In the past, I have written about how my interest in 17th and 18th century weapons began and how I started building rifles, locks, etc., as a high school kid in the late 1960’s. The first of my efforts as a teenager were not very good at all and here is an old post about my early attempts at gun building and lock making….
https://americanlongrifles.org/forum/index.php?topic=75781.msg752744#msg752744I graduated from high school in 1971 and during the next year had applied for entrance into the US Naval Academy. As time went on I found out that I had been nominated by Vice President Spiro Agnew to attend the Academy and then accepted for appointment. During that year between high school and the Academy, I attended the University of Southern California and had cleverly arranged all my classes on just three days a week. That left me two weekdays, and the weekend, to shoot the rifles I had built up to that point. I have never before or since had that much free time just to shoot.
But as soon as I had accepted my appointment to the Academy, I knew that time was very short to complete a couple of other guns I wanted to build….The Viet Nam War was still raging, I was committed to the Navy for almost the next decade at least…I assumed I would be sent to Nam after graduation…who knew where all this would go. So, in addition to the rifles documented in the old post above, I began gathering parts for another rifle and a pair of pistols that I wanted to build before the business of life and duty demanded my more concentrated attention.
The first order of business was to find suitable stock wood. My “go to” place for specialty hardwoods back then was M & M Hardwoods here in Southern California. I wandered in one day and came across a truly magnificent, and unusually large, plank of Brazilian Rosewood. Dark natural color, beautiful grain, very, very hard wood and, as it turned out, very hard on tools. I have made quite a few items out of the plank over the years but, back then, I had saved the largest piece for a planned half stock rifle. And long before I knew what I didn’t know, I band sawed out the shape of the rifle stock. I was intending to build a long, slender half stock rifle like the following, except with a flintlock rather than percussion. I am not particularly fond of half stocks or percussion guns, and I'm sure that this particular rifle was a rather mid range reproduction, but the shape and slender outline appealed to me back then for some reason.
While I was at it, I had always wanted a matched pair of flintlock pistols. The plank was more than large enough and, again with very little knowledge of what I was about, I cut out the stocks for two, long barreled pistols. I had intended to assemble locks for all three from the parts I had cast for the first rifles mentioned in the above old post since the commercially available locks in 1971 (the ones that I knew about, i.e. what I could find in a Dixie Gun Works catalog) did not appeal to me in the least.
So with the clock ticking toward my time to shove off for the Navy, I started in on the locks …and also decided to make up the barrels for the pistols. I purchased a .50 caliber, 15/16 inch straight octagonal Douglas barrel from Golden Age Arms and cut off two 13-inch-long pieces. A friend of mine in high school was the son of a machinist who had a shop not far from my childhood home. He had instructed me and let me use the lathes, mills, drill presses, and surface grinders through most of my high school years to build parts for the rockets I was launching in the Mojave Desert. It was in his shop that I turned the barrels round and swamped them for about two thirds of their length with a wedding band transition to the octagonal breech. I also drilled and tapped the breeches for plugs made up by welding a length of steel strap to a cut off bolt bottomed out in the breech thread per directions in R.H McCrory’s book. With the barrels made and the stocks cut from the plank of rosewood, I started in on hand inletting the barrels.
Needless to say, and as indicated by the title of this thread, “time, tide, and formation” wait for no man. I ran out of airspeed, altitude, and ideas before the clock ran out and I was off to Annapolis. For any of you who have had a similar military experience I don’t need to explain how all-consuming that kind of a life change becomes.
But, as it turned out, after the first 6 months in the Navy, I had settled in, gotten my bearings, and realized that, with a little planning, I might be able to continue work on the pistols at least. So I had my sisters gather up my list of tools, a clamp on vise, the barrels, the pistol stocks, and ship them to me in clandestine packages….Even though we were being trained “in the profession of arms”, building firearms in your room at the Academy was not exactly permitted by regulations.
As things would go, I didn’t really ever have the time to work on the pistols in earnest over the four years at the Academy, but having them there to pull out of hiding and work on for an hour or two whenever I had a moment of free time was a welcome distraction from the ever increasing intensity of my military training.
And then the four years of Naval Academy life was done. Graduation came on the 2nd of June, 1976….Donald Rumsfeld handed me my diploma and commission…the hats flew in the air…shipmates and longtime friends departed for places scattered all over the globe, and life took another drastic turn as I headed out to San Diego and assignment as a junior officer aboard a guided missile destroyer.
