Sep 072016
 

Here are a few examples of freehand borders copied from antique locks – I was playing about at the time and don’t have any note of which guns they came from, although I can remember a few.  I did these  years ago when I was learning and didn’t have a proper microscope,   I hope I’m better now – obviously I couldn’t even rule a straight line, but I have no shame and thought there was some value in showing them – I will try to do better examples when I have time!  Having said that, if you put these as borders on a gun probably no-one would notice how bad they are (except No2!).

Read the number under the line.

No 1 is sometimes seen on percussion locks or across breech blocks – there are a lot of variations of the running arrowhead/flights motif – e.g. see the last one.

No 2, thick and thin line ( mine looks awful – I’m ashamed to show it but the rest are interesting!) are common on plainer flat locks,  trigger guard tangs and butt plate tangs.

No 4 is often seen on trigger guards and similar = there are many variations of this line and scallop design, e.g. No 9.

N0 10- running leaf-  is very common prior to the percussion era – almost the standard from about 1790 to 1816 on  guns and pistols – from the Mantons, Egg etc.  down.

Nos 5, 7, 11 and 18 might be seen as lock borders on late percussion guns such as the Bales of Ipswich target pistols in the restoration blog.

6 and 13 come from lock borders of percussion guns.

Nos 14 and 15 appear across the breech blocks of percussion and later flintlocks.

I have a soft spot for No 13, the rope border – perhaps because of the nautical connection!  Its fairly simple to cut but working out the pattern in the first place is the tricky bit – I have to fiddle around marking it all out to sort out the cuts – its challenging to get everything even, but all the patterns need the spacing carefully marked out and followed.

borders

testplate- borders

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