gun for the next sale at £15K  and a very unusual breech loading  7 barreled .22 rifle designed to fire all 7 barrels simultaneously – thought to be for ‘mopping up’ operations after discharging a punt gun, although the reloading must have taken a while.  There was a nice Westley Richards 1874 patent with the classic crab knuckle joint like my William Powell – in a bit better condition than mine, but in next time for more than I paid for mine – unfortunately black powder only or I would have been tempted to swap it.  I’m still thinking of what I need to cull from my collection – I have relatively few flintlocks so I shall keep most of them, but there are  a number of percussion guns and pistols that could go to make room for more flintlocks……..  The popular things at the moment are little pistols in good condition – prices seem to be on the increase, as are prices of shootable sporting guns.  There is very little market for junk unless it will restore into something  good.

25th April – Sorting out my little robots for my class on Friday – quite a challenge to find something that will give them an understanding of how robots are programmed in the space of an hour! – still I do like a challenge.  Tomorrow I’m off to deepest Norfolk with Dick to see a collector friend who has an amazing collection of flintlocks and an insatiable appetite for more – I keep trying to think of something I could take to sell him, but its my percussion guns that I want to shift!   After lunch it will be a dash to Holts to deposit a couple of 12 bore guns that came from a friend’s gun cabinet when he died – a sidelock ejector by Jeffreies and a Webley and Scott 700 series non ejector – I have no use for them, although the Jefferies is decent bog standard side by side if one wants one – it will probably make around £700.  I  quite like my little 20 bore if I want to shoot a nitro S/S – 24 grams is a decent load as its a light gun, and I occasionally hit things with it when I get used to the weight – I’m a bit liable to wave it around in the air when I pick it up after shooting a heavier gun, and its chokes are tight so its easy to miss (anyway that is my excuse!).

24th April  – Miraculously nothing to take me away from playing today – went to see Dick and look at progress on the little O/U pocket pistol he is cleaning and tidying, and saw a little Tranter .38 rimfire revolver he had cleaned up for a client –  because its rimfire it is classed as an obsolete  calibre and is therefore section 58 and doesn’t need to be on a FAC – rather a pretty little thing – wouldn’t mind one of those for my Tranter/Adams collection!   I tackled the Richards lock that Dick and I had been working on – he had the cock  and the tip of the sear welded, but Jason, our speciality welder didn’t want to weld up the broken bridle – he doesn’t know guns and I guess he didn’t know what liberties he could take, so it was left to muggins to fix it.  Bits of old guns are always a gamble to weld as they may contain a lot of carbon and may fizz like a firework, but this bridle wasn’t too bad – the bit that broke was a narrow bridge between the mounting boss and the main plate, but fortunately there was room for the bridge to be thickened up a bit – so it worked!    I’ve been cleaning up a lovely pair of Over and Under flintlock overcoat pistols – they really don’t need much done to them – I’m still debating whether to rebrown the barrels – I think I probably will if I can do it in a discrete way.  The barrels have LONDON engraved on them, and it appeared almost completely worn down – but actually the cuts were just filled with a hard rust/oil mixture and were perfect underneath.  Its not possible to get the crud out of the letters with a brush as its too hard, so I use a graver, being careful to follow each original cut and cut the very minimum of metal.  Not so much recutting as clearing out – it does leave some shiny metal showing so its best if it is rebrowned or failing that, gone over with blacking using a very fine watercolour artists brush.(0000 size).

A couple of my clients have brought to my attention that putting details of significant restorations of their guns on the site might prejudice their chances of selling them, which I can well understand.  Part of the problem is that Google searches will find even a single mention of a gunmakers name anywhere  on this site, and if a would be purchaser is searching for details of a maker he is likely to see it in unrestored condition and may be put off purchase.  Google images has lots of images from this site too.   For me its a bit of a problem as I do the restorations  partly to have things to put on the blog, and don’t really feel the need to charge much for my time as a consequence.   I usually ask if its OK to put things on the web, and I will now generally avoid mentioning the maker’s name  so that it wouldn’t come up in searches – which will avoid most of the problem.  I am reluctant to charge full economic prices for jobs that I can’t post on the web, but I suppose that is one possibility.  I hope buyers realise that just because they haven’t seen a blow by blow account of a restoration on the web it doesn’t mean that the gun is not in fact heavily restored – they are probably better off knowing!

 

Welded bridle of Richards lock

 

The ‘N’ is cleaned out – you can see the crud out of the ‘O’

 

These are the original cuts minus the crud – the graver takes almost no metal off

These are a beautiful pair of London made pistols in very good condition  Rebrowed they could look stunning  – I’ll probably do it! 

Its a question of getting it exactly right – I’m very fussy about the colour of browning!

 

 

 

23rd April – In Cambridge today sorting out around 100 laundry boxes of old data from Geophysical research cruises between 1957 and 1980 – records from deep water echo sounders, seismic receivers, magnetometers, gravimeters and heat flow – mostly on old paper records from various forms of chart recorder or mechanical raster recorders using electro marked paper.  A lot were early digital records recorded on punched paper tape – some may remember the click clack of the teletype as it spewed out 5 or 7 hole punched paper tape!    The echo sounder records were from Mufax recorders that were designed  for printing out weather maps and used wet paper that turned dark when an electric current was passed through it – a process that depended upon iodine.  The recorder had a beautiful helical electrode that revolved behind the paper and gave a linear sweep against a fixed electrode.   The boxes full of these records had all been infused with iodine and were a uniform dark brown colour.  We kept about 1/4 of the stuff for our archive, and ditched most of the rest.  Some is on hold pending other institutions wanting it.   It all took me back to my days in Cambridge University as I had designed many of the instruments we used at sea, and been on many of the cruises.  I think/hope the rest of the week is more or less free so I can get some gun work sorted out – I’ll go to Dick’s tomorrow as he is fixing up a beautiful over and under flintlock that had a slightly bent frizzen.  I will need to come up with something to do at the Northern Shooting Show to amuse the punters – I thougth I might display a set of parts/castings  for making a double barreled flintlock fowler as I have a complete set I bought some time ago, including a very nice piece of wood for a stock.  I also have most of the modern parts for the ‘Mortimer’ duelling pistols – although not the cocks.

22nd April – The lovely weather doesn’t make for good gun fettling!  On the basis that we usually get one week of decent weather early in the year and pay for it all through a miserable summer, I’ve been outside as much as possible fixing things in the garden, or. I have to confess, just sitting in the sun!   A few things needed sorting with the Lego Mindstorms for school – two units ‘disappeared’ from the school, so we are short of equipment now and I’m trying to get old stuff working with little success – I’ll probably have to buy another set, which is a blow as I’m no longer VAT registered.   I still haven’t had a whisper about the Brownells order so the 8 bore is stalled until the hones get here – I tried running a fibre pad up and down the bore and it seems to be in reasonable condition ( for an old gun) but I do want to hone it.  I could use the lead plug method – you turn up a tapered arbor and cast a lead slug in the bore with the arbor through it – the idea is that by tightening the lead on the arbor and forcing the taper into it, you can gradually expand the arbor as the lead wears down during the lapping with a suitable abrasive. Anyway that can wait til I se what turns up from Brownells – I will have to make a holder for the hones as the bore is bigger than the kit is designed for (12 bore).  I also have a copule of over and under flintlocks to ‘breath on’ when I feel in the mood for some sensitive cleaning and light restoration……….

18th April.  Didn’t get a chance to do anything to the 8 bore barrel – I’m waiting for a barrel honing set from Brownells, but as everything has to come from the US it takes a bit of time and I don’t want to get too far with the outside of the barrel before I’ve attacked the inside.  I spent hours building and testing some Mindstorms robots for a class that Dave and I are helping with tomorrow  – trying to find things that children of 8/9/10 who have very little idea about computers can do (apart from play) with programming robots in just one hour is  difficult.  But we’ll get something to work.

18th April.  I finished the barrel bolt for the 8 bore – it was filed out of a bit of 1/2 x 1/8 spring steel with the boss on the end built up with  TIG welding.  I find with a bit of care you can build quite elaborate extensions with TIG if you melt the rod on the place you want it, rather than getting a melt pool before applying the filler rod as you are supposed to – one of my favourite tricks is building the hook on the front end of a lock plate.  It’s a careful balance between getting unwelded junctions  or having it all melt into a pool – it is a situation where my home made foot control is essential. I did resort to using the miller to reduce the thickness a bit but it was too difficult to hold properly.  I deliberately left the head of the bolt quite chunky as I’ve seen too many barrel bolts with bits nibbled off them where they were not substantial enough to stand whatever was done to them to get the bolt out.   I usually mill the bolts out of a bit of 6mm steel, but thought this would be easier – it wasn’t! 10 minutes on the hotplate of the AGA got it to a nice blue colour, a little bending made sure it held the barrel tight, pop a piece of sharpened 0.8mm wire in to hold the bolt in place, a little hard wax in the hole where the original pin was excavated and its all fine.  I have now started to refinish the barrel with 240 grit, 400 grit and 600 grit paper and then I’ll run my fibre wheel over it and it will be ready for browning – I’m now covered in a fine black dust from head to foot!   I took the back door lining off the Land Cruiser to see if I could fix up a way of opening the door from the inside.  It turned out to be neater than I expected – I was able to fix a short length of steel as an extension on the back of the door handle  and cut an inconspicuous hole in the door lining in the edge of a pocket depression to reach it – job done!  I was so eager to put it all back and try it that I forgot to photograph it.   I had to go into Cambridge to rescue Penny as she had driven into a curb and written off the tyre of her car – unfortunately it is a modern car without a spare and the foam sealant they give you doesn’t work for  damage to the walls of tyres. For some reason the tyres of the Mazda 6 are not a stock item so we have to wait until Saturday before someone can come to fix it.  Given the number of potholes around after the winter there must be a many motorists cursing the absence of a spare wheel.  I’m quite glad the Land Cruiser still has one, although its slung underneath and very difficult to access.

I  can never tell what shade of ‘white’ the background to my photos is going to be – I think this was taken with sunlight streaming in.

 

17th April.  Took a little under and over pistol to Dick’s so he can straighten the frizzen – having looked at a couple it seems that the weakness with under and over flintlocks is that they are quite heavy and if dropped may well land on the frizzen steel and bend it.  They are, I suspect, also prone to breaking the cock at the same time.  I’ve got a couple at the moment to clean up – they are in nice condition so don’t need any dramatic restoration.

16th April – Got on with the barrel bolt for the 8 bore – I don’t have a slitting saw, so making the slot down the middle is a pain  – I cut a first slot with a fretsaw and am opening it up with needle files but its anything but straight – still its not a part of the gun that gets examined often!   My ‘new’ Land Cruiser has a ‘barn door’ rear door, unlike the old one that had  lift up and drop down flaps, so its not so good as a camper van – what is even more annoying is that in a cost saving mode Toyota have left off the inside handle that lets you open the rear door from inside.  But ….  a hasty google and there was a set of photos of exactly how to fit a DIY handle – from the US of course, where that sort of make and mend is much more common that in the UK, where most of the population seem to have lost the ability to do anything original, if they ever had it!  Anyway another thing for the to do list, along with stripping my Yamaha 4 h.p. outboard and digging the salt from the cooling channels – lets hope some enterprising person has made  a You Tube video of how to.  And I offered to make Viking a shot belt out of my left-over leather… and I have 3 meetings in school this week…   I can remember when I used to wonder what I’d do when I retired………..

15th April –  Shot my Manton flintlock at the AML shoot for 30 clays – I had a couple of misfires from worn flints, and it took me a while to work out how to load.  Received wisdom is to place a pin in the touchhole and close the frizzen while loading, but I can’t do that because the frizzens have tabs that cover the touchholes when closed to prevent the main charge from filling the pan.  I started out leaving the pans open, but that blows too much powder out of the touchhole as you force down teh wad, so I got misfires even when the priming in the pan went off – anyway closing the pan while reloading – as it was meant to be- fixed the problem and I had almost no misfires after that.  My score wasn’t particularly impressive as I didn’t really get my eye in except for one crosser that was fast enough for me not to have time to think, but not too fast for me to get onto which I hit all three times I shot it.   I used my little 1955 Berretta 20 Bore hammer gun in the afternoon and managed to break a few – it has very tight chokes on both barrels, as did many guns of that generation so you have to be spot on in targetting.  It was good to get out and shoot after a long break from it!  I took teh 8 bore and it was admired as a working tool – I’ll finish it and take it to the Northern Shooting Show where I will be doing my engraving demonstration as I might be able to sell it.   Holts are sponsoring a clay shoot with us  at the Cambridge Gun Club on 22nd July, which promises to be good fun – they are doing a free valuation for one gun for each entrant, and there will be a shield and prizes – which of course I will not be in the running for, unless there is a booby prize!

14th April – Anglian Muzzle Loaders shoot tomorrow – I’ll keep to my resolution of shooting flintlocks – now I have a good single (‘Twigg’) and a good double (Manton) and a good supply of Swiss No 2 powder and OB priming powder I should be set for some serious practice!  I will of course miss most clays as I always do, but I was inspired by Bev who on the last  AML shoot hit 26 out of 30 clays with his flintlock and beat all the percussions, proving to me at least that shooting flint is not, of itself, an excuse for missing!   I did start to make a new barrel bolt for the 8 bore – I want to get it finished as I want to sell it to clear some space – but cutting the lawn took priority, and then I went to a discussion on what makes a human different from a robot at Homerton so that put paid to any gun work, leaving just enough time to sort out things for shooting tomorrow.  One downside of shooting muzzle loaders is the kit you need – shot and powder flasks (different for percussion and flint), priming, wads, cards, caps, flints, loading rods, unloading rods, brushes, prickers……..   If you take both percussion and flint plus a breech loader for a bit of light relief in the afternoon you need a pantechnicon and several hours to sort it all out.  The only saving grace with my current set of shooting guns ( double and single flint and percussion) is that all four are 14 bore and take the same wads and cards!

13th April – I came to re-assemble the 8 bore and found that I’d somehow lost the barrel bolt – another thing to make!  I had a very pleasant visit from a friend/blog reader/client who bought me three pistols to ‘breath on’.  We had a long discussion about non-restoration, and our feeling that less is more when it comes to good quality pieces.  It’s a tricky area, and obviously each gun or pistol needs very careful analysis to decide what needs to be done, what might be done and what shouldn’t be done.  The client’s views are clearly important, but most sensible owners want an assessment of  the likely impact of any work on the aesthetics and value, and I try to give an honest answer based on my knowledge, but in the end its only my opinion.   Certainly some people are keen for their guns to look as they did when first made, but its rare to find a gun that can be returned to that standard, and it seldom if ever increases the value of the gun to a serious collector, although some buyers ( I refrain from calling them collectors!) want that sort of artificial perfection.    On the list of ‘needs to be done’ I’d obviously include missing or broken parts or missing bits of the stock and major cracks that would affect the strength.  On the probably to be done list I’d include taking apart and lightly cleaning and getting rid of any big dents and dings in the woodwork (unless the rest of the finish is near perfect, in which case proceed with caution or leave well alone), and fixing any lesser splits.  On the might be done we probably move on to the thorny subject of the barrel – to rebrown or not to rebrown, and to recut or not to recut the barrel engraving. Depending on how much work needed to be done on the stock, complete stock refinishing might be necessary, but that is a pretty drastic option for a valuable gun in good condition .  The usual state of an antique gun or pistol is that the barrel finish is much more obviously worn and rusted than the lock and furniture because it is of necessity  soft iron while the rest is hardened.  If the finish on the barrel looks incongruous there will be an argument for lightly refinishing the barrel and rebrowning  it – BUT only if you can do so discreetly, that means NO GINGER browning, beloved of many unknown restorers.  If you decide that rebrowning is going to enhance the look of the gun AND you can do it in a way that doesn’t shout ‘rebrowned’ it is probably worth doing unless the gun is  rare or expensive, in which case leave well alone.  If rebrowning is on the books there may be a case for recutting the engraving on the barrel if it is worn to the point of being difficult to make out individual letters – BUT again the object is just to refresh very lightly so it doesn’t look as if its been done.  In practice, as you will see eleswhere on this website, apparent wear and illegibility of barrel engraving is often the result of the letters being filled with rust with a hard skin on top, in which case with luck recutting will only need to consist of using gravers to (extremely carefully) dig out the mess without cutting much new metal away. Recutting engraving when you are not going to rebrown afterwards is particularly tricky and is only rarely justified.  Having said all that, it all  depends on the value and initial condition, and ordinary guns in mediocre condition don’t have a lot of value, so its easier to enhance their value by careful restoration, particularly if they then appeal to people looking for guns to shoot.  Anyway looking at the pistols that I got today, one had a few bits in the needy category and  all three were in the maybe/probably category in respect of their barrels, but with the caveat that they must not look as if they have been restored!  A tall order, and I’ll have to be in the right mood to tackle them!

12th April – My client opted for the Richard’s lock to be properly fixed and cleaned, so first job was to put it in the derusting tank in its entirety for a couple of hours.  The result looks much worse because the deep hard rust is now friable red or black rust ( it seems to depend on the nature of the original rust – see later) . One feature of derusting is that its almost always easy to remove screws afterwards, and in this case it was easy to strip the lock so that all the parts could be given a thorough brushing with the .03 wire wheel, which removes all the loose stuff and leaves a nice uniform patina.   Stripping and cleaning the parts  revealed a couple of interesting things; The bridle was cracked and in two bits, although it was more or less doing its job, and there was a brazing line on the back of the cock where the shoulder stop had been altered, presumably during the working life of the pistol, thereby confirming that the cock had been a replacement, and explaining the two different positions it could take on the tumbler.  In fact looking carefully at the stop shoulder shows it hardly works as a stop because the replacement cock differs a bit in shape from the original.   Anyway putting it all together with a scrap of flint shows it all works and sparks.  Its now gone off to Dick to get the bridle welded and the cock hole sorted while I get on with the 8 bore.

Straight from derusting (dried on the AGA).  The previously hard rust will now brush off.

Arrow shows where a piece was brazed in to modify the replacement cock – presumably during pistol’s working life.  The bridle is broken just below the arrowhead but it doesn’t show  until  it is taken off.

Cleaned and waiting for the welding. The flint is a bit  blunt, but I don’t have any good small ones.

Having got the Richards lock on its way I returned to the 8 bore.  In preparation for trying to lap the barrel I decided to derust it inside and out.  My previous derusting of barrels had been done in a 2 inch pipe, which wasn’t really very convenient and not big enough for the 8 bore barrel.  One of my favourite distractions is making tools and aids to restoration, so this morning I quickly made up a derusting tank 40 inches long and big enough to hold a single or double barrel.  I had a length of 50x 200 PVC ducting left over from the extractor fan duct at Giles’s flat, and a nice strip of worktop from the cottage washbasin fitting, plus a load of leftover black sealant and white adhesive – saw, squirt, glue and a tank appeared.  It holds about 4 litres of Caustic Soda solution and I fitted a piece of 1/2 inch angle as an electrode in a bottom corner with a steel tab for electrical  connection welded on (don’t allow copper in the solution on the electrode side) and found my length of 1/4 inch bar with grommets as an internal electrode and Robert is your avuncular……      It took about six hours to derust the barrel in a number of different orientations and inside the bore – my tank is set up in the cellar so I don’t have any problems with it getting in the way while its working.   I took the barrel out and wiped it and intense black oxide wiped off, so I left the barrel to dry and then went over it very carefully and firmly with the .03 wire wheel, which left an intense even  black graphite like finish that didn’t wipe or rub off.  You can see the twist pattern in the structure of the metal but its all an even black colour  – I’ve never had that result from derusting barrels before and I’m not sure why it happened this time.  The black must be pure ferric oxide, but it doesn’t usually bond so well to the surface, it didn’t in the Richards lock for instance, which cleaned up to a grey finish.   I am almost tempted to leave the barrel graphite black, its so even!  I suspect that it ended up like this because it had a very heavy layer of browning, possibly as a protection from water – wildfowling must he very hard on guns…..

Tank in use in the cellar – bubbles are hydrogen reducing the rust from ferrous to ferric oxide

Fine black finish – I’m not sure how durable it would be.  I’ll probably strike up the barrel and brown it after lapping it.

 

11 April – I received a nice old T Richards flintlock lock from a blog regular this morning to sort out – the mainspring was slipping off the end of the tumbler well before the cock had reached its stop and come to rest in the pan.   Thomas Richards was a Birmingham gunmaker (c 1749 to 1784) and the pistol this lock came from was probably made around 1760 – it has a rounded profile, a pointed tail, not link on the mainspring or roller on the frizzen or its spring and has traces of engraving in the appropriate style for that date.   The cock looked original, as did all the parts, and they were all lightly rusted to an more or less equal extent, with no evidence of significant repairs.  Looking at the lock the cock seemed to be rotated about 20 degrees from its correct position in relation to the tumbler, yet the tumbler and cock seemed OK.  Taking off the cock revealed the answer – sort of!  Or another puzzle, depending on how you look at it.  One position of the cock on the tumbler shaft is right and works well,  the other is wrong.  I’m not sure why this was done, and I wouldn’t want to use the pistol many times as the bearing surfaces are not great, but for an antique it is fine, and preserves the puzzle for future generations to mull over!  The ‘works’ need a good derusting as the sear is a bit stiff, and the engraving would show up a bit more with attention.

As received the mainspring falls off the end of the tumbler before the cock hits its stop on the lockplate.

Here is the answer, sort of, two sets of notches on the cock, so a choice of positions, one is right, one wrong- but why?

11 April –  Disaster struck!   My old Welcome Post on this blog got so big that my system wouldn’t allow me to edit it as there wasn’t enough memory available on my server!!  I had been meaning to prune it a bit but left it too late, so I’ve had to leave the old one and start a new Post.  The old one is still there, now called April 2018 Post.    I am now back from a short break in Cornwall fixing up our holiday cottage (see tinminerscottage.co.uk & on airbandb ) – I don’t advertise my absences on this blog for obvious reasons!

Now I’ve just got to work out how to sort out the too big post – the housekeeping involved in running this blog is not inconsiderable, so I’m always grateful for the encouraging messages I get from regular viewers – I now have quite a few friends out there!   To finish off the last post, the ‘missing’ basin was eventually scheduled for delivery by Parcelforce an hour after we left the cottage – great timing – I phoned them and miraculously got through within 5 minutes ( a record ?)  and told them not to bother!  I hope they don’t just dump it outside.  Anyway now to catch up with all the things that are waiting for me……..

 Posted by at 8:34 am
Jun 272018
 

I bought this in the June Holts auction – it is a really fine London proofed gun with excellent wood, fresh and crisp chequering and true damascus barrels with  very good bores, and the furniture and locks have high quality engraving.  I keep thinking that there should be something major wrong with it to justify the low estimate, but if so its not obvious to me –  as usual, the possibilities are that its a bitzer – ie the barrel doesn’t belong with the stock, or there are other bits from other guns , but it all seems to belong   It weighs 6 3/4 lbs and has about 3/8 to 1/2 inch of cast for a right hander, and comes up well for me, although it might benefit from a thin pad on the stock.   Here are some photos…..

My motto in gun buying is ‘if it looks too good to be true, it probably is’, but in this case it will do very nicely thank you, with or without hidden mysteries!

 

The wood would not look out of place on a modern Purdey or H&H etc….

The other side is even better figure.

Slight gap between corners of false breech and breech block – the gap between the rib and breech block is due to poor fixing of the rib 

Lovely true damascus, maybe forgings from Leige, which made most of those barrels…

 

Butt plate and tang as clean and unmarked as the day it was made.

Chequering as clean and unworn as if done yesterday – maybe recut??

The trigger guard is a bit rifle-like but no other signs it doesn’t belong.  The locks are shotgun locks (no detent).

Escutcheon on the underside of the stock with initials  F P (?).

The barrel has been rebrowned, but in a good colour so I won’t have to redo it – London proof marks.

 Posted by at 9:22 pm
Apr 172018
 

6th  November.  I was asked about safety catches on muzzle loaders by a correspondent, so I thought it was time that the website had something gun related!  I’ll start a separate post ‘Muzzle Loading Safety Catches’ but in the meantime  here are a couple of examples that come to hand.  The ‘standard’ safety e.g. on pistols like the Andrews described on this site being back converted to flint – acts to lock the tumbler in the half cock position when the slider situated behind the cock is slid forward.  The slider moves in a groove cut in the outside face of the lock plate with a tab passing through a slot cut through the lock plate within the groove – the groove and slot define the movement of the slider.  A ‘ bolt’ is fitted on the tab of the slider on the inside of the lock and held by a pin. The bolt has a protruding square that engages with a slot in the tumbler when in the forward, lock, position.  There is a small triangular spring which attaches under the head of the screw that secures the sear spring and covers the V of the sear spring.  It has a small protrusion on the inside of the spring that engages with depressions in the bolt and acts as a detente to hold it in either the safe or fire positions.  The spring has a small notch near the attachment hole that engages with a small notch in the sear spring and helps to hold it in the correct position.  The safety spring is a very fiddly thing to make on account of the small protrusion and detailed shape.

looks like a bit of rust on the safety!

The safety catch spring sits over the V of the sear spring.

The bolt on the back of the slider is held by the pin you can see.  The tail of the bolt is shaped as a detente for the spring.

 

 The next example will have to wait – I’m exhaused by all the building work!

5th  November – Went with Giles to take the cast iron bath (in 2 parts) to the skip, so we struggled to get it out of the flat and down the stairs on the stair climbing sack barrow and just managed between us to lift it into the land cruiser.  At the dump we got it out, and one of the dump men came and gave Giles a hand getting it up the steps to the skip – I think he then decided we were wimps because he then picked up the second half, put it on his shoulder and took it up to the skip and threw it in – we felt rather deflated at our pathetic attempts to lift it – office work doesn’t prepare you for heavy lifting.  I was still a bit stiff from walking through thick gummy mud yesterday on the shoot with a Kg of mud on each boot – driving back I got bad cramp in my right leg – I had cruise control on but thought I might have difficulty braking in emergency –  anyway a lay-by appeared before I panicked!

4th November  – apologies for going  AWOL…..  busy & then some!   Just come back from a splendid shoot near Beccles organised by one of our AML group.  Quite damp, but not enough to spoil the day although by the end there were a couple of guns that had started to hangfire or misfire – the guns were quite wet, and mostly had to be carried from drive to drive inside a damp slip, so not ideal for their welfare.  My Egg double 16 bore performed impeccably as usual  (touch wood) – the only problem I had was when I forgot to put any shot in one barrel!  about simultaneously Martin double shotted one barrel of his gun – probably just coincidence, but who knows?   By the end of the shoot my Egg had developed a light pattern of rust spots on the barrels  – it had been lightly oiled but obviously not well enough!   When I came to clean it the spots merged into the browning after a bit of work with grade 0000 steel wool and oil, but I’ll be more careful to do something more protective next time there is rain about on a shoot!  My shooting wasn’t too bad – I wasn’t on very plentiful pegs for several drives, although my peg partner (double pegging) managed two right & lets in good style – I had enough good shots to make the day both enjoyable and satisfying!    I need a rest tomorrow, but its the only chance to get help taking the bath to the dump!  I feel terrible about cutting the bath in half – I can hardly maneuver the lighter half, the whole thing must have weighted around 100 Kg.  and apart from the enamel was in perfect condition  – the casting was a very even 7 mm in thickness – a masterpiece of the casting art!  Anyway we’ll try to get rid of it as its taking up space we need to work in.  The windows are going to be fitted on Monday, so that is another bit of progress.  I’m going to have to do my VAT tomorrow as I got a nasty letter from the vatman saying he was watching me!   And so on…………

1st November – Another month gone!  Still destroying Giles’s flat with  abandon!   The kitchen has paused and I am now reducing the bathroom to a shell.  I spent most of today unplumbing the bath and washbasin, having taken most of the tiles off yesterday.  In order to disconnect the bath and basin I had to remove most of the original plumbing, including some in the almost inaccessible  service duct – very tedious!   Having done that I tried to lift the full sized cast iron bath but it was jammed between the walls and very heavy – desperate situations call for desperate measures so out came the angle grinder and I cut the bath in half- I was amazed that it was so easy and only consumed a couple of disks, but it made a horrible dusty mess!  I don’t know if I’ll be able to move it now – I went home immediately I’d done it and had a bath!     My evening reading of one of the Badminton library books of the 1870s is quite interesting on the subject of gun cleaning, which seemed to consist of  a lot of use of paraffin – two things seemed odd, one was the use of felt covered rods that fitted snugly in the barrels to keep them rust free (!), and the other was running mercury up and down the barrels to form an amalgam with the lead and thus remove it.    Apart from some use of neatsfoot oil they didn’t seem to have any good  oils, although it did mention the possible use of clock oil – presumably one of the only non-gummy oils available.   Wikipedia explains that neatsfoot oil is extracted from the feet and lower leg bones of cattle and is used because it is liquid at room temperature, unlike the rest of the fat in the animal’s body – the lower legs and feet not being kept at full body temperature – so now you know – another pearl of wisdom courtesy of cablesfarm!   I have another shoot this Saturday in Norfolk – I’m going to have to acquire some more No 6 shot after this one although I’m not sure where from as the carriage charge is so high!

Desperate measures!  It was surprisingly quick and easy with 1 mm blades.

30th October – I’ve been oiling the worktops in Giles’s flat with linseed oil and driers (terbine) using paper kitchen roll and wearing latex gloves – the finish is coming on well, although I’m not sure it will be robust enough – any way the point of mentioning it is that I was aware that any rags soaked in oil could in theory ignite so I didn’t leave them in the flat but bought them home to light the woodburner – when I picked them up a couple of hours later they were very hot!  I carefully put today’s on a piece of metal and bought them home again – this time they were cold but the paper was badly scorched and  brittle!   So be warned – the most dangerous combination is when fine steel wool, itself highly inflammable,  has been used with linseed oil mix to rub down a stock.   I burnt a hole half way through a 3/4 inch MDF benchtop with a spark from a grinder  landing on a dry lump of 0000 steel wool  the size of a bar of soap – I was lucky not to burn down the workshop as I didn’t see it ’til days later! – with oil it probably wouldn’t need the spark).

29th October – Handed back the Hawkes and Mosley pistol today and realised it was the dead spit of the Andrews pistol I reconverted – they were a pretty standard pattern of heavy personal protection pistols – presumably carried on horse or in a carriage, but not in the pocket!   My shotgun and firearms and explosive certificates all need renewing together in January so I shall find out if my GP tries to charge me for a letter!  I’ll use it as a good opportunity to sort out what could be returned to section 58 and what to include on the FAC from section 58.   Shotguns are no problem but its a hastle to change the FAC so I might as well get it right.  I gather that the Cambridge Gun Club is planning to open a pistol range in January, and there are several people wanting to shoot muzzle loading pistols, so I might see what I have that would be fun to shoot – the trouble is that I’d really like to try all my antiques, but that involves a lot of paperwork!  Went to the flat with Giles and agreed on the bathroom layout and units in about half an hour – I guess choosing the wall & floor tiles will take a lot longer!   I am planning to put down underfloor heating as its easy and out of the way – it is of course a very low wattage so not sure if it will provide adequate heat – I’ll probably put in an electric towel rail to supplement it, then if necessary we can install a bathroom fan heater (- we have one at home for really cold mornings).  I got the instant water heater plumbed in yesterday – as usual there is one compression joint out of a dozen that leaked a bit, but I think that is now OK – I forgot to turn off the stopcock when I left, so I hope so!

27th October – I collected the Hawkes and Mosley pistol from Dick and touched up the engraving on the cock – I hadn’t touched a graver for weeks but fortunately it wasn’t a complex job!  Anyway the pistol looks great – when seen in the flesh it’s complete transformation without any fakery – the best sort!  Photo below and a few more in the post on the pistol.  I had a further email from my rifle club about the medical fee – the police are NOT asking for the fee, and in fact tell applicants not to pay it, and that it won’t change anything!  Well done them.   AML shoot tomorrow – its the Big Bore competition so I have got out my Gasquoine and Dyson 6 1/2 bore and made a batch of wads and cards and semi-wads out of cork table mats.  I can’t remember if I can shoot with it or not – when I mount it my eye is above the sight line, so it will shoot high – I have put on a butt extension to correct it slightly, but the pigeon guns were designed to shoot high as the birds were always rising.  I’ll probably load 3 drams and 1 1/4 oz of shot, maybe 3 1/2 drams – I’ll see.   I really should stick with my usual gun as I do need the practice for game shoots – I am beginning to get a much better image of what the ‘bird’ should look like when I pull the trigger, so maybe the penny has dropped at last!    Work on the flat continued – I was plumbing in an instant water heater but couldn’t find a fitting that mated with the inlet and outlet connectors except a flexible connector, which I used on the outlet side.  The male 1/2 inch nipples on the unit look as if they should take a tap connector but the hole in the middle is too small for the nozzle of the tap connector – I’m sure there is a proper solution, but I just made a modification of the tap connector on a service valve and it fits fine for the inlet.   There is the usual one leaky compression joint as usual – probably because the alignment isn’t perfect!    One of the joys of working on the flat is that there is a fantastic boulangerie and patisserie – Maison Clement- just 70 steps from the  door ( once you have gone down 4 flights of stairs) so my treat of the day is a trip out to buy the paper and have a cappuccino and pain au chocolat at 11.   It also means I can pick up a decent loaf and don’t have to bake bread twice  a week! Simple pleasures……

26th October – The Hawkes and Mosely pistol is now ready for return to its owner.  The barrel has been lightly struck to restore sharp corners and it has come up with a beautiful twist.  The damage to the wood came out with gentle steaming and its been lightly refinished to even it all out.  The cock has been precision welded – it turned out that it was a break in an old weld repair, which is better than the more common brazed repair that needs extensive clearing out to get rid of the braze.   Anyway it is a very neat weld by Jason and I doubt it will fail again.  I am sure flintcocks fail because they are snapped off without a flint or with the frizzen open so that the cock comes up hard on its stop and inertia puts s strain on the back of the cock.  If there is a proper strike of flint on frizzen the cock is substantially slowed at the crucial moment of impact.  If the breaks were due to the impact of the flint on the frizzen  then  cracks would open on the other side of the cock, nearest to the frizzen – and that is very unusual.  I have to pick the pistol up tomorrow and I’ll photograph it then.   Work continues on the flat – we have now hit a snag with the location of the gas hob in relation to the units potentially not complying with new regulations, so probably have a bit of a rethink…..  I removed the hot water tank today – to my surprise is seems to be made of fibreglass or similar and to be rectangular – its very shallow – less than 2 feet tall – and encased in a rectangular hardboard box with foam insulation with a plastic cold water tank above – obviously a ready to install unit with built in immersion heaters etc.  Anyway its now gone and will be replaced by an instant water heater – it didn’t work a proper shower anyway so no loss.

25th – More flat work ( not what it means in the racing industry) – got thesink plumbing working – there is always one compression joint in a system that insists on weeping ever so slowly and resists efforts to tighten it – I had a bit of a battle with one joint this afternoon, lying on my back on the floor with a head torch watching for a tiny meniscus to grow – its a real contortion as I wear bifocals and so I can’t look up and focus on things close by!  I think I fixed it but I’ll see in the morning – I wrapped the joint in tissue.  The island worktop is now in place an the oiling process has started – its amazing how uneven the absorbance of the tops is – its what is incorrectly called butcher block – proper butcher block is of course end grain beech.  The next problem is getting two waste pipes – from the dishwasher and washing machine – into the waste system with only a single inlet – I have now got hold of a non-return valve so I can plumb one directly into the waste pipe downstream of the U bend.

24th October – The Land Cruiser MOT gave me a bit of a scare as the mechanic said it needed the front wheel bearings replaced – as I had spent a small king’s ransom having the front wheel hubs completely rebuilt six months ago I was getting ready to do a bit of forensics and get legal – but it turned out that they just needed tightening – still shouldn’t have needed it but…………. anyway my number-plate lights obviously passed muster!  One LED bulb is in a TicTac box and the other  in a wee sample bottle – all held together with silicone sealant!    Giles’s flat is now has a virtual kitchen – just needs the water, drain, gas and oven connected and the appliances fixed, plus the window and fix up some lighting.  Then I have to remove the hot water cylinder and put in a 10.8 Kw instant water heater for shower and sink and build a couple of cupboards in the space it occupies…… and re-do the bathroom… and rewire the living room and skim coat it and  put in a fancy fanned storeage heater……………..  and then re-decorate everything (except the kitchen, which has been done…….

 

Worktop in the foreground has to have its corners radiused  and then it can be oiled to match the others.

23rd October – Just had an email from my rifle club saying that Cambs Firearms Licensing are ( at random)  asking GPs for medical information when they receive a renewal or new application for a shotgun or firearms license and either they, or the GP are asking holders for a fee for supplying the information.  This is contrary to Home Office Guidance and to the agreement made by Doctors representatives with the government during negotiations.   The advice from BASC ( https://basc.org.uk/blog/press-releases/latest-news/basc-urges-members-not-to-pay-gp-fees/)and clubs is that you should not pay.  If you don’t pay the firearms officer must, if a letter to the contrary is not received from the GP within 21 days, assume that there is no medical reason to withold a certificate……..  Giles’s flat kitchen has started to look a bit better now – the tiling is done, the worktops are in and the wiring is functioning – I was particularly pleased with the bank of switches and sockets in the tiles that have slate effect pop-on fronts and line up and fit perfectly – as Giles’s cousin says, it is a masculine looking kitchen, but that is appropriate!  Inspecting the consumer unit I discovered that it only takes circuit breakers and switches etc that are of one particular make and design – I really hate proprietary bits and pieces – I found that the consumer units in our house were a proprietary design that became obsolete about ten years after fitting, so spares had to be located at great expense.  The electrics in the flat were a bit hairy – there is a protective RCD on the power sockets,  but the metal radiant heater on the wall of the bathroom has none!  I am fairly gung-ho about some risks, but that is a step too far for me!………   I came home from the flat late and had to fix the number plate light on the Landcruiser as it has to have an MOT tomorrow – like many old LCs the bottom of the lift up back door is rusted, so I had to do a bit of improvising – I had some suitable 12 V LED bulbs that fitted, so was able to cobble something together – probably a better light than the original – lots of silicon sealant was used – enough said! Probably time for an upgrade, although the Land Cruisers have been on a downward trajectory since they started adding more and more fancy bits and pieces of electronics.

The American Walnut worktops are getting an oiling that would do justice to a Purdy –  it may be some time before the sink and hob are fitted!  The grain of the American is much more open that that of the European Walnut and the oil just gets sucked in in patches – I’m applying a little talc and a drop or two of driers with the oil to fill some of the grain  – at the moment when you wipe off the excess it leaves a beautiful satin finish.  Protecting it from dust is a bit of a problem!  I probably should have centered the right hand sockets etc on the vertical tile joints at top and bottom – never mind, that would probably bring them too near the hob.  The extractor duct is a little inelegant, but there is no where else to put it – the ceiling is cast concrete and its a party wall.  I haven’t yet figured out how to get my phone to focus!

20th October – Still a lot to do to the kitchen – the nearer it gets to completion the more jobs emerge from the woodwork, so to speak.  We have started fixing the units in place, and I’ve done about half  of the second fix electrics and made reinforcing angles to stop the worktops bowing.  Giles has painted the walls and ceiling.  We need to sand and pre-oil the Walnut worktops before they go in, then we can fix the tiles after cutting them round the electrics, which will be quite a challenge.   We ordered the kitchen window from ‘supply- only.co.uk’ and they told us a week ago that it had gone into production – when Giles rang today to ask for the delivery date they said that they had to order the sections in because we had ordered black, and there was something wrong with the specification – which they didn’t seem to be clear about.  So that is still some time away, so much for 3 week delivery!   I can see that Sunday working is called for this week!  Even so it won’t be finished by Monday……..    Evening reading has now taken in hunting all the Indian animals that it was possible to hunt in 1890 – It was unsporting to  shoot wild boar then because they were hunted on horseback with spears – pig sticking.  An elephant charge was described as magnificent, although presumably less so if you are the focus of the charge.  Apparently it is possible to shoot an Indian elephant head on, whereas an African elephant has a bony mass at the root of the tusks that stops the low velocity 8 bore ball (driven by 12 drams of powder, no less).   By 1890 the writing gives some clues that big game hunting was recognised as not altogether good for the natural balance of things, and there was a concentration on collecting specimen heads and skins of the largest specimens – which  mostly took out the older males, which is more or less what culling does now.

It doesn’t look much like progress – but it IS coming together, we keep telling ourselves!   My plastering doesn’t look too bad with a little local rectification – its now gently rolling hills instead of a mountain range! Its mostly  going to be covered up anyway.

18th October – Big push to get the kitchen sorted by the end of the week!   It’s beginning to come together – I did rest of the plumbing and we got half of the worktop cut for the sink and the units perforated for the numerous wastepipes and plumbing that wends its way in and out of the cabinets.  We have now offered everything up to check where it will fit, but so far haven’t permanently fixed anything.  The oven arrived, weighing 55 Kg, but the Hotpoint delivery driver wouldn’t bring it up the necessary last flight of stairs from the lift on his own, and wouldn’t let us help him on health and safety grounds so we had to take delivery on the landing and bring it up ourselves, although he did, perversely, offer to help us ! – John Lewis hadn’t asked us if we had stairs, and had sent the delivery by a single driver.  He had already aborted two John Lewis deliveries by the time he got to us and wasn’t in the best of tempers!  Another annoyance trying to fit together the folding doors of the corner unit – it looks like a production fault in the fancy hinge parts resulted in a slot being too narrow to fit over a 2.5mm pin – since it will take weeks to get IKEA to sort it out, we’ll take a needle file and do it ourselves tomorrow. As you can see from the photo the new kitchen has a large double oven and a 5 burner gas hob – Giles takes cooking seriously!   My evening reading – for as long as I can stay awake – was about tiger shooting in India in the 1890s  – I hadn’t realised that India had both lions and tigers in those days.  The lion was regarded as as a rather inferior animal and not so much sport to hunt as the tiger which as everyone knows from innumerable illustrations was most often hunted on elephants, with dozens of supporting elephants used to surround the tiger and get it out into a position where it would be exposed, when it often then selectively attacked the elephants carrying the hunters.   Makes shooting pheasants seem like a walk in the park, which I suppose it mostly is.

 

17th October – Had a fantastic day’s shooting at Glemham Hall in Suffolk with   7 other muzzle loading  game shooters from Anglian Muzzle loaders on Monday.  It started as a driven stand, that was followed by a walk up through sugar beet with  half a dozen pointers working the beet field ahead of the guns  which flushed a few pheasants, we then crossed a ditch into a beet field that converged on a bit of rough and more pheasants and a couple of partridges –  I hadn’t been on a walk-up shoot before and had only seen dogs used to find and retrieve, but these dogs were amazingly well trained to hunt  to the whistle and voice,  and to point, and were controlled as if on rails.  I was amused to see that when retrieving a dead bird, the dogs  would point the bird and wait for the command to retrieve before collecting it.  Giles’s flat continues to make progress – while I was out shooting he did a round of the ‘white goods’ emporia and bought a hob, oven, dishwasher, washing machine and fridge, all in a remarkably rapid trip!  I am concentrating on getting the plumbing sorted – I always seem to end up with dozens of service valves – which are now normal on every tap or appliance.  We are putting in a charcoal filter in the kitchen tap supply as the Cambridge water makes horrible tea (regular readers will yawn at another reference to tea) so that is another service valve – total planned  so far is 5 under the sink!   I just hope my plumbing is neat enough to put a photo on the blog – I normally use ‘Coppefit’ push fittings but they take up too much room for  complex pipework so I’ll have to used Yorkshire fittings and solder them for the maze under the sink.

15th October – I went to look at the Hawkes and Moseley pistol that Dick is restoring for me – you would not recognise it as the same pistol, it looks fantastic – the barrel has browned beautifully and Dick restored the flats a little so it looks like new.  I was intending to photograph it but by the time we had had a cup of tea the light was too bad.  (I realise that tea has figured rather often in the diary of late – I wasn’t aware that I had become obsessed, but then one never is aware of one’s own obsessions!)

14th October – Two weeks into the renovation of Giles’s flat and we are seeing some progress on the kitchen – walls plastered, first fix electrics, floor laid, part plumbing fixed, window opening sorted with vent aperture, and  units pre-assembled – definitely time for a cuppa!    The aim is to get the kitchen usable by the end of next week when Giles starts his new job and moves in – I’ll carry on with the rest on my own as long as it takes to get the rest of the house in order – the only big job to be undertaken is the bathroom, which needs completely stripping out and underfloor heating installed.  Getting a new bath up to the 4th floor will be interesting!    I have another shoot on Monday this time partly a walk-up shoot over dogs, which I’ve never done before.  This year I seem to have more shoots arranged than ever before – all muzzle loading.  I think I am going to try to do a few with a flintlock, but I probably need more practice at clays before I swap!  I’m also going to have to get some appropriate clothing for the period.  On the mechanics of running this blog site, I was getting about a thousand attempts to hack the site every day – I keep a careful eye on who gets blocked by my security software for trying to hack the site, and every so often I spot a persistent attacker and contact their Internet Service Provider and ask them to stop the abuse – last time it cut the attacks down to 300 per day.  It will build up again but by careful checking I’ll probably manage to stop a fair bit of it!

I appear in these photos as they were taken by Giles – not my choice!

The problem of lack of space behind the IKEA units was solved by half burying the waste pipe in the wall – the units are now spaced 25 mm off the wall  – allowing space for the water pipes, trunking and half the waste pipe.  On the wall to the right they will run inside the cabinets.

 

My plastering is not so hot – on the first wall I made the mistake of working from left to right so I kept touching the wet plaster with the hawk in my left hand!

13th October – Decided to start skimming plaster on the kitchen walls at 4:30 so didn’t finish till late – now well past thinking….

12th October – beginning to see a bit of progress on the flat – the first fix of  the electrics in the kitchen is done and the plasterboard is back – so now its time to skim the walls  and lay the new floor, then finish the plumbing of the water – which is fixed to the walls behind the cabinet backs ( there is about 25mm of space max)  after which the cabinets will be fixed and the waste plumbing installed completely inside the cabinets – I’m still puzzling over the design of the IKEA units – even with 650 wide worktops we can’t get space to fix the waste pipes behind the units.    For my evening reading I’ve been browsing another 19th century Big Game shooting book – this time about  shooting in the Arctic, the prey being Walrus and Polar Bears – the author claims that its more sport shooting Walrus than Polar Bears, although by his accounts I’m not sure either sounds very sporting.  The problem with Walrus is that their ivory tusks are not big enough to make billiard balls from (!), and that if wounded, even severely, they dive deep and are lost.  There is a sporting element, I suppose, in that occasionally one will attack the small boat used to hunt them and puncture it (the boats carried sheet lead to make temporary repairs).  The preferred method of taking them was to harpoon them, but that depended on a professional harpooner so didn’t seem to involve much skill on the ‘hunters’ part.  Part of the difficulty in shooting them is that the front of the head is a mass of bone and the tusks and is difficult to penetrate – the (small) brain is situated in what looks like the neck.  The recommended hunting trip was to leave Tromso in May with a 40 ton walrus boat carrying a couple of the light 20 ft.hunting boats aboard, with a crew of 15,  returning in September – the cost was then estimated at £450 but that didn’t include tea!  £450 then converts to  around  $60,000  now,  which sounds like a bargain for 15 men and a boat for almost 4 months.  Tea seems to be a constant in all Big Game expeditions from the late 19th century – about the only sentiment in the whole ‘adventure’ that I can share!

Things are on the upward path!

