Sometimes you need a challenge...

[Patrick Chadwick]

... and I reckon this will do.

Attachment 54212

Attachment 54211

Is this what dealers mean by "patina"?

Attachment 54210

There should be grooves in there somewhere...

Attachment 54213

... excavations are in progress.

Congratulations to anyone who can identify the type. Tip: don't look at the butt, that is a repair and thus misleading!

More of a case for the archaeologists than a shootable rifle? Just you wait!

More to come!

Information

Warning: This is a relatively older thread This discussion is older than 360 days. Some information contained in it may no longer be current.

[gew8805]

Patrick, going by the shape of the lock, eit could be a Swiss Infanteriegewehr Modell 1842. Hard to tell for certain with the pictures not being the best - no offense. The lock is at least similar to the Swiss M'42. If that is what it is, don't bother looking for rifling, it's not there, it should be a smooth bore. Interesting, most Swiss muskets are in higher grades of condition. Good luck on the work, whatever it turns out to be.

[Peter Laidler]

There is something good about seeing a rifle - or anything similar - left in that condition, but stabilised of course. Saw an old 1940 US Lend Lease farm tractor found on an isolated farm. Now running but pretty much left as it was when it was found. Says more about the thing I feel! And he says that it didn't take much to get it running either!

[Patrick Chadwick]

Attachment 54292Attachment 54291....At both ends Made visible after a strenuous weekend.

In fact, as the lead plug shows, the rifling is very strong, and this will be a shooter. A touch of honing may well be in order first.

Attachment 54290


Not an easy one to recognize, but this is a Hannover "Pickelgewehr" - a pillar breech rifle. And thus rather a rare beast. It is NOT a converted or upgraded musket, although the meter-long (40 inch) barrel could make one think so. Made by Spangenberg, Sauer & Sturm in Suhl, probably early in 1858.

When Hannover decided in 1858 to equip the entire army with these rifles, it was clear that the original makers, Crause in Herzberg, could not cope with the production numbers. So a contract was also placed with Sp.Sr&St. Sauer introduced cast steel barrels, but this rifle has an attractive Damascus barrel.

Attachment 54289

Many parts are stamped with an "S" and number 18. My guess is that this may have been a very early "Suhler", number 18 of their batch, and fitted with a Damascus barrel provided by Herzberg. The witness marks on barrel and breech plug (definitely Suhl) match perfectly, with no sign of other marks that would indicate that it had been rebarreled.

More to come as work progresses!

[gew8805]

Excellent Patrick, it certainly had me stumped, a nice find. The bore is quite good. I agree with Peter BTW.

[Patrick Chadwick]

It's going to be a long job. Bubba fudged on an incorrect French-style butt and hammer. Fortunately, the essence of the rifle (barrel and lock), and the stock from the neck forwards, are in good usable internal condition - for its age! Externally a wallhanger, of course, but it was sold as such and I knew what I was getting.

[Patrick Chadwick]

... because if I mess up this one, I'll never find another.

After the first strenuous cleaning, the bore looked like this:

Attachment 55156

- clean, but with damascus ripples in the lands and some roughness in the grooves.

It now looks like this:

Attachment 55155

- almost mirror-bright lands, cleaner grooves.

Intrepid restorers may like to know how I did this.

Enfield fans will have heard of "ball-burnished" barrels. Well, this is now a "brass-burnished" barrel.

Attachment 55154

I turned up a hard brass plug-gauge (actually, I think it must be a kind of bronze, as the swarf comes off as fine chips, rather like turning iron castings) with a body diameter about 2/1000" larger than the bore diameter given by the previous lead-slug measurement. But left a 1/16" wide "driving band" of about 1/1000" over the (lead-slug) groove diameter in the middle. Going by the old engineer's motto - you can shave it off if it's too large, but it's difficult to shave it back on again if it's too small!

I then very slowly and very carefully turned down the body until the brass slug started to enter the muzzle and breech end of the barrel. I had anticipated the muzzle being slightly worn, but in the end it turned out to be very close - less than 1/1000" above the breech end - almost up to the muzzle. After that, I worked from the breech end only. One really does need good equipment for this, in particular a lathe and chuck that will allow you to remove, test, re-chuck and turn down the slug with a tolerance of about 1-2/10000". Having a bench micrometer helps as well!

Note that the slug has been threaded at both ends, and 8mm machine bolts have been screwed in to transfer the driving force to the body of the slug, without upsetting the ends of the brass. IF YOU DO NOT TAKE THIS PRECAUTION YOU MAY FUBAR YOUR BARREL, BECAUSE IF THE SLUG JAMS AND YOU TRY TO DRIVE IT OUT, THE ENDS WILL UPSET AND JAM THE SLUG EVEN TIGHTER

You have been warned.

