A blunderbuss is born

 We decided to shuffle around the work days this week because of some crappy, cold weather that is supposed to come through tomorrow so we are working today (Sunday) in order to trade it for not working in the shop on Monday. I guess you'd have to see the big picture of all the things we try to do here for that to make any sense, but that isn't what I'm writing about today.

Suffice it to say that I'm working in the shop today, prepping guns. On the menu for today are a few blunderbusses of different flavors and a doglock pistol.

The one I'll describe today is a brass barreled blunderbuss.

If I did the math right, I have nine of this particular pattern here to prep and ship, all spoken for. These are a mid to late 18th century Dutch style gun with an 18" brass 3 stage barrel.

Out of the box this one looked pretty nice, with a nice dark finish that had no flaws to touch up.

I laid out the location of the vent relative to the pan and removed the lock. The first thing I noticed is that the ends of the lock bolts (technically called "sidenails" in 18th century vernacular) were roughly cut off and kind of jagged, so I knew I'd be reworking them before I reassembled the gun.

Venting the barrel was simple and occurred without incident in that the breechplug did not have to be removed and reworked. Removing the breechplug is somewhat stressful on a gun that has a pinned barrel because every time those pins are removed and reinstalled, you risk the pin going crooked and buggering up the wood around it. Regardless of what old-guy reenactors say, pinned barrels are NOT supposed to be removed without a good reason to so so.

Getting a closer look at the lock mechanism, I spotted the main issues I'd have to deal with on this one. There was a little gap between the top of the tumbler and the bridle when the lock was in the fired position which told me it the cock needed to be reworked. With out even being test-snapped ever, i could see a little ding on top of the lockplate from the step on the inside of the cock hitting the lockplate too soon because of this.

Let as it was, the cock would batter itself against the top of the lockplate every time it was snapped and the physics of this would round off the corners of the square tumbler shaft where it passes through the hole in the cock. This would ultimately make the cock wiggle around and cause all sorts of weird wear patterns.

That one is an easy enough fix. The cock was removed, allowing the tumbler to rest all the way forward as it should, then the cock slid back over the tumbler shaft just far enough to scribe a line on the inside of it to show me where the little step SHOULD have been cut. Then it is removed, the new step cut, and it is cleaned up to blend in the reworked surface with the existing metal finish.

I put a 3/4" flint in the jaws and saw a bigger problem: the frizzen was angled rearwards at such an angle that a 3/4" flint wouldn't fit between the jaws and the face of the frizzen at half-cock. While I suppose you COULD just use a smaller flint because a 5/8" flint did fit, it would just be a sorta half-assed fix and the little flint looked silly in a blunderbuss. My job is to make sure it is right when it leaves here, so it was time to fire up the forge and rework it.

A spring vise was put on the frizzen spring and the frizzen was removed. I took it out to the forge to reshape it. After heating it up to orange hot, I took the now-pliable frizzen out of the forge and quickly pushed it, face-down against the top of my antique anvil to bend the "feather" portion of the frizzen forward at a right angle. At this heat, it just bent with very slight resistance.

This era of gun would not have a flat frizzen sticking straight up like that, so the next step was to put it back into the forge, bring it back up to orange heat and bend the feather into a graceful rearward curve that looked better and would allow the flint to strike a long spark from it because it would maintain a steady contact all the way down it's face when snapped.

That being done, it had to be rehardened because if it were just allowed to cool off, it would have been annealed and would not create a spark when struck. It was brought up to temperature, case hardening compound was added in a few layers, then at the right moment it was quickly removed from the forge and quenched in brine, then rinsed in clear water.

Next it was brought back into the shop, blown dry with compressed air, and wire brushed to clean it up.

It was installed into the gun to test it, and I found that the flint wasn't knocking it all the way open. It was removed again and the "bearing" surface of the frizzen (the part that contacts the frizzen spring) was reworked to give it less resistance. It was reinstalled, oiled, and tested with success.

The last thing to fix on this particular gun was the rammer tip. When they are made in India, the brass rammer tips are epoxied onto the turned end of the wooden rammer which is flared out to meet the shape of the tip. Sometimes the epoxy works, sometimes it doesn't. The difference is probably surface prep, but since the parts are fitted to each other I can't really mess with that to fix the problem.