11th October – More renovation – started first fixing the kitchen electrics, it all seems very slow but we are counting on it speeding up when the floor and walls are done and we can move on to fitting the units etc.,  hopefully by the end of the week if we put in a few extra hours.  I had a call from Dick, who has been working on the Hawkes and Mosley for me – he says that the quality is excellent, and the engraving very good – he has struck up the barrel and is pleased with the way the browning is going and the dents and marks have come out of the stock. Unusually the finial of this pistol is clearly poorer quality engraving than the rest of the pistol – this part is usually better engraved than the rest – I always think that it was given to a journeyman to demonstrate his skill, while the rest was banged out on an engraving production line!  I will go and photograph it shortly, or bring it back if it is finished – I’ll have to touch up the engraving on the cock where the crack was welded.   It promises to be a very fine London gentleman’s pistol – a cross between an overcoat and a horse pistol – I’m never quite sure what to call them – I don’t think they would have been carried about the person but kept in the home or possibly taken on a coach journey – a pretty deadly weapon at close range if you were a good shot – I did try a pair of  quality percussion target pistols at man sized targets at about 11 paces ( a typical duelling distance) and while I could hit the area of vital organs (burst a balloon!) reliably after half a dozen shots, four or five  experienced rifle shooters who were not used to pistols failed to hit the ‘man’ at all on their first shot – so my guess is that to be of use as anything other than a deterrent one needed to practice occasionally with the actual pistol you intended to use for defence.  I feel its time for a bit of pistol shooting, but I have to keep my nose to the grindstone for a bit!

10th October – Doing my duty as a school governor this morning and Giles’s flat this afternoon – struggling to work out waste pipes and plumbing with the awkward IKEA base units – now I see there is the gas pipe in the way too!    I had a correspondence with a new recruit to the blog about a ‘rash’ that he had on a barrel he had browned, which I suggested was probably caused by using copper sulphate to etch the barrel  in an aluminium container ( the electrochemical voltage between iron & copper is 0.8 Volts, between aluminium and iron its 2 Volts – so plenty of potential for trouble (pun intended)).  Copper sulphate is quite aggressive stuff – I tend not to use it as I have had copper plating out onto barrels before and its a pain to get off.  I do sometimes use old printed circuit etching solution as a browning, and that is pretty loaded with iron and copper, being based on acidified ferric chloride.  French barrels with fine damascus are sometimes deeply etched and left like that, but I suspect they acid etch them.  I had a moment this evening to deal with the birds I bought back from the shoot yesterday – they didn’t have any way of selling them so we took as many as we wanted – I took 4 partridges and the cock pheasant I shot (the only one shot),  and have crowned them and put them in the freezer – I’d have taken more but its full to brimming now!

9th October – Fantastic day at Bareham Hall on a muzzle loading Partridge shoot – the bag was 190 for 400 shots and very few runners etc.  The beaters were amazed at the performance, which they said was much better than the breech loader’s manage.  Probably because we shoot all year round, and  also you know how much bother it is to reload and you don’t want to be reloading when the best birds come over – so you let the dodgy shots go!  Anyway there were some fantastic drives and I had plenty of good clean shots, and my average wasn’t that much different from the overall – so a good day out!   I suspect we may have made some converts to the muzzle loading cause – trouble is it puts up the demand for shootable antiques! I managed to clean my percussion gun in about 30 minutes, and got to thinking about how people clean their flintlocks – I know someone who shoots high quality original flintlocks who takes the locks out each time and immerses them in boiling water, and I usually take out the lock of my ‘Twigg’ and give it a spray with cleaner and a wipe and then a light spray with lube – if it looks too dirty I pour boiling water over it and dry it on the AGA before oiling it.  Manton cases for sporting guns were designed to hold the locks separate  from the stocks – I guess that was because they were normally removed for cleaning.  Nowadays I tend to use Napier cleaner quite liberally as it contains VP90 corrosion inhibitor that works as a vapor – I also put a sachet of VP90 in each of my gun cabinets – I noticed that Purdy used it in the (many) gun cabinets at Sandringham so I figured it must be effective as they were not obsessive about oiling the guns.

Giles spent part of today putting together an IKEA base unit for the kitchen – there is a BIG problem with these units – whereas all the previous units I’ve bought have a space behind the back panels deep enough to house a 1 1/2 inch drain pipe etc, the IKEA units only have about 1 cm behind the back panel so they will either have to be spaced off the wall or have the pipework run inside the cabinets – I can’t think why they would make them in such a stupid way, I’m pretty sure that other units have about 2 inches dead space for pipes – I bought one such from B&Q in April.  We might be able to space them 1 inch off the walls, but it is going to be tight!  We spent some time trying to find out how deep the space behind the cabinet was before we bought them but couldn’t find the answer.  Anyway its yet another problem to overcome, or else we’ll have to take them all back for a refund, which will be a monumental pain – life is like that, no job is straightforward!

 

8th October – A day catching up with domestic duties like fixing the mower and mowing the lawns!  I went over to Dick’s for the first time in a couple of weeks to collect the Stephen Grant that we had repaired the cock of some time ago as I need to return it tomorrow.  I took the Hawkes and Mosley flintlock pistol to get his view, and he offered to restore it for my client – there is a small crack in the back limb of the French cock that will need a touch of weld from Jason, and the barrel needs browning and a few dings in the wood need raising and the spring on the safety is missing, but it will make a very nice pistol – its basically sound and genuine – nothing to hide or fudge here!  Dick will make a very good job of it – I’ll get it back at some point to touch up the engraving on the breech block a bit.  I’ll try and put up some progress photos but it may be a bit difficult.  I’m off to a driven  game shoot tomorrow so I got out my shoot gear – I am trying to minimise the stuff I take to the peg as it often involves a trudge across a muddy field and the less one carries the better.  Like most (more) experienced muzzle loading driven game shooters I have a spiked tube that holds my loading rood that can be stuck into the ground so the loading rod can be to hand and keeps clean.  I had a bin attached to the tube that  held my shot and powder flasks, but they tended to fall out if I left them in while carrying the tube – I have now attached a piece of 1 1/2 inch plastic tube to hold my sectional unloading rod with worm, and changed the bin for a smaller, deeper one so the powder flask doesn’t fallout.  It all looks a bit Heath Robinson, but it will do for a trial!  I am expecting mostly partridges on this shoot, so I’m in two minds as to whether I should use  No 6 or No 8 shot – I guess I’ll take a flask of both and take a straw poll amongst the more experienced shots!  I got out my usual double, the back action Egg 16 bore, and as backup I’ll take my little 16 bore single Henry Nock percussion conversion.  It’s very convenient that all the guns I use regularly are 16 bore as the wads and cards are common to them all.  Converting the Nock back to flint has been on my agenda for a long time, and now that I think I can hit clays with a flinter, the conversion of the Nock seems an attractive prospect – my only reservation is that the barrel is short – around 26 inches – and I’m not sure that is long enough for the slower powder burn of flint ignition to take full effect – I’ll have to ask Bev as our flint guru!   Giles was off buying stuff for the flat- he wants to get painting!  The flat is just 5 minutes walk from the Cambridge Farrow and Ball paint shop – there can’t be many flats that close to an actual F & B outlet, so I guess the temptation is strong.

7th October – All the renovation has been leaving me with little energy or time for this blog, I’m very sorry to say!  It is quite amazing how much of the time is spent shopping for bits, and then going back for more – I guess that is the trouble with being an amateur – you don’t have a big stock of materials and have to work things out as you go along… At a guess we are spending about 25% or more of the time getting stuff and shifting it from vehicle to flat.  Yesterday morning was a trip to Ikea ( 4 1/2 hours) to buy all the base units and bits for the kitchen and today  we bought a stair climbing sack barrow and shifted almost half a ton of the Ikea stuff (2 hours) to the flat- there is a lift but it only serves alternative floors and so we have one flight of stairs.  Anyway its coming on, and I’ve got the positions of most of the kitchen wiring sorted – so the plasterboard will go on shortly.  We spent some time trying to find suitable black electrical fittings – the ones we liked didn’t have a small 45 Amp cooker switch which we need, but in the end we found that we could stick the front plate from a 20 Amp one we liked onto  a not so nice 45 Amp one – job done, or rather fudged…… I’m going to have to concentrate on getting myself into shooting mode tomorrow as I have the first shoot of the season on Monday – we are all using muzzle loaders and for this shoot will be doubling up on the pegs to give ourselves time to reload.  One feature of double pegging is that you shoot one barrel and then hand over to your peg mate, so you have to reload with one barrel already loaded – to do this safely you need to take the cap off the loaded barrel (unless you get a left and right) – so I plan to make a few more de-cappers for sale.  I’m also going to try out the idea of a plastic collar that fits round the cap and is held by the cock so that there is no possiblity of the cock hitting  the cap and firing the gun – I’m not sure the idea will get universal approval, but I’ll test it out myself.   I managed to sell the Passat on Ebay for a reasonable price, and it should go tomorrow. The flashy red Mazda that replaced it is much enjoyed, although apart from fetching it I haven’t had a chance to drive it! Tomorrow I’ll take the  Hawkes and Mosely pistol (see below) to Dick for his opinion – he might like to do the work too.

4th October – Still working at destroying the kitchen!  All the units have gone and the inside of the flimsy studwork outside wall has been stripped and the rather skimpy insulation removed.  We removed the old window and have ordered a new UPVC one – the price for supply only was very reasonable, so we’ll fit it ourselves, which will enable us to move the opening slightly and lower the top of the window so we can get an outlet for the cooker fan above the window.  The old floor tiles were stuck down with incredibly sticky glue – we tried wearing latex gloves but they got stuck to the tiles – we did eventually get the tiles off after getting through half a dozen pairs of gloves  – the floor underneath is  rather friable chipboard that has suffered from damp in places but I think it will serve as a base for the new laminate floor  – we would have put down ceramic tiles but didn’t trust the sub-floor to be stable enough.  We couldn’t face carrying all the bits of the old cabinets and plasterboard down 4 flights of stairs, so got a rope and lowered them from the external stair tower in about 10 loads.  Giles stood at the bottom wearing a hard hat and high viz jacket, on the principle that probably someone would object if they thought a resident was doing it, but no-one ever questions a workman wearing a hard hat, as every criminal knows!  We still have the old window to get down!

 

2nd October Busy today wreaking havoc in the kitchen of Giles’s flat!   The units are on the way out, the tiles gone and the wiring has been carefully removed from the unsightly trunking running in sight, and will be put back in trunking behind the units where it can’t be seen – In my books that doesn’t count as rewiring, merely slightly re-arranging the existing wiring.  I will get it checked when we have finished and I will consult the latest IEE regs as my understanding may be a bit out of date.  All the wiring is in red and black T & E so is somewhat dated, but looks perfectly good. I tried to buy some special plaster for skimming all surfaces but found that no-one stocked it so I’ll have to use a P.V.A. layer to cut the absorption and use Multifinish.   I think we are making progress on ordering things – we ordered two   3 meter x 650 mm worktops in 38 mm walnut but realised that  getting them up 4 flights of stairs was going to be somewhat tricky as each weighed 75 Kg and they won’t fit in the lift – anyway we have got the supplier to cut each into the bits we want, so the largest is 50 Kg and will fit in the lift.   It is a bit of a pain working on the forth floor and at the opposite end of the building to the lift!   We also have reasonable quote for replacing the windows – I didn’t much like the quote for £3500 for four UPVC windows that you can buy for about £250 each including V.A.T. – I would fit them myself but we are pushed for time and can’t get at the outside so the windowns have to be installed from the inside – this way someone else carries them up 4 flights and takes the old ones away!  We have 3 old storage heaters to dispose of – I’m tempted to throw the bricks out of the window, or more responsibly, lower them on a rope.  Anyway as you might guess, no time for starting the pistol yet, although I might just nip into the workshop for half an hour tonight……….

Fuzzy photo of partially destroyed kitchen. 

1st October – Here is the promised photo of the Hawkes and Mosley pistol I have to restore,  the main obvious issues are the crack in the cock and the replacement cock screw.  The lock appears to have been painted with silver paint, which is mostly removed but the residue may be hiding secrets!  At the moment it looks original, although the spur on the cock looks a bit short?   There are some nasty marks in the woodwork opposite the lock, and a few stains.  The barrel is not too bad, but needs a little attention before re-browning.  The action works well.  I’ll show it to Dick and we can have a good look at it together.  The lock needs paint stripper and then de-rusting and the cock welded and the cock screw replaced.  Getting rid of  the finish on the wood and steaming it will reveal how deep the marks are.  I have started a new post for it, Hawkes & Mosley,  with the original photos.

Three of us spent the day at  Giles’s flat finishing the preliminary clean so we can see what we are dealing with – Some of the details need sorting, and I’m trying to understand the wiring.  It looks as if a foam cornice was put round the ceiling edge then the flat was completely re-wired in surface mounted trunking including trunking skirting boards, and then a new floor was laid in the living room, butted up to the skirting, then a strip of coving glued on to cover the joint between floor and skirting.  I now need to replace the trunking skirting as I want to skim the walls, and can’t get more sockets to fit that trunking.  All a bit involved – the existing arrangement looks a bit of a mess, as does a lot of the plastic trunking!  I don’t want to rewire the flat, but I think a bit of re-arrangement of the trunking is going to be essential to improve the look of the place.  See post Hanover Court.

Giles removing the foam cornice.

Elegant wiring in surface trunking!

30th September – Back from the AML shoot where I exercised my ‘Twigg’ single 16 bore flintlock.  Its the first time I’ve shot flintlock in a scored AML shoot, and I’ve only ever hit a couple of clays with one, so I wasn’t expecting much!  I didn’t hit any for the first half dozen shots, and I made what for me is a capital mistake, which is to try too hard and shoot ‘gun up’  ( gun in the shoulder ready to pull the trigger as soon as its aiming properly) – the extra thinking time  just spoils the flow for me, although about half of the group shoot this way, or at least nearly up.  About half way through I had hit a couple of clays and began to think positively and reverted to ‘gun down’ where you don’t mount the gun until beginning your swing.  At that point I got a bit more relaxed and hit a few more.  The clays were not easy for flintlocks, which are more difficult to get kills with than percussion, which in turn are more difficult than breech loaders, but I did manage 10/30 and came joint second out of half a dozen flint shooters, so a very good result by my usual standard – I think I may stick with the flintlock for a while as its more fun.  I managed most of the shoot on an old flint that looked so bad that I got teased about it – it carried on working for a good few shots before bits cracked off and I had to replace it.  After lunch we had a breech loader shoot so I used my 1955 Beretta 20 bore hammer gun with reasonable results – both barrels are fully choked so it shoots a very tight pattern, and  ‘kills’ well at longish ranges, but it calls for accurate shooting.  At the shoot I got asked if I could renovate a flintlock 16 bore overcoat/horse  pistol signed Hawkes and Mosley – who were apparently London outfitters, so presumably it was made elsewhere.  At some point it has been silver painted, and that obscures some details.  Photos will appear when I’m not being pressed to change ready to go out………..

29th September –  At last, after six months and 2 days Giles’s flat purchase completed!   So the ‘Great Renovation’ has begun with a clean – the flat has been unoccupied for 18 months and was looking very dirty and scruffy, but we’ve removed the worst of the grime from the living room and started to plan in detail.  It looks as if the electrics will suffice with the addition of a few more sockets – its all in a plastic skirting board trunking with built in sockets, so its a matter of trying to find the same system now  – under the current regulations its possible to extend existing ring mains without having it certified, so I’ll do that.   The plumbing will mostly be redone as the kitchen and bathroom will be ripped out and re-fitted, but I can do that, and I’ll put in lots of service valves – there are none at the moment and there are several leaks so the water has to be turned on and off at the incoming main.  We wanted American Walnut worktops and had to measure up and order them as there was a 17% off offer that expires on 30th Sept – so 6 meters x 650 mm of 38mm thick American walnut in what is incorrectly called ‘butcher block’ is on order.    We spent some time yesterday looking at paint colours and collecting cards and samples, but ended up at the local Farrow and Ball outlet.  One of life’s mysteries is why the F&B colours look so much more natural and agreeable than most other paint colours – I’m fairly sure its because almost all other paints are made from only 7  to 9 synthetic pigments mixed to (theoretically)  give any shade under the sun, whereas the F&B colours use a much wider range of more basic natural pigments.  Certainly if you get one of the F&B colour fakers to mix you a F&B colour from their 9 or so pigments it is just sufficiently ‘off’ and unnatural looking to make you want to spend at least twice as much money on the real thing.   Fortunately Giles and I agree about colours so no discord, although its his place so I would defer to his judgement in the end!  I also picked up Penny’s nice shiny red Mazda from Milton Keynes – I thought it was much more fun to drive than the rather boring Passat, and I’m rather jealous – plus its a much more sensuous shape!  I can’t believe it is only £20 per year in Road Fund Licence – it is supposed to be capable of around 60 + mpg but I got the feeling from watching the figures on the dashboard that you need to take full advantage of the 6 speed gearbox and always be in the highest gear possible – the engine pulls well from about 1400 rpm so its not really necessary to go much above 2000 rpm unless  being a ‘boy racer’ – as I normally drive an automatic I often forget to change gear, so don’t do very well on the mpg front in a manual car.  Tomorrow is an Anglian Muzzle Loaders shoot at Cambridge Gun Club and, I believe, the flintlock competition so I’ll continue my new found enthusiasm for shooting clays with a flintlock – there are not many of us although more are joining all the time – those who shoot flintlocks tend to be the best percussion shots anyway ( except me).  I’m resigned to my usual place among the back markers – but someone has to come last!  Anyway the old ‘Twigg’  will be fired up, and I might treat it to a new flint as I had two ‘no spark’s last time………

28th September – I put the Volkswagen on an Ebay auction this morning for repair or spares and within 30 minutes had 8 contacts offering to buy it – I didn’t take it off auction and its now bid over £1000 so I am glad I just let it run.   Tomorrow is set to be an exciting day as I collect the Mazda in the morning and Giles expects to collect the keys of his new flat sometime during the day – then ‘The Great Renovation’ begins.  I got my copy of Black Powder magazine today and was reading Fred Flintlock’s article on nipples.  He is mostly dealing with revolver nipples so my experience of long guns is not the same, but he advocates nipples with the small hole at the bottom which is also the preferred long gun configuration. Interestingly ‘Stonehenge’ in his book (18 82) also favours them, rather than the opposite configuration as found on most old guns I have encountered.  I have some guns with original nipples that have a larger opening at the bottom that almost never misfire, but  if an original gun does misfire often it is almost always cured by making a nipple that is narrower at the bottom.  I have found that original caps by Joyce and Eley seem to make a much louder bang than normal modern caps, so I assume they were stronger, which may explain why original nipples often misfire with modern caps.   Fred discussed ‘blowback’ and the consequences of the hammer lifting, (which a video of a percussion gun going off will reveal as a common phenomenon) in terms of the Venturi effect, but that probably doesn’t apply in the case of nipples as its essentially a steady state effect and the impulse from a nipple exploding is a pressure pulse.  The best way to illustrate the differences is to look at the bulge in a barrel that has ‘ringed’ as the result of a blockage – its purely a wave phenomenon caused by the reflection of the shock wave by the obstruction ( which doubles the pressure) and can’t be modelled by any quasi steady state physics, which would bulge much more of the barrel than a tiny ring. One difference between a revolver nipple and a long gun nipple is that while the former opens directly into the main charge, in a long gun there is a secondary volume next to the nipple. The Venturi effect is interesting, its actually one aspect of the Bernoulli principle – basically  says that if a stream of fluid is accelerating  the pressure is lower as the stream goes faster – so forcing a stream of gas into a reducing space causes the pressure to drop in the constriction.  An interesting further effect is the cooling of  a gas as it expands after being forced through a jet.  Count Rumford exploited the effect in the design of chimneys  at the end of the 18th century to stop firelaces smoking into the room,  – his chimney design incorporated the throat leading into the chimney so that the smoke was accelerating through the constriction so the pressure  dropped and the smoke was sucked up the chimney instead of escaping into the room.  When I uncovered an inglenook fireplace in this room, it smoked so badly that it was unusable, so I applied the Rumford/Venturi principle to make sure that the smoke above the fire was always accelerating until it got past the narrow throat and by then it couldn’t get back.  I built a streamlined shell of chicken wire plastered with lime mortar linking the top of the fireplace opening to the chimney with a movable flap to control the throat – the secret is to avoid any dead spaces where an eddy can form and spill out into the room  –  its now pretty smoke free unless you mismanage the fire.  This blog continues to attract more and more viewers, but alas, I think many of them are not interested in the contents, just in hacking the site – luckily I have good software that defends it, touch wood!.

27th September – Wearing my school governor hat I had a governor meeting at school  on ‘Safeguarding’ – I do have to bite my tongue at times – its quite sore at the moment.  We seem to be rearing each generation less robust than the last and the layers of cotton wool we wrap them in get thicker and thicker until they can’t feel the world!  The latest news filtering through to  me is that students starting University in Cambridge are being brought by their parents ( as is  usual), but the parents are staying around for a few days to ‘help the student settle in’ or some such nonsense-  Ye gods, if my parents had come anywhere near Manchester when I went to university there I would have died of mortification – I only went there because it was about as far from them as I could find a suitable course!  I trundled up the A6 etc from Colchester on my 50cc NSU Quickly – which was anything but with all my kit on the back and left home well and truly behind – I think I went back once after that.   Our tame mechanic told me today that the Volkswagen clutch was nearly dead – its making a horrible racket.  I’ll try to sell it ( openly) with a duff clutch as its quite an expensive job to repair as its a ‘dual mass’ clutch/flywheel assembly – the dual mass flywheel is a complex device that has become necessary with engines that are producing more power from fewer cylinders at lower revs to give the very high m.p.g. figures needed to cut emissions. The basic idea is that the flywheel is in two parts, one part attached to the crankshaft and one to the clutch assembly, the two parts being linked by springs so that the pulses in rotation caused by the cylinders firing compress the springs which then give back the energy before the next pulse – its a very complex spring system and is carefully tuned to smooth out resonances and reduce stress in the drive components.  Anyway I don’t think I’ll be going anywhere in the VW from now onwards so I’m without a car until we pick up the Mazda and I can get my Land Cruiser back from Penny.  I realised that there are two basic ways to buy a used car – you either go to a few garages and see what takes your fancy, or like me you spend hours researching different vehicles until you have a clear idea of what is ‘best’, then you go and test drive one and if it goes OK you then look carefully at all the adverts on the internet  etc and try to buy the best of the bunch.  There is a lot of information on the web – reviews, price guides, reliability figures from Warranty Direct etc, but I always get an up to date copy of Parker’s Guide to used car prices as it has all the models listed and you can work out depreciation rates etc and see how much ownership is going to cost you.  I’m not sure which method is the best way to buy, the first method is certainly more relaxing and probably involves less travel.  At the end of the day a car is just a box with a wheel at each corner!  I did read more on East Africa, but this bit is not so interesting, being about the behaviour of the individual animals, which is just a repeat of comments made in the narrative part.  He is very dismissive of the lion, and the Rhino, which he says is always half asleep and only wakes up in response to approaching hunters because the bird that habitually perches on it and cleans off parasites gives the alarm.  The Rhino has a reputation for charging the hunter if wounded, but Jackson says that it isn’t a charge, its just running off and the hunter happens to get in the way very occasionally!  Ah well, that’s OK then…..

26th September – My education into organising a big game expedition in British East Africa 1890’s style continues, although I feel I may just have left it too late – Jackson writes that between 1891 and 1893 the vast herds of buffalo were struck down with a form of anthrax, and the elephants also suffered from indiscriminate hunting, and all forms of game were getting more difficult to find – he cautions that hunters should only take the males of the species, but that there is still good hunting to be had with a little effort – he argues that its not the skilled hunter after trophy animals that is doing the damage, but seems to realise that the writing is on the wall for that form of sport.  One aspect of his advice that I found interesting was his analysis of the relative dangers of the animals to humans – he rates elephants and buffalo as particularly likely to charge – but thinks that the buffalo is the more dangerous because it is not so easily spotted and so may take the hunter by surprise.  The lion doesn’t seem to him to be so bad beacause it often slinks off if it can, and usually gives a low growl that gives its presence away.  The very worst is a buffalo that is wounded, which will track down the hunter with great determination.    Interestingly he thinks that his 4 bore rifle is not effective at 70 yards, and that he needs to be closer than 50 yds with dangerous game – some authorities would say that there is not much difference between a rifle and a smoothbore gun at that range….    I managed to buy a car for Penny today that met my targets exactly  – a very nice shiny ex-lease 14 reg. red Mazda 6 with 83000 on the clock – should be good for another 100000 miles, by which time it will have suffered from our normal level of abuse and be on its way. I’ll pick it up in a few days when its had its first MOT test … job done, except for disposing of the tatty 09 reg VW Passat. I’m quite envious – my turn next!  Now I need to sort out tools and stuff to take to the flat for the ‘Great Renovation’, which will probably begin on Sunday.

25th September – Rushing about a bit today.  I’m trying to find a car for Penny – the VW Passat estate is on its last legs – it gets a hard life one way or another, and I’m a bit fed up with the constant drain on the battery that no-one has been able to sort out, so its time for a change!  I’m a fan of Japanese cars, my Land Cruiser having done 10 years without problems (except those caused by garages!). We do at times carry a lot of junk about so a decent estate is called for and it will do around 15000 miles p.a. plus so has to be economical to run – Prime suspect at the moment is the Mazda 6 Tourer, which seems like a decent vehicle.  I hate the thought of the £10K depreciation in the first couple of years, and I’m not afraid of cars that have done a high mileage, but as fuel economy has improved dramatically in recent years its better to get a newish car – my preference is therefore to let someone else take the edge off the price.  Most of the cars in our sights are ex-lease cars with about 100K on the clock (the mileage at which the lease companies dispose of them) and around 4 years old,  at about 1/3 of the new price – that takes in many of these cars on Autotrader so lots of choice.  This time I’ll try not to ‘reshape’ bits of the bodywork on gateposts etc………….  I continue to prepare for an 1880s style expedition by reading the Badminton Library ‘Big Game Shooting’.  Instructions for organising a ‘caravan’ for an expedition in the North East of Africa are interesting – The porters, of which there are many, were divided into teams of 10 and  here carry the loads as wagons cannot not used as there are no suitable tracks or fodder for the oxen.  Each porter has to carry his designated load of 65 lbs, plus his bedroll, his own staple food for 10 days (rice, beans – 10 to 15 lbs) and his water for the day ( 3 lbs?) and some had a Snider Carbine and 10 rounds in a belt (my grotty 1871 Enfield Snider conversion weighs 6 1/2 lb). The loads must have been difficult to manage – for instance, a crate of fowls.  On the subject of  arming the porters Jackson says that normally 25 armed porters (plus many unarmed ones) was enough for a trip as far north as Kimangelia, but a more extended trip to the Nijiri plains it would be better to take 50.  He thinks the Masai warrior is a much over-rated individual but the porters fear them. For a trip to Suk country he would take 80 to 100 armed men.  ” If the trip should be extended further North into the Somalia country, it would not be worth while running the risk of entering the country of such grasping, treacherous, religious fanatics as the southern Somalis are with fewer than 150 rifles“.   So,  a veritable army – some things never change……………….  I begin to think that organising such an expedition may be beyond my means – maybe I’ll just stick to buying a car…..

24th September – More lawn mowing and hedge cutting!   The Badminton Library ‘Big Game Shooting’ has now got on to F J Jackson’s 1880s recommendations for equipping an expedition ‘up country’ in Africa, which makes interesting reading.  he doesn’t set much store by a .450 or .500 Express rifle for dangerous game, his preferred ‘battery is as follows;-  A  4 bore single rifle sighted for 100 yds firing a spherical ball with 12 drams of powder and weighing 21 pounds, a double 8 bore rifle sighted for 100 yds weighing 15 lbs again firing a spherical ball with 12 drams of powder (I assume these are breech loaders, it isn’t specified), a double .577  Express rifle shooting magnum cartridges with 6 dram loads and 3 different bullet types, sighted 100 and 200 yds, a .500 Express,  a 12 or 20 bore Holland Paradox and a .295 rook rifle – that ought to be enough?   He recommends taking food from England and adds;-  No expedition should be undertaken without a few pint bottles of really good champagne, to be used medicinally, as few things are more efficacious in pulling a man together in cases of extreme prostration after fever, or when thoroughly exhausted and knocked out of time from long and violent exertion…… of course they should not be taken until the sun is down ( which, this being the tropics happens swiftly and early)  – one wonders about ‘pint bottles’ and ‘a few’. My mother used to recommend Lucozade for that, I prefer Jackson’s idea.  He also includes brandy, wine and whiskey in his grocery list and suggests a teaspoon full of brandy stirred into a cup of champagne to revive a lost appetite.   I was impressed by the following too;-  (after recommending mosquito nets) .. Before having the mosquito curtains removed in the morning it is a good thing to take a cup of coffee or cocoa before getting out of bed ( at 4 or 5  a.m.), as I believe when so fortified a man is less liable to the influences of miasma, which, if floating about at all is worse just when getting up.  (miasma or night air was thought to carry infectious diseases and germs in Victorian and earlier times)   Although I don’t habitually sleep in mosquito curtains, or have a ‘tent boy’ to remove them, I do have a cup of tea before getting up, although sadly I have to get it myself – I’d never realised that my insistence upon this custom was to ward off the effects of miasma but henceforth I shall attend to the habit with renewed enthusiasm……..  but since its now evening and the sun is down and I’m exhausted, could you pass me a cup of really good champagne, with or without the teaspoon of brandy?   Thanks………………………..

23rd September – Trying to get the lawn in some kind of order today – it has been ridiculously wet of late and this is about the only day it has been dry enough to cut.  It was so lush that I had to go ever the lawns with the mower on its highest setting and with the grass-box fitted ( I normally self mulch)  – the grass was just like an early spring flush, not a tired August/September parched lawn.  I’ll have to go over it all again with a lower setting as soon as I  get another dry day – I need to fix the mower sometime as the belt that drives the wheels has worn loose and there doesn’t appear to be any adjustment.  I’ll have to do an internet search, there is bound to be a Youtube on it.    I read more from my Badminton Library book on big game shooting over my coffee this evening -W Frank Oswell’s account of his African expedition.  Some of the logic behind his slaughter of the game becomes clear as I read more, although to modern readers it sounds diabolical!  In his journeys across Africa he does offer to feed whole communities in return for guides and helpers.  In one place he offered to feed them but refused to give them ‘presents’  so got no help but at the next community the 600 inhabitants were starving to death so he offered to take them all (men women and children)  on his expedition and feed them, which he did – on just one day shooting 6 elephants to dry into biltong  for them to take back to their kraal.   He claims that he sent back more than  60,000 lbs of biltong with them – they had to make several trips to carry it all.  He of course was only interested in the Ivory which then fetched about 5/- per pound in Africa.  A later writer (1880) in the same book wondered where all the game had gone, speculating that it might have gone elsewhere, or, just possibly, been shot to extinction!   I wonder how much habitat loss there had been by 1890?

22nd September – Sorry for missing entries!  I spent three days at the Cavendish lab at Cambridge University doing ‘Physics at Work’ presentations.  I give 12 each day, of about 20 minutes each with a bit of time between each to allow the students to swap presentations.  Its very intense as you have to get them  interested and involved and participating  – its not too difficult for those groups that are lively, but you still need to put a lot of energy into it to keep their enthusiasm up.  The worst groups are those that appear dead from the neck up – you really have to work hard to get through to them!  We get groups from far and wide, and all sorts of schools, state and independent and academies. Interestingly there isn’t any consistent pattern as to which schools will have the most buzz and be the most fun, although I always enjoy those from London and Birmingham that have very mixed classes. I think my deadest groups were from an independent girl’s school not a million miles from Cambridge.  Anyway by the time I got home in the evenings I was well past blogging and just fell asleep on the sofa!    Today a couple of loads of logs arrived and had to be stacked, so no playing, but I did manage to post a few parcels of camera bits I’d sold on Ebay.  The good news for us was that at last, after yet another last minute hitch, Giles has exchanged contracts on the flat – completion is scheduled for next Friday so from then I’ll be up to my ears in plaster, wiring, plumbing and kitchen fitting for a few weeks ( or months!) – I’ll try and keep a blog going on the progress as I don’t expect there will be much time for playing with guns.  I have been reading one of my old books in the ‘Badminton’ series on big game hunting – this one on hunting in Africa in about 1845 by the first hunters to venture into much of the country.  Its interesting to see their attitude to killing the game – if they didn’t present a challenge then they were shot to feed the many people who were essential to support the camp as it moved by wagons and ox teams for months on end, or at least that was the pretext – referring to rhinoceros, the old hunter said the most he ever shot at one time was 6 as he needed that much meat for food!  I would have thought one rhino would have kept a supermarket in meat for longer that it would keep fresh, although it is possible that the the bargain with the local people was that they would be provided with meat while the hunters were in their territory as a sort of ‘visitor tax’.  The hunter used a double 10 bore smoothbore percussion gun weighting 10 lbs with a round ball closely patched by rolling it in the hands and cutting off folds, without any wad, with 5 or 6 drams of fine powder – as he often shot from horseback and reloaded there too, he found capping the gun the most difficult part – even on the ground I sometimes find it very tricky when standing in a windy field on a cold day in winter!  He didn’t hunt in the way that a modern hunter would, using a rifle at ranges of 100 to 200 meters, but got within less than 50 meters, often much less, at times riding his game down for many miles until he could get alongside them – although many game animals are faster than a horse, the horse can outrun most animals over long distances.  That reminds me of some recent research that showed that women can sustain their running performance significantly longer than men, and can compete equally in extreme endurance events!  This blog is nothing if not a source of obscure ‘facts’…………….

 

18th September – I was at the Cavendish Labs today setting up my demonstration for the 13 & 14 year old school students who are coming over the next three days to find out what scientists & engineers do with their lives – well, leaving out the bits about shooting!   I have a colleague from my school STEM club coming to help on Wednesday, so I won’t have to do all 36 talks on my own.   I have finished the book on Wyatt Earp and his ‘Buntline Special’ Colt ’45 with a 12 inch barrel.  The book ‘He carried a Six Shooter’ is supposed to be a factual account and uses a lot of historical sources to try to unravel the truth about his exploits.  I found it interesting because, although he had a reputation as the fastest gun  etc… he depended on careful observation and an understanding of the psychology of his adversaries to avoid too many shootouts – often disarming them or occasionally wounding them to control and sometimes to humiliate them.  He and his brothers made many enemies among the bad men,  brother Virgil was badly wounded and  brother Morgan was assassinated, after which he was probably less generous towards the gang involved.  The book, of course, has detailed account from witnesses of the famous shootout at OK Coral.   The book  was set  in the 1870s to 1890s and covered the driving of the railways across the West to support the great cattle ranches and the associated massive cattle drives to the railheads, and then the rush to mine silver.  The guns by then were all breechloaders,  basically the Colt ’45, the 1873 Winchester   carbine and sawn-off double barreled shotguns – presumably 12 bore, loaded with 9 buckshot per shell, with the wads split, which was claimed to spread the shot  – the implication being that putting the slit vertically  caused a horizontal spread, although that isn’t explicit in the book – Wells Fargo favoured these shotguns for the guards on stagecoaches – thus using them exactly as earlier coach drivers used blunderbusses .  I have a Winchester 44-40 of later date but basically the same – my grandfather is reputed to have brought it back from the First World War  but as he died and was buried in France I’m not sure about that.  I do know that for a very short time the observers in the first, unarmed, planes were issued with Winchester Carbines to try to shoot down enemy planes, or rather the pilots and observers – possibly it was one of those. I guess in the very early days no-one had really addressed the need for armaments on planes as they were used exclusively for spotting and it was  a little while before they worked out how to syncronise a machine gun to fire through the propeller without shooting off the blades.  I seem to recall that the first guns just had steel deflector plates on the prop to deflect the bullet, but I may be making that up………………………….. Any way the Winchester is a fantastic example of perfect fitness for purpose – tough, simple and handy – its difficult to imagine a better suited gun for either of those situations.  One day I must convert mine from a Trophy of War on my certificate to Sect 1. so I can shoot it.

17th  September – to celebrate Penny’s birthday we visited Oxborough Hall – a fine National Trust property in Norfolk built in 1482 and subsequently altered and ‘improved’ by the family that has lived there for many generations and still does.   I’m quite an old buildings nut, so I enjoy that sort of place although I am rather conscious of  things that don’t seem right  – a lot of the windows were added or altered in the late 19th century in brick that doesn’t match the old structure and most of the large windows  have fairly recently had their leaded glass removed and plain, modern glass put as single panes into the frames.  I always look to see what the National Trust does about the display of firearms, which of course would have been a major part of  almost any grand house, from the personal sporting guns  and pistols of the owner and family plus those of his guests to the matching sets of muskets that would have been provided for the militia  – most wealthy families had guns from famous manufacturers and kept them for generations. At Oxborough Hall the ‘gun room’ near the entrance had but 4 guns on the wall very high up where you couldn’t see them, and looking neglected – a blunderbus, an Austrian military air gun, an English musket and a foreign musket.  In the ‘King’s Room’ things are even sadder – there is a a pretty poor pair of nonedescript percussion pistols that look like something cheap from Liege but were supposed to be Venetian ( I wasn’t sure they weren’t repros! – I could have made more convincing pistols myself), and a more fancy but still fairly uninspired flintlock pistol from France or Italy, it was so unremarkable I can’t even remember what the steward said, but she was quite amused when I said they were pretty  poor examples of anything! I should have taken a photo but I’m sure its forbidden.  Its a real problem that bodies like the NT think anything to do with guns is politically incorrect or anti-social, whereas in reality it was a big part of life in times past and has a rightful place in any true representation of how things were. Part of my ‘trouble’ is that I say what I think about guns, although I have given up commenting on guns for sale as it was getting a bit embarrassing telling dodgy dealers what had been done to their guns!  Which reminds me, I forgot it was the Birmingham Arms Fair today and I can’t make it to the viewing at Holts so I am safe from buying any more guns at the moment!  I still have a few to shift, must put them on this site.

16th September – I was busy clearing up the house and sorting piles of old papers and came across an old loose page catalogue from my father’s things.  There is no indication of the firm’s name but a page with a letter to customers is signed Kit Ravenshead, Framlingham 1969. It offers a wide range of parts for restoring flintlock and percussion guns, more or less a combination of Kranks and Dysons or Blackleys, including castings for all parts, barrels, reproduction flintlocks, and restocking of all pistols and guns.  With it are two separate price lists, one dated 1968 and one dated 1969.  As you would expect the prices are very different from present day prices,  but interestingly the factor between now and then differs enormously for the different items and for labour.  It is also interesting to note that some prices jumped by a lot between the two price lists.  I’ll give some prices taken at random compared to Blackley’s website;-

Gunpowder was 11/- a pound in 1968, and 13/6d in 1969 – quite a steep rise, but its now  around £20 a pound  a rise of about 30 times.

A Repro Queen Anne pistol kit was £12 in 1968 and  £15 in 1069 – Blackley’s price £339 but that includes springs and screws, about another x 30

A New Land Pattern lock set was 160/- in 1968 and 200/- in 1969 – Blackley’s is £125 including springs, a price increase of about x 15

A flint cock casting went from 32/6d in 1968 to  70/- in 1969 – Blackley’s price would be £20, a rise of x 12 ish  from 1968 or x 6 from 1969!

Browning solution was 7/- but had to go by rail –  Blackley’s now £15  an increase of  x42

A repro Kentucky flintlock rifle was £55 – I guess depending on what it was like, between £600 & £1000 now – around x 15

The catalogue quotes guide prices for various jobs  –  £15 – £25 for restocking a shotgun, £2./10/- for a wooden ramrod with screw, 10/- to £2 for making up a spring to a pattern, £3 for relaying ribs and thimbles etc…..

1968 was during Harold Wilson’s premiership and after the pay freeze and the 4 day week – inflation for the year was 4.7%   – The Beetles were in vogue!  A pound then is worth about 12 pounds now according to the retail price index.  I wonder where Kit Ravenshead went and where the castings came from – some of the stuff came from the US.  I’m not sure when Ed Blackley started – (I must ask him, he’s a friend of Dicks and lives nearby) –  he started not far from Framlingham I wonder if there was a connection?   I’m sure someone will tell me…………

I’m still engrossed in the Wyatt Earp book – I used to enjoy Westerns and  WWII stories when I was a teenager but my father thought they were just trash and discouraged me from reading them, so I stopped reading fiction of any shape or form, and still don’t.  Not the effect he intended, but the law of unintended consequences plagues parental attempts at control – he was never smart enough to realise this.

 

15th September – Oh dear, I picked up the copy of Wyatt Earps book, ‘He Carried a Six Shooter’ that I bought to take on holiday and couldn’t put it down so its now well past midnight (strictly the 16th) and I haven’t done anything constructive!……..too late now…..

14th September – A grand day out, as they say.  I took the ‘Twigg’ flintlock, the John Probin and my O/U 12 to CGC , primarily to have some flintlock fun. I collected the SWISS OB powder that Viking had kindly got for me, plus another 10Kg of shot and bought another 1000 caps (I have no idea where they go – I’m sure it was only a few shoots ago that I bought 500)  Be that as it may, I really did manage to get to grips with the flintlock – it was going off acceptably fast, I managed to break a few clays, and only had two misfires out of 2o shots, without even a ‘flash in the pan’ and that was because the flint was pretty knackered, having been in the gun since I got it – and it had done several ‘have a go’ sessions – so altogether for the first time I felt it was fun and worth the effort! A result.   The Probin turned out not to be great shakes on the breaking clays front although it went off OK – I used SWISS 2 for a while as I thought that the short barrel needed a fast powder, but didn’t hit much with that or the Nobel No 2 I usually shoot.  It will have to go!  I did feel that the SWISS No 2 was shaking me up a bit with the flintlock – its quite a light gun.   Having got bored with missing clays with the Probin, I reverted to the Miruku 12 bore using 21 gram cartridges, which as its a 7 1/4 lb gun is therefore quite nice and comfortable with 21 grams – I was gratified to discover that I managed to knock down a decent proportion of the clays.    On the drive home I was trying to work out how much it costs to shoot a muzzle loader –  you get about 200 shots per Kg. of powder, and 35 shots per Kg of shot, so at around £50 a Kg for percussion powder and £3.50 per Kg for shot that is 25p + 10p + 6 p for a cap for percussion, plus the wads and card (might be home made), so that is around  40p – 45p per percussion shot – flint is more as the powder is more expensive  – probably around 50 – 55p per shot.   That compares with about 30p for a 12 bore cartridge – so its a lot more expensive to shoot a muzzle loader, although I don’t expect that will come as a surprise to anyone who does it regularly.  Mind you, it takes at least twice or three times as long to shoot muzzle loaders in a group as it does breech loaders, so it probably averages out at a similar hourly rate! – and you use less clays so it is cheaper – Phew, thank goodness I’ve managed to justify that then!   I always feel at the end of an exhausting days shooting clays  that the cost of the clays and all the on-site facilities is a real bargain – something less than 30p a clay at CGC – where else can you have a ‘grand day out’ with food and drinks and have change from £30 (conveniently forgetting the powder and shot etc…. )   30th Sept is our flintlock competition with Anglian Muzzle Loaders – I’ll take part for the first time!   I suddenly remembered that school term had started and there would be loads of Governor meeting – I always forget to log onto the secure email server for govenors, but when I did there were the calls to action ( or inaction!)………. bother.    Now I need to order 1000 No 16 bore wads – luckily both the ‘Twigg’ and the Egg double percussion I usually use are the same bore –  I think its now time to pass on the Probin, and also my Pedesoli Mortimer single barreled flinter to make a bit more room.

13th September – Life is rushing by! Giles’s flat looms in a couple of weeks – the buying has taken 6 months so far – incredible.  I’m still sorting out the holiday stuff and putting the boat to bed for the winter and putting more stuff on ebay.  Now there is just time to dig into my shooting supplies to sort out what I need to take to CGC tomorrow – I’ll take the old ‘twigg’ flintlock as I’m beginning to like it and it isn’t a good idea to chop and change too often – there is a saying amongst our group – watch out for the shooter with only one gun.  Having said that, I do want to try out the little Probin double I bought a couple of years back at the Birmingham Arms Fair and decided it was a mistake so put it away.  It actually looks quite useful, although it has a very short barrel – a barely legal 24 1/4 inches long!  Not sure if I have wads etc for it, and I’m definitely getting short of cards.  Anyway I will take it and see what it shoots like – if its not a good fit for me I’ll sell it – I think its probably a £550 gun……

12th September – gradually getting back to normal – holidays are always so stressful, one wonders why one takes them!  I am continuing my clearout policy by listing a load of camera stuff on ebay.  Back in the swing Viking has acquired some SWISS OB  priming powder for me so I can have another go at flintlock shooting at clays on Thursday with some of the lads.  I need to get in training for  percussion too as I have a number of game shoots this side of Christmas and it would be a bonus if my hit to shot ratio got above 1:2 1/2 !   Reading Bosworth (1848) again tonight he had the idea that after about 100 yards balls have lost 1/7th of their initial velocity and thereafter don’t loose any more – he maintains that what they loose in air friction they make up for in falling under gravity, which is a pretty far fetched idea unless he is shooting up at an angle – I guess it might be (almost) true if you shoot vertically upwards – If there wasn’t any air friction the ball would convert  all its kinetic energy to potential energy on the way up to the peak, and then convert all that potential energy to kinetic energy on the way down, so IF there were no losses it would arrive back at the muzzle height with exactly muzzle velocity – taking air friction into account it will, of course, always land slower than that.  He develops this argument and then attempts to prove that very short barrels are as effective as long ones and that one can effectively ‘do execution’ with a 40 bore pistol with a 10 inch barrel at 300 to 400 yards if one can get round the problem of a very short sighing base.  All this with balls not shaped bullets, which are of course much better at long ranges because they can carry more energy due to their higher weight, but don’t, in general loose as much as a ball due to drag.  Anyway, I feel a flintlock riffle is called for – or maybe I’ll shoot the Charleville musket some time?

11th September – Today was pretty chilly so I decided that the AGA had to go back on, and the woodburning stove had to be cleaned out ready for winter.  The AGA is a bit of a pain since regulations brought in low sulphur fuel oil – they have the most primitive burner system imaginable, consisting of two wicks sitting in a puddle of oil that is connected by a pipe to a pool of oil whose level is controlled by a float and needle valve.  Controlling the heat is entirely manual on mine – just tweaking the needle valve to raise of lower the oil level – fancy AGAs have a motor controlled needle valve that is connected to a temperature sensor to give a constant heat.   The problem with the low sulphur fuel is that ash and hard carbon gradually block the part of the burner where the oil flows in, until it finally goes out, at which point you have to take the burner out and dig out the gunk and run a 10 inch long x 1/8th inch drill down the feed pipe to the burner and then put the burner back and fiddle the wicks and flame deflectors into place.  The filter by the tank also blocks up from time to time due to fine black particles – it happens every time the tank is refilled as that shakes up the dirt in the tank.  The only plus point is that it only involves time and doesn’t cost anything except a replacement wick every few times.  Anyway that should keep it running for a month or two.  Reading Bosworth’s book again this evening I came across his take on the accuracy of  rifled against smoothbore firearms.   He was sure there was no difference until he tried a precise experiment with a carefully made smoothbore gun that was subsequently rifled so everything else was the same and got a 3 inch group with the smoothbore and all the rifle balls through the same hole at a range of about 80 yards.  He made the interesting observation that if the barrel of a smoothbore musket is very slightly bent to the right the ball will curve in the opposite direction to the left – the argument being that in passing through the barrel the ball experiences more friction on the left side, which slows that side and causes the ball to spin around a vertical axis – he claims that the effect of this rotation is to cause the ball to deflect to the left, contrary to expectation.  Basic physics tells you that once it left the barrel the ball would travel in a straight line in the horizontal plane if it wasn’t rotating, so any curve must be due to rotation.   My guess is that the air on the left side of the ball is accelerated by the spin, which has the effect of reducing the pressure on that side (the Bernoulli  effect), with the opposite effect on the right side, thus curving the ball left.  Obviously rifling would spin the ball  about the barrel axis and remove any net deflection due to the friction spin.   He was also adamant that a smoothbore must be shot with a light powder charge – he recommends about 1/8th of the ball weight maximum – I’ll have to check how that corresponds to what we use now – its always a fiddle as I use different units for ball and powder ………  it turns out to be what I reckoned I should be using with the Nock 16 bore rifle – 365 grain ball and  about 1.65 drams (45 grains)  of powder ( He was writing about smoothbores, I am referring to a rifle, but the numbers correspond).  Part of his argument for small charges was that with large powder charges the wad came out and tried to overtake the ball and knocked it off course!  Is that a thing?