Sea duty left no room for anything resembling a hobby, so the pistols and the rifle stock went into storage for the next five years… then marriage, two children, a civilian job, 16 more years in the Naval Reserve assigned to ships…Life was a lot like being thrown into a Waring blender. Every once in a while, I would get smashed up against the glass and be able to catch a quick glimpse of the world outside my own…and then immediately I would be swept back into the maelstrom of everyday life where, like Brownian motion, things just seem to happen randomly and at very high speed. When I looked up again it was 1998 and more than 25 years had passed since I started work on the pistols. But by now I had started my own aerospace business and had rekindled my interest in building muzzleloading weapons. So, the pistols came out of the storage locker and sat on my workbench. By the early 2000’s I had learned enough about how these weapons should be that I no longer had the “confidence of ignorance” that I had once had. By 2008 I had found this ALR site and really came to understand how much I did not know. I didn’t want to ruin the pistols by charging ahead before I had learned more and before my skills had improved.
So I would do a bit here and a bit there that I was more sure of. I made vent liners out of beryllium copper.
So with the clock ticking toward my time to shove off for the Navy, I started in on the locks …and also decided to make up the barrels for the pistols. I purchased a .50 caliber, 15/16 inch straight octagonal Douglas barrel from Golden Age Arms and cut off two 13-inch-long pieces. A friend of mine in high school was the son of a machinist who had a shop not far from my childhood home. He had instructed me and let me use the lathes, mills, drill presses, and surface grinders through most of my high school years to build parts for the rockets I was launching in the Mojave Desert. It was in his shop that I turned the barrels round and swamped them for about two thirds of their length with a wedding band transition to the octagonal breech. I also drilled and tapped the breeches for plugs made up by welding a length of steel strap to a cut off bolt bottomed out in the breech thread per directions in R.H McCrory’s book. With the barrels made and the stocks cut from the plank of rosewood, I started in on hand inletting the barrels.
Needless to say, and as indicated by the title of this thread, “time, tide, and formation” wait for no man. I ran out of airspeed, altitude, and ideas before the clock ran out and I was off to Annapolis. For any of you who have had a similar military experience I don’t need to explain how all-consuming that kind of a life change becomes.
But, as it turned out, after the first 6 months in the Navy, I had settled in, gotten my bearings, and realized that, with a little planning, I might be able to continue work on the pistols at least. So I had my sisters gather up my list of tools, a clamp on vise, the barrels, the pistol stocks, and ship them to me in clandestine packages….Even though we were being trained “in the profession of arms”, building firearms in your room at the Academy was not exactly permitted by regulations.
As things would go, I didn’t really ever have the time to work on the pistols in earnest over the four years at the Academy, but having them there to pull out of hiding and work on for an hour or two whenever I had a moment of free time was a welcome distraction from the ever increasing intensity of my military training.
And then the four years of Naval Academy life was done. Graduation came on the 2nd of June, 1976….Donald Rumsfeld handed me my diploma and commission…the hats flew in the air…shipmates and longtime friends departed for places scattered all over the globe, and life took another drastic turn as I headed out to San Diego and assignment as a junior officer aboard a guided missile destroyer.
Sea duty left no room for anything resembling a hobby, so the pistols and the rifle stock went into storage for the next five years… then marriage, two children, a civilian job, 16 more years in the Naval Reserve assigned to ships…Life was a lot like being thrown into a Waring blender. Every once in a while, I would get smashed up against the glass and be able to catch a quick glimpse of the world outside my own…and then immediately I would be swept back into the maelstrom of everyday life where, like Brownian motion, things just seem to happen randomly and at very high speed. When I looked up again it was 1998 and more than 25 years had passed since I started work on the pistols. But by now I had started my own aerospace business and had rekindled my interest in building muzzleloading weapons. So, the pistols came out of the storage locker and sat on my workbench. By the early 2000’s I had learned enough about how these weapons should be that I no longer had the “confidence of ignorance” that I had once had. By 2008 I had found this ALR site and really came to understand how much I did not know. I didn’t want to ruin the pistols by charging ahead before I had learned more and before my skills had improved.
So I would do a bit here and a bit there that I was more sure of. I made vent liners out of beryllium copper.
I replaced the home made locks with round faced small Queen Ann locks that I had used before and thought the style more appropriate.
Original:
Original cut from mold:
Pumped wax:
So now, all these years later, I know that time is running even more quickly on the downhill side. Come $#*! or high water, the time to finish the pistols is now. More as soon as I can gather the pictures and carry on with this 50 plus year project. Wish me luck…..
Copy and photography by David Crisalli.
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