How this gets fixed is that I drill a small hole through the tip and the wood inside of it using a V-block in one of the drill presses to keep it centered. Once the hole is drilled, I fabricate a rivet out of steel rod. One end is shaped into a point, then it gets cut off square and the blunt end is peened into a nail-head shape. When done, it looks like a 1/2" long nail. This gets pushed through the hole all the way so that the pointy end is sticking out.

The pointy end of the pin gets cut off, leaving a little bit sticking out past the brass tip. Then the whole thing is placed on a little anvil on the back of my big shop vise and the rivet is peened into place, causing it to expand in the middle and fill up the hole that it passed through. The ends of the pin are peened down almost flat, then they are sanded down to fit more-or-less flush with the tapered sides of the rammer tip.

It is acceptable for the steel pin to be seen against the brass tip, as this is one of the ways a rammer tip would have been attached to a wooden rammer in the 18th century, so this sort of thing is historically correct. The other common way of attaching a rammer tip was for the tip to be drilled straight through it's whole length so the wooden rammer came all the way to the end and a little iron wedge was tapped into it, splitting & swelling the wood and locking it into place the same way a hammer head is held on today.

As I type this, the gun is leaning against the counter, waiting for me to do the paperwork on it and then I'll move onto the next one. The next one happens to be a 1690's style doglock blunderbuss with an 18" 3-stage steel barrel. There are different potential issues and things to tweak on a doglock and I'll write about them some other day.

Knowing how to do this stuff is what you pay me for!

No, I will not tell you how to vent a gun you bought somewhere else

 Here is an email exchange I just had with someone:

Guy with more balls than brains:  I just obtained a French Flintlock Carbine 1777 Musketoon (AN IX model)

I need to drill the flash hole of vent hole. What is the dimensions (diameter) for the bit?

Me, career gunsmith:  Our guns are shipped vented and tuned.

If you bought one with no vent, it isn't one of ours.

Guy with more balls than brains:  I did not get the musketoon from you. The one shipped to me is not drilled. I am trying to determine the size of bit I should order or buy.

I was hoping you could give me this information.

Me, career gunsmith:   Ask the guy you bought it from.

Guy with more balls than brains:  Thanks for the great assistance.

I cannot believe the balls some people have. What would make someone think that I would tell him how to (maybe) fix an unfinished gun that he bought from one of my foreign competitors?

Here is a truth for people like him: an unvented gun is an unfinished project kit gun at best.

There is a lot more to making an unfinished gun work than drilling a hole in it. DO you know how to inspect the barrel? Do you have the proper tools to safely remove the breechplug when you need to rework it? Of even funnier, when you break off a drill bit in it? Do you know how to adjust the lock parts so that the gun is safe to carry loaded? Can you heat treat the lock parts after reshaping them? Do you even know what you are looking at enough to KNOW if something is unsafe and needs adjustment?

Here is the first hint that the answer is no to all of those questions: the guy who is going to play gunsmith does not know enough about what he is doing to even have a clue about what sized vent to drill.

Ignoring the fact that probably half of the guns that are floating around as "unvented" project guns are my intellectual property that was ripped off, no professional gunsmith in his right mind would give out tech information to someone who clearly lacks the knowledge to be screwing around with this stuff.

Makes me wonder if the guy also writes to random doctors he has never met and asks "Hey, I'm going to try my hand at carpal tunnel surgery on my wife, what size scalpel should I get?"

If you have to ask me about drilling a hole, you should probably not be playing gunsmith.

What happened in the shop for just one musket

 I get idiotic emails all the time from people who have never built or fixed anything in the whole lives asking questions like "What is taking so long, all you have to do is put the gun in a box and mail it".

Uhhhh, no. Flintlocks aren't legos. They don't just snap together.

Let's take a look at what I had to do to just one musket that I finished up on this afternoon. It is a Spanish Model 1757. The Spanish 1757 pattern was Spain's more-or-less copy of the French muskets of that era, only done with Spanish twists like a ring topped jaw screw that you tighten with a punch instead of a slotted screw that you'd tighten with a screwdriver and a grooved frizzen because the flint available in Spain kinda sucked. Other than those things, the 1757 pattern looks much like a brass mounted Charleville if you were to squint at it.