10th September  – trying to tidy up all the holiday stuff!  Ran the outboard motor to flush it with fresh water and get rid of any salt left in the engine, but puzzled that after about 10 minutes running the stream of cooling water coming from the engine was still cold, but steam was rising from the engine casting and it was quite hot to the touch – earlier in the year I did have to replace the water pump and remove solidified salt from the bottom of the leg, so I’m a bit concerned that the waterways in the engine are similarly blocked with just a bypass somehow letting the water through  – I’ll need to sort it out before next year – I’ll have to phone the very helpful parts shop in the Isle of Man who helped me sort the water pump. – another job to do!  I haven’t yet dug my copy of the infantry tactics from the heap of holiday luggage, so my lessons are temporarily halted!   I don’t have any English military flintlock or matchlock muskets to practice with – the nearest I have is a nice Russian version of the Charleville musket made around 1830 in the factory at ISCH that became the Kalashnikov factory – so I guess it counts as  my Kalashnikov in a way – I haven’t been able to find a bayonet for it yet, so my practice will be less than realistic…..  I was troubled to realise how few of the books I took to Cornwall got read ( 1/4 of 1) – its amazing how tiring being on holiday is, even (or especially) when you are doing nothing – it confirms my belief that holidays are intrinsically bad for you – our family can just about manage 10 days before things begin to unravel………..

 

9th September – back in Cambridge after a somewhat tiresome drive with some torrential rain and a couple of stupid  artic. drivers playing blocking games on the M25 – they stopped after we drove alongside and photographed the drivers and numberplates!   The Sensitive plant suffered the indignity of another car journey – probably set it back again.  It was dark and raining when we got back so haven’t been to see the chickens yet.  I picked up my repro copy of  Bosworth on the Rifle (1848) to read over coffee – I particularly liked his assertion that the hardening of steel by quenching was due to electricity, and his statement that ‘It is highly probable that our knowledge of  carbon may be very limited’.  Science was beginning to be applied to metallurgy but was in the very early stages – it was not long before he wrote that diamond had been identified as a form of carbon!   By the time of his book cast steel was becoming available in America, and he was extremely dismissive of the properties of English wrought iron……   This is going to be a busy Autumn for me – I have to do presentations to GCSE students at the Cavendish Labs as part of the University’s outreach project – I’ve done it every year for the last 21 years and really enjoy it, although its tiring doing it 36 times in 3 days – I am usually loosing my voice by the end!  I have to sort out and run my STEM club for primary kids at the local school – also fun, and Giles is about to complete on his flat in Cambridge that I have nobly/stupidly offered to do up for/with him – its a complete mess and needs a new kitchen, new plumbing and heating and skim plastering before it is completely redecorated and carpeted, plus we want to sort out some up to date LED lighting with remote controls. We might also need to put some internal insulation on a couple of walls – we need to check the existing construction and do some thermal calculations – I’m thinking of  plasterboard backed with 1 inch of Celotex – there isn’t room for more.   A nice little project – hopefully completed before Christmas! – So if I am a bit remiss in my attention to antique firearms and this blog, please forgive me!

8th September –  Took the boat out of the water today in preparation for  our return home.  There were 3 square rigged ships in Mounts Bay today, and Tom & Giles took the boat out for a last trip to look at one, the Earl of Pembroke registered in Bristol.    My training in infantry tactics goes slowly but I now understand the limititions of platoon firing that left chunks of the front line unloaded and vulnerable.  It was replaced in the early  18th century by a new drill – the firings – that divided the regiments into 15 platoons and had a complex firing system that distributed the fire more evenly along the front,   It was organised and controlled very carefully using flags and drums to signal which platoon was to fire, and when required the each platoon was divided into two firings to distribute the firepower more evenly in both time and space.  Unforunately there is very little written about the precise signals used, so if I find myself in charge of a regiment of infantry I guess I’ll just have to make it up as I go along – which, to be honest is what I usually do anyway!  The firings probably originated with the Dutch Army, and were used by Marlborough against the French with some success.

The Earl of Pembroke at anchor off Newlyn Harbour   (photo courtesy Tom)

7th September – managed to pull ourselves out of our dozy state to visit a couple of local iron age villages from the Romano-British period (AD43 – 400) at Chysauster  and Carn Euny.  We all get quite deeply involved in what it would have been like living there at the time they were inhabited – Our view of that is much influenced by the weather  at the time of our visit – today it was overcast with light rain at times so our view was that it would have been pretty damp – but who knows, maybe they had long hot summers like I remember when I was a child – and maybe enough snow in the winters to need tyre chains for the car – although snow and frost was pretty rare in Cornwall even then.

Entrance to the ‘courtyard’ of one of the houses at Chysauster of around 200 A.D.

7th September.  Slow start to the day following a superb meal and some interesting wine at Ben’s Cornish Kitchen.  It was clear why Ben’s is ranked third best restaurant in Cornwall – if you want to go there you’ll need to book a long time in advance, we were very lucky to get the last table at a few days notice.  I’m still reading up on early infantry tactics in case I find myself having to organise an infantry battalion using flintlocks against infantry or cavalry.  The first uses of platoon firing ( see earlier post) occurred when infantry regiments were still composed of  musketeers and pikemen armed with iron tipped 5 metre long pikes that were considered the prime defense against cavalry in the ratio of about 2 musketeers to 1 pikeman. A minor improvement in platoon firing at the end of the 17th century was the drill of ‘locked-in’ shooting where the 3 ranks were slightly staggered so that the back rank fired over the right shoulders of the second rank, thus saving the second rank  having to stoop to shoot when the three ranks fired. At this stage not all regiments had upgraded from matchlock to firelock.   The next major change in organisation came with the introduction of the plug bayonet for musketeers that enabled the pikemen to be armed instead with muskets, thus increasing the available firepower by about 50%.   The major disadvantage of the plug bayonet was that once fitted by ramming  the handle into the muzzle the musket could no longer be fired, and it occasionally got knocked out.  This could be a problem when the line was defending against a cavalry charge as it meant that fire could not be withheld until the last moment because of the time taken to fit the plug bayonet.  It was not long before the plug bayonet was replaced by one that fitted round the outside of the muzzle so  that it could be in place during firing if necessary, although presumably it got in the way when reloading.  With these improvements the Dutch were able to drive off French Cavalry charges by withholding firing until the last moment, which thoroughly shocked the cavalry.  From the drill books there is a suggestion that the musketeers were actually drilled to present their arms in a firing  position and not fire, so that they could intimidate the approaching forces.  In one battle indeed the cavalry were so scared by this tactic that they baulked at attacking.   Anyway, I’m feeling better prepared for the eventuality that I find myself in command of musketeers  – by this time the command function had become much more important as tactics got more complex.  Still, by learning what I have so far and with improved weapons etc, I’ve probably advanced to being able to deliver 5 times the firepower that was normal during the English Civil Wars.

 

6th September   Giles and I went sailing today as it looked like a nice breezy day – we set off from Newlyn heading south down the coast heading for Lamorna Cove, but the further South we got the bigger the waves got, and after we had entertained a substantial amount of the English Channel inside the boat we decided that it would be somewhat less wet going in the other direction, so we headed off to visit St Michael’s Mount from the sea – something I have always wanted to do.  We anchored off to have  a bite to eat and make the obligatory cup of tea – a ceremony made possible by the amazing design of the ‘flat’ camping stove. Unfortunately the tide was too low to let us into the Harbour. Then back to Newlyn  and a look at the Lady of Avenal – a square rigged charter boat.  On entering the harbour at Newlyn the outboard motor ran out of fuel – how they know to do it just when its awkward I don’t know.   Tonight off to Ben’s Cornish Kitchen for a birthday meal for Penny.

Filling the kettle for tea at anchor off St Michael’s Mount in a slight chop.

5th September  Blowing half a gale today so no sailing – I replaced the hinges of the double glazed PVC window in the bathroom with a pair bought from Screwfix – they didn’t include new screws and as the – old ones were mostly rusted beyond use I had to search my boat fixing kit for stainless self tappers , fortunately finding enough to do the job.   In the afternoon we did our annual scour of the galleries in Marazion but didn’t see anything we felt compelled to buy!  It is, however, cheering to see pictures by artists whose work we bought in previous visits increasing in price!  Now anything by Fred Yates fetches a mint, even a few square inches of quick watercolour, and the quirky artist Siobhan  Purdy we liked on a previous visit is getting something of a cult following!  Anyway, apart from the news that the Sensitive plant is looking better by the day, and the cockerel at home hasn’t attacked our house sitters, that is enough news for now!     I’ve been reading up on my infantry tactics in case I find  myself in command of a company of musketeers.  As you will recall, in the English Civil Wars the armies discovered the shock power of  mass firing at close range, but in any situation that didn’t immediately lead to direct contact with the enemy, it left the whole battalion unloaded and thus unable to return fire.   There were several schemes for maintaining a sustained fire, a couple of which I have already covered, and one in which the musketeers in  six ranks fired from the back rank while the front five knelt, then the fifth rank stood and fired, then the fourth etc until the front rank had stood and fired, the only problem then being that as you had to stand to  reload, the firing couldn’t restart until the front rank had reloaded.  One way or another all the drills for sustained fire across the whole battalion had disadvantages and slowed the firing down to less than 2/3 of the theoretical maximum rate based on how long it took a soldier to fire and reload – typically about 1:4 for a firelock using cartridges (as in powder and ball in a paper wrapper, in case you haven’t been attending!).   By around  1689 a solution had been worked out that gave much greater all round flexibility – platoon firing.   In this drill the battalion was divided into platoons of  around 24 to 36 musketeers  and lined up on the front with 8 or 12 platoons, each 3 or 6 ranks deep depending on how long a front was expedient.  The size of the platoon was based on the ability of its platoon commander to communicate effectively with the entire platoon.  If sustained fire was required  from the battalion then one in four of the platoons would fire and immediately reload while the three other platoons fired in sequence.  This arrangement gave the ability to produce the shock mass firing if needed in the event of a cavalry charge.  Ok, that’s got that straight – anyone care for a bit of practice?

St Michael’s Mount, Cornwall, in a fresh breeze.

Here is our picture ‘Dear Friends’  by Siobhan Purdy  – an artist who is going places!

4th September   Pretty wet this morning, but we went and moved the dinghy from Mylor to  Penryn Harbour (near Penzance) so that we could sail a new bit of coast, but the weather tomorrow looks a bit hairy with 25 knot winds.   I read a bit more on the infantry tactics – of course by around 1680 the matchlock was a bit old fashioned and the military began to introduce both the snaphaunch and the true flintlock – then called the firelock.  The distinguishing feature of the snaphaunch  was that the ‘hammer’ – or ‘steel’ was  separate from the pan cover whereas the true flintlock – a French invention – had the frizzen as we know it, integrating the pan cover and the steel.  Amazingly the flintlock appeared in more or less its final form – the only real developments of significance was the change from a vertically pivotted sear acting through the lockplate to a horizontally pivoted sear, the abandonment of the ‘dog catch’ that gave rise to the name ‘doglock’ and acted as an external safety catch, and the change from the tumbler shaft forming part of the cock, with a separate tumbler pinned on the shaft to a tumbler with integral shaft held in the cock with the ‘cock nail’ (cock screw).  Further refinements included the provision of a ‘bridle’ to support the inner end of the tumbler shaft, and of a bracket to hold the outboard end of the frizzen pivot.  Alongside the introduction of the the snaphaunch and firelock  and the continued use of the matchlock as the changeover proceeded, there was a changeover from the use of bandoliers of wooden chargers containing the powder for a single shot, with the balls kept separately, to the use of cartridges – paper tubes containing the powder necessary for the priming and the main charge plus the ball – the soldier taking the cartridge, biting off the paper end opposite the ball, putting a little of the powder in the pan and the rest in the barrel, then either dropping the bare ball down the barrel and following it with the screwed up paper, or dropping the ball and paper down the barrel.  It should be noted that in smoothbore military muskets the ball was always smaller than the bore with enough ‘windage’ (clearance) so that the ball was a rolling fit and could be dropped in, even when the barrel had begun to foul after a few shots. To require the loading rod to ram down the ball would have significantly slowed the  rate of fire – which was one reason why rifles were not introduced before the American War of Independence, when we took a bit of a battering from American irregular hunters who were used to accurate shooting with their rifles.   Until the mid 18th century it should be noted that the powder supplied to the English troops was inferior to most of that used by the European armies – if you think of the very fine and expensive priming powder that we use to shoot clays with a flintlock so that we get fast ignition you can imagine how long the typical 17th century musket took to go off once the  trigger was pulled!  In passing its interesting to note that the basic flintlock mechanism lasted with only minor developments for around 200 years.  The matchlock probably had a similar lifetime in one form or another, but the percussion era, including all the variations from ‘scentbottle’, pellet lock, tubelock, Maynard primer etc lasted barely 60 years before the breechloading cartridge era, which has now clocked up some  150 years.

3rd September  Very windy this morning, and lots of rain, but this evening its quiet.  Anyway, a bit of time to read  up mid 17 century infantry tactics.   Around 1648 the musketeers stopped being issued rests for their muskets, presumably because if they were shooting 3 ranks deep, only the standing rank could use the rest.  It’s not clear if shorter barrels were used, or if they just had to support the long heavy barrels.   The English Civil War kept us out of European Wars  while the Thirty Years War went on there, but eventually we got drawn into the battles of France, Spain and Portugal.  After a brief time when the Parliamentarians and  expat. Royalists fought on opposite sides in Europe, the Restoration put Charles II on the throne and  a small body of English troops, including many from the New Mode Army of Cromwell  fought on the side of the Portuguese  trying to secure independence from Spain.  This highlighted the difference between the Continental  infantry tactics, unchanged for 30 years, and those of the English.  At the battle of the Dunes the English held their fire while cheering, until the Spanish were within a pike’s length before firing 3 deep twice (they were formed up in files of 6) and setting too with the butts of their muskets to devastating effect.  The Spanish Generals watching the battle were reported as thinking that the English were going to defect to the Spanish side because they didn’t fire at range!  As you might expect, a few  battles like that and the continental armies followed our example and to some extent our advantage, particularly the surprise element of it, was lost.  Reading accounts of the period make me want to try a matchlock rifle!

The coast at Godrevy  looking towards the lighthouse – not a place to try to land by boat!

2nd Sept.   A lazy day as its my birthday – we visited Charlestown Harbour where there are a number of square rigged ships that are used in films, thegging is incredible – I guess it takes a while to know which is which, I don’t know how volunteers get the hang of it.  We are off to dinner at the Gurnard’s Head at Zennor, the nicest restaurant we know in Cornwall.

1st September  Another fantastic sail – good breeze and warm and sunny.   Sailed across Falmouth Roads to St Just in Roseland and then across and up through Falmouth Harbour to Flushing Town Quay where we landed for a walk and a Cornish cream tea with clotted cream ( put on the scone before the jam, not the heathen way) then back to Mylor and home for a Barbecue in the garden.  If I can now stay awake I’ll figure out more about early infantry tactics, but please forgive me if I fall asleep before writing it up!  As promised here is a photo of the sensitive plant – I have no recent photos of the cockerel as I don’t feel I can ask our  house sitters to risk life and limb.

Some of the leaves are quite dead, but there are enough to keep it alive, I hope.

 

31st August   We had a good sail yesterday although it was on the verge of raining a couple of times and there was a bit of breeze so we had occasional spray on board.  We have the dinghy on a pontoon at Mylor Marina, a bit of an extravagance but this is a holiday.  Followers will know that the Sensitive plant is in intensive care – it is probably going to survive – I plan to take a photo tomorrow.  I hear from our house-sitters that the cockerel is in good form!    From the sublime to the ridiculous( or v.v), on  a historical front, the battle of  Edgehill in 1642 at the start of the English Civil Wars showed that the tactic used by the infantry on both sides of a single rank of musketeers firing  while the rest of the battalion  was either waiting or reloading produced very inconclusive battles and was not effective against cavalry charges.  Thereafter both  the Parliamentarians and the Royalists  changed to a much more decisive drill that involved the front three ranks firing at once, the front rank kneeling, the next rank crouching and the rearmost of the firing ranks consisting of the tallest soldiers standing.  In addition they held their fire until the enemy was  within less than two pike lengths –  at most 32 feet away. Even a hyped up soldier with a fairly inaccurate weapon would stand a good chance of doing harm to the attackers at that range.   The musketeers in the three ranks fired together when the enemy came within  range and  then immediately set about them with the butts of their guns, joined by the pikemen who were usually part of the infantry battalions  – although some were  exclusively composed of musketeers.  The effect of the initial heavy fusilade at very close range was usually devestating, especially when followed up so rapidly by a direct onslaught.  Even cavalry could rarely break this defensive tactic, especially since the cavalry relies upon the speed of its charge, and once stopped is vulnerable.   In addition to the heavy close firing, the infantry retained the ability to revert to a continuous firing regime when necessary to pin down parts of an enemy army. In the North of England battles took place in areas where there were a lot of hedges and obstructions, so that direct charges across a long front were not possible, and so different tactics were used, although there are no records of what those tactics were!

30th August  It’s raining – this is a mistake, its supposed to be a perfect fortnight!   I  noticed that my recent posts have had the odd word displaced – sorry, its because I’m using my laptop and if I occasionally touch the touchpad by accident it jumps and starts typing somewhere unexepected and I don’t find where it has put the spurious text.  ON the subject of the mechanics of this blog, I still get almost as many attempts to hack the site as I do genuine visitors!   Hackers use networks of other computers around the world that they have infiltrated  to launch their attacks – called botnets.  I can look at the IP addresses of every hacker who visits the site and what they are trying to do, and it is fairly easy to identify particular networks of bots under a single control as they follow a pattern – some networks only use each computer once, but some repeat attacks from the same IP address.  I can sometimes pick out one member of the net that visits more frequency from the same IP address – if I see that that an address is attacking often I check out the IP address with ‘whoisit’ and send an email to the service provider complaining of abuse – so far I have made two abuse complaints and killed two botnets!  But it’s an ongoing problem – today another one has emerged!   Anyway the news from our house-sitter is that the cockerel is behaving – the chickens are currently shut up so that contractors can fix the roof of the neighbour’s barn without being attacked!

29th August  We decided not to go sailing today to give ourselves a break – 10 hours of being out in the fresh air having been too much for some of the party – . anyway we needed to stock up with food (and wine).  We went for a walk at Lamorna Cove in the afternoon, and looked at the remains of the old quay that collapsed in a storm a couple of years ago and will now never be repaired.  No change in the situation of either the Sensitive Plant or the cockerel!   To return to the English Civil Wars, the problem for the musketeers was that it took somewhere around 6 to ten times as long to load a matchlock musket  as it did to stand, blow on their match to get rid of the ash and make it glow well, aim and fire it.  It was therefore necessary to devise a formation and a drill that allowed the battalion to keep up a steady rate of fire.  Obviously you don’t want a front line that is only one soldier deep, with 9 out of ten reloading, so you organise them in ranks and files, ranks being the lines parallel to the front  and files being the lines formed behind each soldier on the front rank.  The basic principle would be along the lines of the front rank firing, then turning and marching to the back of their file to reload while the new front rank marched forward one pace to occupy the place of the departed man, thus maintaining the position of the front, at the expense of the men reloading having continually to move.;  An alternative method had the men reload where they fired, and the back man of the file marching forward to take up a position one pace in front of the previous firing position, thus producing a gradual advance.  either technique required a 6 feet spacing along the ranks to allow the men to march through – remember that they each has a lighted match and those loading were likely to be exposing powder.  In a nutshell, the issue of keeping up a steady rate of fire was the infantry problem as long as battles were fought by armies drawn up facing each other in ‘open’ combat, and it only changed with the introduction of the rifle in the American war of Independence and the use of long range targeting.  Up to then it was considered advantageous to hold your fire until the enemy had advanced to within around 20 meters or less of your position – hence ‘wait ’til you can see the whites of their eyes’ . Hence the need for very strict discipline and a strong  sense of duty in your infantrymen!  With the introduction of the flintlock musket reloading was faster and a typical time to reload might be 4 times that allowed   to fire, so if the if using the previously mentioned formations, the files might be 4 deep  instead of the previous eight or ten deep. In fact as time passed many different schemes of firing were tried in an attempt to create the optimum fire pattern, sometimes  organised so that if necessary more than 1/4 of the available muskets could be brought to bear in one volley, for instance against a cavalry charge when it would be all over in the time it took to reload.

Typical Cornish engine house from the 19th century  – usually associated with the tin mines, although this one at Baker’s pit may have been associated with china clay workings.

28th August  Yet another beautiful day – what has happened to Cornish weather?  We launched the boat at Mylor  and spent the day gently wafting about in the breeze soaking up the sun – we even managed a short swim, although the water was a bit chilly.  We felt quite intrepid until we saw all the kids immersed for hours!   Regular viewers of this blog will be pleased to hear that the Sensitive Plant is still with us, and reports from home indicate that the cockerel has not savaged anyone (yet).   I started to read up my military tactics – starting with the formation of the first English Standing army at the beginning of the English Civil wars.  The first battle at Edgehill was fought in October 1642 and since we didn’t have any established military infantry formations, the Parliamentarian forces adopted the Dutch formation, and the Royalists adopted the Swedish , although only decided on the morning of the battle, so they can hardly have been well rehearsed.  Both sides fired away at each other all day without gaining advantage until nightfall and ammunition supply problems brought the battle to a halt.  The rate of firing must have been slow because the drill for shooting the matchlocks was complex due to the hazard of having a permanently glowing match in hand while reloading from one of the 12 wooden tubes of powder in the infantryman’s bandolier – balls were kept in the mouth in the heat of battle.  The danger of the glowing match led to accidents – a soldier at Edgehill went to get powder from a barrel with a glowing match between his fingers and set off the whole barrel, killing several nearby…….

Just lying in the boat looking at the sails……… be envious!

27th August   Another beautiful day – we went to the  Young Farmers Annual Show at Swithians Showground  where we saw a demonstration by the Ferrgie Fillies (a group of country women) who did a splendid demonstration of formation   driving of vintage T20 Ferguson  tractors   – the commentary was hilarious  –  for a formation of  the 8 tractors as an arrowhead we were told that although it didn’t look particularly impressive from ground level, it looked much better  from directly above!    The sheave tossing involved  pitching a bundle of straw over a  high bar on a sort of rugby post –  I misheard and thought originally that it was sheep tossing, which would be a bit much for a public display!  We did a round of places to launch the boat, Mylor was full of cars and people, and Loe Beach was its usual delightful slightly scruffy self.  Here is a view of the beach at Hayle:-

Low tide –  this is the channel into Hayle Harbour – a tricky entrance at anything other than high tide.

 

27th August – resting in the garden in brilliant sunshine this morning after a rather tedious drive to Cornwall towing the dinghy – bound to be slow on a sunny bank holiday, although its past the peak as the schools go back soon.  Penny is a bit concerned because the Sensitive plant we brought with us is looking a bit the worse for the journey in a hot car – we brought it because she doesn’t quite trust our house guests to look after the it (hope they don’t find this blog!)  –  we do seem to bring strange things on holiday with us – last time we brought a dinghy to Cornwall on holiday years ago we had to bring a cage full of young ferrets that we couldn’t find a sitter for, so I put the cage in the boat.  When we got to Cornwall we had to call at Tesco to get milk and someone saw the cage of ferrets and asked what they were doing, so not really knowing what they expected me to say, I explained that they had never been sailing before so we had brought them so they could try it.  The chap looked at me strangely and then ran away…   It takes all sorts!

25th August – not sure what happened to yesterday!     One way or another I’m afraid that the next couple of weeks is going to be a bit gunless on my blog!  We usually charter a boat on the West coast of Scotland about this time of year, but we need one or both of our sons to crew a 43 ft sailing boat and this year they couldn’t be sure that they would be able to come, work possibly getting in the way, so we are going to our cottage in Cornwall  and taking our 16 ft dinghy to do a bit of pottering about around the south coast – we have been through every size of sailing boat, so this is more or less back to the beginning when we sailed a Wayfarer with a couple of young children – not the ideal boat for safe and gentle pottering.  Our Cornish Coble is a pleasantly staid boat but still manages to get along reasonably.  Anyway we’ve got friends coming to stay in our house so they can visit Cambridge – and look after our rather vicious (and noisy) cockerel.  I did post a picture of him last winter – I’ll see if I can find it.  He is magnificent  and struts about the garden king of all he surveys – I think I have got him to remove me from his list of creatures to threaten – when I went  near him in the garden he used to turn side on and edge towards me, twitching his near leg – he has pretty formidable spurs and was clearly preparing to use them – my ‘defence’ was to lunge at him so he backed off, which he did – he now doesn’t threaten.  Anyway I’ll expect almost daily reports from them on his conduct.  I had an amusing conversation with a neighbour, who is a farmer and keeps chickens  – he was telling me that he had  hatched 5 cockerels last year and that they were making a terrible noise at 4 in the morning – presumably he was being polite in not including ours in the number – anyway he did say he was going to move them to another part of the farm as there were neighbours there  who might ‘appreciate’ the noise!    I am taking a few things to do in the evenings as I sit by the woodburning stove (see Cornish Cottage) – I’m trying to get my head round the Mindstorms robotic programming so that I can keep up with the 9 year olds in my Science and Technology club!  I’ve also packed a couple of gun books – Crudingtons books on the British Shotgun, and  a book on infantry tactics in the Brown Bess era, when massed ranks of soldiers in brightly coloured uniforms stood facing each other  and the side that kept its head and had the best disciplined firing plan won.  It is called ‘Destructive and Formidable’ by David Blackmore and cover the period 1664 to 1746 – I hope it will give me some interesting insights to pass on through this blog.   I also packed the typescript book on William Palmer, Master Engraver as I want to go through the data and summarise it.

23rd August – I had an email recently from a collector who I’d done some work for asking if I knew anyone who had a Lancaster cartridge pistol with 2 or 4 barrels.  As he is a section 7(1) collector I got to thinking about possibly extending my own collection from the percussion era and a few obsolete calibres – .32 and .41 rimfire pistols that I got from my father’s estate.  Section 7(1) lets you keep what would otherwise be Section  5  pistols.  Section 5 pistols require the Home Secretary to authorise possession and is very restricted, but Section 7(1) is available with the normal firearms authorisation – it is still quite restrictive – you cannot shoot them or have ammunition for them, and the pistols have to meet one of four of strict criteria – historically important, aesthetic quality, technical interest or particular rarity – it also helps if they are part of a serious and relevant collection, but you can keep them at home.  Full details are in the relevant home office guide, see LINKS or LEGAL, I put them on both.  My interest in pistols is spreading out from my flint and percussion pistols – I am interested in the transition from the individually fettled guns of the 18th century to the mechanised production of the mid to late 19th.  It’s the transition from forging and filing to machining to final size that I find fascinating – what happened to the thousands of outworkers who made the individual parts of the guns – each person more or less specialising on one operations on one part of the gun!

 

22nd August – Pete came today to collect the repaired ejector nib on his hammergun – I hope it will do for another 100 years use!  He was interested in finding a gun to restore in some form or another, so I dug out an old Witton single barrelled gun – originally a rifle but now with a very rusty and battered smoothbore barrel of around 14 bore.  I’d had it for years and it wasn’t doing anything for me, except reminding me all the time of the jobs I still had to do so I passed it on to a good home.  It would make a passable rifle with the right barrrel, which I don’t have, and if I did I’d want to make a flintlock not a percussion.   I found another little facimile book today, its title is ‘Suggestions for the Cleaning and Management of Percussion Arms’ by George Lovell, ‘ Inspector of Small Arms for her Majestie’s Service  –  Published by Authority of the Master General and Board of Ordinace  etc.. – Lovell was a well respected figure in the development of military arms.  I don’t know when the facimile was printed, but the original by Lovell was printed in 1842 and describes in detail each part of the service musket of the time and how to clean and maintain it in some considerable detail with lots of line drawings – one day I’ll scan it and put it on this blog.  Dick rang to say he had a very fine pistol to fix with a beautifully stock inlaid with silver wire and would I like to go and see it?   as my car was away having the bushes on the anti-roll bar fixed, the answer was not today!  Its not back tonight, so I assume the parts were difficult to come by. Vehicles are a constant pain – we tend to buy good, often  high mileage cars and run them into the ground, having done a little ‘reshaping’ of the bodywork in the meantime.  We try to buy reasonable quality medium to large cars, and aim for a depreciation plus all costs except fuel of well less than £2K p.a. on average, which we usually achieve – I’m conscious of this as its coming up to  vehicle replacement time which requires a bit of research online to make the right choices.

21st August – A number of irrelevant struggles today!  Last night I read an interesting bit in Bosworth’s 1848 book (see yesterday) concerning the construction of ordinance and the strengths of various metals. Interestingly he says brass, which he specifies as an alloy of tin and copper that we would now call bronze, brass being the name we now give to predominantly copper – zinc alloys, is twice as strong as wrought iron or cast steel!  Talking of ordinance (cannon) he says that wrought iron is seldom used as  it is not very strong, and that cast steel forms  large, weak crystals when used in large masses as it cools slowly (can be true but is not the full story).  Its quite interesting to see how a lack of understanding of the crystal structure of iron/carbon solutions with face or body centered carbon atoms and cementine led them to ‘invent ‘ all sorts of explanations for   the hardening and tempering processes.  One piece of information that was completely new to me concerned very large ordinance – cannon with bore over 2 feet – used in Constantinople (now Istanbul) overlooking the Bosporus waterway against ships passing through or attacking the city.  It was virtually impossible to hit the ships by judging the trajectory – presumably the powder was not consistent enough to get repeatability – and the breech pressures with iron balls was too high for any barrel material known at the time, so as in very ancient times they used carefully worked stone balls.  The use of such a relatively light ball enabled them to fire the cannons more or less parallel to the water surface and let them bounce along the water  like a skimming stone thrown on the beach, thus relieving them of the necessity to get the elevation right – they just had to point the guns in the right horizontal direction!  Apparently this led to high kill rates –  it must have been terrifying watching a massive ball skimming across the water towards your ship. Shades of Barnes Wallis and the Dam Busters, only 100 years earlier –  I don’t suppose he had read Bosworth’s book!  I’m tempted to find a nice pond and try firing marbles along the surface- I wonder if I have a suitable marble-bore smoothbore gun – A couple of wads and a very light powder charge might work – I would of course need a model ship to make the experiment realistic ( and put the gun on a Sect 1 firearms certificate)!

This blog is getting a steady stream of visitors – around 220 per day quite consistently – which is gratifying, and I get a number of appreciative emails, usually with an interesting question attached – like the recent one asking if it was possible to resurrect a fine deactivated shotgun as an obsolete calibre rifle – I think the answer was that it would in all probability strictly speaking end up as a section 1 firearm, although if  all the parts used were pre 1939 it might possibly qualify as a section 58(2) obsolete calibre.  Even if it was initially it was a Section 1 by virtue of the re-modelling, if it was indistinguishable from an original and essentially pre 1939 it is difficult to see how it couldn’t subsequently revert to Section 58, possibly via a Registered Firearms Dealer.  I did discover that you can take any gun to the proof house and bring it back as a section 58 firearm – i.e. without it being on a firearms certificate.   In truth a lot of the aspects of firearms law are a bit woolly where antiques are concerned – the difference between say a .577 Enfield rifle kept as an ‘ornament’ or ‘curio’ and one kept with the ‘intention’ to shoot is clearly all in the mind – the first is  section 58(2) and can be freely kept and displayed (as long as I don’t have a criminal conviction) but the second is a section 1 firearm and I can get a mandatory prison sentence for having it without putting it on my certificate, and it has to be locked away!  What is more, I think I  can swap it back and forth, and in theory leave the slot for it on my certificate even when I’ve reverted  it to my collection at section 58 as long as I notify them each time, although I don’t think that would make me very popular.   What about intending ‘one day’ to shoot my section 58(2) Gibbs-Farquerson falling block rifle (Obsolete calibre – Gibbs No 2)?  It all points to the need for us to join both the MLAGB and BASC,  who work hard to protect our sport.

20th August – In the course of redecorating I had to move a bookcase full of miscellaneous books and as part of an ongoing de-cluttering process I have been sorting out some of the old books I have acquired from my father and other places and taking carrier bags full to Oxfam.  I am building a pretty comprehensive library of gun books – some inherited but a lot purchased at considerable expense and am always on the lookout for anything original.  As you can see from the picture above, one of my treasures is an original hand coloured copy of Ezakail Baker’s  handbook for the rifle at about the time of the first rifle regiments (see post Ezakail Baker’s Practice &c ….).  In my hunting upstairs earlier today I came across a copy of the ‘Text Book for Officers at Schools of Musketry’ revised in 1868, which covers theory of rifling and trajectory as known at that date plus how the ordinance made gunpowder – it appears to be concerned only with military muzzle loaders – mainly the Enfield.  A similar and slightly earlier book that I have in an old facsimile copy is ‘A Treatise on The Rifle, Musket, Pistol and Fowling Pieces’ by N Bosworth, originally published in 1848 – it is a pretty comprehensive treatise on almost random aspects of  guns, from refraction of light to the strengths of different kinds of tin – another interesting read…… While taking the books to Oxfam I stopped to browse their stock of old books and picked up a copy of ‘He Carried a Six Shooter’ by Stuart N Lake – the biography of Wyatt Earp  – it cost me £7.99 so it better be good – I’m saving it for holiday reading!  On the subject of books I am currently reading an original copy of  ‘Field,Cover and Trap Shooting’ by A.H.Bogardus – the champion wing shot of the world (and originator of the glass ball trap) – as he described himself. Published in 1878 it covers the transition from muzzle loader to breech loader. The bags he shot, almost none of which were driven shoots, are mind boggling to us now and he did it daily for years!  Another old book that is from a different age I am also reading is ‘The Sportsman’s Handbook of Practical Collecting Preserving and Artistic Setting Up … by Roland Ward – one of the most famous taxidermists ever, published in 1890!  Again it is so out of kilter with the modern age, although not as much as some of the older hunting books that describe Africa before loss of habitat and  over hunting  destroyed most of the big game.   Having written this paragraph I’m struck by how long book non-fiction titles were in the 19th century  – almost an essay in themselves.   Just to show that I’m not stuck in some Victorian swamp, I am also reading, or to be honest, struggling to read a very recent book – ‘Gun Culture in Early Modern England’ by Lois G Schwoerer, which SHOULD be an interesting book.  Unfortunately reading it is a bit like wading through treacle- English is not Schwoerer’s first language and he doesn’t know much about guns, neither of which are conducive to an easy read. Add the fact that it was clearly originally a thesis ( You can tell by the title – Early Modern is a term exclusively used in the history trade!)  and seems to have dispensed with the services of a copy editor, or indeed any kind of editor. Shame really as I’m sure there is a lot of good work if only I could see through the lack of logical order and the repetition.  I might have another try, it should at least be good for sending me to sleep, not that that is a problem I normally have, if only I didn’t find it so annoying………….

19th August – I’m not sure what I had in mind for tonight, but I got sidetracked by an email asking about a complex problem related to deactivated guns and obsolete calibres that had me reading through the Home Office Guidance on Firearms Licensing 2016, which effectively filled the hour I set aside.  It makes fascinating reading, particularly some of the illogicalities of the law  – for instance the occupier of land, including those who have shooting rights, can lend a shotgun to a non-certificate holder to shoot in his presence on the occupied land but only in person, whereas in the case of a rifle he or his servant can lend the rifle!  Anyway I found the information I was looking for – obsolete calibre firearms must have been made before 1939 to count for section 58(2).  The Acts are full of assorted cut off dates that probably have logical relationships to gun development, but they are not always obvious – as another example, you can make an inert gun with only relatively simple safeguards against making it shootable as long as its a replica of a gun made before 1870.  And then there is the section 7 cutoff of 1918, or so I believe – I must look into that…….  I have put the two most useful Home Office Guides on the bottom of the LINKS page,  Guidance on Firearms Licensing,  and Firearms Security Handbook  – they are both the definitive guidance issued to police and trump anything else you are told – until it changes!   see LINK tab at the top of this page.

18th August – Finished the decorating – I tried to get a local firm that matches paint colours to do me a Farrow and Ball colour but they didn’t get anywhere near so I left them with 2 litres of a failed attempt and went and bought the real thing at exorbitant price!   I always used to mix my own colours but I’ve got lazy and want to use colours out of a tin – the only trouble is that I don’t actually like the result that much!  I have dozens of tins that are not the colour on the label but are never the colour one wants now, or if its the right colour its not the right type of paint….   I did a little bit of engraving – literally!  I had another go at engraving round the edge of a 1p coin – its quite a big space – have a look at one.   I might try getting two rows of lettering on the edge next time but the copper is a bit soft for the finest work.  I’ll try to get some photos but it will involve setting up my microscope camera and I’ve probably forgotten all its little foibles!

17th August – Distempered the landing ceiling and walls – so my shoulders ache!  I had another gun to repair today – another 12 bore hammer gun that had a broken spur that pushes the extractors out then the gun is opened – on this gun it was filed up as part of the action flat so not a replaceable part. As in so many of these repairs, this was a re-repair of a brazed or hard soldered repair from the past.  They are always more of a pain than a straight weld of a fracture because you have to get rid of all the  foreign material before you can weld, and that invariably means that the close fit between the parts is lost and you have to make a guess at the exact alignment and find a way of holding it in place.  I tried holding the parts together with Plasticine but it had to be too close to the heat and didn’t work – its a difficult weld because the action flat side of the break is a massive heat sink, and the bit has no thermal inertia, so the bit gets red hot almost instantly at least until it has some weld connection to the main part.  Anyway I managed to jig it up and put on a bit of weld – I was using piano wire as a rod, to get a bit of carbon into the weld, but the danger is that you will let it cool too quickly and then it is too hard to file.  – Anyway after a bit of fiddling I got enough weld around it to look strong enough for the job and managed to tame the hard bit – it was then a case of filing it to fit and checking that it moved the extractor but also let it go right back in as the barrels came to the face.  That was all working nicely, but the fore – end didn’t fit and needed a bit more taken off the sides of the spur and general tidying up of the hinge area before the gun would open and close easily – I guess in total it took a couple of hours to get right – mostly because I am not a very expert welder and haven’t done that job before……  Here are some pics;-

The ‘spur’ had been brazed on but failed, so the joint had to be cleaned of brazing.

Finding a way of holding the parts in the correct alignment was a bit of a fiddle, but worked in the end…

I should point out that this is a fairly basic but decent working gun – I wouldn’t trust myself to do the same on a quality gun – I’d leave it to Jason..!

It’s nice to have photos coming out without the pink tinge!

 

16th August. Just got back from a trip into deepest Norfolk for a North Norfolk Music Festival performance of Walton’s Facade at South Creake Church – Brilliant, one of my favourite pieces of music – a good friend was playing trumpet.  That’s our bit of culture for the summer!  I went to see Dick today to give him the Steven Grant to store until collection.  He was giving me a lesson on ejector mechanisms, including a neat little box of tricks designed by Westley Richards, a genius a slightly off beat inventions.   He is working on a Purdy style ejector on a pretty little double .410 – I’ll take my camera over next week and get s few pictures.

15th August.  I had a visit from a fellow AML shooter with a 12 bore hammer gun (rebounding Stanton patent of 1866 locks, triple bite top lever action) with the rear trigger snapped off, with the bit in a bag.  I prefer not to keep other people’s breech loaders for longer than necessary, and then I take them to an RFD for storage as I’m not one myself, although as things are going that may become necessary. In this case I figured I should be able to do a ‘ while you wait’ repair myself, and only keep the gun if I failed!  I stripped out the broken trigger blade and clamped it to a slab of steel and positioned the broken bit with Plasticine while I tacked the sides of the break, then filed a deep ‘V’ across the face and fill welded it with piano wire as the welding rod.  All very satisfactory and not too much metal to file off  and it didn’t get hardened too much to file down and polish on the fibre wheel.  A quick flash with the fine oxygas flame to put a bit of colour into it and pop it all together, removing the caked grease and cleaning the rust off the trigger guard back and recess in the stock – all done in an hour or so and ready to go.  Plasticine is, as I may have mentioned, the precision welder’s best friend – it holds bits in position and doesn’t move when it gets hot – it is more or less a mixture of dried clay and Vaseline or something like that, and if it gets very hot the Vaseline evaporates and the clay remains in position, but usually the tack welding has been done by then.  As promised, I did take the locks off the LePage pistol to investigate the single trigger mechanism, but unfortunately I couldn’t get a stud out without damaging it and so couldn’t expose the mechanism well enough to photograph fully, so you will have to make do with a verbal description…   The trigger has a vertical axle sticking out of the top.  pivoting on this axle is a blade the longer  back part of which forms the trigger blade – It sits below the conventional sears and can swing to be under either the left or the right sear. a spring biases it to sit under the left sear.  An extension of the blade in front of the axle carries a stud that sticks out on the right hand side of the blade.  A cam slope on the tumbler of the right hand lock pushes the stud when the right hand lock is fully cocked, causing the blade to swing its front to the left and its back section to the right so that it sits under the right hand sear, at which point pulling the trigger  fires the right hand lock which fires the front charge.  If the right hand lock is not on full cock the blade always sits under the left hand sear and that lock will fire if it is cocked.  I noticed that if both cocks are on half cock the left cock will fire if the trigger is pulled – the half cock bent does not appear to be of re-entrant shape as you can see from the photograph.

Showing the stud in the blade in front of the pivot. 

The ramp on the tumbler  that acts on the stud is arrowed.  Notice that the half cock bent is not designed to resist a trigger pull – ergo it is not safe!  You’ll also notice if you look on this site regularly that I have got rid of most of the colour cast in these two photos – I changed 3 flourescent tubes near my photographic station to daylight tubes  – no expense spared in making your experience better!  I did buy a 50W daylight flat panel to put above the station, but left it in the shop, so that is another trip to Cambridge!

 

14th – I felt for the regular followers of this blog, having put up with my ramblings for far too long  (do I hear faint cried of Hear hear?) so I dug out an interesting pistol from the recesses of the collection I inherited from my father.   It’s French, by the well known Paris gunmaker Le Page and is a large bore percussion pistol firing superimposed charges – it has two cocks and a single bore into which two loads are placed, one after the other.  The right hand nipple leads to the front charge, and the left hand nipple leads directly to the rear charge.  It has a single trigger that releases one cock at a time – if both cocks are at full cock, the first pull fires the front charge, and the second pull the rear charge, but if only the left cock is at full cock it fires that one (corresponding to the rear charge, so it would be a bit unfortunate if it was double loaded and you accidentally cocked the left cock and didn’t cock the right!   Maybe I will take the locks out and have a look at the mechanism that achieves this and put it on the site- I’d like to see how it shoots one day, its a big bore (a 20 bore cartridge just fits into the muzzle) for a relatively light pistol and must have used a pretty small charge.  Obviously you need to get the loading dead right to make sure the flame channels line up with the charges  – I can feel a dummy loading coming on………

Anyway here it is – more in the new post ‘LePage pistol’

13TH – Sorry, no time for guns today.  Up at 5:30 to start the car boot at 6:30 – madness!   Anyway I did get rid of a fair bit of junk from the attic, and made a bit of pocket money, but still loads to go.  One booter explained to me that my cameras and lenses were too good and should be on Ebay in September when the courses in photography and art begin as they all use film cameras.  So next target is to bite the bullet and do a bit of ebaying after the holidays – to that end I got out all the kit I used for 1 hour for making an underwater video of the reaction of fish to seismic surveying in Mexico and getting it working so I could sell it – its a bit old but good and it still works…..

12th August – Quiet day – I’m doing another car boot sale tomorrow in the hope of clearing some more space in the attic – I seem to have loads of camera stuff to get rid of – including a camera from a Spitfire – a 12 Volt electric cine camera that ran at the same frame rate as the guns fired – by coincidence there was a Spitfire parked in the middle of Newmarket today – on display. It was a non-flying one without a Merlin engine, but it had apparently taken someone 30 years to make and it did look pretty convincing inside and out.  I packed up a few gun related  bits to send off – part of my current plan to get rid of all the things I don’t want to keep  – my trouble is usually that as soon as I have reluctantly parted with anything, a sudden and urgent demand drops, metaphorically speaking, through the letterbox.  A couple of years ago I dumped a load of plastic parts I’d had made for a seabed system over 10 years before, that I thought had gone out of use years ago,  The bins went at 10 o’clock in the morning and an email asking if I still had any came at 4 p.m. the same day out of the blue! – that bit of clearing out cost me a few hundred pounds.   Similarly I dumped  2 large boxes of patent reprints from about 15 years before, only to get a query re similar patents 2 days later.  My current policy is ‘ If you can easily buy another one or its junk it goes, if not , keep it).

11th August – Looking further at the theoretical loads for black powder muzzle loaders, since by Newtons law force = mass x acceleration,  to keep the acceleration constant as we increase the shot load, we need to increase the force in proportion to the shot weight, so  1 1/2 oz shot load needs 1 1/2 times the powder used for a 1 oz load  and so on.  Simple really – more or less the same powder charge for the same shot load whatever the bore size (within sensible limits – probably works for 16 to 12 bore?).   That at least is the simple theory – but we all know life is not quite like that.   The hammer of the Steven Grant of a few days ago has now been expertly welded and filed up and I got it back to engrave.  The previous botched repair had had some re-engraving done to a similar botched standard, and some of it was still extant – we didn’t file it all off as the spur of the repaired hammer was already slightly slimmer than the original – anyway, I re-engraved it as best I could in the circumstances and it now looks a reasonable match for the right hand hammer – its a real fiddle doing hammers because of the compound curves, and some cuts are almost impossible – I used my lining graver as a sort of scraper to put lines down the middle of the hammer where the spur joins the body as you can’t get a conventional graver to the correct angle to cut.   I’m happy that it looks a lot better than it did, and it is now strong enough to stand any normal use.  Its all back together now and ready to go.

 

10th August – Went for an ‘informal’ shoot at Eriswell with half a dozen of the AML gang – I decided that I was going to get to the bottom of my failure to get any of my flintlocks to go off properly fast when others could load them and get them to work well!  I took my Twigg (see Twigg puzzle) which doesn’t have a link on the mainspring or a roller frizzen but should still be reasonable, and it has always given very few misfires.  I had tried various priming powders I had, including some OB ( the AML preferred primer) that I had bought at great expense so today I tried the OB again, expecting good results, but disappointment again – then I compared my ‘OB’ with Viking’s and we realised that mine was a lot coarser, in fact not OB at all!  I don’t know how that happened, but somewhere in the supply chain I had been given the wrong stuff – probably Swiss No 1.  Anyway Viking very kindly lent me a small flask of ‘proper’ OB and lo and behold I managed to break a few clays with a flintlock – quite a breakthrough for me.   While wandering from stand to stand I got to thinking about charge sizes, as muzzle loading folk use a variety of bore sizes from 6 to 20 or so, although mostly in the range 10 to 16 bore.  We seem to more or less ignore bore size in discussing what powder charge we are using, although most of us use quite similar shot loads and, for percussion guns, similar barrel lengths.  Anyway I thought I’d try to work out a theoretical optimum based on some simple physics (that being the only sort I can do while wandering about!).   Basically, a given weight of black powder converts to a given amount of gas, so to accelerate a similar shot load to a given velocity through a similar distance the force on the wad needs to be the same.   The fixed amount of powder converts to a fixed volume of gas, which generates a pressure that is inversely proportional to the volume – and for a fixed length of barrel that is proportional to bore area.  But the force driving the fixed weight of shot down the barrel is generated by the pressure acting on the wad, and for a given velocity and shot weight the force must be the same – the force is given by the pressure times the area.  So  for a fixed powder and shot load we have pressure proportional to 1/area and force proportional to pressure times area – so the area of the bore disappears from the calculation – so theoretically we should use the same powder charge for the same shot load irrespective of bore size. which is somewhat counter intuitive!  It does ignore practical considerations like the friction of the wad on the barrel walls, and speed of burning and the buildup of pressure etc. but in principle it explains why we can all talk about that powder charge we use without specifying too carefully what bore our guns are.

