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.