I ordered an East India Company Pattern F musket in .75 smoothbore from IMA a ways back and it arrived through customs last week. These are percussion muskets that came after the Brown Bess but before the P1853 rifle.

Typically, these are supposed to be in better shape than many of the Nepal cache guns IMA has been offering and they do come partially cleaned in that they appear to have been given an external wash-down of some sort, but they are not diassembled, de-gunked, and re-assembled like some of their offerings either. I guess I'll refer to them as "semi-cleaned" lol.

The East India Company didn't really have a military presence in Nepal, so it's assumed these muskets were captured from Sepoy rebels by the Gurkha contingent fighting with the EIC and Britishicon forces during the Sepoy Rebellion. Evidently IMA does not have thousands of these, perhaps not even hundreds, so if you've ever wanted one now is a good time to buy while they are still available.

This is how the gun arrived. It's going to clean up well but will need some stock patching. I couldn't resist ordering another inexpensive Gahendra at the same time as they were on sale. The EIC musket is the one on the bottom.



The gun isn't without a few warts, but I think they are all fixable.

Here's the lock. The wood at the front tip iss totally punky and is crumbling to nothing so I will have to inlet a patch there and re-shape that area. This is before touching it, the damage is much more than shown before I can get to sound wood. It should be patchable.


No idea who the lockmaker is, and so far I've only taken off the mainspring, but these are the markings I saw so far:


The barrel has a fair bit of corrosion here and there and some dings at the muzzle that should file out. These are the worst spots of corrosion and note that one of the staples for the keys was broken. I don't think either of these corrosion areas will make it un-shootable. Also, from what I have seen of other guns from the same batch, most have less under-stock corrosion than this one does.



I repaired the staple already by brazing it closed, am now in the process of re-browning it. I used silver braze instead of brass simply because I had some on-hand.


Markings at the breech plug:

Under the barrel:


This assembly mark (IIII) matches the trigger parts, the keys, trigger guard and some other bits:

The above mark was struck out and this new mark placed next to it which matches the stock's barrel inlet.


Presumably the barrel contractor is Henry Clive:


Here is a period crack along the barrel line crudely fixed with an iron nail. I will be repairing this.


And this was the worst spot of pitting noted above, note that the rust crusties must, at some time in the past, have caused part of the stock to break out. This will get patched.


There is also some bad cracking in the lock inlet which will need to be epoxied shut.

The nipple was badly frozen in place. I had to heat it to get it removed after 12 hours of soaking in liquid wrench did nothing. It's intact, thought the corners got a bit rounded. I have a modern spare replacement that is slightly taller, but if the hammer still lines up, I'll use the new one for actual shooting.

Bore is still coated in yak fat/dried cosmolene - so I can't report on that yet.

I did get the bottom metal out as the trigger was pretty rusted and needed cleaning, this was making it too slugish to use reliably.

The wood must have had a lot of tanin in it as the trigger guard screws were almost totally dissolved and will need replacing.
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