9th August – A visit from a Yorkshire muzzle loader down south to visit Holts – we had a very pleasant few hours looking at some of my collection and a few he had brought with him – He had brought a cased Beaumont Adams revolver in 54 bore so I showed him my almost identical one – I have an empty case I was going to put it in so I photographed his case and label to give me something to work on.  He had a bullet mould with his that didn’t have the spiggot on the base that holds the wad on the original Adams revolvers – I don’t know when it was dropped.  I have a rather beaten up early Adams stamped 56 bore that is unusual in that the action is the mirror image of the normal action – the cylinder rotates anticlockwise and when you remove the pin it drops out on the left side – a few were made like that by Tranter – I am not sure why, possibly for left handed shooters, although it seems it would be only a slight advantage to the shooter, and a significant trouble to reverse all the parts.  My visitor brought a nice 16 bore percussion rifle with a fairly authentic looking peep sight on the back, although like my Samuel Nock rifle, the pinhole in its lowest position is much higher than the bead of the foresight, so it won’t sight at shorter ranges.   I suspect that the peep sight had been adapted to fit the gun, but whether the foresight was meant to be replaced, as I have done, or it was only shot at longer ranges isn’t clear.   I think, as I’ve said eleswhere, that these rifles were shot with quite light powder charges (1 1/2 dr) so the velocity was quite low and the drop at range would have been considerable – even so I’d think that the sights would not be much use below about 200 yards or more.   When I get our a few of my guns I always end up realising how many still have things to attend to – like finishing the locks on the Lancaster  double rifle!  And stripping and documenting and repairing the enclosed lock J R Cooper patent percussion gun.   I did venture into the workshop and made a nipple for the New Land Hanovarian conversion – it turned out that the nipple hole was a good fit for 9/32 B.S.F. for which I have taps and dies.  I always turn the nipple thread end and cut the thread and drill the bottom bit of the hole, then rough down the nipple area and part it off, then put a tapped block in the chuck and screw in the nipple and finish it off.  I stood the nipple up in the vice with lead on the jaws and filed the square – normally my filing is a bit wonky, but this one was good!  I hardened it with Blackley’s colour case hardening powder to colour it down – I probably ought to temper it a bit- I usually take them to a purple-blue if I’m going to shoot them, so they don’t fracture – I’m using EN8 steel.  It could be a bit longer and a bit fatter to hold the nipple better and so that it doesn’t come off when the cock is on the bolt, but it will do for the time being…. I don’t intend to shoot it…….

Could probably do with a bit of rusting etc!  It looks a bit new.

Cased Beaumont Adams 54 bore revolver

 

8th August – Had a couple of chaps from ‘Green Deal’ here insulating my roof for free, courtesy HM government, with 12 inches of glass wool.  When they first came to do it a couple of weeks ago they  couldn’t get through the 10 inch square loft opening so they sent a different team today who made me a nice hatch into the loft, which I had been meaning to do for years – in fact for 23 years since we moved in – and then laid the insulation!   And all free!  The only downside is that clearing the landing of books, pictures and ‘treasures’ like an original ticker tape machine and an old railway ‘train on line’ single line working indicator so they wouldn’t get covered in dust just showed up how much the decoration had got tatty since it  was done about 20 years ago.  So I suppose that is a job to be done now the place is empty…………better see if I still have the original can of paint handy!  I really think decoration should last 50 years, but it was done with distemper which is a bit fragile………  Dick had a go at sorting the hammer of the Stephen Grant (see a couple of days ago)  and it became clear that it had at some point in the past had the spur completely broken off and very badly welded back on without any penetration – hence it was so weak it eventually broke on the impact of the hammer on the firing pin.  It will be fixed properly this time!

7th August – I took some photos of a relic I saw in someone’s collection of bits and pieces on the way to be destroyed so that I could put one on this website – its an early centrefire double 12 bore to Joseph Needham’s patent 1544 of 1862 with what Cruddington describes as Rotating single bolt snap action.  The lever pivots on a shaft near the top of the action face and works a bolt that moves out from just below the  action face, giving it an advantageous leverage.  The unusual feature of Needham’s patent is that the lever has an ‘elbow’ that moves the hammer to half cock as it is depressed.  A similar ‘elbow’ fixed to the other end of the shaft cocks the left hammer to half cock.   The date of Needham’s patent indicates that it may have been made from 1862, although the gun and variations of it sold well, and the patent was also taken up by Holland and Westley Richards.  The locks are missing, but could be from before or after rebounding locks were invented around 1867….. although it hardly needs rebounding locks as the hammers are lifted out of the way before the gun is finally opened.  Shame this is all that is left of the gun….  On the subject of patents, I looked again at the Stephen Grant illustrated below with the cracked cock and noticed the action face was stamped E.C. Hodges Patent  257, the 257 being a serialisation not the patent number.  The patent is No 3113 of 1865 for a firing pin that is in line with the axis of the bore – achieved by a rather indirect coupling between the firing pin hit by the hammer, and a separate bit that fires the cap – you can’t see anything from outside.   The Grant gun does not have rebounding locks so probably dates between 1865 and about 1870 . I gather that the hammer failed due to the shock of it stopping when it hit the firing pin and the nut around it, and that it was known to have a fault.  I has now gone to be very carefully welded by our expert Jason at Speciality Welders in Haverhill.   The fun thing about these early breech loaders is that there were so many patents and variations, and  examples of many of them still exist.

Needham’s patent 3113 of 1865  –  The ‘elbow’ that lifts the breast of the hammer to half cock position can be seen on the back of the lever.  A similar elbow is fixed on the other end of the cross shaft.

The bolt is close to the action face – I’m not sure of the function of the little spring near the hinge pin.

6th August – I picked up one gun to play with at CGC yesterday – an early Stephen Grant hammer gun with Jones underlever and non rebounding locks that had a cracked cock.  The owner wanted the cock replaced with a casting because he was not convinced that a welding job would be strong enough.  The crack is at the back of the spur and so must have been caused by the gun being dropped butt first and the spur catching on something pretty solid – or some similar action, but not over enthusiastic cocking which would crack it from the front. (p.s. it cracked from the shock of hitting the  firing pin and surrounding nut as there was a fault in the metal almost fully across the spur).  In order to replace the cock with a casting, the existing cock would need to be repaired carefully to match its opposite number exactly, which would probably involve welding it back  in position.  A silicone resin cast would then be made to form a mould for a wax to be cast, the wax would then be mounted on a ‘tree’ with lots of other wax castings of other moulds, dipped repeatedly in suspensions of fireclay and sand to form a composite mould, then dried out carefully and finally heated in a furness to melt out the wax – molten steel is then poured into the near white hot ceramic mould to make the steel casting.  Some detail is inevitably lost in the three transfers  ( part to mould, mould to wax, steel to ceramic mould), and there is some shrinkage in the wax and in the steel so that the final casting is some 2 to 5% smaller than the original.   Looking at the cracked cock I am sure it can be repaired as strong as it was  originally, although I would get Jason to do the welding rather than attempt it myself to be on the safe side.  I’ll take it to Dicks when I get a chance to get his opinion, but I don’t think a casting will match the right hand cock particularly well, even if I re-engrave it carefully.

Pretty gun – It must have been quite a blow on the back of the cock, or else there was a bad defect in the metal. – Under the microscope it looks like the latter – there wasn’t much good metal holding it on, just a thin skin at the back, the rest of the break is an old fault.

5th August – One benefit of keeping this blog up to date is that when I got to CGC today to shoot I was handed a plastic bag of 16 bore cards in response to my blog that I had run out!  Thanks Bev!   I did the competition in the morning with my trusty Egg muzzle loader with mixed results, but I felt that my lesson had got me back on track as most of my misses were at tricky clays.  In the afternoon I used the Beretta hammer 20 bore, which I didn’t do too badly with, although I did realise, prompted by some recollections from Viking, that it had a pretty tight choke in both barrels (at least half choke or nearly full ) – apparently typical of Beretta hammer guns from the 1950s.  Anyway it seems to throw a pretty tight pattern compared to the typical modern 12 bore so I’ll use that as an excuse for not hitting more clays!   I think it does need the trigger pull regulated – possibly just the sear spring taken down a bit and a bit of polishing on the nose of the sear – I will consult Dick, who is much more used to modern guns than I am.  I had another look at the Lees 8 bore percussion gun that I described  earlier as a wildfowling gun, but we decided that it wasn’t heavy enough – wildfowl guns were meant to shoot large shot loads and were pretty heavy to control the resultant recoil  – this was only about 7 to 8 lbs, so was probably a live pigeon gun.  Anyway the consensus was that 3 to 3 1/2 drams of Czech powder (2 3/4 of Swiss) was plenty enough, with 1  1/8 to  1  1/2 oz. of shot.  A 12 lb wildfowling 8 to 6 bore might shoot 5 to 6 drams and 2 or 2 1/2 ox of shot if one felt brave enough.

4th August – Off at Cambridge Gun Cub all day – Martin was kindly giving me a lesson, which certainly highlighted where I was going wrong – I now need to get that embedded in my reflexes so I don’t shoot with my conscious brain!  Difficult for someone who likes to think about everything and is prone to analyse.  Very well worth it, and my little 20 bore suits me well, although Clare thought the trigger pull was a bit heavy – I’ll check it out when I can find some 20 bore snap caps.  After my lesson we entertained a party of newcomers to muzzle loading to give them a chance to try both percussion and flint  – I think I used up my entire supply of  16 bore cards so I may have to scrounge some for the regular Anglian Muzzle Loaders’ shoot tomorrow – or make some if I have time after cleaning my guns from today and making bread ( not, I hope, gunpowder or oil flavoured!).  I need to take some 1/4 BSF nipples for a fellow M/L shooter if I can find some.  I could actually do with some more myself as the nipples in my ‘working’ muzzle loading double are getting a bit mushroomed and the caps don’t fit properly – I did try to grind them a little on my fine diamond hone, so I think that will act as a holding operation!  I might have a go at making some more titanium nipples – the last ones were good, although its early days yet as they have only fired 30 or 40 shots so far.

3rd August – I had a very pleasant day cruising on the Thames on a narrow boat, and came across an amazing sight at Caversham Lock – we came up behind a convoy of amphibious vehicles waiting to go down the lock.  There was every kind of amphibious vehicle you could wish to see, from a Citroen estate car with a big outboard on the back to a number of military amphibians, in a rally from all over Europe that apparently attracted some 55 entrants.  The military vehicles included  a couple of amphibious U.S. army Jeeps circa 1939 and a couple of US Personel Carriers that looked really interesting – they had apparently been designed and made in 3 months for the Normandy landings and were intended to have an operational life of 3 weeks!  And here they were more than 70 yeas later, still in very good condition and fully functional – amazing.  I had a very interesting conversation with the organiser (from UK) about a book I remembered reading some 50 years ago called Half Safe about a chap who crossed the Atlantic in an amphibious Jeep ( in the 1950s?) with his newly acquired wife  –  according to my informant she left him as soon as her feet touched dry land, but he knew much more of the story and indeed he had the manuscripts of two further books describing his continuation round the world, which apparently have been published – I must follow them up!  I didn’t see a British DUWK amphibious vehicle amonst those waiting, but most of the vehicles/boats  had already gone through the lock.  On the shooting front, which after all is what this blog is supposed to be about, I’m off to Cambridge Gun club tomorrow for a shooting lesson to see if I can get a bit more consistency into my shooting – I’ll take my usual muzzle loader, the D Egg double with back action locks, plus my Miruku 12 bore and the Beretta 20 bore hammer gun I bought recently.  So we shall see if lessons do me any good!  I’ll report back, unless I turn out to be so bad that I want to keep quiet about it!

1st August – The year rushes on!  And I spent most of the day on the telephone with the service department trying to sort out a friend’s alarm system – I think in the end I got there….  I just had time to get back to micro-engraving this evening, so I thought I’d see  how I got on with curved letters at the 1/2 mm scale… Finding words that only have curved caps in them is difficult – you only have 2 vowels to play with , U & O, which limits vocabulary somewhat!  there are several that end in ..USS or ..OSS but I couldn’t come up with a complete sentence!  Anyway engraving curved letters is an order of magnitude more difficult than the straight line caps and I had to revert to EN8 steel to get it right – I also need a tool with an almost non-existent heel or it drags round the bends and spoils the  shape.   I can just about do 1/3 mm (13 thou) but a bit ragged!  In the end I  started to engrave round the edge of a 1 p piece, which worked out well…    Today was almost a record for visits to the site  270 so far today and 37 referrals from search engines.. I can usually see from the search words why they got to this site, but today I was left wondering how a search for ‘ oil field Bator’ on Bing directed someone to this site, maybe I’ll try myself!  – I just did and I’m none the wiser!   I am sorry that I’ll probably not be posting until Friday as I have a very busy few days and evenings….  I’ll have to think of something appropriate to engrave round the edge of my 1 p piece – a good use for what is becoming a completely useless coin.

30th July – I left at 6 a.m. to go to the car boot sale at Fulbourn- I only do them when I feel that I must clear some space in the attic  – it has to be pretty desperate for me to raise the energy, but it was, so I did!  I actually got rid of a lot of stuff in to the ‘zombies’ in the first ten minutes at the prices I wanted, and ended up taking very little home with me in the way of bulky things. So successful was it, in fact that I might have another go before long and clear out some more stuff……..   I even had a wildfowler on the stand who had a muzzle loader at home – I suggested he might look at this website, so welcome if you do!   Having another look at the New Land, I think it would improve things if I did de-rust the lockplate and the cock – I probably won’t strip the lock first – we’ll see what happens!

29th July – Today there were 5 times as many visitors attempting to hack this site as there were legitimate users!   They probably represent a few hundred warped individuals using botnets hosted on the computers (or routers) of unsuspecting  owners – there are tens of thousands of  routers in use that have a shocking vulnerability that makes them very easy to load with rogue software.  Most of them get permanently blocked from accessing this site, but it all makes work!  I finished off the New Land as far as I planned to go, but I’m now wondering if it would look better if I derusted the cock and lockplate – I will contemplate the issue!  I spent the afternoon filling the Land Cruiser with ‘stuff’ to take to a car boot sale tomorrow – not so much to make money as to get rid of clutter – I’ll probably give most of it away for a few pence  rather than bring it home!  I love the ‘zombies’ at car boot sales who descend on you the moment you arrive and want to see what you have so that they can buy anything they think they will be able to sell on for more – they almost climb into the car in their rush to uncover supposed treasures – I contemplate just having an auction on the spot and getting rid of the whole car contents in one go and leaving – the chap in the buchers’ shop suggested I might throw in my car as well, but I wouldn’t want to put potential buyers off!   So that is most of tomorrow written off!  Anyway, here is the Hanoverian New Land as of today…….

I probably ought to recover the background board!  More pics in the New Land post.

28th July – Where has the summer gone?  I lit the woodburner this evening for a bit of cheer!  The New Land is almost done – a nice sticky layer  of ‘slakum’  ( linseed oil & beeswax & driers ) is just setting up on the stock at the moment, and the barrel looks OK so I should have the finished photos tomorrow.  I spent the day struggling to get a control system to talk to the internet – frustrating… So I reverted to the mind numbing activity of trying to engrave smaller and smaller writing!   I decided that my EN8 steel is a bit soft so I changed to hard brass – usually a pig to engrave, but good for very small things.  It is difficult to do letters with curves in them, especially ‘S’s and ‘B’s so I tried a short sentence that only had straight letters – WE ALL LIVE IN A HAZE – which just about sums life up.  When I have mastered the straight line letters I’ll have a go at the curved ones, but I think I will have to come up with a more suitably shaped graver.  Here is my test piece – the scale is in 1/2 mm divisions (20 thou)  so the letter heights from the top line are  about  2/3 m.m. (26 thou),  1/2 mm  (20 thou) , 1/3 mm ( 13 thou) ,  1/4 mm (10 thou)   and 1/6th mm  (6 thou).  By the time I got to  1/6th mm I had to stop putting serifs on the letters as I was running out of magnification on the microscope (max x 25) and I didn’t have an arm steady for my right arm.  My aim is to get to 1/4 mm including curved letters but it is quite challenging!   Why bother, I hear you ask – there is no answer!

Click on the photo for a clearer view.

 

27th July – I went with Dick to deepest Norfolk to visit a fellow collector – as usual we took a few choice pieces to show and looked at some interesting guns including a little single barrel hammer  shotgun with Jones underlever engraved below the knuckle with the words ‘converted by Richards Norwich’.  We spent some time trying to work out what the conversion had been from.  It could not have been from percussion as the breech had integral lumps etc,  there was no sign of a notch for a pinfire, and the cock would have been funny if it had reached the pin, and the firing pin was obviously part of the original design.  It couldn’t have been from a rifle as there was no sign of a rear sight mount, so we were left with a change of calibre – the barrel seemed too light for good balance, and the breech seemed too thin.  We surmised that it was now a 24 bore ( there were once cartridges in that size) from the 25 stamped under the barrel between two Birmingham proof marks – we didn’t have a bore gauge.  What gauge it was before ‘conversion’ we couldn’t guess – possibly 28 bore?  Anyway it kept us amused for a while.  We also saw a fine Blunderbuss with a Forsythe scent bottle lock that had come from a Bonham’s sale – it was in near perfect condition, but not looking quite like a perfect sleeper – it had apparently been in the Holland and Holland collection in the past and I thought that it had probably ‘gone through the works’  at Holland’s at some point.  The trouble with extensive refinishing of a gun is that it leaves you wondering if it could be a complete fabrication, although in this case I think not.  I took the New Land pattern to show as it has the clever safety bolt – the main purpose of the bolt is that it blocks the cock very securely from hitting the nipple but holds it fairly close so that a cap on the nipple cannot come off but cannot be fired, even if the pistol is dropped on the cock, until the pistol is put on half cock – some way back from the bolted position – and the bolt withdrawn.  The bolt has a spring fixed within the false breech acting in one of two grooves in the underside of the bolt so that it is firmly held in the lock or the free position.  This means the pistol can be carried with a cap on the nipple and the cock let down onto the bolt in complete safety – it can then be fired without having to fumble for a cap – put it on half cock, move bolt to left, full cock fire……   Clever and safe!     Unfortunately my pistol got banged on the butt cap, which dislodged one of my repairs that I’d stuck on with superglue that had not for some reason done its job properly – I have now glued a new piece in using Araldite and used an Araldite walnut dust mix to fill in any gaps.  The barrel is still rusting but the tang nail is finished – 20 minutes in the derusting tank with the voltage reversed so it acts as a rusting tank  dulled it down enough to look OK.   It had had a going over with Blackley’s colour case hardening compound which basically makes everything look greyish.

26th  July – After a morning spent struggling with websites I thought to make the tang nail for the New Land Pattern – making screws being one of my favourite things (Julie Andrews singing in the background…….). Having established that it was about 1 B.A., and having a 1 B.A. die I went out to the outside workshop where my lathe is, to begin turning a piece of 10 mm rod to size – BUT turning the handwheel on the saddle didn’t move it, so no nail without first stripping the saddle which is a pain and I’d forgotten how it came apart… Anyway it was a 5 m.m. roll pin that had come out or sheared – I didn’t find the parts but I had some spares so it is now fixed and the screw made – first a blank with a false head as below, then make it fit and mark the lower flange with the slot alignment, cut off the top and put in the slot and finish the head ( on a grindwheel and a 240 diamond hone and a fibre wheel.  Having done that I’m not sure if the military pistols would have bothered to align the slots.  I would put up a photo of it finished but its in the cellar being rusted…. along with the breech end of the barrel –  here is an out of focus photo of the nail start – I don’t often get photos out of focus – I use manual focus, and because my camera is up high so that I can put things on the bench to photograph, I use the camera screen and magnify to get a dead sharp focus where I want it.  I almost always use around f6.3 aperture as it gives a compromise between image sharpness and depth of field, and lets me use the room lighting, or sometimes with a white LED  panel handheld to show some particular feature.  Using the screen to focus means that the reflex mirror is already up when the shutter is released, thus minimising any camera shake in case the tripod isn’t steady enough.

I had to grind the thread end a bit, as it was too long.

26th July – Had a  bit of a battle with the website as I couldn’t log on due to my having changed a file to try to stop people logging on to disrupt the site – so I suppose it served me right – but then I tied to sort it and made the site so that no-one could even look at it! Oops….   Anyway I spent some time moving files from my other WordPress websites and generally fiddling in a desperate attempt to regain entry – a case of thrashing about like a headless chicken… Anyway, as you might gather from the fact that you and I are here now, I succeeded!   I’m getting on with the New Land pattern – the stock is looking good – I’m pretty happy that it is now finished.  I made new pins to hold the trigger guard and trigger in place using lengths of an old steel knitting needle, so that leaves getting the browning on the barrel sorted where I stupidly derusted the breech area some time ago, and making a nipple for top hat military caps.  I am unsure what thread they are – since the breech block was made in Germany, it could be anything.  The metric system was first   realised in France in 1799, abandoned in 1812, and readopted in 1837, but didn’t become a true international standard until 1875.  The thread looks like 26 or 28 t.p.i – anyway finer that the 20 t.p.i. of an Enfield musket.  I think 9/32 x 26 t.p.i. will fit if I make it a bit oversize and swage it in the hole!  The only problem is that I have a plug tap in 9/32 x 26 but no die!  I keep buying odd taps and dies but never have the size I want apart from my set of UNF & UNC up to No 8.

25th July – I now know the origin of the converted New Land pattern thanks to a German follower of the blog – it was converted in Hanover  for the Hanoverian Artillery  around 1844.  see http://www.waffensammler-kuratorium.de/HannArtillerie/hannArtillerieti.html     see also on the post on this blog….  Thank you Joerg!    So now I know its an interesting pistol, not just a boring conversion I had better sort it out!   At some time I started to repair it by gluing in a new bit of wood on the butt, and re-gluing a chip the other side – but I think it was before I had much idea about these things and I got the chip a bit displaced.   There was a ragged chunk missing around the barrel bolt on the muzzle end of stock, and when I came to dig it out I found that quite a lot of the ‘wood’ was pretty weak filler – one thing I have learnt is that it is easier to repair things if you cut back to a clean surfaces with the minimum number of  faces, all flat… see teh New Land Hanovarian conversion post for more photos..

The break down the back face of the cutout bit is from the pin that held the bolt in – I guess someone pulled the bolt out too far and broke off a chunk of wood with the pin and bolt – they tried to use filler, but most fell out……. I’ve cut it all away.

 

24th Off to King’s Lynn to listen to 17 yr old nephew Ben’s composition played as part of the King’s Lynn music festival by a  professional string quartet  – amazing what the young can achieve given the opportunity.  That is why I run my club for primary school children – left completely to their own devices they (mostly aged 8 & 9) planned and put on a presentation to parents with comperes, computer presentations and live displays of their  Lego Mindstorms robotic devices.  A big problem of today’s education system is that the kids are not given the opportunity to screw something up without it being labelled as failure!    While in that part of Norfolk we visited Castle Rising castle – a splendid castle of 1140 with the usual changes and additions – mostly sadly a ruin but with a couple of rooms in the forebuilding – I always come away from places like that dreaming of reconstructing them – strictly a dream as any messing about with historic ruins is definitely a no-no in the heritage trade!  …. All that by way of saying I didn’t have time to do anything with guns!   However, my contacts in the muzzle loading shooting game continue to multiply – I had a call from  someone who wants a shootable double 10 bore – but not a heavy wildfowl gun of 12 lbs – email me if you have one for sale – see CONTACT.   Talking of lbs and inches, I guess after Brexit we will no longer be allowed to use Kg and metric measures – I bought a metric ruler today in case they become unavailable…………………………………………………..

23rd July – very heavy rain – ‘fun’ unblocking overflowing gutters!   I flashed up my furnace as I thought I’d see about a bit of aluminium casting but the element was broken so I had to stretch and install the spare which means partially disassembling the insulation bricks – still it wasn’t too bad to do and its up and running now.  In the process of finding the break I discovered that I’d got the live and neutral wires swapped at the main switch (unlike in the US, our power lines are not balanced about earth) so I put that right, it didn’t make any difference  but is inelegant. I also added a switch so I can use the P.I.D. controller to monitor the cooling temperature with its output disconnected from the heater, to save having to reset the temperature to room temp.

The number of visitors to the site, the number of  visits within the site and the number of search engine hits is rising slowly but hasn’t quite reached the heady heights of last winter!  The site gets a lot of spurious visits from ‘bots’ trying to log in – the blog is supposed to be protected from them and they can’t do anything as they  can’t find the real login entry – I’m sure the site is safe from them, but I think they may be added to the visitors count and I’m trying to work out how to avoid this.

22nd July – photo of the tap wrench below as promised. Casting around for some thing to post, I picked up an old New Land pistol that has been converted to percussion – its on my list of things to love,but hasn’t got there yet.  BUT it has a nifty safety catch that I haven’t come across before, and as I’m sure someone ‘out there’ will tell me all about it, I decided to put a some photos  on the site – for more see Post ‘New Land Pistol Conversion’

Magic tap wrench – the top part swivels +/- 90 degrees for unscrewing or screwing taps in awkward places – it will shift the toughest fittings! Top jaw is sprung.  It latches onto the nut and can be used as a ratchet with care.

New Land with plain New Land pattern lock converted to percussion with new breech block with cross bolt safety shown in ‘safe’ position

21st July  -Turns out I hadn’t finished work so I missed yesterday, except that I did pop down to Dick’s with the funny pistol I had engraved – he was pleased, which is just as well as there is no going back!  Bit like being a brain surgeon or a bomb disposal expert, but with somewhat less critical outcomes!   Actually I’ve always thought I would have been temperamentally suited to either career – probably not so, but one can always fantasize.  Anyway, enough nonsense….  I got round to fitting a new kitchen tap today – I was reminded what a fantastic tool the tap wrench is – I’ll post a picture in case anyone hasn’t met one yet.  But I did a bit of engraving too – I got back to playing with tiny engraving which involves grinding up some very small tools and trying to cut lettering in smaller and smaller sizes – I polished the tools on half micron diamond paste on a ceramic lap (horribly expensive – around £180 I seem to remember) but the finish still isn’t fantastic.  I tried engraving the EN8 plate I had annealed but it is a bit soft and the unannealed plate is better as it provides a bit more resistance to the tool.  It is relatively easy to engrave readable lettering 1/2 mm tall, and 1/3 mm is OK too – I did manage to get down to 1/4 mm – I am thinking of changing my name to get rid of the O in my surname as its the only curved letter in my usual short name, and curves are much more difficult to cut at that scale than straight lines.  No photos of that as its a bit difficult to take them.  I did manage to photograph the last of the guns I borrowed from Dick to put on the site. Its an 1853(?) French ‘ Le Faucheux a Paris’ 16 bore pinfire converted to centrefire – photo here, I’d be interested in any more info anyone has on similar guns.  (More on Post ‘French 16 bore’)

 

19th July  Almost finished my recent gainful employment so I can retire again!  I’ll have to un-retire when I do Gile’s flat, although that is taking forever to get completed as there are 7 parties in the transaction – a company selling on behalf of the executors of the previous owner, the executors, the vendor’s solicitors, Giles’s solicitors, the leaseholder and the selling agents, plus Giles!   So each iteration takes about a month to sort!   Anyway I did manage to steal the odd hour to go and finish Dick’s pistol – I’ll have to take it to him tomorrow, and see what delights he has to offer.  I have one more gun to photograph and put here when I get a moment.

 

I can see a few bits that need touching up!  Always the same when you photograph anything – you look at it with different eyes!

It does look different in the flesh as the metal is shiny  and the contrast is greater.

 

17th July – I put up a full post on the furnace for info……………….See ‘Heat Treatment Furnace’

I have almost finished the tang of ‘another one of Dick’s funny pistols’ – just got to put some structure on the raised bits, but it looks better than I expected so far…..  A few things I would do differently if I did it again, but life is like that!

16th July  Lawns today!  I did a bit more on the tang of Dick’s second funny pistol – I dread to think how many cuts it takes to do the backgrounds but I guess when its finished there will be well over 1000 cuts in the engraving – judging by the rate at which I’m having to sharpen gravers, I’ll have done about 60 and re-ground about 15 of those with broken points!  I have swapped to using the gravermax for the background lines as it keeps its edge better and is easier to avoid over-running into the raised areas.    Not sure I’ll have much time tomorrow………

15th  July – I used the furnace for the first time, annealing a piece of EN8 steel for an engraving test piece at about 900 degrees C.  I got the PID controller and wired it in and checked it – using a decent voltmeter and the tables for a K type thermocouple I reckon the controller under -reads by about 30 degrees at high temperature, and it doesn’t seem to get up to the set temperature but starts to cycle while still below it – still, with the voltmeter and tables I can set the PID controller to a temperature that gives the result I want.  Anyway it worked!  I had the piece of steel in an envelope made from stainless & titanium foil from Brownells & crimped tightly to exclude air so that I didn’t have to deal with any scale on the surface after the heat treatment  – that was a great success, there was a very light colouration on the surface of the metal – as with tempering it, but no loss of metal – definitely recommended for heat treatments above about 5 or 600 degrees C.  I wasn’t absolutely sure if the metal in the envelope really got as hot as the furnace, but it took almost on hour to get up to temperature, and I held it there for at least 20 minutes and cooled if very slowly, so I guess it did.  I must put another switch on the panel to disconnect the PID output so I can just use it as a temperature readout while it cools.  I also have a cooker control on the panel I can switch in to control the rate of cooling if necessary.   Its a really neat design – well done to the young lad who designed it – he’ll go far!

 

The two bolts sticking in the furnace bricks are blocking alternative holes for the thermocouple probe. 

I carried on with Dick’s ‘other funny gun – engraving the tang – I decided I’d experiment with a cut out background, so I came up with a design and started at the top – stages are ;- black the metal, scribe a rough design, cut outlines with a push graver, remembering that with cut backgrounds you need to make the raised bits slightly oversize and bold, then go round all the edges of the areas that will be cut out with the gravermax canted over so that you cut an almost vertical edge to the raised areas and a sloping edge to the cut areas – these cuts should be fairly deep.  Then cut out the background using closely spaced parallel cuts with a push graver – the skill is in starting close to an edge and NOT running into the raised area at the end of the cut, and keeping the cuts even.   As the graver wears down it will cut deeper and take more force to cut so you are more likely to slip at the end of the cut  – getting through the stages below needed 3 sharpenings of the gravermax graver, and 10 of the hand gravers.  I made a couple of small slips but fortunately nothing that couldn’t be burnished out with a polished carbide tool.

Outline design.

Cut edges of raised part more or less vertical

 

Cut background with closely spaced parallel lines – keep them as even and parallel as possible.  That leaves the internal detail to be done.

 

14th  July  More grappling with ‘Prior Art’ and suchlike.  I started to do the barrel and tang of Dick’s ‘funny gun No2’.  I got the rings round the breechblock done in traditional ‘fir tree’ design and put a plain border round the tang and screw hole- its a very narrow and long tang which presents a bit of a problem – its too narrow to put the ‘wiggly line and tadpoles’ on as it would leave a silly strip in the middle.  I had half an idea for the filling the space, but it involved lots of curves and I wasn’t sure if I could get the breechblock out – curves means rotating the part and with an 18 inch barrel that’s a pain  – anyway I did manage to get the breech out without using heat so that frees up the design a bit.   I have to do a practice for new designs, or if I haven’t done old ones for a while to refresh my muscle memory, and all the bits of plate I have are EN8 and not free cutting so they are difficult to cut and play havoc with the gravers – I will have to source some nice ‘soft as butter’ mild steel – most bits of the guns are better than my practice plates!  I’m sure the ones I learnt on were better or I’d never have got anywhere!   Will do some photography at the weekend and put up another gun – I have one sitting here, although its not a particularly puzzling one.

13th July  As a break from hunting patents and publications on the web I engraved the lock of ‘another funny gun’ of Dick’s to match the other borders, and invented a small motif for the tail as ordered, something a bit unusual was the order.  So the border is the wiggle with ‘tadpoles’ and I did a wreath for the motif – I did start to cross hatch it but that went wrong so I cut the surface back a bit and stippled it with the gravemaster and a slightly rounded point – it worked fairly well after a few tries – the wreath may need a cut or two to even it up, but it works OK.  We decided against putting a  spurious name on the lackplate in a fit of moral rectitude, despite the fact that its a Blackley casting!  Talking of which, I have been trying to persuade Dick that its wrong to put conjectural bits on the 1630 blunderbuss just because the owner asked him to make it look good – I was telling him that he ought to be awkward, like me.   I’m afraid I haven’t got round to photographing the next puzzle, so you will have to make do with the  JR Cooper patent (or not a patent as I believe is  the case) for tonight’s puzzle  gun.  With luck there will be a gun tomorrow – I was planning to go to Dick’s so I’ll try to hunt some more out – I don’t know how long I’ll be able to keep this up !

I haven’t tried stippling before and it took a while to get the effect even when I inked it – it probably still needs  more done to it. .

13th July Again the puzzle has been solved by Joerg who may just have an advantage since the last two were German guns – its to a Franz Jaeger patent of 1909 or a slight variation of it and again is a known design – see post still called Weird gun. I’ll have to try to find an English gun as a puzzle – can I suggest a look at the so far unsolved puzzle of the ‘J R Cooper patent hammerless percussion shotgun’ ?  see ‘latest updates’ – I’ve bumped it up so you can find it!  The puzzle is – is this the only one made? was it ever patented?  did it work?

12th July  Yesterday’s puzzle gun was solved very quickly and turned out to be a reasonably well known German pre 1914 design  – in fact when I went back to Dick’s this afternoon and said it’s a Collath gun he dived into his junk cupboard and produced another Collath that had been sleeved and re-chambered as a 20 bore!  He also brought out about 10 other junk guns of various degrees of interest and I looked them all over with a view to giving you something more challenging – and I found an amazing gun – almost unbelievably complex and so intriguing that I bought it back to photograph.  So this is tonight’s challenge – its a double 16 bore toplever opened boxlock non ejector, with a Deeley forend catch and steel barrels without any maker’s marks or names, with the number 2812 on it.   From the outside it looks quite normal although two pins rise from the top of the action body to signify that it is cocked.   See the post ‘Weird Gun’ for what is weird about it, and drop me a comment if you can throw any light on it!  ( I hope the post name will change when I know what it is!   Here is the side view, which is fairly normal……  Oh, and the proof marks look like post 1950 East German Suhl marks…..


Apart from the cocking indicators it could be any hammerless boxlock – but see post ‘Weird gun’ to explore the weirdness!

12th July  It turns out that my ‘French 16 Bore’ is in fact a German Collath  gun – thanks to Joerg who came back pretty quickly to my post.  I conveniently found an auction description (Holts Dec 2013 Lot 965) that confirms Collard chambered guns as antiques if kept as an ornament or  curiosity – which it certainly is – so no certificate needed!   It is difficult to exaggerate the power of the internet as a source of information!  He also pointed me to a website with a host of information on Collath shotguns , rifles and drillings and their special cartridges.

11th July   The STEM club children came good and did a really smooth presentation, so that was great and justifies our ‘hands off’ approach.   I was on school matters most of the day so everything else rather went by the board!  But duty calls, so I found another treat for you – a  French breechloader without any identification.  Its a 16 bore hammerless double gun with damasus barrels with an underlever that initially moves the barrels forward away from the breech faces while leaving the extractors behind.  Once the underlever has opened 90 degrees, further motion moves the barrel further and causes  the bolt that is attached to the underside of the barrel flat to disengage from the slot beneath the breech face, allowing the barrels to fall on a small hingepin at the front of the fore-end. Dropping the barrels disengages the pin that has been holding the extractors in the backward position. The process of opening the gun also cocks it.   There is a strange safety catch in the form of a butterfly nut on the top of the breech – when it is aligned fore and aft it is in the safe position and it obstructs the sight line down the barrel – when in the fire position at right angles to the sight line you can see across the middle of it, so it is immediately obvious when you come to shoot that the safety is still on – although it would be difficult to move it from one position to the other while it was anywhere near mounted.   It has the usual continental decoration of raised design against a punched background – possibly etched before punching – rather fine when viewed under the microscope.  I would be very interested in any suggestions of a maker or patent.   The gun has sling swivels as was common on continental shotguns, and the chambers appear to be highly tapered for the first 1.5 cm, loosing at least  .5mm in diameter – I don’t have a 16 bore snap cap or cartridges to try.  As before I have started a new Post with all the pictures on it  ( French 16 bore ).

10th July – Meeting in School this morning – its going to be a very schoolful week!  Tomorrow my science and technology club ( AKA the cardboard box club, after its favourite making material) is giving a presentation to the parents of the creations they have made using Lego Mindstorms – its going to be exciting as I leave it all to them to organise and do – there is usually a bit of chaos and confusion on the day, but my take is that its all part of the learning process! Its really not because I’m too lazy to help – honest!    Anyway I finished recutting the casting for the triggerguard for Dicks other funny pistol – I noticed when I looked at the photo that there were still a few cuts to add.

9th July – Splendid day’s sailing on the Orwell in the Cornish Coble – the wind was just perfect , not too strong but pretty steady and it was hot enough to be pleasant to be out in the breeze.   I’ve done a bit more engraving on Dick’s extraordinary pistol – the butt strap is now finished and I’m starting to recut the trigger guard which is a Blackley casting – the metal is pretty tough so I’m having to use the gravermax to cut it efficiently – I can cut it with a push graver, but gravers wear and loose tips much quicker with hand engraving than with the gravermax,  its not clear to me why that should be – at least the wear bit, I can understand the points surviving  on the gravermax  as it doesn’t put such strains on the tip at the end of cuts.

The Trigger guard casting will need quite a lot of work on the surface to get it right – but its usually best to recut the engraving once, before any other action, so that you can still decifer it before it gets a nasty layer of oxide on the surface. and you can just see where the lines went.

8th July  – a day away from reading patents!  Got the boat ready for sailing tomorrow, we are missing out on our Hebridian charter this year as our crew is unavailable  so are taking every opportunity to sail the dinghy.   When I was at Dick’s last week he had got out a pistol that he started restoring many years ago from a wreck someone found in a garden shed  – it turned into one of Dick’s famous flights of imagination but never got finished – we’ve all been there, haven’t we?  He had got as far as to get Geoff Moore to engrave the trigger plate but the rest was a work in progress – only without the progress!  Anyway he got it out and asked me to complete the engraving – lock, barrel and tang, trigger guard and the butt strap with a fitting for a stock.  So here is the pistol –  I got started on the butt strap tonight, I have had to keep the same borders as Geoff Moore started – not one I’ve seen before but it will do nicely, and is quick to do – its a wiggle line with tapered cuts in the wiggles – the line is cut in one go with the gravermax (cheating!) and the side cuts by hand.   I realised how nice it was to engrave a free cutting mild steel – its like butter compared to the bit of steel I was practicing on – no wonder I break so many points off gravers.

There IS a real antique buried somewhere inside this – quite a bit of the original wood is there but with a lot of additions!

I wish I had Dick’s eye for shapes – its a totally bizarre pistol- but so elegant in a French sort of way!

Geoff doesn’t do the traditional English style, but its quite continental and suitably elaborate – quite a challenge to put my work alongside his!.

The wiggles on the right haven’t had their separate cuts added yet.   I’ll leave the rest of it plain as its part of the grip.

7th July –  I’ve got a lovely gun for you tonight in my run of early breech loaders – this one is a bit later than the Joseph Lang guns of the last two posts – it is more or less the second hammerless breechloader design to reach any market after the Murcott patent 1003 of 1871.  Its made to patent No 284  of Gibbs and Pitt  of 1873, and has  an underlever that opens the gun and cocks the tumblers (if fired) and snaps shut.  It is a double bite closure with a spring driven bolt into the lump, and has a triggerplate action.   See post for more details of this lovely gun which is in very good condition, having been lapped and reproofed at some point.   I am a bit confused –  the gun is engraved ‘Gibbs & Pitt Patent  204 Bristol’ but the patent cited by Cridington & Baker is actually No 284 – I guess the engraver got it wrong.. Anyway I’ll put the rest on the post…..

6th July – I did my 9 hours work today so I can have a few minutes for the blog!    I’ll put up the other Joseph Lang photos in a new post – its a 14 bore double centrefire gun with his second pattern closing – the bolt has got a bit further from the hinge and the lever is now wrapped round the trigger guard instead of pointing forwards – its still a single bite inert bolting system.  When I get some spare time I’ve got an engraving job to do for Dick – another of his ‘funny’ pistols he is recovering from a rather sad antique – I had a little practice of the border that Geoff Moore cut on the finial  – I need to keep more or less the same border on all the bits – I have the lockplate, the backstrap to engrave  and the trigger guard to freshen as its a raw casting.  I’ll put up some photos when I get a mo……..

5th  July  – I should be beavering away, but I escaped to see Dick and he pulled out a stream of interesting old breech loaders for me to look at – he has lots of the ones illustrated in Cruddington and Baker’s books.  I was particularly looking for Joseph Lang guns as pictures are sought, and I found on in addition to my own.  Looking through his old guns I found a number of interesting guns in odd bore sizes  – I decided that I’d borrow three that were obselete calibre – a 14 bore Lang double centrefire, a really fine  Gibbs & Hill hammerless 10 bore and a little French 14 bore.   I’ll picture them all on separate posts for simplicity – J Lang Pinfire 16 bore (mine),  J Lang 14 bore double and  Gibbs and Hill 10 bore.  so far I’ve done my own Lang ;

 

5th July  Work has kept me a bit busy the last day or two, but I haven’t forgotten my responsibilities!   I emailed a MLAGB Black Powder contributor about a 16 bore Lang pinfire I have and he would like photos for a book he is writing on Lang – so that’s another job!  I fixed the furnace but haven’t had time to use it yet.  I have now resolved to thin out my gun collection a bit, so watch the GUNS FOR SALE tag in the next few months when I get a chance to take a few photos.

2nd July – Reading papers and patents today – boring so I went and cleaned and sanded the gunwales of the boat and fixed up the graphite crucible in my furnace, but the element broke and I had to take it to pieces to fix it.  I was hoping to melt some metal  for fun.

1 July  –  In a rare spare moment I drifted back to the engraving – the test plate I have is slightly hard – EN8 or somesuch – and is a bit difficult to work with hand tools so I tried the Gravermax pneumatic graver – it would be much easier if I could control it better, but at times it decides its going to cut very deep lines and at other times it behaves better – practice, practice, practice…….   One good feature is that it isn’t so prone to breaking off the points – I find that cutting out the background is a sure way to take the tips off the hand gravers!ocks

 

 Posted by at 3:12 pm
Apr 172018
 

___________________ DIARY _____________  _________

7th April – Gave up on Parcelforce after another ‘I’m very sorry but there is nothing I can do…’ so went and bought another basin and fittings for another £150.  Now I suppose there will be a fight to get the money back on the original order from Better Bathrooms!  I heard  today that E.J. Blackley, the founder of the eponymous company has died.  A great guy and a great inventive genius – the business continues to be run by his son Kevin.     I had a look at diamond sharpening stones, and was pleasantly surprised that the prices were considerably less than the last time I tried to buy one.  From  www.buybettertools.com  a 6 inch DMT (reliable brand) stone in 1200, 600 or 325 grit  costs 29.99 including VAT.   My very fine diamond stone is a DMT extra extra fine at 8000 grit, but I didn’t feel it was worth the cost (£101.99)  as it didn’t give a very good surface finish.  A half decent 6 inch x 2 inch Arkansas stone is going to cost at least £50, but with care you could make do with a  slip of 1 inch x 3 inches. (disclaimer – I have no connection with ‘buy better tools’ and have never used them, but the stones are branded so shop around for DMT diamond stones…)  I looked at optical visors before I got a microscope, and borrowed an expensive Optivisor, but it didn’t really do anything special for me that a cheap one didn’t do perfectly well.  As explained elsewhere, with simple optics there is a direct relationship between magnification and working distance  – the higher the magnification the shorter the working distance. A magnification of 3.5 is about right to give you enough room to engrave without sticking the graver in your nose.   A number of professional engravers use a single loupe or eyeglass in one eye, and engrave with their face very close to the work, but I find it very difficult.  I now rely entirely on my microscope which gives me magnifications from about 5 up to  x  25, but a decent stereo microscope that is suitable for engraving will cost you several hundred pounds secondhand, or about £600 or more for a Chinese version.  I found a very good second hand Wilde ( later Leica) with stand for the price of a new Chinese model.  I was lucky that the microscope I found had almost suitable magnifications for engraving, and I found an add on lens that made it perfect for my work.  The big advantage of a microscope is that the more complex optics breaks the relationship between magnification and working distance, so that I can have about  120mm of working distance at all magnifications I can use.  Don’t buy a microscope until you have checked out the magnifications available and the working distance- you need a low mag. of x5 or less, and are unlikely to need much above x25 even for very fine work.  A  working distance of around 120mm is good – much more and you can’t get your hands and eye into comfortable relative positions, much lee and there isn’t room for your hands between the objective lens and the workpiece.

6th April – Still tearing my hair out over my missing parcel which hasn’t materialised. Hours trying to phone just gets people who say ‘ terribly sorry, but there is nothing we can do’  – Its still in Birmingham as far as I can see, but in the digital pipeline and inaccessible to mere humans – it it doesn’t materialise tomorrow I’ll have to find a substitute.  The missing item is a bathroom basin that I need to replace one I have already taken to the dump, and I need the room  finished soon as it will be used next week.  It’s supposed to be delivered tomorrow, but I’m loosing hope…………………   Thinking about starting engraving, I realise there is quite a threshold to cross, because, althought it seems that it is a fairly simple process, you can’t really see well enough with the naked eye so you need an optical aid of some sort, which you won’t at first be used to using.  You also need some means of holding the workpiece, and  since the force you need to exert for engraving steel is quite high, the holding needs to be secure but you need to be able to move it with your other (left) hand and to use it to oppose the force of the engraving hand.  All this bearing in mind that in the beginning your graver will occasionally come out of the metal  suddenly and fly off and impale your other hand – all that without the complication of actually engraving.  Plus there is the problem of what you are going to engrave!  I haven’t managed to find a source of suitable soft, uniform steel with a fine or polished surface in pieces that are handy for engraving.  I usually buy cold rolled mild steel bar in 6 or 8 x 50 mm in 3m lengths and get it cut into 150mm lengths by the supplier  ( I need to check who is best)  and then get a local firm to surface grind it, but I haven’t found anyone who will produce a suitable surface, so I have to do a lot of work to get the surfacc fit for engraving with a fine file and then wet and dry down to 1000 grit.  I have bought cheap little engineers squares and engraved those for practice – check out Tracy Tools on the web, great service and very very cheap for what seems like perfectly good stuff – I get blanks for gravers from them, plus drills, taps and dies.   I must investigate getting steel with a decent finish and add it to my shop.  Having got that far with our beginning engraving, we then meet the next little problem – within a few minutes you will either have blunted your graver or more probably broken off the tip as you tried to finish off a cut without impaling yourself – so you need to sharpen it – whole new can of worms!  As a beginner you CANNOT sharpen a graver without a jig, you can get a proprietory one or get one of mine.  Then you need a ‘stone’ to sharpen it on, and since gravers are hard and the surface to be sharpened is small they will quickly wear the surface of anything but the hardest ‘stone’ into an uneven shape that won’t sharpen true. If you break the tip off your graver you’ll need to remove quite a lot of metal, perhaps 1/4 mm or more to get the point back, so you need a fairly coarse ‘stone’,  but that won’t give you a very good finish so you need a finer ‘stone’ for finishing.  Even that stone will be a bit fierce for putting the tiny heel faces on the back of the point  ( maybe a triengle of 1/4mm side).  So you need 3 ‘stones’, preferably the coarse and the finishing will be diamond ‘stones’, and the heel stone an Arcansas stone – about the hardest, finest stone in use – you can’t get proper black Arkansas any more, but the white is OK.  I use 260  and a 1200 diamond, and a white Arkansas stone, plus I have an old  10000 grit diamond that I just use for starting the heels so that I don’t score the Arkansas   ( the 10000 grit diamond was a disappointment for sharpening as it didn’t give a particularly good surface and was very expensive).  You can’t shirk the sharpening palaver especially when beginning as you’ll spend around  1/4 to  1/3 of your time doing it, and you won’t get much joy out of your engraving until you have mastered it.  BUT  it is perfectly possible to master it all in time – I did, and I didn’t have any hints on steel engraving, just an old graver that I used  rather primatively on brass 50 years ago……………  If all that sounds a bit daunting you can always cheat and start with copper, which you can buy with a good finish and won’t require so much force, or be so destructive of your tools, so less sharpening time, then when you have made some progress you can make the transition to steel.  I wouldn’t recommend brass  as it is difficult to get a soft grade that engraves easily – most brass is a pain to engrave as it requires quite a bit of force to cut but will then suddenly yield and your tool will skid off making a nasty unintended cut across the surface and into the side of your thumb!  I have found rifle cartridge cases engrave well but the curved surface is not easy for beginners……

5th April – Spent hours chasing a parcel that had gone astray and that I needed urgently.  The , I bought it off had given it to Parcelforce in time, but Parcelforce had ‘ sent it to the wrong depot’  – how you can do that with everything computerised with bar codes is beyond me.  Anyway I spent hours waiting in queues to talk to the supplier and getting no-where – the phone number they gave me for Parcelforce also got nowhere  In the end I googled ‘Parcelforce Birmingham phone number’ (the latest depot it had been sent to) and in 30 seconds got sense and a promise that it would be prioritised and arrive tomorrow morning – we shall see!  Anyway I got so frustrated that I took a chainsaw to a massive Budlia tree/bush and reduced it to a mangled stump, which left me with a very large heap of tangled branches to get rid of  – still, I felt better for it.  Still having some issues with my over enthusiastic Rottweiler blocking my visitor, but I’m working on it.  And so, unfortunately the Gun Case Blog is again neglected.  I had an email asking about what was needed to start engraving, so I might see if I can come up with a simple list.  I get a few emails every week from visitors to the site and I’m always pleased to hear from interested enthusiasts, so if you have any questions you think I might be able to answer, or constructive comments for that matter, email me as per CONTACTS………….

