Patrick,
I’ve been having a terrible time with the white balance on my daughter’s camera.
I tried to take assembled rifle pictures over a white background and using bright lights but the pictures came out terrible. I had to make major white balance changes using an editor and they still looked bad to my eye. I just couldn’t get them right.
The coffee table pictures were a last ditch, after midnight attempt to get some pictures up that night after the first try failed.
Taking good looking pictures is important to me and I will need to work on that.
I do have a good friend that is very camera savvy. He will be coming home from college over the Christmas holiday and will help me get some better pictures up. After many good years of service, my old camera that I was so used to finally died this year. I try to make due with my Daughters “cheapy” but my friend’s is far better than both of ours put together.

Quote Originally Posted by Patrick Chadwick View Post
Your eyes fool you in such matters. You can see it in the way the surface of the rifle appears slightly different according to whether you place it on the highly reflective brown table top, or on matt white paper. You think it looks the same in both cases, but the camera shows up the difference.
The camera really does see more than the eye. I often go back through the pictures to pick up fine details that my tired eyes miss. One of the reasons that I take so many pictures is because I have such a lousy memory and it helps to have a well documented history of where I’ve been.


Quote Originally Posted by Patrick Chadwick View Post
Go very, very carefully!
You can bet that I’ll be VERY careful with any dye near that stock. I will probably swipe one of my wife’s very fine art brushes and snip most of the hairs out of it. All of that will have to wait till though till I purchase the dye. The dye that Claven2 recommends is sold locally (about 25 miles north of me) but the store is in downtown Portland. I DON’T DRIVE DOWNTOWN!!! There is no intelligent life in downtown Portland. I would rather drive crooked blunt sticks into my eyes than drive downtown. I’m most certain that would be less painful. Sorry about the rant but I just won’t do traffic jams, parking meters or mass transit. Fortunately for me, for a few bucks more I can just mail order it ($10 US delivered from a few states over) and avoid all of the insanity.

The Leather Guy leather hides supplies - Product Info



Will my .45cal lead bullets work ok instead of round ball? Obviously the round ball would be easier to drive through but it comes down to being what I have on hand.



The brass rod will also need to be ordered. Everything on this side of the pond is cut to 1 yard (3 feet). 1 meter sure would be nice considering that the barrel is 34” long.

I found some Jamison .43 Spanish brass but will hold off until I have confirmed the chamber dimensions.

.43 Spanish

I’m too cheap to buy Cerro-safe and am working on a home brew solution using sulfur and graphite to cast the chamber with.

Mix 4 parts Sulfur with 1 part graphite




I couldn’t find a local cheap source for graphite so I crushed up a bunch of pencils and ground them into a fine powder using a coffee grinder.










My only obstacle now is coming up with a safe way to melt the sulfur in the house without putting my Wife into orbit. This stuff stinks BAAAD!!!, especially if it scorches or even worse yet if it spills on the burner and catches fire! I could set up a camp stove outside but that uses an open flame. Not safe with sulur in my opinion.

If I make any meaningful progress, pictures will follow.

Joel.