The gun I finished up is serial number E-191.

First step is to unpack it. When Customs had inspected this particular shipment, somebody had opened up and discarded the bubble wrap it was shipped in to see what it was. Customs being Customs, they just slashed into it with a razor knife, so the first thing to fix was a slash down the side of it that went across not just the stock, but some of the brass furniture.

The slash mark had to be scraped flat and touched up to make it disappear. The slash on the brass meant the part had to be removed, stoned down and buffed back to a smooth surface.

The lock gets removed and the vent hole is laid out by scribing. The vent is drilled. Then the barrel had to be removed because the breechplug was about 3/16" too long and when the vent was drilled, the hole just went into the steel plug instead of connecting to the chamber area.

The barrel had to be secured in a barrel vise, a witness mark stamped into the bottom so as to ensure that the plug screwed back in to the exact same spot, then a wrench with a cheater bar on it was used to unscrew the breech plug.

Once it was out, the face of the breech plug was relieved by grinding it back in such a way that the vent actually connected with the chamber area so the gun could go off. The newly ground metal was oiled to keep it from rusting then screwed back into  place with the aforementioned wrench until the witness mark lined up.

The barrel was then removed from the vise. It had left some "frosting" on the barrel flats where the wooden blocks that hold the barrel had grasped it, so the flats had to be buffed out to match the rest of the barrel finish.

Now the barrel was reinstalled: first the tang screw, then the three barrel bands in order. The front sling swivel was reinstalled. A few scraped spots from the bands being removed and reinstalled had to be touched up. The rammer was put back into it's channel.

On to the lock. Surprisingly, the lock was timed correctly. Probably 3/4 of the time, they are not and I have to tear them down and recut the step on the side of the cock so it stops against the lockplate at the same time the tumbler stops against the bridle.

Everything else looked good on the lock...so far, so good. The lock was reinstalled.

Then I put a flint in it to test it out. The first flint broke in half the long way, but it popped the frizzen open like it should. Shit happens, flints are just pieces of rock and sometimes they just break, so I tossed it and put another one in. The same thing happened but it made kind of a lame spark. One flint breaking is not a symptom of anything but a weak spot in a flint, but two breaking is certainly a sign something is odd.

Before I got into the frizzen weirdness, first I had to troubleshoot the lock. It seemed to have a spooky hair trigger. I removed the lock again and studied how the nose of the sear engaged the full cock notch, finding the notch to be at too great of an angle. The lock then got stripped down to it's components after compressing the mainspring and I went at the full cock notch with a fine stone to change the angle. The lock was reassembled to try it out, and I had gone just a degree or two too far, so it got torn down again for more stoning. It was reassembled again, put back in the gun and it worked fine (not the frizzen, we are still working on the tumbler here, there is still a broken half-flint in the jaws).

Now that the tumbler was working right, the lock got removed from the gun and torn down again so I could harden the new working surface of the full cock notch. This was done using a Mapp gas torch, Kasenit, and a bucket of water in the shop. Then tumbler got blown off with compressed air to remove any water from quenching it, then it got wire brushed to clean the Kasenit residue off of it. The tumbler then was oiled and the lock reassembled & installed in the gun once again.

Now my attention was shifted back to the frizzen issue. First the frizzen spring was compressed with a spring vise so the frizzen screw can be removed without stripping it.

Upon close inspection, I found that one of the grooves in the face of the frizzen was slightly crooked and this caused one corner of the flint to bind up in the groove, which was what was causing the left half of the flint to break away.

Out came the Dremel with a cutoff wheel in it to widen and reshape the grooves so they would be as parallel as possible for a series of hand-cut grooves on the curved face of a steel part.

Since the frizzen was already not quite hard enough to begin with AND I had to recut the grooves thus removing what little case hardening was in them in the first place, it had to be rehardened. This mean sanding the face of it until all of the scratches and gouges were smoothed out and it was shiny. Since it is a grooved frizzen, I cleaned out the grooves using a wire brush.

Then it was time to go out to the forge. The gas forge is outside in an enclosed, covered work area because it isn't the sort of thing that is safe to have inside the shop. The frizzen is put on a little stand that I made inside it and the gas forge is fired up. The frizzen heats to a dull orange temperature, then it is removed using tongs and held over a box which catches the spilled case hardening compound as I pour it out of it's canister onto the hot frizzen.