4th April – My Rottweiler (named Wordfence – see below if you are not a follower of my blog) bit me, presumably for interfering in his choice of who to block from this blog, and blocked me!   That is more difficult to deal with than his blocking of other people, as I can’t get onto the site to unblock myself!  Fortunately I have a ‘get out of jail’ card, otherwise I wouldn’t be on the blog now.  I’m sure it blocked me for some transgression that I hadn’t committed – If you get blocked from the site email me and I’ll sort it!    These tribulations are sent to try us……….

3rd April – Internet came back last night, probably somewhere flooded, there was a lot of  water about and the phone was on the blink too.    I managed to re-instate a regular visitor to this blog who had somehow got blocked by my  pet Rotweiler  – Wordfence – that guards my blog against the (literally) hundreds of attacks every day.  Anyway I managed to catch it blocking his IP address and duly admonished it.  Peace is now restored!   I was prompted by his recommendation to a watch ‘The Repair Shop’ on BBC2   that I’d recently been invited to apply to take part in a TV show being produced that wanted real ‘nutters’ who were prepared to go to any lengths to find parts etc to restore the object of their passion, the nuttier the better.  I did give them a brief  intro to the world of muzzle loading shooting and restoration,  but I must, unusually, have sounded too sane for their plans, and they went off in search of more interesting nutters – perhaps like the 40 odd families I met at a lock on the Thames this summer who were each driving some form of amphibious vehicle on a  rally  on the river – ex army DUKW’s, amphibious 1940’s Jeeps, converted estate cars and whatever the little amphibious car of the 1970’s was  – 40 of them in total – what a sight.  The extraordinary thing was that they had come from all over Europe, as far as Poland, driving the bigger vehicles or trailing the smaller ones – talking to them,  I realised that I and  my muzzle loading friend are indeed sadly far far too sane to qualify!

2nd April  – My internet is playing up and its almost impossible to do anything – try again tomorrow!

1 st April  Too late for April fool’s jokes, that has to be before noon.   I have been reading Keith Neal and Back’s book on gun cases and trade cards.  Its a very useful guide to dating cases and also for anyone who wants to case antique guns, either in an antique case or a adapted box.  While the best course of acction for anyone contemplating doing that would be to buy a copy of the book, they are hard to come by and expensive, so one gun may not justify the trouble and expense – I thought I’d extract some essential information from the book and put it in a Post, and add a table of dating features to my GUN DATES page – so that is the intention.  I also need to do the promised Post on duelling pistols…..

30th march – Almost another month gone…  I put all the furniture back on the 8 bore, where I know the fit is bad I put a bit of hard black wax on the edge using my tiny hot air gun (1/4 inch nozzle) to take up the gap, and melt more into any remaining gaps.  The butt plate needed the bottom edge trimmed slightly – they often stick out a bit and catch, anyway it all went together reasonably well, and I got the screw heads aligned perfectly.  So its beginning to come together – at the moment its all covered with sticky slacum ( boiled linseed, beeswax and terbene driers) waiting for it to go jelly like so I can wipe/rub it all off again.  This process will be repeated until the finish is good enough, although it is always possible after a few coats to change to wax furniture polish and cheat!  I was checking Brownell’s website for honing stones – I might just buy a few bits to make up a hone – the regular ones go up to 10 bore but I’m sure I can fudge things – the extension rod to make the hones long enough to go down the barrel are much more expensive than the rest of the kit and definitely won’t work with 8 bore barrels, so again I’ll resort to making something.  I wish I had access to a Delapina lap, but never mind!  I am not sure I have the perfect recipe for Slacum – I did a series of trials and came up with a maximum of 5% beeswax and around 1% terbene driers – but it didn’t seem that critical, apart from keeping the beeswax content at 5% or less.  On the last lot I made the terbene went into short strings when I added it to the oil – not sure what happened there………..  My hard wax is made up of beeswax and carbon black, but it is possible to buy very hard coloured wax for repairing scratches in furniture that would be better – trouble is it costs £100 for a kit and has mostly colours we wouldn’t use.   I was wondering today what essential kit one would advise someone starting out in restoration to buy initially – If I think what I would not like to be without, apart from the obvious collection of screwdrivers (turnscrews in gun speak) I guess I’d say a simple derusting setup, if necessary using an old phone charger or similar, and a cheap grinder with a very fine wire brush (probably as expensive as cheap grinder!).  If I were mostly dealing with guns in better condition than I normally restore, I’d probably come up with a different list.  Whichever you tackle, the need to be able to make screws will come up sooner or later if you can’t outsource that work, which takes you into the realms of a small lathe and taps and dies.  And so it goes on………& on……………..& on………………………………………………….

The steel cup is a bit thick (limited by size of available end mill!) and I didn’t get rid of all the defects around it, but its meant as a functional restoration.  Steaming has taken most of the dings out – minimal sanding was done – it is very effective.

 

 

The finial is quite badly rusted round the edges, which makes the fit rather poor, but improved!  It no linger looks like a tired old gun that has been neglected and I hope one day it will see use again when the barrel is done.

 

29th March – More 8 bore…   I forgot to mention when discussing removing screws that one of the problems with fitted screws in old guns is that the heads are contoured to fit the furniture and as you unscrew them you need to keep the screwdriver aligned with the slot, which often means tilting it as you turn it, otherwise you partially come out of the slot.  Anyway having stripped and cleaned all the furniture I escalated the job to include gently refinishing the stock as it had plenty of dings etc.  I inlet a small piece of wood where a bit had come out round the finial of the trigger plate and cut the surface flush and refitted the finial temporarily, then set about steaming out the dings in the spout of a kettle on the AGA – difficult to do if you are using an electric kettle, but a wallpaper steamer would work.  That got out or reduced a lot of the dings and destroyed some of the finish so I removed  most of the rest on the butt with 320 grit sandpaper and methylated spirits (wood alcohol) as it was varnished with shellac.  I cleaned  the chequering using an old toothbrush and meths, enough to show the chequering reasonably clearly.  Several goes over the stock with medium grade steel wool and meths got it to a reasonable finish – I didn’t want a complete strip to bare wood, just a somewhat better finish.  There were a number of black stains – probably iron stains, so I very carefully applied oxalic acid with an artist’s paint brush to soften the stains – you need to be very careful or it will bleach the unstained wood very pale – if that happens you will need to colour it down with Van Dyke crystals in water or a spirit stain, applied carefully.  When you apply oxalic acid or stain using an artist’s brush, apply it streakily along the grain of the wood – that way you hide any edges amongst the grain markings.   Having got the wood to a fair finish and acceptable colour I wipe over it all with a piece of kitchen roll dipped in shellac dissolved in meths – button polish is one name for it –  this seals the grain.  Applying a second coat messes up the finish because it leaves smear  marks, so at that point I’ll go to using ‘slacum’ to give an English oil finish, which will require several dozen coats, but before that I’ll remount all the furniture.  At the moment I’m waiting for the butt plate screws and the sling mount to derust….. I also need to fit the steel cup for the side nail.   The next big job will be to sort the barrel, but that may have to wait a while as I need to make/buy a tool for lapping the barrel before I rebrown it.  lapping the barerl will have to wait while I clear out the outside workshop as I can’t move in there at the moment for stuff bought back from the flat – I have just about cut up all the wood from the window surrounds and fittings but all the tools, plumbing bits and electrical wiring parts are scattered around – if you don’t get much gun stuff on the blog for a bit it will be because I’m trying to have a massive sortout – there is a certain amount of domestic pressure for de-cluttering etc in addition to the workshop……………….. Happy Easter!

28th March – Continued with the 8 Bore restoration today with a visit to Dick to use his vice and torch to shift the breechblock, which we did successfully –  its a strange fact that breech plugs almost always come out with  perfect threads without a trace of rust.  Any rust is usually confined to a tiny bit around the joint at the barrel and on the edge facing into the powder chamber.  I don’t know what they used to lubricate the thread, but it certainly lasted 200 years or so! This one was no different, once heated almost to wood charring temperature and held very very securely in the vice it yielded to a 2 ft lever and came out easily thereafter.  The passage from nipple to main chamber contained a lot of hard blackish powder, but as it was slightly damped with cleaner or whatever I couldn’t get it to flare like black powder although I think it may have had some in it – by the way, I DID carefully probe the barrel with a screw rod to check it wasn’t loaded before heating it!  Anyway a trip to the electrolytic bath and a bit more picking out the passages with bits of bent wire and I’m sure its clear now.   Now the breech plug is out I can see that the barrel is pretty reasonable, certainly shootable.  I may have a go at lapping it if I can make a suitable tool.   The side screw hole was a mess so I dropped a 16mm cutter into it and made a plug and glued it in, but I then made a steel cup for the head of the side nail so I might put that in instead.  I initially thought that I would leave the butt plate as they are usually horrible to get out, but the rest of the furniture looked so much better than it did, so I took it off.  The two screws holding the butt plate are almost guaranteed to be rusted around the heads and stuck fast.  The threads are often rusty and stuck in the wood too, often pulling most of the threaded wood out with them.  The technique to get them out is to very carefully pick out the slot in the head of the screws down to the metal, and put some release ‘oil’ on the joint – I put a small drop of gun oil and then take a brush of Acetone and brush it around the edge of the screws – it penetrates better than proprietary penetrating oils.  You need to hold the butt very securely and have a screwdriver that is a perfect fit and try carefully.  The top one is usually the worst – if it doesn’t budge fairly easily play a fine torch flame onto the screw head ( it does need to be a very fine flame) and try again.  The 8 bore butt plate screws came out fairly easily, the top one with heat, and once started the screws themselves were as clean as a whistle.  There was quite a bit of flake rust on the inside of the buttplate and on the wood and it took about 3 hours at 2.8Amps to derust the buttplate fully.  Having derusted the furniture and thoroughly wire wheel brushed them ( .03mm wire brush)  I generally coat the hidden surfaces with ‘Metalguard’ which leaves a thin anti-corrosion film over the surface of the metal as its in a fairly active state after derusting and will rust easily.  I’m generally happy to put the furniture back with just the Metalguard as protection, sometimes putting on another coat if the part has been handled much since first coating. Most oils and greases soak into the wood so be sparing if you use any behind the fittings.

 

You know how it is?  Having got so far with the restoration (actually more of a tidy-up)  I can see that the woodwork could be a bit better, so for completeness I might just steam out the dings, and possibly refinish it – in for a penny, in for a pound……

Yes, I know its not quite centered!

The buttplate is held on by two screws and the tab along the top.  After removing the screws the whole buttplate must be moved backwards by 6 mm to disengage the tab.  As you can see, there was quite a lot of rust under the plate- its surprising that the two screws were in perfect condition in the wood.

27th March – I think I have identified a couple of cocks from E J Blackley & Son for the Post Office pistol and the Mortimer, so I rang Kevin B up and had a nice long chat – Kevin asked if the P.O. pistols would have had a French style cock ( either a spur cock or a true French cock ) or an old style cock.  The French style use their ‘chin’ as a stop on the edge of the flash guard, rather than a step on the back of the cock hitting the edge of the lock. Kevin pointed out that the stock needs a small cut-away section for the stop of the ‘English’ cock, whereas the ‘chin stop’ doesn’t have the cut-out.  We decided that they had had English cocks and possibly his pattern FC91 would fit so I’ll order a couple.   The ‘Mortimer’ of course hasn’t yet got a stock so I can’t use that guide to the cock style, but the locks were made for a mainspring without a link, bearing directly on the tumbler as of old, so I guess that its an old style lock and  would suit an ‘English’ cock – I guess it probably didn’t have a roller or link on the tail of the frizzen or the frizzen spring either.  I reckon Blackleys cocks FC90 would fill the bill – I’ll have a look for frizzzen spring castings for the ‘Mortimer’, but I’ll probably make the mainsprings as I enjoy that.  I’ll see Kevin at the Birmingham Antique Arms fair in June so I hope they will be cast by then – Kevin says he is doing fairly frequent castings now.    I stripped the furniture from the 8 bore and put it through the electrolytic derusting.  It was quite pitted and the engraving is quite worn and pitted so it won’t restore to anything like original state, and as most of the bits are hardened, I can’t easily recut them.  I did try on the finial of the trigger plate by annealing it, but its too far pitted to make any difference so I’ll leave it.  The wood around the furniture is badly stained black, and on one side of the finial is missing – I think the staining is a combination of rust and too much oil on the wood – my father, who owned the 8 bore before me, used to slosh oil about on guns and several of ‘his’ guns suffered from staining, although in this case there is also quite a lot of rust under the furniture  that I have now scraped away carefully.  I’ll go down to Dicks tomorrow and we’ll remove the 8 bore breech plug (with luck) – I ran out of gas for my Butane torch today, and my vice is not really man enough.  I also need to take back the engraving I did for himon the Fowler duelling pistols.  I will start a new post on both the PO pistols and the 8 bore.

Looking at the insurance certificate that came after transferring my insurance to the new Land Cruiser I spotted an exclusion – apparently I was allowed to carry up to 2000 cartridges but no explosives – now of course black powder is an explosive so I was a bit concerned that my insurance would be invalid if I carried a flask of BP to Cambridge Gun Club, let alone brought a couple of Kg back from purchase from our group.  Anyway not wanting to find my insurance void I rang my broker and explained how I used black powder in a muzzle loader instead of cartridges.  They very helpfully said that’s OK, you can have BP up to the equivalent of 2000 cartridges – now at 2.5 drams per shot and 1.77 grams per dram that amounts to round about 10Kg. of BP !  Anyway I said thank you very much, and they made a note on my insurance that they have authorised it.  Result!  But you had better check your own insurance if you carry BP in your car.

A selection of cocks from stock, on the left ? for the good PO pistol, the rest are ? for the ‘Mortimer’, FC 90 is on the right.

Furniture as was – click on pictures to see in detail.

 

After an hour each in the electrolytic derusting bath and a fine wire wheel.

 

 

26th March – the year marches on…  I managed to sell my old Land Cruiser Amazon for the asking price and it was away within 8 hours of it being bought so that makes the new one a bit less of a shock to the finances.  I drove the old one to get it out, not having driven it since I got the new one, and immediately realised just how much more solid and hefty it was – a lot more tank-like to drive too.  But I did really like it and it didn’t let me down once in 10 years, so goodbye……   I took a photo of the two Post Office issue pistols I bought in Bonhams for a ridiculous price some time ago – I still can’t work out why as there is a lot of work in restoring them.  They were listed as rare so I guess I was taken in in an absent minded moment!

What a mess!

By Harding, some of the lock parts are missing, and one cock is completely wrong, the other is possibly OK but a replacement.  It will be a very good exercise in restoration for this blog!  I now need to source a pair of cocks for these pistols and a pair for the ‘Mortimer’ repros.

25th March – busy day – has the feel of the first day of spring which I define as being able to leave the back door wide open while you potter about outside without worrying about the kitchen getting cold.  I sorted the kit to go in the new Land Cruiser – it is the same position in the range as the old one but doesn’t have quite the solid feel of the last and while most gadgets  are identical it has lost the programmable driver’s seat positions and the steering column now adjusts manually instead of by motors.  I guess the weight has been cut down a bit to improve fuel consumption – I can now carry the (removable)  back row seats with one hand where I used to struggle to lift them.  But it does have a camera to view the tow hitch while reversing!  My old one is getting lots of offers on Ebay, but so far not quite high enough to temp me.

Looking round for guns to sell to make some space ( pistols don’t really take much room) I came across an 8 bore percussion wildfowling gun – its reasonably nice – wildfowl guns were never very fancy as they were strictly working tools for rough conditions, – I can’t read the name as the lock is a bit worn and pitted.  The barrel is pretty heavy and fine on the outside but had patches of rust inside so I set about cleaning it by running 320 grade paper up and down by hand and in a drill . This generated a lot of messy rust as I’d squirted Napier cleaner down the barrel.  Anyway after a long session including getting bits of 320 grit paper stuck in the barrel, and then ‘loosing’ a couple of tissues that I was using to clean out the mess I did get it clean enough to look at the bore – probably OK is the interim verdict.  I took out the flattened nipple with some difficulty but there is no passage through to the barrel.  The next stage is to remove the breech block – its  a round barrel with a scalloped ‘flat’  on  top so I’ll have to be very careful not to damage things.  I had a try with the breech cold but I was in my indoor workshop and the vice is not really man enough for the job and you do more damage that way, so I need to migrate to the outside workshop which I haven’t used since the Autumn and is full of junk – nothing is simple…….   Anyway when I’ve had a good look at it I will tidy it up and put it up for sale on this website – I suspect that it will again make a fine wildfowling gun…. but I’ll sell it as an antique anyway.

8 Bore single wildfowling gun – a typical functional working gun – it will clean up very nicely

24th March  I had a look at a typical Irish Duelling pistol from the height of the duelling craze in Ireland

Features of note are;-

  • Octagonal barrel – after about 1770 – Spanish form before then.
  • Round butt section – most early English duellers had flats down the sides, wider at first.  Post 1790?  The ‘hatching with 4 dots in each diamond resembles that used by Durs Egg in the early days of the genre.
  • Roller on frizzen spring (also known as ‘feather  spring’)  This is probably post 1780 ish.
  • Bolts secure barrel – replaced pins around 1775, later style pistols had silver ovals round bolts for protection.
  • non rainproof pan – not necessarily a good dating guide as many old style pans were made long after the rainproof pan was patented.
  • Running leaf (feather) engraved border to lock – this came into use in English guns around the turn of the century(?), along with little bits of engraving such as that on the cock of this gun – I’d rate this a strong pointer to a date.
  • No set trigger – the best duellers usually had a set trigger, but some customers probably didn’t want them on teh guns they ordered.
  • Tip of cock rolls forward – early or old fashioned feature.

By Comparison here is a duelling pistol by Hutchinson of Dublin.

It has;

  • No hatching, small flats on butt – probably earlier than the above
  • A link from the tail of the frizzen to the frizzen spring – probably an early feature, maybe 1770s. (later – roller on frizzen tail, then on spring.)
  • Similarly plain lock – the cock is a replacement, copied from another Dublin dueller by Edwards of about the same date(?).
  • Tip of cock rolled forwards .
  • More pronounced ‘swamp’ on barrel.  (i.e. a more pronounced ‘waist’)

I’d probably put the top one at around 1800  or a bit later,  mainly on account of the lock border engraving – other features support a date of 1790 or later.  The Hutchinson may be  a bit earlier – possibly around 1780 to 1790.   Estimates like this are always approximate unless you have something more concrete to go on, like an patent, or the introduction of platinum (John Manton 1805 ish) but in this case the link on the frizzen is an unusual feature and suggests an earlier rather than a later date, unless it was a speciality of Hutchinson.  Of the two, I’d say the Hutchinson is the more elegant pistol.

 

 

22nd March Had a look at the result of Holts Auction – quite a lot of guns sold at the low estimate and I noticed a couple that sold below the bottom estimate, which is almost unheard of in Holts, although fairly normal in Bonhams and other auctions.  A couple of guns went well above estimates, but its a difficult job picking out what will appeal to collectors and I guess its easy when you are pricing hundreds of guns to miss the occasional special.   There were a number of unsold lots too. It’s impossible to tell how much the price achieved is more or less set by the estimates, or its just that the estimates are accurate – for expensive stuff the price is determined externally to a large extent, but for the run of the mill stuff I suspect that the estimates are important in setting the price achieved.  Difficult to make a judgement about my area as there were not many decent muzzle loading shotguns, although I think it would have been possible to pick up something shootable at a reasonable price.   The Nock 7 barreled gun made £20,000 but it was very fine.  Unfortunately I couldn’t find any suitable restoration projects for the blog, so I’ll have to do one of the many that I already have.  Went to test drive a car for a friend but had to wait while the salesman sold a £50000 10 year old Aston Martin to a youngish looking chap – I can’t imagine what the insurance must have been – but not my cup of tea even if I had the cash.  Off tomorrow to pickup my ”new’ 9 year old Land Cruiser – come to think of it, by comparison maybe the Aston Martin wasn’t such a bad buy!   Dick has a pair of duelling pistols by Hawker of Dublin for light restoration – Hewker was second only to Rigby as an Irish gunmaker of the late 18th century.    ( ……Usual for breakfast)

21st March – busy day – off to Holts at their new location in Blackheath, S.E. London.  I drove because I had the Alex. Henry and the Theo. Richards to return, and I also wanted to go to Cricklewood to look at a replacement Land Cruiser so it involved a journey across London – not only did I have to pay the congestion charge but an additional ‘naughty boy’ charge for having an old diesel vehicle – around £21 in all.  But it is quicker than the previous journey by train to Hammersmith.  Anyway I meet increasing numbers of ‘old friends’ at the auctions as my circle of contacts widens, which is nice although it cuts down the time available for looking at guns.  I did check out a few percussion shotguns and had a quick look for good restoration projects (none) and checked out a gun that Martin fancied.  One  friend I met said apropos of this blog that I  included everything except what I had for breakfast!  Well, just to complete the picture, the answer is toast.  No more details will be revealed.  On to Cricklewood where I crawled under and over an ’09 Land Cruiser that was starting to corrode underneath – shame as the price was good, then onward to another on the way home which was the same age but much better and lower mileage but more expensive than my target – but I bought it nevertheless after a bit of a haggle, so now have to get rid of mine on ebay as the part exchange price didn’t excite me.  Now I will have a smart, undented vehicle for the first time in ages, have to try to keep it that way!   I’m pleased to report that our work on the Alex Henry met with much admiration – it was a good example of our ‘less is more’ approach – do the least that you can get away with to achieve the truly authentic result, and make your improvements incrementally – only resort to major surgery when a bit of simple cleaning and refurbishing leaves obvious problems.   Had a discussion about making ramrods – one suggestion was a section of an old greenheart fishing rod, optionally ‘ebonised’ with a blowtorch.  We all went away determined to have a try with out preferred method, so I’ll  have to finish the ebony squares I have cut – I will try and make a jig to plane them octagonal, or possibly 16 sided, and then experiment with a form of ‘cenreless grinding’ with a belt sander, or possibly turning in a lathe by advancing in short sections – we shall see, I’ll report here…..

19th march – I sold the pair of pocket pistols by Abbey of Long Sutton – it was a beautiful little set and quite a bargain – I am not sure why I sell my small stuff and keep all the big guns, they take up too much room!  now I’ll have to find a few more from my collection to put on the website – its time to go hunting for some restoration bargains, although I can’t pretend that there is any profit in it, (except to my wife, who fortunately doesn’t read this blog!).  I do have a little pair of flintlock pocket pistols made for the Post Office – at least it  is two almost identical pistols.  They are in very bad condition and missing the proper cocks.  I bought them at auction for a ridiculously high price – they were catalogued as ‘rare’ and I fell for it, more fool me, although I suppose someone else must have bid one offer down from me so I’m not entirely alone in the idiot stakes. Anyway I ought to fix them up, which involves getting cocks for at least the  one that has a very home made cock. The one with the almost right cock has 1969 and some initials  stamped tidily on the back of the cock, so that is hardly original!  I also have to get a pair of cocks for the ‘Mortimer’ pistols so I’ll have to hunt around. I’ll do some photos of the Post Office pistols some time.  I discovered this morning that my little CNC machine had managed to bend its spindle a bit so the cutter doesn’t run true – must have happened when it drove the cutter into the work in a mad moment – the only solution is a new DC motor at £40 or a nice brushless 500 watt motor at £90. Unfortunately neither have substantial bearings, but maybe I’m expecting too much.  Tomorrow is a day for car hunting if I can find any to look at – I also have a couple of meetings at the school which promise to be ‘interesting’……… c’est la vie.  Wednesday is Holts viewing and Thursday and Friday might wrap up the vehicle saga, who knows…………….

18th March.  I got into trouble from one of the regular readers  of this blog for my tardiness in keeping him entertained!  Apologies!  I will do better in future….  Yesterday we had an Anglian Muzzle loaders shoot at Cambridge Gun Club in the freezing cold  – I had lost my capper on the last game shoot of the season and hadn’t replaced it so by the end of the morning standing around for 2 hours in a biting wind I could only fit a cap on the nipple by a sort of random process of tries since I couldn’t feel anything.   Unusually we shot the ‘driven’ stand as part of the competition, which helped (almost) everyone’s scores – I can shoot those clays well when they are coming more or less overhead but the few that come lower to the side I miss.  I think the ones I can hit are the ones where the muzzle of the gun blanks out the clay as you try to get a lead on it, so you are effectively shooting ‘Churchill’ style ( follow, accelerate, fire as you pass the clay and keep going)  rather than maintained lead where you get in front and try to judge how far ahead you need to be as you wave the gun about.  I also manage to hit a few that are so fast I don’t think I stand a cat in hell’s chance of hitting them so there is no chance of a considered maintained lead  – I obviously need to train myself a bit better.   Anyway I had  a reasonable result by my standards!     Apropos  of  the parts for the Mortimer duellers, I looked through my bookcase for inspiration and came across a book that I didn’t remember – The British Duelling Pistol by John A Atkinson published in UK and Canada in or before 1978  which is a very thorough summary of the development of the type from 1770 to 1850 or so with particular reference to the key makers – Griffin (&Tow), Twigg, Wogden, Durs Egg, Staudenmayer and the Mantons.  It has lots of dating information and lots of typical 1970’s black and white photographs that are almost entirely useless as the only details visible are things that show up in outline!   In spite of that it is a very good reference, although how accurate it is I am not sure – I say that because its section on Forsyth seems not to agree with things I have read elsewhere – for instance claiming that his initial work was with chlorate mixtures rather than the fulminates as mentioned in his patent.  There is also no mention of Purdy who was involved in his business as far as I understand – I had better read Keith Neal’s book on Forsyth next…..  One detail that interested me was the observation that the gold poinsons set in the breech blocks of guns were stamped with a gold foil facing, rather than being solid gold pressings – bit like UK copper coins nowadays!   That might explain why those in my Manton double flintlock have lost their gold, and make it more acceptable for me to gold plate them.   This week I’m off to view Holts sale on Wednesday in Blackheath – first time since move from Hammersmith – its quite convenient as its an hour and twenty minutes away and plenty of parking  – I just need to remember to book the Dartmouth crossing on the web before I go or I’ll be in trouble.    I’m not planning to buy anything, although I have a few things to check out for friends and a couple of guns to take back for people who will be at the sale, plus a couple of guns that are going into the next auction.  I must try and find a day to go on another car hunt – I’ve promised to find a small car for a friend, so I’m looking at the baby version of the car I got for Penny – a Mazda – not as common as one might expect, but right at the top of the Warrenty Direct reliability index, and they should know as they insure cars against mechanical breakdown – also cool looking, although I’m not sure my friend will be as keen on a red one as Penny was ( I’d already bought it when she saw it so in truth she didn’t have much choice) !    And I started to strike up the barrels of the ‘Mortimer’ to see how much work they needed – quite a lot of file marks to get rid of, it turns out!   I’m hoping I can train my little CNC machine to cut the lock pockets and possibly profile the stocks – hope dies eternal in the human breast…..  Goodnight.

14th March – I just noticed – something strange has happened to this website.  A few days ago the number of daily visitors dropped from about 350 to about 170 – almost halved.  My first thought was that all my regulars had given up as I’d vanished, but I didn’t think I had that many daily visitors!  A careful check in my protection software showed me that almost all the attacks on the site that try to find a way to log in ( but don’t get anywhere near finding out how)  had stopped overnight – so half the traffic to the site was spurious, and presumably since it all stopped pretty suddenly it must all have come ultimately from a single coordinating centre.  I wonder if its gone for good?

14 March – Sorry, long time without blogging!   I decided that all my old shot flasks leak and because of the way they are sewn it tears the leather beyond repair, so I thought I’d make another one, using a modelling clay block to mould some soft suede round and then clamping round the edge it with a couple of bits of ply with the right shaped cutout .  Cutting out the profile for the clamping plates seemed like a nice easy job for my CNC miller but its got me totally confused – the actual milling seems OK  BUT the mill shoots all over the work area before starting and usually crashes into one edge stop or another.  I have tried editing the G code file but I can’t work out where or why its flying about in the pre-amble – maybe it will all come clear tomorrow!    I went hunting for a replacement Land Cruiser today – its fascinating what you learn from people in the used car trade if you chat to them.  I found that the reason there were virtually no 2009 or 2010 Land Cruisers on the market is that they all get shipped to Kenya, which won’t allow import of pre-2009 vehicles.  The older ones go to Tanzania.  Apparently a team comes over to the UK a couple of times a year from each country and just buys them all up to ship back – presumably new ones carry a huge tax and the bane of old Land Cruisers in the UK – underbody corrosion – doesn’t happen in hot climates so they last indefinitely.   I might have found a good one  but I have to wait for the boss to come into the showroom to see if he will accept my offer!  Then I’ll have to get rid of my old one, rust and all, although I did get a fairly decent offer in part exchange –  because he knew he could certainly sell it on to the Tanzanians. Unfortunately the P/E offer related to a Land Cruiser that I didn’t want to buy at a different used car lot.    I often get queries about gun related matters via this blog – at the moment I’m trying to help unravel a J Probin flintlock that is missing the locks and has a gold banner with ‘WESTLEY RICHARDS’ on the barrel which seems a bit out of place…. any ideas?

9th March – I am still working on the cnc miller, but making progress.  I have found a workaround for most problems, and I created a model of a curved shape as a trial – although it was only a small shape 30 mm x 100 mm it had radiused  top edges and they take a lot of passes to shape – the estimated time to complete was over 2 hours, but on the first run the cutter came loose in the collet and I had to abort the run – I couldn’t work out how to resume it, so I started again from the beginning with a new piece of wood . On the second try I accidentally closed the program on my laptop half way through, and that killed the job!  But each time I get more things sorted out.  The job I’d most like to be able to do is to cut accurate lock pockets, so I have started to look at ways to copy parts from photos as locks are not good for drawing using the normal tools in CAD packages!  Anyway here are the photos of the parts for the pair of Manton Duelling pistols I bought off Dick – the locks were beautifully made by an ex-Purdy man – the cocks are wrong so we’ll get some older style ones. One false breech is wrong, but it is possible to make one from stock steel with an angle grinder and a bit of welding and a lot of drilling and filing!   I’m not sure about the Blackley castings of the trigger guards – they may be a bit late – the originals would probably have had a simple acorn finial in front of the guard and a wider guard.  I’m not sure about the set triggers either – a bit of research is needed!  Going through some dating clues I would put the model for these parts at the late 1970s – it has the old pan shape, which changed around the early 1780s, but a fully octagonal barrel that came in during the 1770s.  It could have been half stocked, but I think probably without a rib, but with loops for the ramrod fixed directly to the barrel.  More research needed!

and they need mainsprings and frizzen springs………………………

6th March – I’ve been rather busy trying to get my little CNC 3040 milling machine working.  Up to a point I have succeeded – well I’ve learnt a lot along the way.  I haven’t done anything useful yet as I’m still struggling to get the host software (bCNC) working properly – after each job the P.C. looses its connection to the cnc controller box and has to be reset, which is a pain – I’m not sure if it will run a proper job without stopping but I’m getting near to trying.  I’ll have to get a CAD program up and running to generate something to make – probably Fusion 360 as its free!   I got a set of parts for a pair of fine duelling pistols from Dick – tehy were made by someone who was a Purdy gunsmith some time ago – the locks are fine – machined from solid, not castings but he didn’t have the proper cocks. They need a few more bits sorted but will make a fine pair of pistols.  The barrels are nice but I suspect they are not twist so won’t pass as the real thing.  I’ll make them up as a pair of inert pistols as I don’t want to bother with putting them on a certificate – at the moment the barrels are unfinished.  I have some nice walnut for stocks, so it should make a good project – Dick says thay are copies of a Mortimer pair – I must look out some photos so that I can get teh engraving right.  I’ll post some photos of the bits soon, when I stop playing with the CNC.

March 1st  – Quite Arctic round here and a bit of snow, coming home last night my 4×4 was skating all over the road if it got half a chance.  I spent the morning taping up draughts in the workshop as I couldn’t get the temperature up above about 16 C even with the woodburner and a 3KW fire going.  Its now well above 20 C so OK.   I bought a book from Amazon, well more of a leaflet, called ‘Firearms Lock Design’ by Steve Culver.  Its actually restricted to the design of the sear and tumbler (or cock) and the proper geometry to ensure a safe trigger pull, but you can’t get everything in 26 pages.  Its a commendable effort, obviously home produced although printed by Amazon – but with very clear diagrams.  I am not sure I have come across many original guns that have the nose of the sear 0.9 mm across as he suggests, but the principles he lays down are sound and should help anyone who tackles the ticklish job of refurbishing a worn sear-tumbler engagement.  I had hoped for some suggestions and advice on the cock-frizzen geometry in flint guns, but that isn’t as clear cut as the geometry of the sear-tumbler and anyway was more of a matter of opinion and development.   Steve’s basic geometry requires the tumbler pivot centre  and the sear pivot centre to make a right angle at the point of contact of the sear and tumbler – that way when the sear moves its end moves along a radius from the tumbler pivot.  If that isn’t clear, best get the book from Amazon!   I managed to get most of my ‘bandolier’ shot flask done and added the strap and buckle and temporarily put in the Irish dispenser so I could try it out – it seems to work fine, the leather is much softer than a traditional one, so its more comfortable to wear, and it holds a good load of shot – I haven’t checked how much.  I’ve just got to add stitching to the straps.  I have a number of old flasks that have started leaking and would be very difficult to repair neatly (rather than Bev’s technique that involves rolls  of duct tape)  so I might use their dispensers to make a few more flasks – I rather fancy a suede flask.  My next project is getting my Chinese toy cnc machine ( a 3040) working with a new controller board – at the moment I’m trying to sort out the wiring of the new ‘Smoothieboard’.  I can’t work out if it is capable of driving the stepping motors of the 3040 or if it is meant to rely on external drivers – the documentation is a little haphazard…….  Also on the agenda are a couple of ebony ramrods – I ripped up a couple of square blanks from my nice stock piece, so now have to round them, but its much too cold to venture into the unheated outside workshop to do them…………………

Feb 25th Celebratory meal and a bottle of champagne at the flat to celebrate (almost) completion.  It really is a super flat, the basic design is good and Giles’s interior design is brilliant, and my 4 month’s work is well justified!  Result.  Since it was the first nice weekend I’ve had free I ventured out into the garden  _ I can see I’ll have to get tough with the rats that eat the chicken’s food – I did stand around with a .22 air rifle but it has telescopic sights so is almost impossible to use without baiting them  – I need a No. 3 garden gun!   Anyway poison will suffice after I’ve been to Horse Requisites tomorrow. I continue to get a good number of visitors to this site, about 350 a day -although about half(?) are bots trying to bust the site.  I do get about 30 visitors from Google and other search engines including Baido, the Chinese search engine.  I must justify all this support by putting some more gun stuff up!

Feb 23rd.  Busy organising and then running a class on computer programming at ‘my’ primary school with my friend Dave.  We have both done a lot of programming professionally and have a fairly dim view of the way its taught so we had a chance to try our way.  I wrote my first program in 1966 on punched cards to run an an IBM mainframe, and we used old punched cards of that era to write down commands of our ‘people computer’ programs in class.  For some reason the cards were never numbered, and a fairly simple program generated quite a stack of cards – so if you dropped the stack………..

I’m experimenting with leather to make an Irish pattern bandolier flask – making progress.   I am revisiting Cruddington’s book on modern shotguns, Vol 3 to refresh my mind about single trigger mechanisms.  The problem is that between 1889 and 1910 there were 91 patents from UK gunmakers for single trigger mechanisms as they scrabbled to find another innovation to keep the market bubbling after the hammerless ejector and self opener were established.  The problem was (and is) that best guns last too long to sustain a trade without continuous new and wonderful inventions!  There are basically two ways of making a single trigger fire two barrels without double discharging on the involuntary second pull that almost always follows when a gun is fired – the first invented and original English mechanism used a fairly involved linkage between trigger and sears to ‘loose’ the involutary pull – like for example the Boss rotating turret that moved with each pull and only allowed the gun to fire on the first and third pull. The other class of mechanism involves inertial weights that are driven by the gun’s recoil and change the linkage between trigger and sear – most modern production shotguns (Beretta , Browning and clones) use the inertia system.  You can tell which your gun has by firing off snap caps – if mechanical changeover you will probably need to make a dummy pull between firing pulls as you won’t make the involuntary pull on a ‘dead’ gun.  If you have an inertial changeover you won’t fire the second barrel without bumping the butt on the ground to mimic recoil  between the pulls.  I find it very difficult to work out exactly how the various patents work from the drawings in Cruddington, so I usually doze of while trying!

Feb 21st Still suffering from the effects of solder fumes – I thought I’d do a web search for solder with less bad flux, i.e. colophony free, but then I found I was already using that, so maybe I’ll go back to the normal, bad, colophony flux.   I was trying to buy some faux ivory from the US as it claims to be used by various museums, and I thought I’d make a few brushes and a couple of pots for caps, but the minimum order is $50 and the carriage would be $60, so a bit pricey for something to play with! Maybe I’ll stick with the Axminster stuff. Or I could use ebony or horn or box.

I dug out a nice single percussion barrel that I bought with a junk stock and took out the breech block – the bore is quite good – I am sure it would hone to a perfect bore and still be a safe wall thickness.  It has a percussion breech, although it might have originally been a flintlock.  I was thinking that I might see if I could get/make a new breechblock so that I could make it up as a flintlock.  The barrel has Birmingham proofmarks but the pitch of the thread is exactly 1.5mm – not an whole imperial size.  The O.D. is 20.5 mm.   I do have a not very nice stock that I have fitted the barrel to  – the easy thing would be to make a percussion gun, but I don’t need another one!  It might be a good barrel to try lapping………..

Feb 20th – I had to do some electronic assembly of printed circuit boards for a client today.  I have a real problem with the fumes from modern solder flux which give me every kind of respiratory irritation and really crock me up, so I bought a new extractor/filter fan and replaced the activated charcoal filter in my old one, but somehow the fumes managed to escape the suction and got me – I’ll have to think of a better way – perhaps put the whole outfit in a large box with elasticated arm holes as for shot blasting or  solvent cleaning. ……… I went to see Dick today and took the Walklate bits I had engraved, which he was well pleased with.  Earlier he had mislaid the locks of the Blair and Sutherlands that I had left with him to get Jason to weld and Dick to reshape the frizzens and he was in quite a state – I was a little concerned as the gun is worthless without them, but I was sure he would find them, which he eventually did, in a pretty box exactly where he had put them for safekeeping!   When I loose things I’m reluctant to move anything in the search, because I always assume it will turn out to be within plain sight. I think as you get older your sight might be OK but some of the higher processing gets a bit worse so you miss spotting things you once would have picked up on.  ‘The flintlock lads’ are going to CGC on Thursday and I might join them, but I might have to do some preparation for my Mindstorms school stuff as I will have to be ready on Friday to keep 25 children occupied/entertained/learning – the really nice thing about not being a teacher is NO PAPERWORK.

Feb 18th – I’ve finally taken most of my tools back from Gile’s flat and given him back my visitor’s parking badge so I can no longer run away  to  Cambridge and buy the only decent bread in the county from Maison Clement on Hill’s Road! But I plan to get Giles to go in early and buy some of the ‘mother’ that they use to make the sourdough bread so I can make my own sourdough!  Now I have to concentrate on helping with computing lessons in school using the Lego Mindstorms.  The computing syllabus in primary schools is quite comprehensive and involves teaching the kids what ‘algorithms’ are – I know one when I see one, but defining what one is is another thing altogether!  Anyway Wikipedia says that ‘defining ‘algorithm’ is quite challenging’, so I feel vindicated.  I was trying to think of an example and came up with a handy one – find the difference between two given numbers,  If I give you two numbers you can give me the answer easily, that is solving a specific problem, but if I ask you to write down the full sequence of  basic operations by which you could find the answer for any two numbers, say a and b, then that is an algorithm, or generalised method ( clue -you don’t know which is bigger).  Another little little chore awaiting me is to buy a replacement Land Cruiser as mine is getting a bit long in the tooth.  I’ll have to get one about 10 years old and it won’t be much different from my present one (17 years old) , just, I hope, not so rusty.  I’ve been watching the ads on the web for a few weeks and those on offer seem to be having price reductions so I haven’t been in too much of a hurry and haven’t really had time to drive round the country looking at them.  Now I’ll have to concentrate…………………….

Feb 16th Another day of playing – where will it end?  I cleared out my indoor workshop in the morning, and then my piece of faux ivory arrived so I thought I ought to use it.  First I went through all the books I could find to look for photos of gun cases with brushes.  There are a number in Keith Neil’s  book on cases, although most don’t have a visible brush.  He lists them as being accessories in cases but doesn’t illustrate them with his other accessories.  I guess that they are the first accessory to get lost, and anyway will certainly wear out before any of the rest of the outfit so one shouldn’t be surprised that they are a rarity.  Although they are usually thought of as a flintlock accessory they were, it would appear, included with some percussion pistols and ? guns as well as percussion revolvers.  I found one design that seemed to appear in John Manton cased pistols and guns, including a pair of  cased percussion pistols from the Paul Murray collection in the November 2017 sale and a very similar brush in a cased flintlock fowler in the same catalogue.  As they were both from the Paul Murray collection one can’t be certain that they were originally with those guns – it would appear that a lot of ‘restoration’ went on, although having said that, there is a similar brush in a cased pair of John Manton pistols in Keith Neil’s  ‘The Mantons’.   I’ll start a separate post for these photos etc.  Anyway I decided t make a rough copy of the John Manton pattern brush so I did a bit of scaling from the photos and concluded that the brushes were pretty small – the body barely 2 inches long.  I tried turning the faux ivory, which is just a polyester rod on my wood turning lathe but I don’t have a short toolrest  and can’t get the long one near the work if I’m using a live centre, as I was.  The result is that it was impossible to turn the rod freehand as the tool just chiped the faux ivory (polyester rod)  and eventually shattered the end off.  It did cut in my metalwork lathe but of course I can’t do very nice curves using the handwheels.  Still I got a fair approximation to what I wanted.  I’ll have to find a way of sticking the bristles in without the glue running so far up the hairs – maybe epoxy instead of cryoacrelate..   I tried my new flask, and found that it doesn’t shut off very securely, so out came the spring for a bit of adjustment – anneal, bend, harden and temper – it now seems to be much more secure.

 

 

Feb 15th.  Valentines’s Day went without my noticing it – shame on me!   My first day of playing for the week.  Every time I’ve used my flintlock I have felt the need for one of those little brushes that you occasionally see in cased flintlocks,   I know you can buy them from Kranks etc, but that goes against the grain somewhat!  I remembered that when I did lime plastering I use Chinese pig hair as a reinforcement for the first plaster coat on the lathes and it comes in neat rounds all standing on end, and I still have a couple of unopened bundles which look like a giant brush 3 inches in diameter and 1 1/2 inch bristles.  I needed to use my wood turning lathe to make a former for the end of my flask, so while I was at it I turned up a little brush handle from a scrap as a proof of concept (more later on that) – a bit tricky to get a suitable bundle of bristles and then feed them into the hole in the handle but with the aid of masking tape it was done and a few drops of very low viscosity isocyanate put round the edge sealed it all in and stiffened the brush just enough – perfect.  Looking at the photos in Keith Niels book on cases I see that most of the brushes seem to be handled with ivory – elephants not being available on ebay I settled for faux ivory and have ordered a piece of 1 inch rod to try out.   Using the former  I turned, I completed the end of my leather covered  plastic bottle flask by clamping and gluing the leather and  adding an eyelet – now completed, I checked and it throws 1.1 oz of shot ( or about 30 grams) which is fine.  The full flask is a bit heavy but for clays I need that much shot and I can usually put it down on a table.   I visited Dick to take the frizzen and screws I’d engraved and pickup another little job – a lock by Walklate needing a border and a couple of sunbursts and a border round the cock and frizzen – lock now done….    On the subject of ‘proof of concept’  I learnt during 40 years building specialist equipment for geophysical research and as a small company that if possible you should always try out a minimal solution before embarking on anything fancy – that way you either discover that the fancy wasn’t necessary, or that the whole thing doesn’t work anyway, or if you end up making the fancy version you save so much time and trouble because you know what you are doing/want that it saves time overall.  A  number of the jobs that clients bought to me were an unnecessarily fancy solution to a problem that hadn’t been thought through properly and I almost never managed to put them off, with the result that by the time I had done the design and  was ready to make the kit they had backed out – I charged them 90% and delivered nothing – which was frustrating but profitable!  I get the feeling that the government ought to try the proof of concept approach with all its horrendous IT projects that flounder.

‘proof of concept’ brush  – should be ivory or possibly ebony or box

Border recut and sunburst on tail and in front of cock.

Feb 13th.  A bit low on gun related activities – Mondays is my day for the work on the Bullard Archive of Geophysical Instrumentation when I’m not doing other things, and today I was fixing up Giles’s wardrobe at the flat.  I must admit that I am reluctant to go into my workshop at the moment because its freezing and my little woodburning stove takes at least a couple of hours to heat it up because there is so much metal in there – for that reason its not really viable to do much work in the evenings.  I did manage over the weekend to sew a leather cover for the plastic bottle that is the body of my shot flask – the bottle is a nice 250 ml bottle from a hand soap  pump.   I wondered how much shot you could get in 250 ml so a quick calculation…  Lead has a density of about 11.  So if full of lead the flash would hold 11 x 250 gms = 2.75 Kg, but of course its full of lead spheres so you need to take into account the packing coefficient which will be about 0.6  (perfect packing would be a bit more, perhaps 0.64 or so), so that reduces the weight in the flask to 1.65 Kg.  A typical charge is 1 oz, which is 28 grams, so my flask will hold almost 60 shots.  The dispenser, however, is supposed to throw 1 1/4 or  1 1/2 oz so unless I modify it by sticking a bit of packing in the tube, I’ll get about 47 shots of 1 1/4 oz , which is fine for a 40 bird competition and a few spares…..  I need to work out how to finish the end of the flask, I’ll probably use an eyelet somewhere so I can hang it, but I’m waiting for some leather glue before I tackle that job.

The leather was sewn on a sewing machine and put on soaking wet.  The external seams stop it rolling, which is handy.

