Quote Originally Posted by Patrick Chadwick View Post
Oh I do! And spend hours presenting the results.


- Which would prove that it is NOT an 1854 model !
And an arsenal date marking would surely have been stamped, not chisel-cut?


Not at all. I am saying that the barrel on a 13.9mm calibre rifle would hardly have been thick enough at the muzzle end to ream it out for a 0.756" smoothbore. That is 19.2mm.

In the book "Militärgewehre und Pistolen der Deutschen Staaten 1800-1870" from P.255 on there is a complete chapter on the M1854 Lorenz rifles. PP256-258 show drawings of lock, backsight and barrel profile. All completely different to your example, and the barrel profile drawing indicates an external diameter at the muzzle end of 19.95mm. Say 20. Paper-thin if you bore that out to 19.2mm!
I suspect that if you measure the muzzle diameter of your gun it is considerably larger, more like 23.7mm. Say 23.5 to 24 = 0.92 to 0.94. Approx, of course. Please let me know.
A 13.9mm rifle with a muzzle diameter of that size would have been a real "bull barrel". For a target rifle - OK. For a military rifle - too heavy.

The trigger guard looks like the one from the M/54 Jaeger. But the Jaeger had a 71 cm barrel, octagonal, turned down to round for 11 cm from the muzzle, to take the bayonet. Your barrel is 32" long, therefore not a Jaeger barrel.
The full-length M/54 rifle barrel was 36 Viennese inches = 946 mm =37.24". That could have been cut down to 32", but then the foresight and bayonet boss would have been lost.


To make it look like a military rifle?

Finally, all Lorenz rifles had a proper nipple boss on the side. That nipple boss is home-made, and was never an arsenal product.

I could, of course, be wrong in all of this. It would be interesting to hear comments from someone else!
I am impressed, you certainly sound like you know your 19th century firearms. I measured the bore diameter again and it measures 19.19mm inside diameter, and 23.88 outside diameter. The thing that perplexes me the most, is that if the barrel was originally manufactured to be used on a fowling piece, why the bayonet lug and front and rear sights? I carved a rear sight out of a piece of steel, patterning it after several advertised Lorenz rear sights which were on Ebay. But was it normal for something to hunt ducks and geese to have a bayonet and sights?

As for calling it a "Lorenz", I'm only going by what little information I could glean of the internet. I found several similar to it which were referred to as a "Lorenz", or simply an "Austrian musket".