The compound melts (it is a medium fine powder that looks like a greenish-grey gunpowder and stinks like urine when it melts) and flows over the face of the frizzen. Now it goes back into the forge to melt further and spread down into the grooves. After a few minutes, it was taken out of the forge and more compound applied. If I recall, it got 3 coats of compound.

Once it has been at red hot for a few minutes while the working surface was completely covered in the melted compound (any bare spots will ruin the process), the red-hot frizzen, compound and all, was quickly taken from the forge and quenched in a bucket of brine. It instantly cools with a loud pop as all of that heat energy transforms into sound.

Normally the next step would be to rinse the brine off of the part in a bucket of fresh water, but the fresh water bucket still has a thick block of ice frozen across the top of it so I brought the frizzen, still dripping wet with salt water, into the shop and rinsed it in the smaller, one-gallon bucket of fresh water on the workbench.

Once rinsed, it got blown dry with compressed air, wire brushed to remove the residue, everywhere except the face of it had oil rubbed onto it since the original protective oils were burned off in the forge, then it was reinstalled in the gun for it's final function test. NOW it worked as it should.

The last step before bringing it out of the shop is to make sure there are no burrs in the bore at the muzzle from when the barrel was cut to length. Shockingly, there are none and it was finally time to start the paperwork on it.

I measured the bore and filled out the chart on the front of the owner's manual. The caliber and serial number get written on the customer's invoice and I make a copy for our records. A series of instructional sheets on cartridge making, muzzleloader safety and general load data get printed out to enclose with the owner's manual.

Then, and only then, is it ready to "put the gun in a box" to ship it.

FWIW, this was a relatively simple one compared to some of the stuff I have to deal with before declaring a gun ready to ship. 

My adventure with COVID 19

 I started back to work yesterday in a limited capacity after being laid up with COVID for three weeks.

It was only a matter of time, really. It just took longer to get to us because we were social distancing before it was cool. Really, we are located in the woods, halfway up a mountain, about a mile and a half from the closest paved road. We generally only leave the property maybe 2-3 times a month to get chicken feed and perishable groceries, pick up prescriptions at the pharmacy in the next town etc. It isn't quite at the level where you could call us "hermits", but except in the good weather when Wendy and Ellie go to homeschooler meetups our life isn't too far removed from hermithood. 

For the past two years that the world has been losing it's collective mind, we have simply shrugged it off and chosen not to play. We don't wear silly masks, armbands, or beanies with propellers on top because any thinking person can see that that nonsense won't stop the transmission of an engineered bioweapon. We don't get experimental, untested injections. We shake hands like normal people. We get together with other homeschooler families who think alike and do our best to live normally.

Yeah, we know exactly who brought COVID into our home. It was a guest who stayed here for nearly a week so our experience with it doesn't really give us any indication about just how virulent and easily transmitted it actually is. So much for that experiment!

At the end of the 1st week in February, the girls came down with COVID. 10 year old Ellie had a fever and was lethargic for two days, then it was over for her. Wendy ended up in bed for a week with the fever, aches and pains, coughing, and head congestion. After a few days of fever, it broke and life went on. The interesting thing is that I had no symptoms that first week and tested solidly negative on the (made in China) free tests that the government had mailed out, while Wendy was a solid positive.

It worked out well that I was not sick because I got to be healthy to take care of the girls while they were sick. Right when Wendy was snapping out of it, it hit me. First, I was just sorta tired and took a Sunday off. The next day I was in bed, sleeping all day and feverish.

The feverish stuff continued for about a week and ended itself with one miserable, sweaty night that left the bedding soaked with sweat.

Now two years ago, I had planned to treat the fever part of COVID with "The Bark" like thy would have in the 18th century. Peruvian Bark (yellow cinchona bark) is what was used to treat anything with a fever in the 18th century because it is a natural source of quinine, and of course quinine treats malaria. Not having much understanding about microbiology then, since it treated the fevers of malaria, it was used to treat all fevers, regardless of whether that makes good scientific sense or not. Basically, it is the colonial homesteader version of the synthesized drug "Chloroquine" which was used early on in the COVID scenario before big pharma figured out how to get stunningly rich with their so-called "vaccines" and endless boosters. The plan was to use it if anyone's fever was TOO high.