Feb 10th.  I have a project to make another shot flask as a couple of mine have splits in them.  I did get a leather bandolier from Pete and made an Irish shot dispenser that fitted, but the bandolier ( which is a Kranks pattern) is a bit too stiff to be comfortable, and in sorting out stuff I had picked up as part of a job lot at auction I came across a steel Hawksley English pattern dispenser, and found a plastic bottle of suitable size that the dispenser screwed into.  The Steel dispenser more or less worked, but didn’t close the first shutter ( nearest the bag) fully so No 7 1/2 or smaller shot could still escape.  I figured this was because the spring fouled on the shutter, but when I looked at one of my working flasks I realised that the spring was in the wrong way up, and that it was the wrong size to fit properly – so I set about making a new spring from a piece of old spring of the appropriate thickness – making springs is one of my favourite jobs!  The angle grinder and 1 mm cutting disk let me rough shape the spring  in a couple of minutes, then I annealed it and filed it to the right blank shape and heated it to red heat and bent it where I reckoned it should be bent and hammered the bend flat. It was a simple job to fit the spring and get the right degree of opening, and I then heated it up to bright red to quench it in water – unfortunately my gas/oxy torch was a bit hot and I melted a bit of the edge – first time I knew that the little torch ( I bought it for lead welding) could get hot enough to melt steel! Still, it was usable so after quenching I polished it and annnealed it to blue on the hotplate of the AGA.  The rest of the dispenser looked a bit patchy so I popped that on the AGA too, and it came out a uniform purple colour – I wasn’t trying to make it look authentic so the result is good – now I’ve got no excuse for not finishing the flask

The dispenser as found but after a dip in the derusting tank – the rust seen is loose and will brush off.  Notice the spring orientation. 

This is the old spring shown in the correct orientation – it is too long to fit properly, which is presumably why it was put in upside down.

 

This is a working flask – the spring is the other way up.

New spring made, hardened and annealed to blue.

Quick flash on top of the AGA to give it a uniform colour.  The right hand shutter should be the other way round to clear the slot fully but I can’t get the screw out!  It does work, just occasionally it isn’t as smooth as it might be.  I know its not an authentic colour, but neither is fixing it to a plastic bottle – albeit leather covered!

 

Feb 9th.  Finished off the bit of engraving for Dick’s funny pistol, which is coming along nicely.  By coincidence the hammer (frizzen) needed a wiggle engraving similar to that on the trigger guard on the Alex Henry.  The pistol is a bit of a joke and so Dick hadn’t spent too long on the parts and the hammer is a pretty raw casting from Kevin Blackley that Dick had in store from ages ago – I cleaned out the lines and did the border – it looks the part. The screws match those already fitted.  Nothing very demanding there!   I have now sold the Perrins youth’s fowler and am advertising my mint Mortimer reproduction single barreled 12 bore – it has hardly been fired and worked well for me, but I have an old single that I slightly prefer, plus my pride and joy Manton double meets most of my flintlock needs!

Here is the fantasy pistol restoration of a wreck found buried in a garden at an early stage – now nearly finished..

(This photo dates from before I got rid of the warm white tubes in the workshop!)

Feb 8th.  Thinking idly about double charging a gun and flame travelling from the first charge to the second, I wondered about what was originally used as packing between the powder and the shot.  My ‘unthought’ was that tow was originally used as wadding – tow is unspun broken fibres of flax, jute or hemp originally.  From the late 18th century  when best guns were often cased ( cost was probably around 2 to 5% of the gun price) a wad punch of the correct size was  included – presumably that would be used for overshot cards too.     There is an advertisment reprinted in The Manton Supplement’ for John Manton  that is for ‘wadding’ and says that if you send the number of your (Manton) gun they will send you the wadding of the correct size – which clearly refers to precut wads similar to what we might use  now.    I seem to remember that accidents during loading were attributed to fibres of tow remaining in the barrel and still glowing.  Presumably if loose tow was used it emerged from the barrel as a flaming  mess – I have occasionally used a paper tissue as a wad, and can verify that it burns and smokes on the ground afterwards.  Any information would be welcome.  One reason why we are always careful to see where the wads land when shooting over dry grass in summer.  I picked up a couple of pieces of engraving from Dick for a ‘funny’ gun he is restoring.  It was dug up in a garden so there was only a bit of the stock remaining, so he has made a fine saw handled pistol and is restoring the remnants of very fine chequering – I don’t know how he does it, it requires much more patience than I can muster.  I am to try to engrave a border on the hammer/frizzen.  I’m always unsure which word to use for it, the traditional usage is that in flintlocks the cock is the cock and the frizzen is called the hammer, but in percussion guns the cock is often called the hammer – I’m not sure if it was ever still called the cock?    I had to go to Giles’s flat to ‘snag’ a problem – in order to insulate the 25 mm gap between the plasterboard and the underlying brickwork in one (cold) wall I drilled a series of holes  & injected aerosol expanding foam only to have it coming  out round one of a row of power sockets. When it had ‘set’ I unscrewed the fronts of the three sockets but they were stuck fast.  I didn’t think it was a good idea to have power sockets set in possibly inflammable foam, so today I prepared for a major job, probably involving taking out the sockets, boxes and all.  Unusually it turned out to be much easier than I had feared because for some reason the foam didn’t adhere to the plastic of the sockets at all, although it stuck firmly to everything else including the wires and the screws in the sockets.  Anyway I was able to pries (prise?) the sockets out and clear out the foam around the wires and eleswhere and put it all back in pristine condition in about 3 hours – that job done……. My next project, before I start on any more of my pile of guns to restore, is to get my little Chinese CNC milling machine ( 3040)  working – Giles and I ran into a brick wall with it last time we tried as its control board runs from the parallel port of a P.C. and modern ones don’t have parallel printer ports and it you use an add-on port it doesn’t work fast enough, so I’m going to have to get a different control board from the web.   CNC milling requires a number of processes, all of which are dependent on pieces of software, and if you don’t want to pay out for them – they can cost a lot more than the machine – you have to scrabble around to find free programs.  The process consists of software for designing the shape,  then software for working out the toolpath necessary to cut it, then software to turn that into G code instructions for the X,Y and Z axes in terms of distance, and then software to turn the G code into pulses to drive the X,Y and Z motors – getting it all to work without a commercial package to sort it for you is somewhat tedious…..

Feb 8th.  I had an enquiry about the T Perrins I have for sale, so I got it out – it was one of the first guns I restored, and when I look at it now I think I did a decent job of it.  I was fairly sure that it wasn’t a shooter when I restored it, but looking at it now I think it would stand a proof charge pretty well. There are pits on the outside of the left barrel but the 6 inches or so of the breech area is good.  A lot of my friends shoot worse!   Provided that there is no air gap in the load most old guns will stand double shot load perfectly well – I heard an account of  a terrible accident when a beginner double loaded one barrel and it split at the breech with dire consequences.  This raised my curiosity because double loading with two normal loads would be unlikely to ignite the second lot of powder because the wad, shot and card would be in the way.  If it were just the normal first charge that ignited then you just have the equivalent of maybe 2 1/2 times the normal shot load which doesn’t add up to even a moderate proof charge and is something that any gun in use should stand or it shouldn’t be in use.  So what went wrong?  If the second charge ignited when the load was some way down the barrel it would have burnt quite slowly, but if that happened  some way down the barrel where the walls are quite thin it could have split there.  A much more likely explanation is that the second  wad and shot load was never pushed down into contact with the first load – its a known problem that if there is a gap very high pressures will be experienced,  as when a barrel is plugged with mud or snow, or a bullet is incorrectly seated.  The maximum pressure occurs at the blockage as the pressure wave from the explosion is reflected by the block and effectively doubles the local pressure for a short distance – hence the ring bulge that forms in rifle barrels if the bullet is not fully seated, or gets jogged along the barrel.  I suppose it is also possible that the second powder charge has such low density and so much air within that it acts as a gap.  I have inadvertently fired a double loaded gun without harmful effects – even the recoil was  quite reasonable – I am much more careful now – I use a marked loading rod so I can see immediately how much is down each barrel.

Feb 7th.  Looking at the Alex. Henry again, I came to the conclusion that maybe the barrel engraving would benefit from a bit of TLC.  My client had suggested it and I had thought it wasn’t necessary, but looking at the gun with all the rest of the engraving crisp, I could see that the barrel had the usual  problem that the engraving had got filled up almost flush with the surface with a hard layer of rust and maybe oil so that it couldn’t easily be seen.  So biting the bullet I carefully picked out the rust using a variety of engraving tools.  The aim is to take out the rust, but inevitably you cut into the metal slightly, so you need to use the tools you would for engraving the letters.  Basically in this case I used a flat that was the same width as the wide strokes,  a slightly rounded onlette  for the fine strokes and a ‘square’ ground to about 70 degrees for the angled bits of the serifs and the round letters.  The engraving was interesting because the name and address engraved on the breech side of the rear sight is subtly different from the patent and gauge engraving on the  muzzle side of the sight in script and also how it’s cut.  Anyway I’m quite pleased with the improvement – worth 3 hours of very careful work!  I also replaced the pin that holds the bolt into the stock – the bolt(s) that holds the barrel on should be captive, held in the gun by a small pin driven through the stock and running in the slot in the bolt.  The pins are usually removed when necessary by sticking the edge of a blade into the pin near the top and pulling it out – for this reason it is better to make replacement pins out of fairly soft steel so the blade can get a grip – don’t be temped to break a bit off  an ordinary domestic hard steel pin. Incidentally, I’m fairly convinced that the rifle was beautifully re-stocked  some time ago and not used since.  I cleaned out the nipple nipple and its hole – the nipple is an original and has a platinum plug with very small hole at the exit – probably around  0.7 mm – the thread is fine – safe to shoot.  The nipple hole was pretty rusty so I can’t guarantee that the cross passage between the nipple and the chamber is clear – I ought to put a small brush down the barrel to clean out the powder chamber anyway.  If I was about to shoot it I would probably clean the barrel with boiling water and pump it through a few times to get rid of any loose muck, but the bore looks good.  The breech block has a platinum plug on the outside of the cross chamber to plug the hole where it was drilled – I would not want to remove it.  Some double guns have a screw  on inner face of the breech plug for access which can (sometimes) be undone to get access for clearing out.

 

I found it difficult to photograph the engraving because the rust pitting tends to catch the light – click on the photos for a better view.

 

Feb 7th. –  I realised that the ‘wear’ on the Alex Henry trigger guard tang was the result of filing out the worst of the rust.   The notes on speed of ignition of gunpowder from the Health and Safety report on powder storage (see below) are interesting ;-

The argument about the SD (standard deviation – a measure of the variation seen in a number of experiments – applies equally to the difference between Swiss No 2 and TS2 – but its clear that in general the numbers support our experience of these powders – I wonder where  Czech powder comes on the scale?

Feb 6th.  STEM club at school this afternoon – more peaceful than sometimes!  I think we outfaced the children with Lego Mindstorms so we’ll do something a bit simpler next half term.   I have been chasing round as I had forgotten that I had an outstanding order for some electronic boards that I supply so I had to spend this morning soldering in components – I need some connector strips that  are due tomorrow, then I can finish enough to satisfy the customer for a while!  I did get round to visiting Dick to pick up the Alexander Henry rifle he has been cleaning and titivating, and  fit the trigger guard that I had re- engraved – he has done a super job of cleaning up the furniture and getting dings out of the stock etc.  The rifle is in mixed condition that makes one wonder how it got like that.  The stock is very crisp and new looking- the chequering is like new and all the stock edges are sharp and unworn and the inletting is very close fitting.  The engraving on the lock is very high quality and  sharp and the furniture matches in quality.  There is a fair bit of wear on the tang of the trigger guard where the hand would grip and a bit on the bow of the guard.  The breech end of the barrel is in clean condition but 6 inches further towards the muzzle it is quite uniformly pitted with rust – quite deep along the junction with the under-rib in places.  There are also small rust  pits on the patch box lid. The bore is pretty good but has a slight patch of rough near the muzzle (I haven’t tried to clean it out).   Antique rifles don’t usually show as much use as shotguns (unless used extensively in e.g. Africa) but I  wonder if this one has been restocked at some point, like my Purdy rook and rabbit rifle?  I suspect that the rust was the result of a small number of wettings, possible just one that wasn’t dried off and oiled… the owner must have been gutted, as this wasn’t a bargain basement rifle! Its what I love about antique guns – there are always multiple layers of mystery to be unraveled after almost 200 years!  Oh, and it needs a good ramrod!  I have a piece of ebony I bought at great expense that would make half a dozen rods – I must pluck up courage to cut it up now that I have a new blade in my radial arm saw……….

There is a terrific sense of movement in the scroll engraving – very clever work – wish I could do it!

Feb 4th  – I decided that I needed another storage box for black powder and while driving was discussing with Giles how the regulation design of boxes worked in the event of fire.  With his usual inquisitiveness and love of the internet he came up with a report on the latest (2013) tests done by the HSE on setting fire to the boxes.  What is interesting, apart from what actually happens when you put a regulation box containing plastic bottles of black powder in a bonfire, is that the research concludes that there isn’t any significant difference between 500 gm and 1 Kg containers of BP, and that 25 x 1Kg containers in one box was no more dangerous that 9 x 500 gm containers.  They also concluded that the ignition speed of the powder didn’t make any difference to the overall conflagration. Its a shame that the HSE hasn’t updated the design of black powder boxes to take account of this research, especially since black powder continues to be sold in 1 Kg plastic bottles, which means it all has to be decanted into smaller bottles that are in all probablility not black carbon loaded antistatic plastic like the original ones.  I notice that my new explosives licence has no limit on the amount of explosive I can keep – I thought it was 10 Kg, which is enough for me, but not excessive – it amounts to 20 x 500 gm  bottles assuming they are all full – quite a big box.  Incidentally, if you do have a fire your powder box should survive for 8 to 12 minutes before going up, and bottles will mostly go up separately.  Here is the HSE  report on the 2013 testing…. rr991- storeage of black powder, test data

Remember, this is the website for wacky facts – and don’t forget to email your comments on Air Guns to   firearmsconsultations@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk   today or tomorrow!

Feb 3rd  – Having nearly finished the flat (nothing in our household is ever completely finished  – we would feel a loss of purpose if it was) I can play a bit.  I recut the borders and motif on the trigger guard of the Alex Henry rifle.  Its a tricky part to engrave because of the rounding of the edge where the border lies, and the obstruction caused by the trigger bow and curvature of the guard.  The original engraving was done by a right handed apprentice and was not particularly good – you can usually tell which hand they engraved with because the little ‘comma’ motif can be cut easily in the normal i.e. writing, way but is more difficult if it curves in the reverse direction – it has to be cut from the narrow end and its easy to turn towards your body, not away.  Anyway that came out an improvement and I coloured it a little with a gas torch to match the rest.  In our discussions about how far to take a restoration job Dick and I try to avoid anything that looks too perfect, referring to that kind of over restoration as an XXXX job, where XXXX is the name of a well known restorer! We had that discussion over the Alex Henry barrel.  I also finished the butt pad for the Manton – as I wasn’t sure how it would turn out I did a fairly quick and dirty job, but it fits well and is secure and the gun comes up much better.  It was good to get back to a bit of engraving………………

I had just started to recut the top border here….

The wiggle border is quite tricky on the rounded edge of the trigger guard as its easy to skid.

 

More of a trial than a quality product!

2nd Feb – I sent some time this morning struggling with my computer, which had decided that my email program Thunderbird hadn’t updated fully and I needed to reboot – after a couple of reboots and no change I went online and found some ‘remedies’, none of which worked and I couldn’t download another copy on top of it – in the end I deleted a few likely looking files from the program directory and managed to re-install a new version without loosing all my emails.  In the meantime the computer decided that I couldn’t log  into my bank account, although by this evening it had relented!  Dick finished the repair of my ‘Egg’ percussion that fell and broke the fore-end into 5 pieces – I don’t know how he manages to get things back together again so well, but its difficult to see any signs of repair unless you look very carefully.  He has almost finished the Alex Henry – its coming up beautifully, everthing is pretty well mint except the trigger guard ( which I’m going to do a bit of refreshing of the engraving on) and the barrel which is a bit pitted on the outside .  We have had several discussions about what work its appropriate to do on the barrel and have come to the conclusion that its an all or nothing job, there is no halfway option, and we both think that the rest of the gun is so good that to do a full striking up of the barrel and refinishing it will spoil the authenticity of the rest.  Plus it would be pretty expensive!  We’ll see what the client thinks.    I have done a bit more work on the butt pad for the Manton – then I stood it against my Samuel Nock percussion the stock is almost an inch shorter so the butt pad is needed.   I’ve just got to finish it off and lace it to the stock.

This was in 5 pieces with the bolt broken out – superb repair by Dick

Its really a prototype/ proof of method, but I may never get round to making the real thing!

1 Feb – another month gone…   I heard yesterday that our muzzle loaders/MLAGB  and not going to the British Shooting Show in a fortnight – I was looking forward to manning the stand and meeting a load of interesting people – shame.   I had an email from someone who tried to list an old lock for a flintlock on Ebay and got it kicked off as being part of a firearm – Sites like Ebay and Amazon are paranoid, as are many carriers, so be warned.  I guess we all know that we are in the sights of lots of organisations – a couple of examples come to mind – Everyone with a shotgun license or a firearms licence is on a government list of potential terrorists – i.e. people having access to firearms.  Some of my friends have been asked out of the blue at ports if they are carrying firearms.  I did hear a report that if a firearms holder rings 999 for a burglary in progress the police will wait for an armed response unit before attending – I can’t verify that.   Another important issue all those interested in shooting should be aware of – the government is running a consultation on sir gun law and amongst the possible outcomes is to bring our laws in line with Scotland – i.e. licenses for all air weapons – you can imagine the chaos in firearms licensing departments from the extra load of this pointless exercise in nanny statism.  The consultation ends on FEB 6TH so not long to do it – you can see details at here  and send your email response to firearmsconsultations@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk

BASC makes the following points about the issues raised – if you haven’t got time to compose an email just cut and paste this, it will be better than nothing!   ;-

We have highlighted the following points:

  • Current legislation already addresses the issue of storage and under-18 access
  • Airgun fatalities are extremely rare. The Home Office has been able to identify only four involving minors since 2005. A national licensing system would lack proportionality
  • Airgun manufacturers already supply products that are safe, fit for purpose and fully comply with firearm and consumer laws. If an airgun is modified without proper authority, then the person making the modifications is responsible, not the manufacturer
  • The police already struggle to properly service existing certificate holders and simply do not have the resources to deal with millions of additional certificates
  • Airgun restrictions would have unintended consequences including a collapse in sales for the trade and a loss of opportunity for young people to learn marksmanship and proper firearms handling. Restrictions could also undermine conservation efforts as airguns are used to control grey squirrel populations.

29th Jan.  I put in an alteration to my shotgun certificate recently to take off a couple of antiques that were not shootable any longer, and put on two others to replace them – the old guns going back to my (section 58) collection, and the ‘new’ ones coming from my  collection.  Each time I do this I get an email asking me who I transferred the guns to and where I acquired the  ‘new’ ones from, although I indicated clearly that its my collection in both cases – I guess the clerks don’t get to deal with shooters of antiques very often, but I’ve had to give impromptu lessons on the firearms act several times.  I might offer to go in and take a load of antiques!   The certificate forms have had the number of spaces for changes drastically reduced to 6, so I’ve already used 2/3 the available spaces withing the first three weeks of the certificate’s life!    I was in the flat today to hang another door, which called my attention to my new ‘tool’ discovery – often when I do a job I discover some device, tool or gadget that is so useful that I regret not having come across it years ago for the time it saves – this jobs gadget is a big bag of colour coded plastic spacers from Screwfix that stack together and come in a range of thicknesses so that you can make up any thickness of spacer from about 1 mm to 20 mm to within a mm or less  or  more when perched on a block of wood). Perfect for fitting  and levelling doors, windows, cabinets, cupboards, worktops etc, –  anywhere there is a gap to be controlled.

28th Jan  Giles has now more or less moved to his flat and I only have a few jobs to finish – like fit the 3 remaining doors and make a desk and stop the washing machine from destroying itself when it spins on account of the decking is too springy for it!  Anyway I am now able to have weekends at home to catch up with domestic and gun fettling.  I did the shopping for the first time in months – I’d almost forgotten how, and Giles and I finished the wood (offcuts from the American Walnut work tops at the flat) for his coffee table, and I welded and painted  a base out of some old bits of scrap  1″ square section steel tube I had lying about – I bought a cheap chop saw for metal and wood recently – the way it chews through metal is impressive, although it does spray bits of red hot steel all over the place – you need a helmet as bits fall on your head, as well as full face protection.  I fitted a new blade on my radial arm saw as the old one was getting a bit tired – luckily the 30 mm to 16 mm bore adapter from the old blade fitted the new one exactly.  I even found time to fix up a sling style Irish shot flask from an old nozzle I had and a leather that Pete kindly gave me.  When I shot the Manton I realised that the stock was a bit short for me – I couldn’t find my leather pad so I bought a nasty rubber one at CGC so I’ve started to make a leather one that fits the gun properly – I have made a pad from the Judo mat foam I had, and ordered thread and leatherwork bits, so I’ll put up photos when I do some more on it.  To top off the weekend I managed to make 28 lbs of marmalade to see us through the next year!  Now exhausted – makes me realise that spending all weekend working on the flat was a doddle!

 

25th Jan.  A very pleasant day at Cambridge Gun Club, apart from having to cross a lorry route 4 inches deep in sloppy mud in my shoes!  Anyway Bev and Pete both gave the seal of approval to the Manton as being a good fast shooter, and I did hit a few with it, plus I’d cured the stalled cock problem.  I used my Samuel Nock percussion after lunch and had some luck, and one or two nice clays that I wasn’t expecting to hit.  My conclusion was that I might as well shoot flintlock as the results are not much different and its more fun!

24th Jan  –  My next job at the flat is hanging new doors – I bought 4 oak doors on offer – they seem to be part solid part veneered with a ‘manufactured’ core and look the part – my problem, if indeed it is a problem, is that they weigh 34 Kg each and need 3 hinges, not two.  I don’t fancy cutting all the rebates for the hinges in the oak edging strips by hand with a chisel, so I thought I’d see if I could buy a jig for a router.  Unfortunately the jig costs about twice what a router costs so its plan ‘B’ – make a jig!   I had fun this afternoon as Dave and I have been helping Cherry Hinton Church run a STEM club for children aged 7 to 11.  This week they had to build something to transport a 1Kg weight across an 80 cm ‘river’ so we stretched a string on some frames and made a carriage to carry the weight across.  Its great to see the children tackling problems but doing it all in less than an hour is challenging.   I’m off for a quick shoot with my flintlock friends tomorrow – the weather promises to be fine although there will be a bit of breeze.  I’m hoping to pick up 2Kg of Swiss No 2 as I’m completely out.  I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that I am not good at judging how fast a flintlock is going off ( unless its painfully slow!), except I can roughly tell by the recoil how fast the main charge is burning (at least I can tell that Czech powder is very ‘soft’ and TS2 less so).  The experts seem to be able to hear from the sound of the firing just how fast ignition is, and to tune flintlocks up by using slightly different loading techniques for the fastest ignition.  They are quite sure that Swiss No 2 and Swiss OB priming powder are the right things to use. I’m not sure I can tell the difference between Swiss No2 and TS2 but I’m told the latter is significantly slower.  Lots more for me to learn here – still, from the photos  my Manton is producing loads of sparks in the pan!….. we shall see..  I might take my camera to see if I can get a video that can be used to time the whole discharge process.

23rd Jan  – Busy weekend entertaining grand daughter (7) who was fascinated by engraving and the microscope.   I’m having a day off from the flat to get the Manton sorted so that I can try it out on Thursday at CGC.  If you’ve been looking at my previous entries you may remember that the frizzen of the left lock doesn’t fully open of firing – I took a video of it sparking, and you can see that it produces plenty of sparks in the pan before it stalls – see frame below.  The left frizzen opened a bit further than the right before it reached the ‘flip-over’ point so I took the left frizzen out and worked on the cam that runs on the frizzen spring roller on my 1200 hone and a fine diamond slip, I took it very gently as I didn’t want to overdo it, and after half a dozen attempts got it to open fully on sparking.  I use a small ‘mole grip’ to hold the frizzen spring off the frizzen while taking it on and off.  A quick polish on the fibre wheel finished the job, so I hope it will now function as it should, although as you can see from the clip before I worked on it, there was no shortage of sparks falling into the pan, even though from the geometry it looked as if they might not make it into the pan.  I would put the video on the web, but being a cheapskate I’m using a free version of Videopad and it wants me to buy a copy before it will let me export videos – I’m sure there is a workaround but I haven’t time to sort it at the moment.  Looking at the photos, it occurs to me that by the time the flint has travelled to the bottom of the frizzen the flint really isn’t moving at an angle to put much opening force on the frizzzen and by then the frizzen should be flying open under the influence of the frizzen spring. Obviously the flint has to scrape down a lot of the face of the frizzen to generate a good supply of sparks – I guess that the inertia of the frizzen actually carries it over the ‘flip-over’ point after a certain point.  I have read that flintlocks should fire without any significant strength in the frizzen spring, just on the inertia, although I haven’t tried it – in the flintlock days, the balance between the mainspring and the frizzen spring was regarded as a key factor in ignition speed. I must go through the video and work out how fast things happen! Answer – really too fast for my 50 frames per second camera- its mostly over in 40 mSec but the glow lasts for about 3/4 of a second – when I put powder in the pan everthing is obscured by smoke after about 40mSec.   – the persistence of the heat shows why you have to wait in the event of a hang fire.

 


Nothing wrong with the sparking here, but the frizzen stops there!  Its surprising how long the glow from the heat lasts on the flint.

 

The clamp is one I usually use for resoldering ribs on double guns.

 

After repair – you can just see the ghost of the frizzen in the open position. This is the first frame (50 f.p.s) of action, the next frame is blanked out by smoke from the powder.  My camera is not a proper video camera and makes a bit of a mess of very fast moving objects.  The image is mangled – you shouldn’t be able to see both the frizzen and the rib underneath it in the same frame, but the editing software might have somehow scrambled it! 

18th Jan. Back at the flat today after I had picked up a couple of 12 bores from a recently widowed friend and took them to an RFD for a safe ekeeping.  I have a couple of little jobs to do including fixing an IKEA cupboard door – I bought a set of hinges from Screwfix as it is a waste of time struggling to buy anything small from IKEA, only to discover that they sabotage that possibility by drilling out the normal fixing screw holes ( which they don’t use) so that they are too big for any standard hinges! ( typical IKEA) – I managed a good fix using plastic bushes made from wall plugs, so I got away with it, I think.  I will attack the problem of the Manton frizzen soon!  The left frizzen won’t fly open on firing  – I tried inverting the flint, or using a different flint but they strike the frizzen in about the right place (around 1/3 the way down), and seem about the right length, they match the one in the right cock which works fine.  In the literature they talk about balancing the strength of the main and frizzen springs for fast ignition, and it is possible that the frizzen spring is a bit strong on the left frizzen – I have seen it said that guns will work with almost no frizzen spring, but I’m not sure they would be very fast in that state.  Looking at the equilibrium position of the frizzens (the point at which they are balanced between springing shut and springing open) I see that the left frizzen has to be more open before it is accelerated by the spring compared to the right frizzen by about 10 degrees or so.  This is a function of the exact shape of the lobe on the back of the frizzen that is in contact with the roller on the frizzen spring in relation to the roller position.  The amounts of metal that need to be removed to change the equilibrium position are quite small, so I might first have a go at gently reshaping the tail of the frizzen so that the left and right are the same.  The next step would probably be to weaken the frizzen spring very slightly.  It is quite interesting when I spark off the left lock and the frizzen doesn’t open – the edge of the flint that is shaving off the sparks & steel slivers momentarily glows red hot and cools over maybe half a second.  I guess the hardness of the frizzen face has an effect on the friction/heat/work generated as the flint gouges down the frizzen face, so maybe hardening the face would be another solution?    I’ll take some photos tomorrow, and try to get a video of the red hot glow.

16th Jan.  A very pleasant day’s shoot at Woodhall Estate – sunny, not too cold but with quite a breeze.  I started out with the flintlock using TS2 but I wasn’t confident that it was going off fast enough and I wasn’t having much success so I decided it had better wait til I could try it at clays with some expert guidance in tuning it up.  Annoyingly for the last shots the left hand frizzen wasn’t opening fully, although it did fire (another thing to sort out & put on the blog!).  Anyway out came my  Samuel Nock double percussion, and I did begin to connect. I found crossing birds difficult in the wind but I improved as the day progressed and had a cracking last drive with  birds going like rockets directly over me (my favourite shot), so I accounted for a significant fraction of the bag on that drive. We always get a modest bag on muzzle loading shoots, which is why I like them – mine is usually particularly modest!  Anyway since I broke my Egg double, the Nock will become my percussion gun of choice.

14th jan.  Time to tackle the problem with the double discharge of the Manton.   Sometimes the full cock position is not secure as it should be, so that the gun will release the cock of the second barrel when the first is fired.  This may be due to one of two causes, either the bent ( the notch in the tumbler that catches the sear ) is worn or not properly formed so that the sear can slip out too easily, possibly in combination with a worn, rounded nose on the sear, or the sear/bent are perfectly OK but the sear is not able to move far enough to engage the bent fully. The sear arm is lifted by the trigger blade, and should fall far enough to let the sear engage. There are two things that might prevent the sear from falling, the trigger blade may be too high or the wood of the stock may be getting in the way.  The arm of the sear that contacts the trigger blade is often bent as a result of previous ‘repairs’ so you need to check carefully to ascertain the cause before attempting to fix things.  Fiddling with the bent and the sear nose is very tricky, and not something to be embarked on lightly.  In the case of the Manton  it was clear that both bent/sear combinations were pretty near perfect and the problem was that the left sear arm could not fall enough to engage the sear nose fully in the bent.  As a simple test, when the gun is at full cock you should be able to feel a little play in the triggers before they engage with the sear – in my case there was no play.  Looking into the hole in the stock where the sear arm goes I could see that the wood was not getting in the way, although there wasn’t a lot of clearance.  At this point  I remade the little roller on the left  sear arm as the one on there was bigger than that on the right (The Manton is unusual in having a roller on the sear arm).  This of course provided a bit of clearance, in fact more or less cured the problem, but I wanted a little more clearance, and the right trigger also had no clearance, although the sear did just manage to engage its bent.   Apart from bending the sear arms (not really possible with the rollers) the clearance can be made in one of two ways – you can directly file or gently grind a little off the top of the trigger blade which will mean that the triggers move further back to fire the gun, or you can file/grind a little off the front of the triggers where they are stopped by the end of their slots in the trigger plate, which will mean that the triggers have a little more forward movement.  I opted for the second method, having first polished the tops of the trigger blades on my fibre wheel to give a good bearing surface, I ground a little off the fronts of the triggers on my 260 grit diamond lap.  I now have about the right amount of play ( 1 mm or so) on the left trigger, and a bit less on the right, but enough clearance for it to function correctly.  One of the interesting speculations when fixing things  is how they came to be like that – is it just the result of wear, and if so where/how, or does it indicate something has been changed/repaired – maybe different locks put in or a reconversion attempt?  In this case I don’t have an answer!  Clearly the gun nearly worked and it might have been a very minor thing that tipped it into not working but I can’t see what that was.

New smaller roller 

Possible places to relieve the trigger blade height.

I ground here on a 260 grit lap

13th Jan.  I’ve just come back from Somerset where I was very kindly invited to a shoot on Friday.  We had a very pleasant day on a small, informal shoot in some lovely country and the weather was kind.  Birds were a bit scarce, but that didn’t detract from the day, especially for the three of us who were in period costume and shooting muzzle loaders – 2 flintlock and one percussion.  I took my new double 16 bore flintlock John Manton, which I had never shot before, and my faithful ‘Egg’ – inverted commas a because its one of those guns that obviously came out of Birmingham and had a name put on it that would appeal to punters – whether it had anything to do with any Eggs at any time is immaterial!  My Egg fell over in its slip at home and when I got there it had snapped off the stock in front of the locks into several pieces, so the Manton it had to be!   I started with Swiss No 2 powder and 1 1/4 oz of No 6 shot (stolen from 12 bore cartridges as I had run out). The first shot resulted in both barrels firing as the sear was jogging out of the bent on the left lock when the right barrel fired.  I didn’t really have time to investigate, although the full cock on the left barrel seemed to hold, so I just took to firing the left barrel first – it was a bit trickier to take a second shot by moving to the front trigger than the normal sequence, but it enabled me to carry on. Anyway my second shot connected so that was good.   I ran out of Swiss No 2 (black powder) towards the end and swapped to Nobel TS2 that I had – it seemed to burn quicker than the Swiss and gave quite a recoil with 2 1/2 drams of powder and 1 1/4 oz of shot.  My host was shooting an 18 bore flintlock using Czech powder and had told me that it had virually no recoil so I put 2 1/2 oz of my TS2 in his gun and he was surprised at how much recoil there was.  I will have to see if I can find a source of TS2 as it was very clean and burned fast.  I had two misfires where the pan flashed but the barrel didn’t fire – I put that down to not pricking out the touch hole between shots.  The Anglian Muzzle loaders ritual requires that the touch hole is blocked by a pin during reloading to keep powder out of the pan and make  sure the hole is clear.  I can’t do that with the Manton on account of the ‘lips’ on the hammers (frizzens) – see photos below.   It was quite clear from Friday that the lip on the left barrel, which is as intended by Joseph Manton,  was there to allow air but not powder to pass – it very effectively stopped self priming, which did happen a bit with the right barrel.  ( I will do a bit of welding to reproduce the lip properly on the right hammer)   I had a look at the sears tonight – both seem to be touching their respective trigger plates when on full cock, the left is definitely preventing the sear from engaging fully in the bent, the right more or less OK but I’d like a little bit of clearance to take up when the triggers are pulled.  The roller on the left sear is a replacement and slightly larger than that on the right and may be the problem – I’ll remake the roller tomorrow and see where we are.  One thing is certain, when free to move the sears are very securely located in the full cock bents – in fact possibly too well seated, which may have something to do with the current problem.   I have to go to Dick’s to take him a brace of pheasants so I’ll discuss it with him.  While in Somerset I was taken to meet a man with a fine collection of flintlock guns who turned out to know many of the people I know – its a small world!  Now that I’m shooting flintlocks I really need a new version of the de-capper that will be useful for both flint and percussion – I’m making a prototype with a turnscrew blade for the cock screw for flint changing and a bigger pin for poking touch holes.

8th Jan.  I took the Manton barrel to Dick’s this afternoon to be proof tested so that I can be confident to shoot it when the opportunity arises.  My main concern was/is with flintlocks that they may be a conversion or a bodged job and the touch holes may blow out as a missile – I have similar concerns about the nipples in percussion guns, but they are easy to check/repair if they look dodgy, whereas you can’t investigate the touch hole.  I strapped the barrel (wrapped in a towel) into the stock of my large rampart gun, with a pad of judo mat behind the breech plug, and clamped the stock into a flattened workmate and tied it in.  Each barrel was loaded with 4 drams of Swiss No 2 and 2 1/2 oz of shot.  We laid a short trail of powder to one touch hole and lighted it with a gas lighter which produced a double discharge as there was some powder scattered about.  Anyway the arrangement worked well, the breech punched a neat hole half way into the judo mat but stayed in the stock in the workmate and still on the ground – a lot better than last time we proved a barrel when it took off into the mud.  I should point out that Dick is an RFD and knows what he is doing, having made innumerable guns himself.  At least I can now be confident that the Manton won’t explode when used with normal loads ( 2 1/2 drams and 1 or 1 1/4 oz).   I collected the fore-end Dick had sorted for Bev – to be honest I didn’t recognise it as the same fore-end I’d given him, it looked like one from a new gun – I don’t know how he does such good chequering on such unpromising material.  He has also sorted the touch hole in the Theop. Richards flintlock – it looks perfect, and I am assured that nothing will shift it short of blowing up the barrel!    I had a good look at the Blair and Sutherlands – it is a re-conversion and the frizzens are wrong so we’ll see what can be done, photo included here……

The frizzen doesn’t fit the pan

 

Blair and Sutherlands – The frizzen doesn’t fit the pan and there is a crack in the support – red arrow points  to it. Its a fairly poor re-conversion.

6th Jan.  Back in the flat for a bit of sorting out, then a bit of work on the Manton.   I decided that I needed to do a more thorough job of sorting the false breech as just padding the face of the stock with epoxy  wasn’t going to do much for the appearance!  I did a little filing with a diamond file on the breech plug and false breech to get a better fit, they are better, but I couldn’t get them into tight alignment – I’ll live with that for now and tackle it later when I decide if I’m going to take out the breech plugs and lap the barrel.  Anyway I  did a bit of building up of the top edges of the stock with epoxy and rottenstone and adjusted the fit of the false breech to get rid of the gaps, and and does look better now.  The photo was taken when I had applied a few coats of dark shellac to the work area to ‘bring it all together’ but before I’d rubbed it down.  I need to work on the oil finish of the stock too.  I’ll  also have to get rid of the ginger browning on the barrel soon as it mightily offends my sense of historical accuracy!  Some of this can wait until I see if I can hit anything with it!  I got out the Blair and Sutherland double flint I bought some time ago as its on certificate and can now be replaced with the Manton.  The B & S needs the frizzens attended to and the frizzen brackets on both are cracked and will need welding – then it might have to go!

I still need to rub down the shellac and fill the couple of nicks in the inletting, but it is much better.

Much better fit of the false breech in the stock, but I still need to get the breech plugs tight against the false breech, but as both are hardened it is difficult to work on them – I haven’t really found where the problem lies, despite smoking the parts  – maybe I’ll take it to Dick and ask him, he is better than me at spotting these things.  He has now finished replacing the touch hole of the Theopolis Richards single – it was a re-conversion and had a screwed plug, which he replaced with one with a better fit with a German silver facing.  He had planned to soft solder the facing, but in view of the fact that it will eventually be shot, I got him to hard solder it instead.  The barrel appeared to be loaded with wad and shot but no powder.   He has also cleaned up the Alexander Henry rifle, and I look forward to seeing that.

5th Jan – In the case with the Manton was a three piece cleaning rod and jag, a spring clamp and an Irish pattern belt shot flask by Sykes that had lost its scoop.  I like Irish pattern shot flasks and use a small one hung round my neck by a loop on the bottom of the flask for game shooting.   I had the top parts of a similar flask I had bought at auction in a box, so I appropriated the scoop.  First problem was that it was too long, so I trimmed it to fit the belt flask and checked that it held 1 oz of shot, which is probably my normal load.  It is important that the scoop catch works well or you loose the scoop in the field, and if you are unlucky, all the shot at the same time.  The catch on the replacement scoop was a bit weak, and had been made for a thicker rim so it was a bit loose in the belt flask.  I decided to remove the spring catch from the scoop – it was held by a small, almost invisible brass rivet that I drilled out.  When I got the catch out it was broken and quite rusted, so I decided to make another one out of a piece of 3mm x 10 mm spring steel (the stuff I use for de-cappers)   Making one allowed me to make the catch a bit stronger and more positive in action, and to make a slightly bigger thumb lever, and chequer it with an engraving tool for better grip.  The new spring fitted well, and could be bent so that it held its tension and stayed in place reasonably well, so I hardened and tempered it and put it in with a touch of epoxy glue, which seems to work. I will put a small rivet in when I can find a suitable material to make one from, probably copper wire.  See photos. I’ll need to get a leatherworker to make new leather bits as the existing leather is cracked and leaking. My attempts to pack a new bed for the false breech  of the Manton failed miserably – the epoxy stuck perfectly to the clingfilm and peeled off the wood which I hadn’t degreased adequately. Anyway I cleaned it all off and have built it up with a paste of epoxy and rottenstone, which appears to be a better colour than epoxy and wood dust, plus it seems to harden better. So I will now reshape the epoxy to fit tightly on the false breech. – actually as usual when I came to fit things it needed a little more epoxy in one or two places………………..

Irish belt flask, replacement scoop, broken catch and donor top.  Bent nail holds the belt flask together!

Flask with new scoop in place, with bigger thumb piece (chequered) and stronger spring and better catch. It now needs the leather replaced!

4th jan – Bev did come back to me re the lip on the hammer of the Manton, so I had another look at ‘The Mantons – Gunmakers’ to see what I had missed.  The illustration that went with Patent 2722 was so bad that its difficult to make out how it is meant to be, but I read it as similar to my gun but with the hole in the lip on the line of the surface of the hammer pan lid, with the hole carried across the surface as a half round depression to exit on the outside of the pan. On my John Manton, the hole in the lip is such that it just misses the surface of the hammer.   Some of the confusion comes about because there were two court cases concerning the lip, 6th July 1814 Joseph Manton v Parker, and 20th June 1815 Joseph Manton v John Manton, both are described in detail in the Manton book.   In the first case the argument was that the lip and hole had been used as a self priming device, so that powder could flow through the hole into the pan to prime it, and then when the hammer was thrown back on firing, it cleared the powder from around the hole, avoiding ‘fusing’ and giving faster ignition.  In the second case the argument revolved round the use of the hole to allow air to escape from the barrel without letting powder out.  Joseph’s patent only mentions the second function of the lip and hole – he lost both actions on the basis of prior art, in the first case the argument seems to have been that even if the perceived function is different, it was the same thing.

The obvious thing was to see what happens when you try and put a typical powder through the hole in the lip, so I filled the pan with our normal shotgun powder and shut the hammer down –  however hard I tapped the lock with the lip downwards, all I got out was a few grains of dust, certainly not enough to prime anything!   That confirmed my suspicion that to self prime the hole would need to be comparable with the touch hole, and it is much smaller.  It would only reliably self prime if you used very fine and well graded powder, which they didn’t.  case closed……….

I did a bit more ‘fettling’ of the gun – one of its several problems is that the false breech doesn’t fit snugly against the stock, which is not good if I want to shoot it as that is where all the force of the recoil is transmitted.   I am not yet sure if my ‘fudge’ will work, but I carefully wrapped the false breech in clingfilm and put epoxy glue mixed with walnut dust onto the wood and replaced the false breech in position – it still needs time to harden so I don’t know if it will work, but it looks promising. ( Its not intended to glue the false breech in, the cling film is the release agent).  I steamed out a couple of dings, and have started to grainfill the stock a bit with rottenstone mixed into red oil with driers.  Red oil is linseed oil that Alkanet root has been soaking in for months  – a lovely deep red colour.

 

Not a very snug fit – not sure what is going to take the recoil!

3rd January  – A bit more pondering the Manton, sorry if I bore you!  The left hand lock (probably the least repaired) has a lip on the frizzen (hammer in the language of the time) that covers the touch-hole when the frizzen is closed but has a small hole through it  aligned with the touch-hole.  The right lock has a crude attempt to fake it.  There is some confusion about the purpose of this lip and hole so I went back to the Manton book and found it in an 1803 patent of No 2722 of Joseph Manton, younger brother of John, and a subsequent legal case for breach of patent in 1813 between the brothers which is fully written up.  It was known that you should not pile up the priming powder around the touch hole, but have it out of direct contact – the reason being that flame propagated more slowly through the powder than if the flash jumped a gap.  Piling the powder and getting slow ignition was known as ‘fusing’. It would appear that the principle was well known and that some guns were made with the frizzen obscuring the touch hole when closed so that the primer was not able to pile up at the hole.  Joseph Manton’s 1803 patent was for a lip that covered the touch hole but with a small hole in its centre to allow the air to escape when the wad was pushed down the barrel, without spilling the main charge into the pan, where, being coarser, it would have ignited more slowly. Joseph’s patent had a channel from the hole in the lip through the pan to the outside to allow easy escape of the air.

Lip and hole as per Joseph Manton’s patent 2722 of 1803

Manton’s patent shows a channel cut in the frizzen under face to allow the air to escape

Joseph’s claim in 1813 against John for infringing patent 2722 on two issues was thrown out because prior art was produced on both issues – on the lip and hole one witness claimed to have been making guns with this feature 27 years earlier for a period of three years.  Since no guns could be produced with this feature dating before the patent it can be presumed that the lip and hole were not really a sucessful, revolutionary idea, as indeed Col. Hawker said at the time!  Anyway my John Manton of 1808 has the feature on one frizzen almost exactly as illustrated in the patent specification in a drawing with such bad perspective that I’m not bothering to show it!  So my gun made in 1808 was one of the supposed infringements, but lacks the channel through the pan to allow the air to escape, although its difficult to see how the pan was that well sealed to need it!   Anyway having read all that, I will make sure I’m not guilty of ‘fusing’, or at least that I experiment to see if it really does slow things down.  I’m sure Bev will tell me if I’m barking up the wrong tree.

I am continuing to sort out a few things on the Manton – the trigger guard tang didn’t lie flush so I took all that out and cleaned out the bases of the inletting – if the parts have rusted at some time in the past they get a hard layer on the wood that stops the part seating – this can be very carefully scraped off, avoiding touching the sides of the inletting or you will spoil the fit – if the parts bed properly don’t touch the inletting!   I ran the trigger guard and trigger plate etc under the very fine wire brush and they do look better now.  The nails and screws all fit very well and are (probably) original.  I got most of the muck and varnish out of the chequering with methylated spirit – the chequering is somewhat uneven flat topped engraving and probably original.  The stock is very open grained so I might do a bit of grain filling as I refinish the stock – an oil finish as it is would leave too much grain visible.   Apart from the barrel, which needs rebrowning a proper colour, I’m offended by the escutcheons round the fore-end bolt (that holds the barrel in place) as they are just too big and bold.  Dick suggested that, as I don’t really see an easy way of replacing them with smaller ones, I engrave matching leaf borders round them – its something that I think wasn’t done till later in the percussion era, although I’m not sure.  Anyway it may be better than leaving them?

Rust and muck can be CAREFULLY removed, keeping away from the sides! 

The edges are a bit rubbed but there is nothing to clean off here!

This escutcheon is too fat and looks wrong!  The bolt head is a bit too big too.

2nd January 2018 – better get used to writing the new year date!  I went to Dick’s today for the first time in months to show him a couple of jobs that need attention, and get his opinion on the Manton – however hard we tried, we couldn’t find any evidence of modern re-conversion or lockwork – the only repair that is modern is the splicing on of the new fore-end and that is done so well that if you hadn’t been told, you would be unlikely to see it in any normal inspection.  So I’m happy to accept that it was a  good buy!  I noticed before I bought it that it had a significant ‘cast on’  i.e. the stock doesn’t line up with the barrel in the vertical plane but the butt is to the right of the barrel centre line by about 1/4 of an inch (about 1/8 of an inch would probably be more normal)  At the time I thought I might need to have the stock slightly straightened, but then I forgot all about it.  Now when I try the gun it ‘comes up’ beautifully and I think will suit me well.  Bev had a look at it but when he mounted the gun his eye was well over on the right barrel – too much cast!   I’ll be interested to see how I get on with it – I have a feeling that I’m too adaptable in my gun mounting so that I usually feel most guns fit me, but whether they actually do when I’m shooting them is another matter!  As an experiment I’ve taken an unknown gun and never put it to my shoulder until I’ve called for the clay, and hit it.  We shall see.  One poor bit of my Manton is the chequering, which is well filled up with ‘gunge’ and almost disappeared in places – its usually very difficult to clean it out – if you try to recut it without removing the hard stuff, the tool will wander because the wood is softer than the infilling dirt etc.  sometimes Methylated spirit ( wood alcohol) will shift it but more usually I need to resort to paint stripper of the dichlormethane variety.  I’ll give it a try and take some photos.  I’ve left Dick with a very nice Alexander Henry percussion rifle that needs the metalwork cleaned, and a Theophilus Richards single barreled flintlock fowler that has blown out its touch hole and needs to be safe to shoot – it has had the cock replaced as have so many guns – it looks as if it should have a French cock because of the shape of the fence – but that has signs of welding so I’m not sure what was going on – also the barrel  looks a bit early for a French cock- Dick will have a proper look when he takes the lock out.   He has a small flintlock lock for me to recut but hasn’t finished all the work on it yet.

