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!