Silver Mounted Naval Academy Pistols – Finished !!! After 54 years !!! by David Crisalli: Part 7

Glad the pictures help.  I am fairly well known as a Ludite but I have to admit that having a cell phone with a camera in my pocket has been a big help.  I had to disassemble some test equipment out at my desert test site and taking pictures as I went so I could get it all back together again was a huge help.  And yes, shaping the portion of the fore stock where the rear pipe goes is a huge help….as long as you don’t cut away too much wood.  However, trying to "dig through" a lot of excess wood to get the pipe installed never makes for an easy or well done inlet.

Daryl….Taylor is correct.  This rosewood and ebony are about equal in working difficulty.  I have seen pictures of Taylor’s wheel lock…..magnificent !!

I’ve built several pistols now with these spurred butt caps and there must be some sort of trick that I have missed completely on how to do these.  Without a doubt, trying to get these butt caps installed without looking like I did all the work with my left foot and a hatchet has been a real pain in the ….well….neck !!!  After several hours of work, I have one done.  And to explain a bit, I needed to cut the long spurs off my original wax patterns before I cast the butt caps because the curve was incorrect.  The intention is to cast longer, less curved spurs and solder them in place on the butt caps.  But as long as the cap spurs were short, I thought I would inlet the caps as they are, and do most of the hard part, and then add the longer spurs later.  So here we go….. here is where I started….

This was just trying to figure out where the bulk of the wood had to be removed…..

These next two show the work in progress….and again, this rosewood is like cutting iron…..

Here is what it looks like after several long hours of removing wood one molecule at a time…..

And here is the spur pattern laid in place.  I will cast four of these in sterling silver, silver braze them to the butt caps, and then finish inlaying the long spurs.

Here is the current status of both pistols…..coming along….slowly….

Had to stop for a bit to dodge the most recent California fire storm…..It often looks like Mordor around here….. 

Back to work. Next items on the list are the butt cap spurs and the trigger guard. I made a mold for the spurs and pumped the waxes.  They will get cast in silver in the next batch of castings.  Meanwhile I started in on making a pattern and first mold for the trigger guard finial.  As noted earlier, I will make the trigger guards in three pieces…the finial, the bow, and the tail and then silver braze them all together.  This first picture is a pattern made up of other items I have carved and cast for other projects and some pink dental plastic….

This next photo is the pattern with a silicone rubber preliminary mold…...

And here is the mold with the first poured wax pattern.  This pattern will be refined slightly in the wax, then cast in sterling for final refinements.  The final pattern will then be used to make a vulcanized rubber mold from which the patterns for the final trigger guard parts will be made.

I had a plank of very black, half inch thick Gaboon ebony so I decided to make the ramrods for these pistols out of that instead of “ebonizing” a hickory rod.  I cut two square pieces, rounded the ends in a metal lathe and then transferred the blanks to a wood lathe to get them down to about 3/8 inch in diameter.  From there I used a Tom Curan scraper to get the rods down to the correct size and tapered.  (God bless Tom for this great tool…I always think of him when I use it…..  )

Started in on some of the stock carving on these pistols.  I don’t want to go overboard but did want some embellishment around the lock panels and at the barrel breach tang.  This rosewood is both a delight and a nightmare to carve.  It is an exceptionally hard wood but it is also very particular as to grain orientation with respect to the direction of the cut.  As a consequence, even to do this minimal amount of carving, I have had to keep the tools as sharp as possible and cut in various directions even within a short linear distance.  A cut direction that works for a half inch or so often must be completely changed for the next half inch.  All this makes for a very slow carving process.  Not done but here is the progress thus far……

Copy and photography by David Crisalli.

Ax by Rich McDonald

 

Photography by Jan Riser.