31st December – Busy with getting the house sorted for another onslaught!   I had a look in the Manton book to check my assertion that the chequering on my Manton was too modern – from his photos most of his guns were chequered around that date, and the chequering was fairly plain and similar to fairly coarse modern chequering.  The most obvious difference is that chequered John Manton guns from those few years (around 1808)  had chequering that just ran out at the edges like a fringe of about 2 to 3 chequer pitches length.  The run outs appeared to be very even and there were no deeper/wider or other distinct lines around the chequered area.  My Manton does have the chequering outlined with border lines as in modern stock, I don’t think it will be feasible to return it to the original borderless pattern.   I had a few hours on Friday to make another small batch of de-cappers and engrave them – when I haven’t engraved for a while, trying to do it on spring steel snaps the points off my gravers – the harder ( & more expensive) the  graver steel the larger the bit that breaks off.  So I ended up having to grind about 20 gravers, some of them by as much as 3/4 of a mm.  By the third  de-capper I was more or less back in the groove and managed to wear down the points on several gravers before I broke the tips off!

29th December – I had a further look at the Manton and took a few more photos.  I’m convinced that the locks are original and came from a John Manton gun , I believe both were from No 5028  ( the illegible number on the edge of the rt hand lock would be consistent with 5028), althought interestingly there are subtle differences in the engraving on the two locks that only an engraver would register, so perhaps the two locks were engraved by different people or the engraver didn’t have a consistent style.  The main differences are in the border – the left lock tends to have 4 nicks in each side of each ‘leaf’, whereas the right lock has mostly three nicks on each side of each ‘leaf’.  The same pattern is followed for the borders on the two cocks, although the right cock shows  burrs thrown up by the engraving tool which suggests that it has been engraved since the rest of the locks received their current level of wear (so possibly a replacement).   There are also differences in the engraving of the two dogs on the tail of the locks, although these might be due to the different handedness of the engraving.  Its probably worth noting that most gun engraving in London was done by specialist companies that did engraving for a large number of gunmakers, and for ‘ordinary’ engraving as on the Manton  several people might work on different bits of the gun.   What questions remain, and how might they be resolved?   Let’s accept that the lockplates are original and from a John Manton gun No 5028 of 1808 or thereabouts.  I also think that the left hand cock is contemporary.  The right hand cock is a little bigger than the left but matches it closely – the engraving is a little less refined and hasn’t worn much – it could be a replacement from way back or a fake.  The frizzens are similar except that the left one has a proper small shutter with a small hole to mask the touchhole and stop loss of powder during loading, the right has a bit punched up to replicate it, with no hole. ( The Manton book shows this feature on Joseph’s guns not John’s))  The engraving on the frizzens is closely matched and looks original or a good fake).  The barrels have 5028 stamped on each, with London V and C/P marks in ovals, and one had the barrelmaker’s initials (?) T V or T Y stamped on it (p.s. its clearly T Y).  The breech plugs are both numbered 5028 – they do not quite mate flush with the false breech, which suggests that the false breech is not the right one – it isn’t particularly well let into the stock either, or possibly the fit is not perfect because the breech plugs have been out and not returned exactly in the correct alignment. The tang of the trigger guard has 5028 engraved on it (not stamped as I originally thought, which would be wrong!) , and the trigger guard is engraved with the dog scene that appears on the tail of the locks – so I guess the trigger and mechanism is original.  The butt plate has engraving en-suite with the rest and fits well (now I have knocked the peg in a bit).    I can’t find a number stamped on the stock anywhere but I’m not sure it would have been in 1808.  Looking at the locks etc under x 20 magnification it doesn’t look like a re-conversion, although I could be taken in – I haven’t examined a lot of top quality reconversions in great detail,  I know there are one or two engravers around in the UK who can do good imitiations of 18th & 19th century gun engraving, but I’m not usually taken in, so I have to think that it may well be more original than I anticipated.  Given that the gun came with a contemporary case, a Dixon powder  flask  ( although with too small a throw for a shotgun, 1 1/2 dr max – more like a rifle load – it will probably do for my Nock rifle) and a 3 piece cleaning rod I think the price (£ 1700 hammer price) was fair, although not a bargain.

I had a look at the bore – as I saw before I bought it, there is a bit of pitting but it looks OK to shoot.  The barrel has had the ribs resoldered – not a perfect job as you can see the solder through the browning.  The barrel measures 29 inches – in all probability it started life as 30 or possibly 32 inches – they were common lengths for Manton at that date, so it has probably been shortened, which would explain the healthy amount of metal around the muzzle.  I ran some 600 grit paper up and down the barrel, plus a steel Turk’s Head mop – I might try lapping it if it shoots well.

 

Number on the edge of the lock, and replacement (?)  roller on the sear ( I have never seen one before)

Could be 5028 on the edge in the same place?  The roller on the sear is as it should be. 

 

Mostly 4 nicks in each side of each leaf of the border.

Mostly 3 nicks in each side of each leaf

 

28th December  – Family party passed off without injury  Tom and I put on a demonstration of shooting out a candle flame at great risk to his person – he is alive and recovering well.   I had a look through the Manton book to see how my new gun matches the photos –  it is certainly right for the serial number in most details, and there is even some evidence that John Manton locks had the name engraved in rather asymmetrical places.  Looking at the photos I took you can see a few minor differences between the two locks.  Two features mentioned specifically in the Manton book for guns with serial numbers close to this one (5028) were the serial number engraved on the edge of the lock plates, and a roller on the sear to reduce friction between sear and trigger plate, thus making the action smoother.  The left hand lock has the correct number engraved on its edge behind the cock, and the right lock has some corrosion there that makes it difficult to be sure – I’ll need to look under my microscope some time.  Both locks do indeed have the roller on the sear, although one looks like a replacement.   The cocks are French pattern, which is also right for the serial number, as are the gold poinsons and the London proof marks in an oval.   An interesting feature I hadn’t noticed before is that the frizzen springs ( and mainsprings) have a tab to locate them in the lock plate instead of the more common peg – you can see it in the photo of the underside as one frizzen spring is standing off the lockplate.  I am inclined to believe that the locks are original, but the jury is out on whether they are re-converted from a percussion conversion (pending time under the microscope) – it is also just possible but unlikely that the locks come from different guns.  Of course the locks could just be clever reconstructions using the information in the book but it wouldn’t make any kind of economic sense given the state of the stock and if so it has me fooled for the moment!   On balance I’m happy that it is basically original and should make a good shooter –  better than I thought it might be when I bid for it.

CLICK ON THE PHOTOS FOR BETTER PICS!

The engraving is classic William Palmer for around 1808, the year Manton used the 5028 serial number.

The last ‘N’ of Manton gets close to the cock, but there are photos in the Manton book of similar ‘mistakes’.

I have a strong dislike of ginger rebrowning as I think it was never like that originally, but I’ll live with it for the time being!

You can see the tab on the frizzen spring on the top lock.

 

 

27th December.   I hope you are all had a good Christmas – we are still in the thick of it as we always have a large family party a few days after Christmas and another at New Year.  So I haven’t done much with guns, although I did get out my new ‘Manton’ that I bought at Bonhams last auction.  I bought it to shoot, and at a price that clearly wouldn’t buy a pukka cased double flintlock by John Manton  so its interesting to see how much of a dog it is!  It came form the Murray collection that had a lot of guns that had been through the hands of ‘restorers’, most of them reasonably competent at e.g. reconversions.   This one was obviously in a poor state as the fore-end has been largely rebuilt and the checkering very worn ( and probably a bit modern too).  The barrel has the appropriate Manton London poinson in gold and a single gold line, and has a nice twist (it has been rebrowned) and has the number 5028 and London view and proof marks.  Its fit to the false breech is not perfect – there is a small gap that I need to look at, but the barrel isn’t obviously suspicious. The touch holes look like platinum.   The locks could be reconstructions – the cocks are possibly slightly different, although not obviously castings – the lockplates are ‘right’ but the name is in the ‘wrong’  place on one and is slightly obscured.  The works look OK.  One top jaw is slightly  bigger than the other.  The touch holes on the two sides are in very  slightly different alighnment with the pans, which always suggests re-conversion as its an easy error to make ( been there, done that!)!   The tangs and butt plate don’t lie well in the woodwork and the number on the triggerguard tang is stamped not engraved.  The case is about the right date although the label, possibly genuine, is later than the gun or box(?), the case has probably been refitted a bit, the layout is now correct for a Manton flintlock, with the locks dismounted from the gun for storage – incidentally on many of the double flintlocks with  recessed breeches you cannot (should not) remove the barrels without first removing the locks as there isn’t enough clearance in the frizzens to miss the stepped out barrel as you lift it – you risk doing damage if  you try.  Anyway, it ‘comes up’ nicely and I’m looking forward to shooting it shortly. I put in a couple of new flints ( yes Bev, I do have a few)   If it does shoot nicely I might be tempted to re-stock it, I have a nice piece of wood!  I’ll put up some photos in the next couple of days when I get a moment – currently the workshop where my camera is set up is so cold it is painful to spend any time there!

24th December  (just!)  It’s too late to get all the prezzies you forgot, so just relax and enjoy the day – they’ll probably be cheaper in the sales anyway!

23rd December. Very magnificent rib of beef  (chosen in preference to the T bone) now in the fridge!  I’ve just sold the last de-capper that I had in stock so I’ll have to make another batch – I get rid of one or two every time I go on a shoot- they are not much in demand for clay shooting, although I use mine fairly often for both.  Making them is a good excuse to do a bit of engraving practice – I’ll see if I can do some over Christmas when being in the midst of one’s loving family becomes a little overpowering!   I took the Andrews pistol lock off to photograph the safety catch mechanism from the inside and  now find that the side screw is missing – I have a nasty feeling that it fell on the floor and got hoovered up!  Since it was made by me anyway its not too serious.  The workshop is a complete mess as I haven’t done anything in there for three months except clean a couple of guns – another little chore for Christmas.

22nd December.  Back from a quick visit to family in Wales, I can now sort out urgent things like securing a large T bone joint of beef for Christmas day!   I popped into the flat to take a couple of photos before I went, see below, its looking good, and will be super when tidied up and finished – about a couple of fairly gentle weeks work.   I rang the firearms department to see if I was going to get my renewal by 2nd Jan when it expires, mindful of the intervening holidays and was given the mobile number of  my F E O who basically sorted it all out over the phone including calling me back with a couple of queries – their records differed from mine – that we sorted out very quickly while I was parked in my car.  Fantastic service and the F E O was happily aware of the difference between ‘certificatable’ firearms – those that must be on a FAC or Shotgun certificate, and Section 58 guns that may or may not be on a certificate – it makes discussions much simpler!  Anyway I should get my certificates in time to avoid shipping  my guns out to Dick’s store.  I see that I got into the latest issue of Black Powder – I seem to have achieved notoriety because I had been shooting my single barreled  Twigg flintlock with the same flint since I got it ( a few ‘have  a go’ sessions and a couple of practice sessions) and almost got through the 30 shot flintlock competition, but had to change it for the final few shots – I have to admit that when I removed it from the gun it didn’t resemble any gun flint I’d ever seen but until its end it hadn’t misfired once!  Bev said it looked more like a pebble than anything else, and I wouldn’t argue with that, wish I had a photo of it.

19th December.  I have now knocked off from the flat for Christmas!   A chap came and fitted the gas hob today – he asked me if I’d thought of doing it myself, looking at the rest of the renovation – the answer is that the lease requires gas work to be done by a gas safe engineer,  and I don’t fancy being in the dock if we start a fire in the block!  Otherwise I would have done it!   Anyway the kitchen is now fully operational ( Giles is cooking dinner with a friend there  tonight) and most of the rest is working – the few remaining bits can wait while I belatedly think about Christmas….  I might even get out my Manton purchase from Bonhams and have another look at it.  My Certificates run out on 2nd Jan and I haven’t heard anything from the Firearms team, so I think a check up is in order.  I don’t want to have to take them all to Dicks if it runs out!

18th December,  Gas fitter turned up today to fit the gas hob but didn’t have the required gas tap, so that didn’t happen!  maybe tomorrow, although I’m beginning to think that the hob will never be installed.  There doesn’t seem to be clarity in the regulations, which makes things difficult.  The regs originally said that the hobs must be installed with fixed piping, not the flexible pipes used with gas cookers, but then this was ‘clarified’ to allow fitting using convoluted stainless ‘flexible’ pipes.  I’m not sure that most fitters realise this, althought you can buy the pipe from good old Screwfix, so it must be OK!……..

17th December, Still at it!  Today we shifted a completely  full Land Cruiser’s worth of old doors and windows and old PVC trunking & junk to the dump, so things feel a bit better.  The walls are done, most of the lights are fitted and working and the clean-up has begun.  The office, which was more or less finished, is now the dumping ground for flat pack furniture and a sofa  – Giles says he wants to have a dinner for his friends on Tuesday, so no peace for me in the interim – he has been working very hard on it himself, he was painting at 7 a.m. this morning – so I feel I have to do my bit!  Still got the ring, skirting and 9 sockets to fit in the living room, and the heater.

15th December.  Sorry, I haven’t posted on the website for  whole week due to flat panic – Giles wants to  move in, or at least be able to stay there by the beginning of next week and I want the bulk of it out of the way by 20th December.  Lots of it is almost finished, but very little is completely done! The bedroom and office have been carpeted and their skirting boards and electrics are installed, so they are pretty much OK – the bedroom even has a bed now.  The bathroom is waiting ceiling paint before it can be finished, but I did get the underfloor heating working today and most of the stuff is in except the shower screen and a mirror and mirror light.  The kitchen is waiting for a gas fitter to fit connect the hob, and some cupboard work.  The living room is the last to get attention – it needs the final coat of paint on the walls and the skirting and electrics fitted and the storage heater installed with 150 Kg. of bricks!  Plus a major effort clearing all the rubbish out- the plasterers left several bags with lumps of set plaster and all the old skirting and other debris needs to go down 4 flights of stairs……………!  Anyway today saw the installation of a new consumer unit with proper RCD protection, so I can get the lights working at last!  I’ve been using some nice looking slate effect  ‘screwless’ electrical fittings – sockets and switches – from Screwfix, but they are a pain to install as they are a very tight fit in the boxes and don’t allow the normal angle adjustment – they hardly fit in 25 mm deep boxes – next time ( if there ever is a next time) I’ll stick to good quality fittings!   I apologise for the absence of gun related stuff – I will try to do better over Christmas – I expect I’ll be bored stiff once the flat is put on one side!

8th December.  Bought the Christmas tree today, so it must be getting near!   I got the ‘office’ at the flat into a fit state for the carpet to be fitted – the trunking skirting boards are in and all the wiring is installed ready for the sockets to be fitted – once the carpet is in (on Tuesday) it will be ready for furniture.  We now have to get the bedroom to a similar state by Tuesday to receive its carpet.  I’ve started to re-install the wiring – great masses hanging down everywhere – its lucky I spent a lot of my life with electronics in the days when everything was connected by massive wiring harnesses, so dozens of identical wires don’t phase me!   I think Giles wants to be able to move in at the end of next week – so I’d better make sure there is some lighting, at the moment its a couple of portable photographic lights on tripods.  I tried again to drill into the concrete ceiling but the masonry drill didn’t make any impression so I used a cheap 8 mm diamond coring drill – I got about an inch into the concrete then swapped over to the masonry drill to break out the core left by the diamond drill and it almost immediately broke through into a void – presumably the concrete beams are hollow or have hollow cores.  Anyway good enough to fix a ceiling light fitting.

6th December.  I cracked a problem I had been struggling with at the flat today – the ceiling is made up of large slabs of precast concrete with chamfered edges butted together, the whole skimmed in weak gritty plaster about 6 mm thick.  The joints have moved a little so we dug them out and as there is not enough skim to bury a wire to the ceiling lights we thought to run a 1 mm T&E in the crack and then fill it flush. I spent an hour with a sticky Fix All  grab adhesive trying to stick the wire in the crack yesterday without success – the gluey wire kept falling out onto me.  Today I tried with No More Nails grab adhesive and fixed the ends first, and used hardened tacks to hold it up while the glue dried – it stayed up!  when set I covered it with tile adhesive, which is strong and flexible and bonds well, and scraped it flush – now I just have to smooth it with filler or decorater’s caulk  not sure which at the moment.  I tried drilling into the concrete slabs, but after 5 minutes I’d gone a couple of mm at the most, so I decided there must be easier ways of fixing the ceiling light – use a Rawlplug and screw into the crack – seems to work!

5th December.  I did have a look at the Holts auction Catalogue for next week, but I could only see one possible flintlock double that might interest me  (the Burnie), and I wasn’t too excited by that, so I’ll keep my hand in my pocket and carry on fixing the flat.  I went in this morning, and the study that Giles had painted last night felt like being inside a cardboard box on account of the colour not being that different, and causing the walls to come in at you.  So maybe a bit of a rethink.    Carpets in the office and bedroom are due to go in on Tuesday so a bit of a rush on to get the messy jobs out of the way and the skirting fixed – all the wiring runs in 100 x 25  PVC skirting as as there is nowhere else to secrete it – it then goes up bits of plastic trunking embedded in the walls to the recessed sockets and will look much better than the single sockets mounted on top of the old skirting.   Unfortunately the further through a restoration you go, the more little jobs there are and the longer everything takes…………………

3rd December  Dick reminded me that there is a Holts sale coming up soon, and his catalogue is 50% bigger than usual – so there are probably lots of goodies on offer – I’ll have to have a look.  Holts got kicked out of their Hammersmith venue – I’ve heard two stories, one that the young Duke of Westminster wants it for a flat, and the other that the regiment that used it has amalgamated with several others and needs it full time.  Anyway the next sale is at Blackheath,  to the South East of London more or less on the M25, so it might be quicker to reach by car for me – but I will have to remember to prepay the Dartford crossing fee!   I went in to Screwfix Manor today for a bit and ripped out most of the wiring that is redundant or will be replaced – the pile in the photo is about 2/3 of it!   I’ll have to start putting it back next week when a bit more painting has been done – Giles is busy with that every spare moment.  I found a horrific piece of electrical stupidity today – There was a cord pull switch in the bathroom (as there should be) but obviously at some time the switch had broken, as they do fairly often, so someone had carefully wired a torpedo switch on the end of a cable across the original contacts, so you now had to grip a small switch hanging down with live wires inside while in the bathroom.  The appalling thing about it was that the workmanship looked professional!

2nd December  Another month gone, and still labouring on the flat, which should now be renamed ‘Screwfix Manor’ on account of the amount spent at Screwfix on an almost daily basis!  Anyway I did have a couple of days off last week for the Bonhams auction.  I bought a John Manton double flint gun that was listed as a reconversion, as it looks as if it will make a fine shooter.  I had had a good look at it and decided that there were more questions that answers concerning its various bits, but the barrels had a lot of meat, and the locks were strong, so it would do – it has a case that is more or less right and a trade label for John Manton that is a few years later than the gun.  Looking at it carefully I see that the cocks are very slightly different, and the lock plates were engraved by different people, so I can’t be sure the locks were not remade, probably using original tumbler, sear etc.  We shall see how it shoots when I get a chance to try it.  Whoever remade it did a rather good job – not just on this gun but on many of the guns from the Paul Murray collection in Thursday’s auction.  I had a muzzle loading shoot on Friday near Sudbury with 7 other guns which was most enjoyable, the weather holding off and not getting really cold until the last drive.  I realised that my success rate at partridges (French)  is substantially better than at pheasants – I’m not sure why, but it may be that generally pheasants  announce their arrival and give you lots of time to shoot, whereas partridges seem to be on you in a flash, and the less time I have to think about it the better I shoot.  There was one strange problem on the shoot – one percussion gun failed to fire its caps – the nipples were rather large and the caps didn’t fit very far on, but the cocks didn’t seem to push them down fully.  The mystery was that this gun had been regularly used in its present form on many shoots without a moment’s problems.  We tried several makes of caps but it didn’t make any difference – we didn’t have time to make any detailed diagnosis before the second drive, but fortunately I had a couple of ‘normal’ 1/4 BSF nipples and a nipple key in my bag, and that solved the problem – but I’d love to know why the problem arose!   Next week is a big push at ‘Screwfix Manor’ as Giles wants to be able to move in, at least partially, by the middle of December, and I am under notice that I have to be available for more mundane ‘get ready for Christmas’ duties at home ( although to be honest I think a couple of days should be enough for that, but I daren’t say so!).  At the moment all the wiring in the flat is hanging down as the lights and trunking are removed – of course technically it will all be the original wiring replaced, with just a few extensions to the ring circuits as permitted under the regs!    Onwards and upwards, no peace for the wicked…………..

28th November  The flat is beginning to come together now – we have a loo and most of the rest of the bathroom done – just the grouting and the shower and shower screen to install, and the light and mirror to sort out.  At least the plasterers have finished, leaving a thin wash of plaster over all the floors – plaster is wondrous stuff – you can mop down the floors many times, and they still look ‘cloudy’.   It was STEM club this afternoon, and the children started building bits of the mechanisms for sorting red and yellow ‘apples’  – its amazing to see their concentration, and mostly they are getting on well in groups – only one ‘sulk’ today, which is pretty good.  We had a visitor who is planning to start a STEM club in Cherry Hinton – I think he was impressed with the atmosphere, I certainly was!     I’m still pondering the guns in Bonhams sale – there is one puzzle gun by Joe Manton with the ‘wrong’ barrel inscription – I had several discussions concerning its pedigree,  Bonham’s think its OK, but the bore looks like it was made yesterday, and my instinct says if it looks like it was made yesterday then it probably was!  Two uncertainties is enough to convince me that there is a 80% chance that its a modern replacement – plus there are enough clearly messed about guns in the Paul Murray collection for it to be possible, given the work that was put into restoring and re-converting others.  We’ll see what the market thinks!   anyway, here is the promised photo of the Theopilis Richards with the damaged touch hole.  Its a bit of a mess, and will have to be done carefully as it is intended as a shooter.

 

It looks a little as if the area round the touch hole has been welded ?  Without probing the area further, it looks as if there is a threaded hole with a plug originally capped with ? gold, with just the gold drilled for the small tough hole, which is presumably why it blew out due to pressure on the back face. I need to look at it  carefully to see if its by any chance a re-conversion.  Probably best to take the plug out  and make a new one with a thinner gold facing and the small hove beginning in the solid metal of the plug . I’ll take it to Dicks when I get a chance, although it has to be said that I haven’t been over there for weeks due to the flat work!

27th November  Yesterday I went up to look at the guns in Bonham’s Auction, the imminent auction is over two days, the first day (this Wednesday) is mostly swords and miscellaneous firearms and armour, and the second  (Thursday) is the entire Paul Murray collection from the US, so everything on teh second day has an additional 5% VAT as its imported.  There are a lot of interesting guns, and some in the Paul Murray collection that have been  extensively restored and are reconversions from percussion -some are  fairly well done but not in the same league pricewise as the originals.  There were a couple of nice percussion singles in the first day’s sale (lots  214  and 215) that had reasonable barrels and if they go for the estimates ( 450 & 500 up)  would be good value as a shooter – I also liked the Rigby 18 bore double (lot 224) estimate £600 – 800  – remember that is the hammer price, with the buyer’s premium plus VAT on top – another 30%.    It’s getting difficult to find a decent shootable percussion single shotgun for under  £800 , and more for a double.  The Paul Murray collection has lots of bits and pieces – if I thought I would get round to it, I’d buy a wheellock lock ( there are several locks on their own)  and make a replica to fit it.   The Paul Murray sale has a few flintlocks that are probably out of my range, and a number of very messed about re-conversions. There is a Joe Manton tubelock that I’m tempted to bid for – but I am expecting it to go for well above the estimate so I wont stay with it for long…. Its difficult to guess what the lots will make in relation to the estimates – in the past Holts was pretty realistic and  nice guns were usually knocked down a few bids either side of the top estimate, but Bonhams I think uses the estimates to draw people in, plus you can’t telephone bid on  estimates of £500 or below.    One other little treasure that David Williams of Bonhams pointed out to me was actually two – a pair of bronze turnoff pistols in fantastic condition (lot 642) estimate £3000 to 4000  ( that is 4050 to 5400 to pay, with the 5% import VAT included)  As the song goes ‘if I were a rich man…..’ I’d buy those – so pretty!  I’ll probably go up on Thursday for the excitement of watching other people spend money and something might slip through the net and end up in my collection – the last time I was at a Bonhams I went to pay for whatever manky rubbish I had bought, and there was a chap wrapping up a nice double flintlock fowler, and saying ‘ I can’t believe I just bought this for £300’.  I don’t know how I missed that one, but I did – a hint – Bonhams do sometimes sell below the lowest estimate, but Holts generally take the lowest estimate as the reserve and won’t sell below.

 

 

23rd November  Just back from a splendid day’s shooting at Woodhall Grange estate in Hertfordshire.  Ten guns all shooting percussion muzzle loaders and some really challenging birds due to the estate having lots of tall trees and the wind, which was pretty strong at times.  It took a while to get a grip on the lead required as the birds were motoring on some stands and some guns ( me included) took a while to get to grips with it, but a lovely sunny day and not really cold considering the wind.  Overall we got a shot to bag ratio of 2.7 which would be decent for a breech loader in those conditions.  I came back with two antique section 58 guns to fix, a single flintlock 16 bore by Thos. Richards that has lost its touch hole and needs it put back in, and a nice old Alex. Henry percussion .461 cal rifle that is a bit tired and needs a thorough clean and gently brushing to see what it looks like, before deciding if it needs the engraving recutting – I’d only do it on the barrel anyway as most of the rest is hardened and it is good enough that it would be a sin to anneal it just to do a little titivating of the engraving…… I’ll post some photos of both guns when I have a moment.  I have another shoot next week and I was trying to scrounge some No 6 shot, but Martin said he always shoots everything with No 7, clays and game and he is one of the more successful shots.  Bev, who is a demon with percussion or flint, makes his own shot which comes out in a range of sizes and is mostly quite round!  He tells me that the lead runs through very small holes ( I think .3mm diameter) and drops in to a fluid  – I think he said that fabric softener was ideal.  Maybe I’ll get him to take some photos for this website?  How about it Bev?  More on that later, as they say…

20th  November  While lying on the floor of the bathroom at the flat, pondering the slope on the bath waste pipe, which looks barely adequate but can’t really be modified as it goes directly in to the communal stack, I got to thinking about apple sorting machines for the STEM club children.  There are lots of videos of modern machines on You tube – mostly annoyingly without much technical information and with tedious music, but I came across a video of a museum exhibit of a old apple sorter somewhere in the US that is hilarious – the link is  https://youtu.be/y9MLs0mS_Hs.  I’m learning the jargon of apple sorting – one new word was ‘singulation’ which refers to the point in the process where the apples cease to be treated in bulk and begin to be checked individually.  In the museum video the singulation  puts the apples past a human operator to pick out bad ones, then onto an Archimedes screw to transport each one to the size sorter – the size sorter is the fun bit, it consists of a spring loaded arm that throws each apple along a row of cloth bags, so that they are sorted into bags according to how far they are thrown  by the arm, which presumably distributes them into the bags according to weight, which is a fair proxy for size!   I’m not sure we want to copy the principle for our machine, but I’ll take the video and show it for fun.   Anyway the plasterer arrived and started the ‘greening’, which is applying a green acrylic based grit wash to the walls as a bond for the skim coat.  By the weekend he should have finished the skimming and we can start to put back the wiring in new trunking/skirting.  Maybe I will have finished the bathroom by then – I look forward to having a loo again!

18th November   I’m sorry that I have been too exhausted to post most nights lately, and I’m afraid that the number of visitors has dropped off in consequence!   Work on the flat continues, the panic is due to the imminent arrival of the plasterer – by which time I need to have stripped off all the old plastic skirting boards containing the wiring and sockets, and all the rest of the electrical trunking, which means taking out most of the wiring, and cutting new boxes for sockets in the walls at the regulation height of 450mm.   Plus sorting out the window sills so that the window surrounds can be plasterboarded, which will give a much better look than the prominent beaded wooden surrounds to the old windows… most of that is now in hand, and a lot of the debris from the flat has been removed today by Giles and a friend – its now in the back of the Land Cruiser waiting for a trip to the dump- probably on Sunday, which is a rotten day to go as all the world and their dog is incompetently maneuvering their cars  and generally clogging up the place. Its rather like going to Screwfix on a Sunday – I am a fan of Screwfix, they have almost everything you could need in stock although how they fit it into the stores I cannot imagine, and every attempt I make to get things cheaper elsewhere ends in failure, plus they are so pleasant and helpful, which is presumably why on Sundays the world and their dog, having dumped their rubbish at the tip makes a bee line for Screwfix and clog that up too while trying to fathom out what they want, which usually ties up the assistants for hours.  ( moan over…. )….and the extra little door for trade customers  and speedy service ( I am for some reason one) isn’t open on a Sunday…    On Thursday evening I noticed that our storage heaters were all stone cold – a quick check showed that the night rate was running and the clock OK and the rest of the power was OK but no live output to the night store consumer unit.  A quick check on the web confirmed my suspicions that the contacter in the clock had failed.  A phone call to E-on at 8 the next morning took 20 minutes to get through to the right department via several operators, but got a promise to come and fix it within 3 hours, a man  duly arrived around 11 and changed the meter and clock for a new digital meter with some re-arranging of the wiring and was on his way by 12 – well done E-on!   I’ve been idly thinking about the project for my STEM club – I have a load of 50mm diameter pool balls in red and yellow and I’ve bought 20 50mm wooden balls that are much lighter that I can paint.  The idea we are forming is for the children to make one, or possibly two ‘apple’ sorting machines using Lego Mindstorms – it has colour sensors so can differentiate between ‘ripe’ and ‘unripe’ apples and also spot ‘bad’ (black) ones, and I’m sure the children can think of ways of sorting out smaller ‘apples’ and even possibly sorting light and heavy ones.  The challenge is going to be to get 15 children of 7 to 11 and varying experience of  Mindstorms to design and build it in one hour a week for 10 weeks – well I like a challenge, as does my colleague Dave…..   I’ll try to get some more photos of the flat tomorrow….

15th November.   Six hours of tiling heavy tiles (around 4 Kg each) and four or five trips up and down four flights of stairs carrying things has left me a bit exhausted!  The main tiling in the bathroom is now done, although there is a little bit to finish when the bath is in place. I had a bit of a problem cutting the tiles longways for the top strip as you can’t snap them so I scored the front and cut them on the back with a diamond blade in the angle grinder and they chipped badly on the edge where the saw went through as you can see from the photo – but when grouted I doubt it will show at all ( I hope!).  I now have to fit window boards and pull off the skirting board trunking and attached sockets and wiring so that the plasterer can skim the walls next Monday.   Unfortunately there is a lot of ‘stuff’ up against many of the walls, so a major clear out and re-arrangement is in order!   I’m looking forward to another muzzle loading shoot next week in Hertfordshire – all the shoots begin quite early and are at least an hours drive away so it will be an early start.  I must get some more No 6 shot!

14th November.  I wrote more yesterday than I published – I just forgot to press the button – its there now…   Not much work on the flat today as it was STEM club time again!  I had 8 children signed in for the first session and another half dozen jostling for places, so we signed up 14 in total, spread over year groups 3 to 6, that’s around age 7 to 11 so its quite a challenge to keep them all happy in a highly technical environment – this year we are doing sorting – the idea being to make machines that sort  e.g ripe apples or tomatoes from unripe ones, represented by red and yellow pool balls using the Lego Mindstorms computers and sensors and motors and lots of cardboard and sticky tape. I’ve been watching videos on You Tube of commercial machines doing it – the scale of food production always staggers me.  Just in case anyone is interested I’ll keep you posted on Tuesdays!   Tomorrow I’m back at the flat attempting to finish off the tiling in the bathroom, then making the window boards on Thursday morning.  I went to buy timber for the boards and found that premium softwood was about £9.50 per meter and I could get Red Grandia for about £11. since the softwood had loads of knots to be sealed and filled and the red was completely knot free  it was a no-brainer…….

13th November.  A RED LETTER DAY !   cablesfarm.co.uk has had 1 million hits (clicks) since it switched to its present form in May 2015, from a total of 140000 separate visits – which means that on average each visitor looks at around half a dozen items.  The number of visitors and visits and search engine referrals per day has been rising steadily over the years, it now averages around 240 visitors per day, although that does include the site being scanned by the search engines, which they do frequently because the content changes often and they keep updating the information they need to respond to searches.  This site comes fairly high up search engine listings, and has a very strong presence on Google images for anything related to antique firearms.       The Police have started another firearms amnesty, which is of course a ‘good thing’ BUT I always worry that concerned people will feel the need to hand in perfectly legal antiques, and some valuable guns will be destroyed as I doubt anyone involved knows or cares about antiques.  If you know of anyone who might hand in antiques, please tell them to check with a  someone who might know.  In fact there is nothing special about the amnesty arrangements except publicity – Home Office guidance is that the police should always accept surrendered firearms and only  make inquiries if they suspect the weapon has been used in a crime ( same as for the surrender).

 

12th November.  Day off while I sorted out mt tax and office work!  Giles went to the flat to remove the wooden facings round the window openings (on teh insides) so that we can get them plastered next week, and found a disturbing void behind one – he didn’t think it was structural – we shall see!  All points to a less than perfect standard of workmanship in the original build!

11th November.  Back at the flat to try the bathroom bits in place and plan the plumbing etc and waterproof the walls to be tiled..  Managed to get the bath in but it involved hacking out a bit of wall.  I’m going to have to leave out a couple of tiles when I put on the 10 mm thick tiles so that there is room to maneuver the bath in – they will have to go in afterwards.   I had better take tomorrow off to do my tax and sort  out my certificate renewals since you now need to get land authorisation and club signatures to renew – new from last time! And I need a photo……

 

10th November.  I got the underfloor heating down – it was a loose cable that had to be taped to the floor – since the cable is a fixed length and runs had to be a set distance apart it was a bit of a gamble as to how much of the floor got covered, but in the end I got all the bits that you could walk on covered.  Putting the tiles on top was a bit of a challenge – the tiles are big 900 x 225 – and its difficult to judge the thickness of tile cement as you have to be careful not to comb down to the wires – anyway I got by – a couple of tiles are not quite flush with their neighbors but they are out of the way !  They were still moving around a couple of hours after fixing – I think for the wall tiles I’ll try for a faster setting adhesive.  Tiling the walls is going to be exciting, there are about 50 tiles of 800 x 200 to fix, with a total weight of 200Kg – I just hope the walls stand it!  I think I had better do the tiling in several stages – 50 tiles falling off the wall at once would make mincemeat of me!     A couple of gun related happening – a friend has bought a nice over and under flint pistol by Staudenmeyer that might come through the workshop, and a TV producer from Wales is looking for nutters who like restoring antique things and thinks I might be one such!  Me, a nutter ?   Anyway an early night as the w/e is scheduled for carrying on the bathroom, plus my accountant wants my tax return by Monday as she is away for the rest of the year – as she only does my tax as a favour (  after about 40 years, I think) I am grateful, and it will be good to get it out of the way.  My old  consultancy and instrumentation business is just about staggering on – every so often I decide it has died under me, only for it to pop up with something interesting that I feel inspired to do…. I’ll probably regret chucking in my VAT registration!   I kept the old website going unchanged since about 1997, and was able recently to refer to it as a historic reference in a patent case !

8th November.  I made some progress on the bathroom and got the cement board up on the stripped wall – I now need to take out the loo and skim one of the walls – then put in the board on the floor to receive the underfloor heating, then stick that down and put the tiles down.  Fortunately the heating cable tail will end up in the cupboard with the consumer unit, so minimal wiring to do.  I unpacked the bath and the cabinets and I think I can see how it all goes together – we seem to have sets of taps we didn’t order – they would not be our choice, so will be replaced.

7th November.  I did my VAT return yesterday – its such a pain that I’m de-registering and ending many years of getting paid by HMRC as most of my outputs went abroad…..  The flat is hotting up as I’m trying to get the bathroom in before I have to divert my energy into getting ready for the plasterer.  I got the call to re-start my STEM club at school next week – I had thought that it was in abeyance until January but my co-STEMer Dave and I have come up with a project for the children that requires a bit of automation using the LEGO mindstorms computers – more on that later, as they say…………  So back to safety catches on muzzle loaders…  Safety catches were often fitted to percussion rifles – my Lancaster double rifle has safety catches – but they differ from those common on overcoat pistols such as the Andrews described below – In many rifles the catch is fitted in front of the cock and has fewer parts and a simpler construction.  These catches work  on the inside face of the cock, which has a radial groove with a notch in it.  The slider combines all the functions of the knob, bolt and spring, and apart from the groove and slot in the lockplate and the groove in the cock, the only other part is a small screw with a flat head that screws into the slider from the inside of the lock.  The slider has a raised lump on the rear end of the spring tail that engages the groove in the cock, and the forward end of the slider is formed as a spring with a slight protrusion on the underside that engages with one of two depressions in the face of the lockplate to hold the slider in the safe or open position.  A further groove on the inside of the lockplate takes the head of the screw so that its top is level with the inside face of  the lockplate.  So there are only two additional parts to this safety, the slider and the screw.

The lump that engages in the cock hasn’t been shaped to fit yet.

 Posted by at 3:09 pm
Apr 122018
 

Extracted from my 2018 diary, so it is to be viewed in reverse order, start at the end and work back!

 

30th march –   I put all the furniture back on the 8 bore, where I know the fit is bad I put a bit of hard black wax on the edge using my tiny hot air gun (1/4 inch nozzle) to take up the gap, and melt more into any remaining gaps.  The butt plate needed the bottom edge trimmed slightly – they often stick out a bit and catch, anyway it all went together reasonably well, and I got the screw heads aligned perfectly.  So its beginning to come together – at the moment its all covered with sticky slacum ( boiled linseed, beeswax and terbene driers) waiting for it to go jelly like so I can wipe/rub it all off again.  This process will be repeated until the finish is good enough, although it is always possible after a few coats to change to wax furniture polish and cheat!  I was checking Brownell’s website for honing stones – I might just buy a few bits to make up a hone – the regular ones go up to 10 bore but I’m sure I can fudge things – the extension rod to make the hones long enough to go down the barrel are much more expensive than the rest of the kit and definitely won’t work with 8 bore barrels, so again I’ll resort to making something.  I wish I had access to a Delapina lap, but never mind!  I am not sure I have the perfect recipe for Slacum – I did a series of trials and came up with a maximum of 5% beeswax and around 1% terbene driers – but it didn’t seem that critical, apart from keeping the beeswax content at 5% or less.  On the last lot I made the terbene went into short strings when I added it to the oil – not sure what happened there………..  My hard wax is made up of beeswax and carbon black, but it is possible to buy very hard coloured wax for repairing scratches in furniture that would be better – trouble is it costs £100 for a kit and has mostly colours we wouldn’t use. 

The steel cup is a bit thick (limited by size of available end mill!) and I didn’t get rid of all the defects around it, but its meant as a functional restoration.  Steaming has taken most of the dings out – minimal sanding was done – it is very effective.

 

 

The finial is quite badly rusted round the edges, which makes the fit rather poor, but improved!  It no linger looks like a tired old gun that has been neglected and I hope one day it will see use again when the barrel is done.

 

29th March – More 8 bore…   I forgot to mention when discussing removing screws that one of the problems with fitted screws in old guns is that the heads are contoured to fit the furniture and as you unscrew them you need to keep the screwdriver aligned with the slot, which often means tilting it as you turn it, otherwise you partially come out of the slot.  Anyway having stripped and cleaned all the furniture I escalated the job to include gently refinishing the stock as it had plenty of dings etc.  I inlet a small piece of wood where a bit had come out round the finial of the trigger plate and cut the surface flush and refitted the finial temporarily, then set about steaming out the dings in the spout of a kettle on the AGA – difficult to do if you are using an electric kettle, but a wallpaper steamer would work.  That got out or reduced a lot of the dings and destroyed some of the finish so I removed  most of the rest on the butt with 320 grit sandpaper and methylated spirits (wood alcohol) as it was varnished with shellac.  I cleaned  the chequering using an old toothbrush and meths, enough to show the chequering reasonably clearly.  Several goes over the stock with medium grade steel wool and meths got it to a reasonable finish – I didn’t want a complete strip to bare wood, just a somewhat better finish.  There were a number of black stains – probably iron stains, so I very carefully applied oxalic acid with an artist’s paint brush to soften the stains – you need to be very careful or it will bleach the unstained wood very pale – if that happens you will need to colour it down with Van Dyke crystals in water or a spirit stain, applied carefully.  When you apply oxalic acid or stain using an artist’s brush, apply it streakily along the grain of the wood – that way you hide any edges amongst the grain markings.   Having got the wood to a fair finish and acceptable colour I wipe over it all with a piece of kitchen roll dipped in shellac dissolved in meths – button polish is one name for it –  this seals the grain.  Applying a second coat messes up the finish because it leaves smear  marks, so at that point I’ll go to using ‘slacum’ to give an English oil finish, which will require several dozen coats, but before that I’ll remount all the furniture.  At the moment I’m waiting for the butt plate screws and the sling mount to derust….. I also need to fit the steel cup for the side nail.   The next big job will be to sort the barrel, but that may have to wait a while as I need to make/buy a tool for lapping the barrel before I rebrown it.

28th March – Continued with the 8 Bore restoration today with a visit to Dick to use his vice and torch to shift the breechblock, which we did successfully –  its a strange fact that breech plugs almost always come out with  perfect threads without a trace of rust.  Any rust is usually confined to a tiny bit around the joint at the barrel and on the edge facing into the powder chamber.  I don’t know what they used to lubricate the thread, but it certainly lasted 200 years or so! This one was no different, once heated almost to wood charring temperature and held very very securely in the vice it yielded to a 2 ft lever and came out easily thereafter.  The passage from nipple to main chamber contained a lot of hard blackish powder, but as it was slightly damped with cleaner or whatever I couldn’t get it to flare like black powder although I think it may have had some in it – by the way, I DID carefully probe the barrel with a screw rod to check it wasn’t loaded before heating it!  Anyway a trip to the electrolytic bath and a bit more picking out the passages with bits of bent wire and I’m sure its clear now.   Now the breech plug is out I can see that the barrel is pretty reasonable, certainly shootable.  I may have a go at lapping it if I can make a suitable tool.   The side screw hole was a mess so I dropped a 16mm cutter into it and made a plug and glued it in, but I then made a steel cup for the head of the side nail so I might put that in instead.  I initially thought that I would leave the butt plate as they are usually horrible to get out, but the rest of the furniture looked so much better than it did, so I took it off.  The two screws holding the butt plate are almost guaranteed to be rusted around the heads and stuck fast.  The threads are often rusty and stuck in the wood too, often pulling most of the threaded wood out with them.  The technique to get them out is to very carefully pick out the slot in the head of the screws down to the metal, and put some release ‘oil’ on the joint – I put a small drop of gun oil and then take a brush of Acetone and brush it around the edge of the screws – it penetrates better than proprietary penetrating oils.  You need to hold the butt very securely and have a screwdriver that is a perfect fit and try carefully.  The top one is usually the worst – if it doesn’t budge fairly easily play a fine torch flame onto the screw head ( it does need to be a very fine flame) and try again.  The 8 bore butt plate screws came out fairly easily, the top one with heat, and once started the screws themselves were as clean as a whistle.  There was quite a bit of flake rust on the inside of the buttplate and on the wood and it took about 3 hours at 2.8Amps to derust the buttplate fully.  Having derusted the furniture and thoroughly wire wheel brushed them ( .03mm wire brush)  I generally coat the hidden surfaces with ‘Metalguard’ which leaves a thin anti-corrosion film over the surface of the metal as its in a fairly active state after derusting and will rust easily.  I’m generally happy to put the furniture back with just the Metalguard as protection, sometimes putting on another coat if the part has been handled much since first coating. Most oils and greases soak into the wood so be sparing if you use any behind the fittings.

 

You know how it is?  Having got so far with the restoration (actually more of a tidy-up)  I can see that the woodwork could be a bit better, so for completeness I might just steam out the dings, and possibly refinish it – in for a penny, in for a pound……

Yes, I know its not quite centered!

The buttplate is held on by two screws and the tab along the top.  After removing the screws the whole buttplate must be moved backwards by 6 mm to disengage the tab.  As you can see, there was quite a lot of rust under the plate- its surprising that the two screws were in perfect condition in the wood.

27th March     I stripped the furniture from the 8 bore and put it through the electrolytic derusting.  It was quite pitted and the engraving is quite worn and pitted so it won’t restore to anything like original state, and as most of the bits are hardened, I can’t easily recut them.  I did try on the finial of the trigger plate by annealing it, but its too far pitted to make any difference so I’ll leave it.  The wood around the furniture is badly stained black, and on one side of the finial is missing – I think the staining is a combination of rust and too much oil on the wood – my father, who owned the 8 bore before me, used to slosh oil about on guns and several of ‘his’ guns suffered from staining, although in this case there is also quite a lot of rust under the furniture  that I have now scraped away carefully.  I’ll go down to Dicks tomorrow and we’ll remove the 8 bore breech plug (with luck) – I ran out of gas for my Butane torch today, and my vice is not really man enough.

 

 

Furniture as was – click on pictures to see in detail.

 

After an hour each in the electrolytic derusting bath and a fine wire wheel.

 

 

 Posted by at 2:31 pm
Apr 012018
 

See photo gallery at bottom of page.

Any serious collector of Antique firearms is likely to have cased arms in their collection, and will be well aware of the value added to the firearms themselves by having the correct case, label and accessories.  In a recent auction, an authentic Manton case for a pair of duelling pistols went for £5000 including buyer’s premium, more than the price of a pair of uncased duelling pistols by a good but less famous maker.  The definitive book on gun cases, until someone writes a better one (unlikely) is – British Gunmakers Their Trade Cards, Cases  and  Equipment by W.Keith Neal & D.JH.L.Back , so what follows is culled from their book and the observations of others who know more than I do.  Be aware that some experts have reservations about some of Keith Neil’s opinions!

The story of gun cases coincides perfectly with the rise of British gunmaking from a position of significant inferiority compared to continental gunmakers to become the most sought after gunmakers in the world through the efforts and innovation of a few dozen individuals, and it is not surprising that this rise was accompanied by a major upgrade in the presentation of their products.

Since best guns were mostly made in London, but bought by the landed gentry, they were usually shipped from maker to buyer, and that would have necessitated some form of packaging, if only for shipping back and forth between maker and user on purchase or repair.  Before the middle of the 18th century packaging for long guns probably consisted of plain deal boxes that were discarded after use, although none survive.  Pistols that needed to be carried around in use were normally carried in leather holsters  , but  would  have been sold in cheap bags made of blanket offcuts, called ‘shoddies’.  Presumably if they needed to be shipped they would also have been packed in simple wooden boxes.

The transition from simple deal box to what we now recognise as a gun case saw a number of short lived transisions via hard leather and wickerwork and tin, but they don’t really throw much light on what we now deal with, if you are interested see Neal & Back’s book.

( later edit 2021)  The popularity of cases with associated accesories probably coincided with the popularity of duelling pistols, since these would need to be carried by the seconds to the duelling ground with all the accessories necessary for loading.  In some duels a pair of  pistols was loaded by the seconds ( as was normal) and each participant used an identical pistol, the challenged dueller having the first choice of pistol.  Duelling pistols would also have been carried to galleries at major gunmakers for practice, so the case as we know it would have been useful.  The need for a fancy case and accessories for a sporting gun is less clear.