The body produces a fever for a reason when it is fighting off an illness. Our normal practice in this family is to leave fevers alone to do their thing unless it is too high. Since none of our fevers really reached a point I would consider dangerous enough to intervene, we just all took our turns sweating it out.

The effects of COVID are still lingering with the following symptoms:

1. Sinus congestion. I mean REALLY congested, but not my nasal passages. All of the little sinus cavities in my head are plugged to the point that I can barely hear (as if I wasn't deaf enough already!) and my balance is off so I'm staggering around like a drunk guy at times. I can breathe through my nose just fine though.

2. The sinus congestion dribbles down my throat and makes me cough & hack. Lungs are clear though. Going out into the cold air to take care of the chickens leads to a lot of coughing afterwards, no doubt having to do with the cold air hitting the warm lungs. This might be normal...I had surgery last year to open up the airways in my face and I am still not yet used to breathing in a chest full of cold air all at once yet because for most of my life I had to work at it.

3. Exhaustion. This is the worst of it. I have never been so friggin' tired in my life! This is a tired of a type I have never experienced. You lay down in bed and the feeling is just bliss! Laying in bed you don't even watch TV because holding up your head to watch TV and read the subtitles just seems like too much exertion. You don't read in bed either because holding up a book is too much work. It is the weirdest thing.

4. Loss of sense of smell/diminishment of certain taste functions. While the loss of smell is unsettling, it is the taste thing that pisses me off because I like food. Not all tastes are affected though. I can still taste chocolate. I'm not quite sure what I can't taste because it is hard to know when something doesn't exist, you know? Regardless, it is nothing that can't be overcome by adding more hot sauce and it makes me wonder what post-COVID cuisine is going to be like with hopped-up flavors to overcompensate for people's damaged sense of taste.

5. COVID-head aka "brain fog". This is a weird one, and I haven't fully thought through the hows and whys of it. COVID makes you kind of stupid. Not "dumb" in that you can't understand and ponder deep subjects...this doesn't lower your IQ in any way. What it does is interfere with your ability to work out the operation of your body. For instance, a week or so ago, I set out to make myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch. It took about 4 or 5 trips to the pantry to get things, put things back, figure out what order to assemble the sandwich in, etc.  Yesterday I was heading upstairs after work and wanted to bring the mail, my empty switchel glass, and a little bucket I bring the day's egg in with upstairs all in one trip and shut the shop lights out in the process. The mail was laying on the stairs. The glass in my left hand, the bucket in my right. It probably took me 5 minutes of standing there picking things up and putting them down again to work out that I could put the stack of mail under the arm that held the glass, put the bucket down on the stairs, flick the light switches with my right hand and simply pick the bucket back up before going upstairs. It is kind of funny, but really frustration and it is getting old.

At this juncture, the way I am staying awake all day is by consuming 3 to 4 times my normal daily intake of caffeine. Each dose takes about 5-10 minutes to kick in and keeps me going for 2-3 hours. I realize that it is time for more when I am suddenly so damn tired that I find myself laying my head down on the table like a toddler who falls asleep in their spaghetti. (to clarify, I don't fall asleep in my food LOL)

Yesterday I felt functional enough to work in the shop and even to (gasp!) use power tools! I managed to get a couple of guns torn down & prepped before running out of steam and today I shipped them. Right before this all hit at the beginning of February, we had got in a shipment of stuff and I had just started to unpack the crates & log the stuff in...it has been sitting there ever since and I hope to get that squared away over the next few days in addition to getting stuff flowing out the door again.

Now, would I do anything differently if we had it to do over again?

Nope. Still wouldn't wear a silly mask. Still wouldn't get the experimental injections. Still would visit other families. Does this suck? Well, yeah. I've been sicker though. Sometime I'll write about the time I lost 30 pounds in three weeks with salmonella poisoning that I picked up at a fancy banquet with the Lt Governor of MA years ago. Like my daughter says: some things just suck.

Was this worth crushing freedom, the economy, global commerce, a couple of years of normal child development (for the non-homeschoolers out there), two years of social division and psychological stress over? Absolutely not!