From about 1770 cases began to converge on the designs we are familiar with – initially made of oak, or  possibly leather covered deal and divided internally to hold the gun and accessories. The first mahogany cases probably appearing occasionally around 1775 and would, like the oak cases have had a handle on the top that consisted of a bow shaped handle pivoted at each end in a  hole drilled in a tube that was part of a fitting with a disk screwed to the case lid.  Note that these Chippendale style handles were mounted ON the lid and prevented boxes being stacked.  Two hooks were usually fitted to the front of the case engaging with loops on the lid – again these stood proud of the wood – they were of rounded section and often hung down  below the bottom of the case, making them liable to scratch furniture or get broken off. At this time shot for guns was carried in an over the shoulder leather ‘snake belt’  and not in the leather flasks that later replaced them. and cases would have had a long compartment for the belt where appropriate – before the snake belt shot would have been carried loose in a bag or pocket.  The case lock, if fitted, had a single bolt and a bone or ivory escutcheon or a simple brass strip round the keyhole.  Long guns were almost always arranged with the barrel removed and at the back with the breech to the left, presumably because it was easier to lift out the muzzle using the right hand for right handed shooters.  For similar reasons the stock was cased with the butt to the right.    Up to 1775 long gun  flintlocks were left in the stocks when cased, but after that date they were always given their own compartment separated from the stock. It was and still is considered necessary to remove flint locks after firing in order to remove all residues and prevent corrosion – it wasn’t until the percussion era that locks were left in the stock when in the case. Some flint long guns, for instance by John Manton, had the side nail passing through the breech block, so the locks had to be removed before the barrel could be taken off to clean – remember that to remove black powder residue normally requires water, usually hot so the barrel will dry off afterwards. Pistols were almost always cased with the locks in the stocks, and cases were made so that pistols only fitted with the locks at half cock.  Case lining would  be in baize from about 1780, or 0ccasionally patterned paper before that.  Baize would have been quite rough and hairy gradually getting finer and smoother in later  years after 1790.

From about 1785 we see a number of changes introduced piecemeal -first the Chippendale  handles were bolted through the case lid – initially with exposed nuts on the inside and later with the nuts concealed beneath the baize, then a version of the style was used with the handle and mounts sunk flush with the case top.  Later, around 1795, a new pattern of handles of circular form recessed into the lid and having a large escutcheon filling the centre was substituted.  This allowed cases to be stacked without damage, and also made it suitable for enclosing in a hard leather travelling case – which became a common feature of best pistol cases, and is still occasionally encountered today.   From about 1790 the hooks were housed within recesses in the case and lid and engaged with pins rather than loops.  The recesses limited the movement of the hooks and made their operation easier.  The hooks were now flat, rather than rounded.   By  1785 it had become common for gunmakers to put their (small) trade card in the gun case, either loose of glued in, at first sometimes cutting out the baize around the card, but later always glueing it to the baize.  As 1800 approached gunmakers had larger paper labels printed and stuck inside the cases.  Some early guns that were returned to gunmakers for modification or major  repair had their labels replaced by that of the gunmaker doing the repair, and so may not be an accurate guide to the maker. From about the date paper labels were used, the escutcheon that had filled the centre of the ring handle was reduced to a smaller escutcheon with a band of wood between it and the ring.  By this time the lock would have had two bolts and the plate in the lid  the same length as the lock plate and with two holes for the bolts.

Details:

Cased guns;   Long guns were cased with barrels removed, flintlocks with the locks also removed.  Usually single guns per case, but very occasionally as pairs, possibly with lift out trays.   Pistols cased intact, almost always in pairs in the flintlock and single shot percussion era.  Very occasionally as a garniture, often with two pairs of pistols for different purposes. Flintlock pistols almost always cased with the locks at half cock and the pan closed.  Percussion usually with the cocks let down.  Percussion revolvers usually cased individually, often with a spare cylinder.

Case material;   Oak initially to about 1770, then mahogony until about 1820, by which time it had got coarser and paler, then mostly oak, initially  again quite dark but becoming lighter.  Some presentation cases were made up in rosewood.

Case lining;   Paper in very early cases, then rough (Irish) baize or velvet, later smoother baize or velvet, occasionally leather, After about 1850 occasionally pigskin. See comments below for link to modern baize maker.

Lining Colour;   Mostly green, but some used blue, purple, red or pink.

Lining style;  The basic styles were the continental, in which the components are held in sculpted recesses in a flat board covering the top of the case, often covered in velvet, and the British in which the case is divided into compartments with flat bottoms and equal depths by ‘fences’ that are covered in the lining material.  The fences could either be made of any wood and totally covered, or be made of mahogany  and carefully covered so as to leave the top edge showing as exposed wood, the fence section being shaped to recess the top edge of the lining. The raised edges inside the top of the case could be treated in either way. Occasionally fences were left as wood.  Fences were usually just glued in, but sometimes rebated into the sides of the case.

Lifting tapes;  Tapes that matched the lining were fitted to assist removing items from the narrow compartments of the case – e.g. the cleaning rods, tools and barrel.

Case Handle.    1770 Chippendale standing proud and screwed on, then bolted, then countersunk.  1790 circular flush handles with centre escutcheon were bolted through.  From about 1800 the central escutcheon reduced to a disk with wood between it and the handle. From around 1820 some cases were fitted with square shaped handles with clipped corners.

Case corners; Not used initially and not common.  Around 1790?  brass corners were sometimes applied externally, later  recessed into the wood.   Bands/strips of brass were used as well as corners.

Case hooks;  Initally fixed to the case with loops on the lid, standing proud of the surface and of rounded section.  Later in shaped recesses to restrict movement and of flat section, the loops being replaced by pins.  Later -1845… sliding bolts  occasionally used instead of hooks.

Case hinges;  Early hinges allowed case to open fully but later (1785?) changed to stop butt hinges that held lid open just past the balance point.

Case locks;  Originally (1770) single bolt with shorter latch plate in lid. Later 2 bolt locks with lid plate same size as lockplate.

Case lock escutcheons;  early inverted teardrop  of ivory or bone or bent brass lining, later brass.

Case labels.  1770 none – 1785 trade card inserted in case on glued to baize or in a cutout in baize.  around 1795 – 1800  printed labels on paper were used, probably about the same time as makers started to number their gun.

Case compartment lids;  From early days there were usually at least two lidded compartments in any gun or pistol case for small parts, wads, balls flints etc.  The lids were usually left as wood to match the case and not baize covered.  All early and mid lids were lift off, but later in the percussion era sliding lids were occasionally used which necessitated cutting away the top of a partition to allow the lid to open fully.

Compartment lid handles;  Around 1770 the lifting handles for the lids were loops of tape or leather.  By the 1775  pistol cases  had loops of brass or silver wire to lift the lids and by 1785 buttons of ivory or bone with concentric rings were replacing the rings although these still appeared.  Occasionally pistol l.ids had turned brass buttons  Long guns mostly used turned brass knobs, larger ones for the lift out mounts for the detached locks.  From 1810 loop handles were no longer used.

 

Cased pair Hutchinson of Dublin circa 1780

Cased duelling pistols  – original case?

Cased single pistol by Fishenden of Tonbridge - case made by meCased single pistol (unusual) – coaching double barreled pistol by Fishenden of Tonbridge = late, after 1823. case made by me.

Note tops of partitions are exposed mahogony – uncommon, particularly so in early cases (?)

Pigskin lined case of pair of percussion pocket pistols.

Fine pair of Percussion pocket pistols in pigskin lined case by Salmond of Perth

Typical cased revolver of 1850 – 1865 – a Pryce and Cashmore in original(?) case – probably relined, possibly refitted.  Percussion revolvers were almost always cased singly.

Most percussion revolver cases were made of oak and were light in colour.  The tops of the lid were usually fixed by small brass screws left visible

Feb 162018
 

In the later days of flintlocks, after about 1780, best guns were often sold cased in mahogany or oak partitioned cases with the accouterments necessary for their use and casual maintenance,which would probably include a jointed cleaning rod and jagg, a pair of turnscrews, a powder flask and shot flask or bullet mould, a small gunmetal oil bottle and sometimes a spring cramp for removing the mainspring. The case would also have a space for patches or wads and in the percussion era a box for caps, or a space for a box of Joyce or Ely caps.  Pistols would have the same but with a single piece cleaning rod.   In the flintlock era a small brush was usually(?) provided for brushing out the pan and pan area.  This was also included with some percussion cases and was used to clean round the nipple and in the hollow of the cock.   Percussion revolvers  sometimes also came with a brush to clean round the nipple area.

Accounts from gunmakere like the Mantons often list accesssories and their cost on customer’s bill, but appear not to include the brushes, and I don’t know what proportion of cased guns originally had brushes – however they would be easy to loose in the field and would wear out quicker than any other part of the outfit so that might explain their rarity in cased guns nowadays.  Looking at a few sources of photos of cased guns it would appear that where there are brushes they are quite small, and often handled in ivory.  I came across 3 photos of John Manton guns of a wide spread of dates and a couple by Egg that all had similar shaped ivory brushes, but given that one is from Keith Neil’s book ‘The Mantens’ it is possible that this was used a model for reproduction brushes to be included in the cased guns of the ( extensively restored) Paul Murray collection.  Almost all the brushes I’ve seen have a single  round bunch of bristles ( probably pig) of about 8 to 15 mm in diameter, although there are some that have 4 or so small bunches mounted in a line.

John Manton from Paul Murray collection – Bonhams Nov 2017 sale.

John Manton & Son  from Paul Murray collection – Bonhams Nov 2017 sale.

 W Keith Neil – the Mantons’

This and all below from W Keith Neil’s book on cases and labels.

My slightly fat copy of  a common John Manton pattern?  Turned from faux ivory (poyester resin) and mildly distressed.

 Posted by at 9:54 pm
Nov 072017
 

There are several types of safety catch found on muzzle loaders – I’ll put examples here as I find specimens to photograph.  One of the earliest safety catches to be widely used was the ‘dog’  on a flintlock – giving rise to the name ‘doglock’.  This catch, which was all external to the lock took the form of a pivoted hook that could be latched into a notch in the back edge of the cock, thus preventing the cock from falling.  This was originally used in place of a half cock notch with early locks with horizontal sears.  I’ll look out some photos.

On somewhat later guns there were several types of safety catch, including ‘grip safety catches’ where a movable section let into the trigger guard tang had to be gripped in order to allow the gun to fire.  A more common type is that found on many flint and percussion overcoat or horse pistols which is described below;-

The ‘standard’ safety e.g. on pistols like the Andrews described on this site being back converted to flint – acts to lock the tumbler in the half cock position when the slider situated behind the cock is slid forward.  The slider moves in a groove cut in the outside face of the lock plate with a tab passing through a slot cut through the lock plate within the groove – the groove and slot define the movement of the slider.  A ‘ bolt’ is fitted on the tab of the slider on the inside of the lock and held by a pin. The bolt has a protruding square that engages with a slot in the tumbler when in the forward, lock, position.  There is a small triangular spring which attaches under the head of the screw that secures the sear spring and covers the V of the sear spring.  It has a small protrusion on the inside of the spring that engages with depressions in the bolt and acts as a detente to hold it in either the safe or fire positions.  The spring has a small notch near the attachment hole that engages with a small notch in the sear spring and helps to hold it in the correct position.  The safety spring is a very fiddly thing to make on account of the small protrusion and detailed shape.

looks like a bit of rust on the safety!

The safety catch spring sits over the V of the sear spring.

The bolt on the back of the slider is held by the pin you can see.  The tail of the bolt is shaped as a detente for the spring.

 

 

Safety catches were often fitted to percussion rifles – my Lancaster double rifle has safety catches – but they differ from those common on overcoat pistols such as the Andrews described below – In many rifles the catch is fitted in front of the cock and has fewer parts and a simpler construction.  These catches work  on the inside face of the cock, which has a radial groove with a notch in it.  The slider combines all the functions of the knob, bolt and spring, and apart from the groove and slot in the lockplate and the groove in the cock, the only other part is a small screw with a flat head that screws into the slider from the inside of the lock.  The slider has a raised lump on the rear end of the spring tail that engages the groove in the cock, and the forward end of the slider is formed as a spring with a slight protrusion on the underside that engages with one of two depressions in the face of the lockplate to hold the slider in the safe or open position.  A further groove on the inside of the lockplate takes the head of the screw so that its top is level with the inside face of  the lockplate.  So there are only two additional parts to this safety, the slider and the screw.

The lump that engages in the cock hasn’t been shaped to fit yet.

 

 Posted by at 10:42 pm
Oct 142017
 

Here are deleted diary entries for the title dates;-

 

30th June  – Another month gone – we have probably had the best of the summer already!   I’m afraid that I’m not going to have a lot of time to play with gun restoration  in the next two or three weeks as  I have a deadline to do the consultancy work I just took on, which will keep me busy for most of the time.  I did manage to play with the furnace before I got the brief for the job sorted out – I put an ordinary  cooker control  in parallel with the digital temperature controller so that I could use the control to set the temperature with the digital control cutting in if the temperature fell.  I got more stable control, but of course I had to do some fiddling to set the desired temperature.  I think these problems will disappear with the proper PID controller .  P I D stands for Proportional Integral Derivative, which means that it anticipates as it gets close to the desired temperature and turns down the power so that it doesn’t overshoot.  I’m struck by how overpowered the furnace is once it has heated through so it really needs the PID. Mine is on the way from China!

29th June – a lazy day – I felt like doing a bit of engraving and I’d taken a few photos of a modern gun Dick was making that had been engraved by Geoff Moore, so I thought I’d try imitating his design, but I just made a horrible mess of it – I’ll have to spend time with paper and pencil to get the style right first.  I wired up a cheap 400 degree temperature controller on the furnace and tried it out, but its a cheap on-off controller not a P.I.D. and it overshoots horribly – going about 25 degrees over the set temperature after it turns off and then undershooting by 5 degrees before it comes back on.  I guess a solid object in the furnace would be more stable due to its thermal inertia.   It now looks as if I’m in for a busy summer as in addition to renovating Giles’ flat – whenever that completes – I am in danger of coming out of my third retirement in 16 years and being a consultant again – just when I thought I could ditch my VAT registration too.  Back to planes and suits if I’m not careful – its unfortunate that I can’t resist it when people come knocking on my door with interesting projects!  I ought to practice sitting in front of a mirror and saying ‘NO’ but its too late in this case.  Maybe it will fund a nice cased pair of small flintlock pistols like the ones I stupidly failed to buy at Bonhams last sale ……………….

I’m NOT going to show my attempts to imitate this!

28th June – Dick & I went to look round the J W Evans die-sinking and stamping works in Birmingham, which was in operation from about 1850s (?) to 1990 and has everything still in place including thousands of dies and stamped parts.   The works produced all the stamped metal parts that were hard soldered together to make fancy Victorian and 20th century silver plated tableware and other decorative household items.  J W Evans output was  the completed object ready for plating, or, in the case of a small fraction of the output made of solid silver or gold, ready for proof marking.   The dies (female part) were cut in a steel block and the corresponding male part was cast in a relatively low melting point metal directly into the die.  The cast part was then fettled to allow for the thickness of the metal.  Very interesting trip – the works/museum is run by English Heritage and is for prebooked visits only – I could have done with a bit more specific information – e.g. what metal alloys were used for the stampings and the male mould part, but a good effort. Horrible journey there as the A14 was closed and we got sent all round the county but we arrived only 1 minute late for our slot and miraculously found a 2 hour parking space right outside the door – how unusual is that!    When I got back I did a bit of touching up on the brass bits of the little turnoff pistol that I had engraved, now that Dick has fitted the two bits together.

27th June – Another session of the STEM club for children – we are still struggling with the Mindstorms software despite most of  a lifetime spent computing – it is a pig!  Anyway not much happened today on the gun front and I have to turn in early as Dick and I are off on a visit to J W Evans old silvesmiths workshop in Birmingham, courtesy of English Heritage.  Not looking forward to the rush hour drive on the A14!   And on Monday I seem to have agreed to go to London.  Life was much more stable and peaceful when I had a regular job, at least I knew where I was going to be from day to day and didn’t need a diary to rule my life!

26th June – A bit more work making a panel to mount the control electrics for the furnace – I ordered a P I D temperature controller from Amazon but failed to notice that it won’t be delivered until mid July – I didn’t think Amazon did that sort of nonsense – one lives and learns!   A well as refitting Gile’s flat, which seems to be on the horizon for  a six week spell I seem to have got involved in another consulting job in the U.S. – I wonder how many times I can retire!  I had come to the conclusion that  in my activities the only noticeable difference between ‘retirement’ and work is that I get paid for one and not the other!  Ah well, my idea of hell is playing golf, so I suppose I’m on the right lines!  But I would like time to take the Samuel Nock rifle to the range again!

25th June – I made a steel ‘crucible’ for the furnace out of an empty disposable oxygen cylinder from my small oxy-gas set, with suspension points and a loop to tip it.  I’ll post pictures later.   I fitted the top closely and made a tube to hold the thermocouple  so it is all now Ok and ready to get the electronic controller working. I did another run, recording the thermocouple voltage at intervals so I can plot the rate of rise of temperature and get some idea of  what the input power is in relation to the heat loss.  I picked up the wrong thermocouple data and couldn’t understand why it was taking so long to get hot – it crawled up to a calculated 600 degrees so I had a look through my peephole and realised that it was actually above 1000C  – at that point I realised my mistake and turned it off- since I had the raw data no harm was done!  From the plot of actual  temperature against time  you can see that the furnace has plenty of spare power – the curve is actually a bit odd but I’m sure I measured it correctly!  Anyway it looks as it will do everything I want including melting brass.   From the graph below I calculate that there is about 30% more power input at 1000C  than needed to maintain the temperature.     My mind is wandering off on the design of a slightly bigger front opening furnace with a bit more power, say 8 inch cube interior instead of 4 x 4 x 8 vertical – I reckon it would still work off a 13 Amp socket and reach 1100C.

I didn’t expect the rise above 600 degrees to follow such a straight line!  Peak temp is about 1087 C

24th June – I finished making and TIG welding the two frames that hold the furnace together and put some 10 m.m. studding legs on the bottom frame to hold a couple of half thickness bricks as a floor.  The whole thing has gone together pretty well so far – the Youtube design is well thought out by the author who says in the video that he is doing his GCSEs  – so he is presumably still at school –  a highly commendable effort.  I deviated somewhat in my construction as I wanted to use up scrap materials I had around the workshop – which included a lot of M10 studding amd M10 nuts.  I  found a bag of 10 mm. Belville washers – they are the dished washers that act as a spring – I used them with the nuts that hold the bottm bricks in place – as I didn’t have any M10 washers I used two Belville washers facing each other.     I found some high temperature wire I had saved from the inside of an old electric cooker and used that to do the wiring.   This evening I finished the main parts of the furnace, but need to do a bit of shaping around the top opening to get rid of some 1 to 2 m.m.gaps that are letting heat out – it probably needs a proper lid.   I did a test run with a temporary top in place, and the temperature gradually climbed over half an hour to almost 1000C !   The outside got a bit warm and the aluminium plate that holds the bottom bricks in place also got quite hot.  Anyway 1000 C is not bad, and the temperature was still rising

The frames are earthed, as they should be. The furness will shortly be controlled by a P.I.D.  (Proportional, Integrated, Deririvative) controller if I can get one covering the temperature range – otherwise I’ll just use a cooker control with its simple on/off regime.

23rd June – Clearing out my ‘rough’ workshop left the big bench empty so an invitation to start a project I’ve had in mind for some time – a simple electric furnace, primarily for annealing and hardening, but alse possibly for colour case hardening and maybe brass casting.  The design comes directly from a Youtube video  (How to Make an Electric Foundry For Metal Casting – Part 1)  , so I can’t claim any credit for what is a very elegant little vertical furnace.   It uses bits from ebay – the most expensive part being the silica kiln bricks – 10 bricks at £26.00 for 5 inc. carriage.  The heating element is a length of heating element from ebay – there are lots on offer, mostly from China, but I found one with next day delivery for a few pounds.  I won’t go into the details as the video is comprehensive, but so far I’ve grooved the 4 main bricks for the element- they are very soft and fragile, and stretched and checked the element – its around 1.6KW, I had to cut around 200mm from the length to get the correct heating effect, and ended up with about 67 inches which equates to around 4 complete turns within the four brick enclosure.  I bought a K type thermocouple from ebay for a few pounds – using a simple testmeter on the milliVolt range enables me to measure the temperature to within about 10 degrees – I put the 4 bricks together on another couple of bricks for insulation and fired it up with the thermocouple suspended in the middle and a couple of bricks on top and in less than ten minutes it had got to about 530 degrees Celsius – I didn’t bother to leave it longer as the corners are not very tight and have gaps at the ends of the grooves so there is quite a lot of heat loss that will disappear when the extra bricks are used to fill in the corners.  I now need to cut the bricks for the corners and base etc and make a metal frame to keep it all together – I have some old Dexion angles that I’ll probably use as it will help clear some ‘junk’ from the workshop – thus killing two birds with one stone ( I’m not sure if the RSPCA prosecutes anyone who uses that saying – I think I’m safe as I understand they have seen the error of their ways and stopped being so litigatious – they are in a bit of a mess at the moment and the Charity Commission has put in its people!).  I have a temperature controller that I will fit, but it needs a bit of fiddling as its meant for a K type thermocouple but only goes up to 400C so it will have to be ‘doctored’………..

The maximum temperature will depend on the insulation and I’m not sure that the elements will be good for much above 800 C.

The corners need filling in and a proper bottom shaped and the whole lot held in a frame welded from Dexion angle.

22nd June  –  My evening reading lately has been Cruddinton and Baker’s books on the British Shotgun – all 3 volumes.  I am getting interested in old breech loaders in spite of my earlier resolution not to get involved in anything later than percussion, except for the odd modern over and under.  Dick came up with an old hammer gun – a rather nice bar in wood to  Smith’s patent with rebounding locks and a single bite snap action closure with a lever on the right side of the lock – it looks in excellent condition and is having a few bits of the wood repaired – it looks as if it was reproofed after 1955 as its stamped with BNP and 12 x65 on the underside of the barrel.  It has a very fine damascus barrel.  I guess this is the 1863 patent of J Smith although the opening lever doesn’t seem quite the same as the description in Cruddington and Baker.  I’ll have to get a copy of the original patents from the British Library.   I gather the gun is probably for sale, so if its within my budget (very low!) I may be interested in adding it to my growing collection of breech loaders! I’ll try to get some pictures.   I didn’t watch the Holt’s Auction live as I was trying to get my outboard motor running ( it took 4 hours but its now good!) but it looks as if the auctioneers had a tough job getting the punters going – I don’t think I’ve seen so many unsold lots in a Holt’s sale before, and many lots sold a few bids up from the bottom estimate.  There were one or two that beat the top estimate, but the best percussion shotguns – the Blissett and the pair of Beaties didn’t find a buyer.  Several lots were knocked down at below the lowest estimate, which is not something you see often at Holts.  I don’t know if the market is in a sulk over brexit, or the extreme heat of the viewing days kept people away. The ‘Manton’ I mentioned at 200 to 300 went for 340 hammer price, that’s around £440 to pay, which is probably a fair price – If I’d tidied it up I’d probably sell it at £550 – £600 but the next bid up on 340 would have been a bit close to the bone.   Anyway not sorry I didn’t bother to bid, but it would have been interesting to have watched a bit of the action.  One cheering outcome is that our Heavy Dragoon ( see Guns & bits for sale) is something of a bargain at £1200 – hurry before we think better of it and up the price  – 1 went for £1000 + 300 and one for £1200 + 400.

21 st June – back from an exhausting day in London at the Holt’s viewing.   Not sure what to make of the guns – there were a few really fine muzzle loaders if you have a lot of dosh – the pair of Beaties were very fine, as they should be at those sort of prices, and there was a nice Blissett but a lot of the less good percussion and flintlock guns have low estimates on them – I am in two minds whether to bid on a couple of items or go shooting instead! Difficult call!  – There were one of two cheap percussion guns that might possibly make shooters with a bit of cleaning up e.g lot 516, the (possibly spuriously signed) ‘Manton’ at £200 -300 estimate ( that’s £260 to £390 cost), but I don’t really have time to do it, so I guess I will stand back!  Nothing like as inviting as the Bonham’s recent sale in spite of the much greater volume!   I din’t manage to find a single wooden antique gun case or anything else that really took my fancy.  The sheer volume of stuff is overwhelming – the sealed bid sale for July has a pile, literally, of repro percussion revolvers, mostly in good condition that have to be on a F.A.C. so not to be bought on a whim- where will they all go?   I guess for a collector of percussion rifles there might be more joy in the sale – one or two very nice offerings.  As usual side by side non ejector shotguns by lesser makers can be had for a song – but a bit more expensive than Southams where many fetched only £5.     But I think overall I’ll keep my hands in my pockets!  It will be interesting to see what things go for but I have too much on to watch it on the web.

20th June – I don’t seem to have time to catch my breath these days, but I’m off to Holts viewing tomorrow to see what is happening to the market and meet up with friends.   It seems there is a widening gap between good antiques and the indifferent stuff –  good percussion shotguns are becoming more popular as the prices of fine flintlocks disappear over the horizon, and a decent gun by a good middling  maker  might make two to three thousand – and that is the hammer price!   I was having a look at Holts selling commission, but their terms and conditions seems very coy about it!  I have decided to pass on my almost new Pedesoli modern reproduction  Mortimer  12 bore flintlock shotgun as I have a single ‘Twigg’. – I’m told its a fairly early one, but in mint condition – I doubt its fired much above a couple of dozen shots  – it is of course a section 2 firearm and must be on a shotgun license  – offers around £750 if you want it…..  I’ll put it on the website later.      I was going to deliver a gun to someone at Holts, but I don’t think I want to be wandering around London with a gun in a slip, things being what they are!  Discretion and all that – it will have to wait……..  I’ll follow up the Holts sale with a trip to Birmingham arms fair on Saturday to see what goes there – I’m suspicious that there are one or two dealers who seem to shut guncases when I approach their stands – I can’t imagine why…………….As the Gilbert and Sullivan Opera goes…. ‘I have a little list’  – its growing!

I noticed there was a ‘Samuel Nock’ in Holts without a name on the lock and with the barrel name ‘recut’ – I shall be interested to see if its as bogus as the photo suggested – but then I am on old cynic !!

18th June – I’m sorry I missed posting yesterday – driving to Rugby and back without aircon and being out all day in the heat left just enough energy to clean my gun when I got home!  I got a taste of things to come today as son Giles is buying a flat that needs complete renovation and muggins has volunteered, so today was a trip to IKEA in Milton Keynes to look at kitchen units – and another 3 hours of driving without aircon – the car showed 31.5 C so another ‘boil in the bag’ experience!  I took some videos at the helice to see how easy it was to track shot – helice is not the best discipline to try the experiment on because you don’t know there the hit will be so need to keep a wide field and thus a rather low resolution, and you need to be fairly well in line with the gun which put you directly in line with the smoke with muzzle loaders – plus a lot of shots are with the bird not rising above the horizon – I managed one shot where you could see the shot going away after the impact, but the impact itself was obscured by smoke – so not much use. I haven’t looked at all the many videos yet but I’m not hopeful – the rabbit one I did previously was much easier as I knew where the impact would be, and it was shot with a breech loader so no smoke.  I’ll have to set up a better trial of airbourne shots!  I took a number of photos of shooting, but didn’t manage to get any of the moment of firing!

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 Posted by at 11:23 pm
Oct 012017
 

 

Not really very inviting!

The old cast iron bath weighed a ton and wouldn’t come out, so I cut it in half  ( 7mm thick cast iron!) see below.

 Posted by at 11:53 pm
Aug 142017
 

I dug out an interesting pistol from the recesses of the collection I inherited from my father.   It’s French, by the well known Paris gunmaker Le Page and is a large bore percussion pistol firing superimposed charges – it has two cocks and a single bore into which two loads are placed, one after the other.  The right hand nipple leads to the front charge, and the left hand nipple leads directly to the rear charge.  It has a single trigger that releases one cock at a time – if both cocks are at full cock, the first pull fires the front charge, and the second pull the rear charge, but if only the left cock is at full cock it fires that one (corresponding to the rear charge, so it would be a bit unfortunate if it was double loaded and you accidentally cocked the left cock and didn’t cock the right!   Maybe I will take the locks out and have a look at the mechanism that achieves this and put it on the site- I’d like to see how it shoots one day, its a big bore (a 20 bore cartridge just fits into the muzzle) for a relatively light pistol and must have used a pretty small charge.  Obviously you need to get the loading dead right to make sure the flame channels line up with the charges  – I can feel a dummy loading coming on………

Typical French etched decoration – almost never seen on English guns or pistols.

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Jul 222017
 

Here is a rather ratty New Land pattern pistol with Birmingham proof marks on the barrel and a safety catch I haven’t seen before – which is not surprising as I haven’t really got into military stuff, although I seem to have few by accident!   Obviously the breech block was made for the percussion conversion,  but were New Land patterns made with Birmingham barrels or was the barrel new with the breech block at the time of conversion?

See later on in the post for full details – this was one of a number of flintlock New Land pistols taken to Hanover after Waterloo in 1815 when George III’s Kings German Legion was disbanded and transferred to the Hanoverian military. the pistols were used and stored until 1838 when they were converted to percussion and issued to the Hanoverian Artilliery

This New Land pattern  has a clever safety bolt – the main purpose of the bolt is that it blocks the cock very securely from hitting the nipple but holds it fairly close so that a cap on the nipple cannot come off but cannot be fired, even if the pistol is dropped on the cock, until the pistol is put on half cock – some way back from the bolted position – and the bolt withdrawn.  The bolt has a spring fixed within the false breech acting in one of two grooves in the underside of the bolt so that it is firmly held in the lock or the free position.  This means the pistol can be carried with a cap on the nipple and the cock let down onto the bolt in complete safety – it can then be fired without having to fumble for a cap – put it on half cock, move bolt to left, full cock fire……   Clever and safe!

See later in post for the full history, and for restoration details…….

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Jul 212017
 

Here is a gun I borrowed from Dick to put on the website – its a fairly early French double 16 bore  made as a dual pinfire ( the notches in the barrel for the pins have been filled)/centrefire gun  (possibly a later conversion?) by ‘Le Faucheux a Paris’ according to the engraving on the locks – I don’t know if that is the same as Lefaucheux as its written in all the books, but it certainly looks right!    It has ejectors but, as one would expect on an early gun, the locks are non-rebounding so you have to put the cocks on half cock to open and  close the barrels.   The date(?) 1853 is stamped under the barrel, along with the barrel maker’s name and two numbers and several stamps with LF in an oval (Le Faucheux?)- the action flat is stamped 1854 and  LF in an oval and there are different numbers on  the barrel( 7688 & 1103  and on the flat (225).   Taking the barrels off involves opening the underlever and unscrewing a very large-headed screw that holds the front part of the metal fore- end in place.  This then lifts off the screw boss and a loose ‘packing piece’ that forms the front face of the hinge bearing falls off – the gun can then be opened and the barrels unhooked from the hinge pin at the front of the action flat.  You wouldn’t want to do that in the field as you would almost certainly loose the loose piece in the undergrowth! ( actually if you do it with the butt down it doesn’t fall off as its on a dovetail.)  The pictures speak for themselves:

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Jul 172017
 

I made a small furnace for heat treating steel, although it should also be hot enough to cast aluminium and brass.  The basic design is from a YouTube video by a schoolboy, and is the neatest small design I have seen on the web, although the basic principle could easily be modified to give different configurations – in particular it would be easy to make a front access furnace, or one that would take a longer part using the more of same bricks and elements etc. with a different configuration and a modified steel cage round it.   Having used the furnaces a few times I think I skimped by only having half thickness bricks on the base as it gets pretty hot underneath – although as its standing on  legs above a piece of stone it doesn’t really matter.    The basic parts of the furnaces were sourced from Ebay and I spent around £80 or 90 making it, but I did have quite a bit of old junk lying about that got incorporated, including the metal for making the framework,  the wiring bits for the circuit and the old plastic box and aluminium panels.

 

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Jul 122017
 

Ordinary hammerless boxlock non ejector ?

Here is a gun I bought back from Dick’s today to photograph – its been in his store for donkey’s years – the owner has long since forgotten he gave it to Dick for some repair of other but Dick seems to know who each gun belongs to from memory, which is quite a feat given most have been in store for well over ten years.  Open the gun in the normal toplever way and you are in for a surprise….

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Jul 112017
 

 

Since posting this it has been identified as a Teshner/Collath of Frankfurt gun that takes a special cartridge – as I understand it these guns seem to have been manufactured up to about 1906 and the ammunition was available up to about 1911 – it is now unavailable, making this a Section 58 firearm rather than a Section 2 shotgun. (see end of post and comment)

Here is a  German breechloader without any identification.  Its a 16 bore hammerless double gun with damasus barrels with an underlever that initially moves the barrels forward away from the breech faces while leaving the extractors behind.  Once the underlever has opened 90 degrees, further motion moves the barrel further and causes  the bolt that is attached to the underside of the barrel flat to disengage from the slot beneath the breech face, allowing the barrels to fall on a small hingepin at the front of the fore-end. Dropping the barrels disengages the pin that has been holding the extractors in the backward position. The process of opening the gun also cocks it.   There is a strange safety catch in the form of a butterfly nut on the top of the breech – when it is aligned fore and aft it is in the safe position and it obstructs the sight line down the barrel – when in the fire position at right angles to the sight line you can see across the middle of it, so it is immediately obvious when you come to shoot that the safety is still on – although it would be difficult to move it from one position to the other while it was anywhere near mounted. The safety is interesting in that it disconnects the triggers rather than blocks them – I haven’t stripped it as it isn’t mine, so I don’t know the details of the action, although I am now tempted.  It has the usual continental decoration of raised design against a punched background – possibly etched before punching – rather fine when viewed under the microscope. It has a horn triggerguard and horn facing on the underlever.   The gun has sling swivels as was common on continental shotguns, and the chambers appear to be highly tapered for the first 1.5 cm, loosing at least  .5mm in diameter – I don’t have a 16 bore snap cap or cartridges to try but I’m sure it won’t fit safely. There are no marks on the gun except a London proof mark and a serial number 6525.  The various labels attached to the gun say that it was bought at auction in 1989.  There is one label that says Bolath (?) ( p.s. actually Collath) .

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Jul 072017
 

Here is a fine early hammerless gun  – Gibbs and Pitt of Bristol took out patent 284  in 1873, two years after the first hammerless patent by Murcott  No 1003   in 1871.   The 284 patent describes two versions, one with the action built on the triggerplate, and one with sideplate action – this is the triggerplate version.  It has an underlever that follows the outline of the triggerguard and hinges down and forward.  As it goes forward it withdraws a sprung loaded bolt that goes  into the barrel lump to secure the barrels in the closed position, allowing the barrels to fall open.  The underlever closes by a flat spring which forms part of the underside of the action bar – when the barrels are lifted the bolt snaps into the forward lump and locks the barrels in position.  The bolt acts on two lumps, the one nearest the hinge has the ramp that does the snap action, the one near the breechface is just a lock.  I guess the technical description of the gun is a double 12 bore hammerless non ejector underlever double bite snap action gun on a triggerplate action !     (triggerplate means that the works of the action – triggers, sears, tumblers and springs are mounted on the triggerplate that comes out with the triggers on it  – on guns of  earlier generations  the actions were mainly mounted on the side locks, as they are on quality guns now – modern guns mostly have boxlock actions – the bits mounted in the action box as the name says!  The barrels are a beautiful plum brown colour and I can’t see if there is any twist beneath the browning – they have obviously been struck off at some time – they could be Whitworth pressed fluid steel at that date, or twist.    The barrels appear to  have an original set of Birmingham proof marks and a set from re-proofing after the 1955 proof stamp changes and carries an NP mark for London – it also has 12 in a diamond and 2 1/2″ and 3 TONS stamped under the barrel  and .740.    The barrels forward of the flats have 13 stamped on them and the original Birmingham view and proof marks.   The maker’s name on the barrel is faintly traceable but there is no trace of any Whitworth designation as is usual on steel barrels of this date.  The bores are very clean and have plenty of wall thickness in them.

There is a mystery with this gun – the engraved oval on the broad backstrap that says Gibbs and Pitt Patent Bristol has the patent as No 204 whereas Crudington and Baker list it as 284 , and say it was his only patent – did the engraver get it wrong, its quite clear and no room for doubt.

The gun serial number is C 395 – the C indicates that it was one of Gibbs and Pitts second grade guns, made up in the Birmingham trade and finished and regulated by Gibbs, but it is a second grade from a first rate maker.  This became a popular action and sold well once hammerless guns were accepted.

Part of the triggerplate action sticks down into the triggerguard area – making these guns instantly recognisable!

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Jul 052017
 

This is a pretty single barreled gun in decent condition for its age  – the action is quite tight. Serial No 2772  – it would appear that Lang didn’t stick to a single serial number sequence.  The later centrefire Lang 14 bore is serial number 2012.  This gun has the Lang single bite ‘inert’ closer, which was used on the first English breech loaders to gain real popularity amonst sportsmen around 1859.  It has the problem that all the first break-open breechloaders had in that the bolt that acts on the barrel lump to hold the barrel against the action is close to the hinge pin, thus magnifying any wear in the bolt or lump, although this gun is obviously little used and is as tight as a nut.   Being a single barreled gun it has a wrap round action body that is very rigid so it  doesn’t suffer from the early defect of  the double barreled guns that had a rather skimpy action flat that could be liable to flex under heavy loads   –  the forces involved were not initially well understood.  Lang never patented this action.

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Jun 012017
 

Here is an interesting and very old blunderbuss – if it is as it seems it may be as early as the English Civil War (1642 – 1651) – certainly it is of a design that was current from about 1640 to 1670 at the latest as far as I can see – there can’t be many guns about from that date, so it may be something of a rarity and of significant historical importance – enough to keep one from ANY conjectural restoration work and anything but the most sensitive repairs !       Features that signify an early date are the general shape of the stock, the dog lock with flat plate and ‘teat’ tail, the sear pivoting on a vertical shaft, the barrel tang secured by a ‘nail’ from underneath, the ramrod pipe made from sheet and opened out to fix it and probably the key early feature – the cock secured by a post passing through the tumbler and pinned on the inside.  I’m not sure about the proof marks – London was using standard marks at that period but Birmingham was still 150 years from opening its first ordinance proof house – anything made in Commonwealth controlled parts   e.g London, would have used the Parliamentarian proof marks of a shield – I suspect that this has a private Birmingham proof mark along with the barrrel stamp E I T and another mark I cannot read.

Here are some photos ( taken with my travelling camera so not quite up to normal standard!)  – I’d welcome any ideas, particularly on the initials on the barrel stamp – they look like E I I or perhaps  E I T with a sun above.   One possibility for the maker is Edmund Truelocke (working 1660 – 1680?) with a shop in London.

The lock is held  in by 3 screws – an early feature.

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May 142017
 

I am asked about loads for muzzle loading shotguns quite often – in fact about as often as I ask other people about loads for muzzle loading rifles!

The answer is that within reasonable limits there is variation in what people use, and I’m sure whatever I say those limits are, someone will pop up and contradict me!  This is strictly my own version of what to use and how to load, modified slightly for beginners – you may cut corners when you have a bit more experience;-

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 Posted by at 6:55 pm
May 112017
 

Dragoons were essentially cavalry of medium or heavy weight, as distinct from light cavalry.  The army had both Dragoon and Cavalry regiments in the 18/19th centuries.

This is a pretty standard Heavy Dragoon pistol of 1795 pattern with rounded lock and iron ramrod.  All parts are original – all the ironwork bits are marked with the assembly mark   X\III  – even the screws.  Proof marks are missing from the barrel, although there is a ghost mark in teh right place.  The marks that would have been impressed on the wood  are missing, although there are pits where they might have been.

This is a pretty straight pistol, all original with a poorly repaired muzzle end to the stock, and  the bents on the tumbler and the end of the sear all worn so that it can be fired on half cock but won’t hold on full cock.  There are numerous small dents in the woodwork from a hard life, and the frizzen has been refaced, also suggesting a hard life.  The barrel has been struck off at some point and lost all but a trace of its marks, but isn’t rusted on the outside and will clean up perfectly.  Here are a couple of views before starting work;-

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Apr 282017
 

Shou Sugi Ban is a Japanese technique of putting a burnt surface on wood.    Giles does a bit of woodturning from time to time (following in my footsteps!) and likes to experiment in techniques – here is his latest project piece.  It is turned from a chunk of spalted beech which was going spongy  in places – I had started to make a bowl of it and then abandoned it years ago so Giles used it for his bowl – he has a good eye for shapes and with a bit of guidance was able to get a reasonable finish on what was a very difficult blank to turn.   Having turned it he went at the inside with a gas blow torch and then put the fire out with water.  Once dry the inside was coated with EPOSEAL 300  – a solvent based two part epoxy sealant that has very low viscosity so it soaks in deep, and sets hard throughout – it leaves the burn surface completely sealed and inert so that it won’t brush off or shed charcoal bits.

Apr 282017
 

Here are a list of the guns currently for sale from my collection and from private sales from friends.  I put this Post as a link to the separate page of GUNS AND BITS FOR SALE because the website won’t let me highlight things on a separate page – this page contains links to the relevant page-

Photos and full description at  GUNS AND BITS  FOR SALE

New Land Pattern officer’s carbine bore  (.65″)  pistol of around 1812 with rare flat bolted lock of Paget pattern with raised (waterproof) pan, 9 inch barrel and  and captive ramrod in very nice condition with the trigger guard very neatly engraved for the 1st Hussars of the King’s German Legion (KGL) £2500

Heavy Dragoon Pistol of Carbine Bore ( .65″) with 9″ barrel  with flat lock engraved H Nock.

Griffin Officers’s Pistol of 1760

Cased pair of percussion turnoff pistols by Abbey of Long Sutton

John Blanch percussion pocket pistol

T.Perrins of Worcester percussion ladies/youths fowler

Mar 312017
 

Here is an ususual 4 barrelled pocket pistol in brass by Wm Walsingham of Birmingham, around 1760 ish.  It is designed to fire all 4 barrels at once with a single powder chamber communicating with all 4 barrels – the 4 barrels are made as one piece and screw off in one.   The stock was silver inlaid but now has only dark lines indicating where the silver wire went.  The underside of the action has script in a language with a  non roman script – I’m not sure what it might be – perhaps Farsi or Sanskrit or a far Eastern script, and this was obviously put on some time after manufacture – possibly much later?   Dick thinks the silver wire inlay might have been done in the country that engraved the script on the gun – I think it is actually fairly typical of decoration put on guns made in England.  The added foreign script look less worn than the original engraving, so the pistol may have been exported some time after it first entered use.

 

 

 Posted by at 11:33 pm
Mar 182017
 

The Andrews is a fairly typical travelling or possibly officer’s pistol of the turn of the 18th century.  Judging by pictures on the internet there were basically two common patterns of Andrews pistols of this type – the earlier with a rounded back to the lock and a semi rainproof pan and serpentine cock in the English style, and the later with a square back to the lock and a full rainproof pan and french style cock with a cutout.   This one is probably the earlier type based on the shape of the lock and so would not have had a full rainproof pan and french cock.

 

 

Stripping the pistol;-

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Mar 172017
 

Joseph Griffin opened his business in 1739 in Bond Street London, and went into partnership with Tow in 1773 to form the well known gunmakers Griffin and Tow.   That puts a bracket on the possible date for this gun, and I would guess this was made in the middle of that period – say 1755 to 1760.   Like all pistols of the period it would have been made and sold as a pair, and indeed the escutcheon has No 1 engraved on it along with a chained bear – the personal arms of the owner.  The pistol is all original and conforms to the pattern seen in other Griffin Officers Pistols  – it suffered extensive damage to the fore-end and that has been very skillfully repaired and  is  inconspicuous.

 

 

 

 

 

 Posted by at 11:07 pm
Feb 202017
 

This gun is a rare example of a Jackson design for a method of speeding up combustion in percussion guns by directing the fire from the cap straight into the centre of the breech block. I haven’t yet found a patent, nor do I know if one exists for this design.  Given that the patent breech by Henry Nock added a secondary chamber in order to speed up ignition by setting up a small primary explosion to set off the main charge, its not clear that going straight into the breech would actually achieve what Jackson intended.  One can see why he might have thought it would, because Nock’s design is counter intuitive.  i look forward to trying it out – I wonder if an ordinary video camera is fast enough to capture small differences in ignition speed – I rather doubt it.   Judging purely by the style, the wood and the engraving I would put this latish in the percussion era – very probably post 1840.

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Feb 192017
 

I have Gold plated the pans of flintlocks using the brush plating system sold by SPA Plating  (www.goldn.co.uk) with great success.   Steel makes a perfectly good substrate on which to plate gold directly without a barrier layer, the only caveat is that rust must be avoided by keeping surfaces very lightly protected by oil or a coating like Metalguard.   Spa plating used to have a very good handbook on plating but I couldn’t find it on the latest website, and the new instructions are less clear so I will put the .pdf at the end of this blog.  I have told them that the new website isn’t as informative!

Here are my hints for plating gold onto steel parts using the SPA plating brush method;-

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Feb 132017
 

I’ve stuck some bits from my blog when I stripped the gun and got it going properly; see the end of the first bit….

 

This is a most unusual gun that I inherited from my father’s collection – I have no idea where he got it from, I have never seen another gun even vaguely like it, except perhaps a Jones Patent enclosed lock gun that is undoubtably of later date, and although I  have shown it to many collectors and experts I haven’t met anyone who has a clue about it – and that includes Holt’s valuer and old gun guru Robert, who must have had most things through his hands at some time or another.    So any information or comments would be valued!

Stock shape and barrel are early features – may be a case of re-use?

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Dec 122016
 

I thought it was time to pull together the bits and pieces that are in various posts into a coherent story!  This post is intended as an introduction to the other posts on barrel re-engraving of specific guns and pistols.

 

Before we get into the details, it would be a good idea to discuss the rights and wrongs of recutting engraving!   I have no problem with recutting on guns that have almost unreadable engraving and are not unusual or of high value – if something is rare and particularly if its old – say before 1770, then I would think very carefully about the need and justification for recutting – in fact I’d almost certainly not do it.  You will sometimes see guns in (proper) auctions that mention that the engraving has been ‘refreshed’ – that’s obviously not to make the gun sound MORE attractive, so it must be intended as a warning – in other words some collectors would avoid it  – so be warned!   I have recut engraving on barrels of good guns where it is worn much more than the rest of the engraving, but it requires great care to avoid it looking like faking.  Mostly I recut things that are being built as ‘bitzers’ to shoot, or not very special guns that have almost illegible engraving, where recutting definitely enhances the gun.

Just to get you in the mood, here is an example of very bad recutting, or possibly just faking on a barrel that doesn’t belong to the gun – with engraving this bad on a Purdey who knows what happened?  It’s difficult to see how this lettering could be put on top of ‘proper’ Purdey lettering, so I’m puzzled – barrel lettering is usually fairly widely spaced so that minor variations in spacing don’t show and it looks more even because the letters aren’t so visually close to each other and period Purdey lettering usually has extremely fine serifs.  ( Update – I have since seen  several Purdey  guns with similar engraving, and come to the conclusion that in fact its just surprisingly rubbish Purdey engraving!)

Faults include ;-  uneven vertical stroke angles, very poor spacing, ‘O’s too small and, stylistically, serifs not Purdey style, spacing too close, letters poorly formed, curved cuts not deep enough or ‘fingernail shaped’  – a complete dog’s breakfast of a job – glad I didn’t do it!

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 Posted by at 10:44 pm
Dec 072016
 

When it comes to finishing stocks for antique guns I like to use the traditional materials – partly for authenticity and because they are pleasant to work with, although undoubtedly not as durable as a thick coat of polyurethane varnish!   Guns were finished using one of two methods, oil finishes or spirit varnishes.  Oil finishes basically use mixtures of oils (usually boiled linseed oil) and waxes ( beeswax and other hard natural waxes) and harden by the oxidation of the oils by oxygen in the air, which takes place fairly slowly – driers, typically based on manganese compounds, are used in low concentrations to speed up the oxidation. The alternative traditional finish was spirit varnish, using a solvent – typically alcohol, in which a naturally occurring material that is transparent and hard is dissolved – typically shellac (secreted by an insect) or occasionally copal varnish (from the resin of a tree), or other resinous material – alcohol and Shellac are the ingredients of traditional French Polish and were very widely used before modern synthetic materials displaced them.   Spirit varnish hardens by evaporation of the spirit  to leave a thin coating of the varnish – the alcohol evaporates rapidly so the varnish hardens quite quickly and far fewer coats are needed compared to oil finishes, but its more difficult to get an even finish. Shellac varnish itself has a brown tint, and so does darken the wood slightly – the better the quality of the shellac the lighter the colour.    It is also possible to use both materials on the same job.

 

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