The barrel must be held by the breech end, vertically, with the main length hanging free. Drive the slug from the breech end, by "bouncing" a length of brass rod onto the buffer bolt. Do NOT stand the barrel on the muzzle end on the floor and whack in the slug with a hammer, as this will ruin your barrel by distorting the muzzle end.
If you feel that a really tight jam is imminent, drive out the plug from the other end - which is why there are 2 buffer bolts - and shave off a tenth of a thousandth of an inch or so. Repeat until you are confident that you can drive the slug right through.

Attachment 55153

The dimensions really are sensitive, and the procedure takes quite some time. For instance: 0.6426" was a clear "No Go". 0.6424" was the start of what would have been a force fit, so I kept on shaving, and finally drove through the slug with a diameter of 0.6415". The rubbing marks can be seen in the photos, and the "true" bore would seem to be about 0.6414".

Attachment 55161

The final photo shows the driven slug sitting in the muzzle. The bore is perfectly* parallel up to about 3/4" from the muzzle, with a very slight widening of about 0.001" to give 0.6424" (see above) close up to the muzzle. The last 5mm will be cleaned up by recrowning. I am impressed by the quality of this damascus barrel, which is now 156 years old!

Now, of course, the crown will have to be cleaned up!

More soon!

-----------
*0.0001" for a muzzle-loading barrel is surely ""perfect" enough?

[Patrick Chadwick]

Well, it's been a year... and if the inline insertion function would only work as for numerous previous posts, then I could show you what has happened!


MONITORS: SOMETHING HAS CHANGED WITH THE SOFTWARE. I have tried the Compatibility view and it is worse. (The Option bars partially disappear)


Quick rant: I HATE SOFTWARE CHANGES. All too often they seem to be a case of pulling up the roots to see how the plants are growing.


Can anyone help? Pleeease?

[Patrick Chadwick]

OK another try!

[Patrick Chadwick]

(A fresh attempt)

Well, I see that it’s been a year** since I invited you all to watch this space for progress on the M1854 Hanoverian pillar-breech rifle. Initial trials with .58” round balls and doubled-up patches showed that it could be fired – and even hit the target. OK, it was only 25 meters, for which one doesn’t really need a rifle to chuck a bit of lead. I already posted the photo of the improved bore. Of course, the muzzle had to be cleaned up as well.



The trouble was – who makes a .64” Minie mold? Nobody, that’s who, and I was dreading the cost of a custom mold, which would have been a very expensive bit of experimentation.

Still, if you wait long enough…something will turn up. And it did, in the form of a (nominal) 16.3 mm / 0.642” second-hand mold for the bullet for a Dreyse needle-fire rifle. This was effectively brand-new, and was rapidly used to cast a few bullets for testing. As cast, these had a diameter of 0.646”. They were calibrated down to a pragmatic value of about 0.642”, the pragmatic factor being a 24-cal shotgun die that happened to be available. The calibrated bullets were a firm push-fit in the barrel.

Now the Dreyse bullet in this modern form (without the paper sabot used by the original bullets) weighs about 440 grains and has a recess in the base to take a winged percussion cap. The resulting “skirt” is far too thick to permit proper Minie-style obturation, as was shown by the test target.

The bullets tipped alarmingly.




In fact, at top right you can see what one might describe as “the perfect keyhole shot”.



The bullet in the photograph was actually recovered from the backstop. There was some snow on the ground, and a friend who had braved the cold with me spotted a 2-yard groove on the snow, at the end of which we found the bullet snug up against the wooden base of the backstop.

As you can see, the bullet did not take the rifling at all. And it was travelling so slowly that it was not deformed by skidding along the snow-covered grass and hitting the backstop. Knowing the distance and the drop, it was simple to estimate that it must have had a muzzle velocity of about 70 meters/sec. Beat that, you 22-250 shooters! Seriously, a good baseball or cricket player can probably throw a 440 grain lump of lead just as fast.

So, back to the drawing board, or rather the lathe. A new base plug was turned up for the Dreyse mold, in the style of the deep-base P1853 Enfield molds from Lyman, Parker-Hale and others. This produced a bullet with a weight of about 490 grains.



Back to the range again - and disappointment.



The calibrated bullets (K1 - K3) were still tipping, although the “grouping” was a touch better than for the first test. Slightly irritated, I took some uncalibrated bullets (the other 4) and thumped them down the muzzle – and the shots improved! By no means perfect, but visibly better.

Although the skirt was thin enough – in fact, maybe a bit too thin, with the likelihood of “blowing the skirt” at the muzzle end - the powder charge was not enough to expand the base sufficiently. So a few grains more of the Swiss No. 3 (FFg), perhaps? But whacking up the charge to Martini-Henry levels was not an option with a 160-year old Damascus barrel. Or the bullet needed to be a bit heavier, to provide more inertia? Or both?

Yes, back to the lathe again, turning about 1/16 off the base of the mold plug, making the bullet that much longer. This now resulted in a 520 grain bullet, near enough to the weight of the original service bullet.

Once more unto the range, dear friends, once more; to fill the backstop up with our English lead … (apologies to Shakespeare and Henry V)



Finally, success!

63 grains of Swiss No. 3 (the service charge was 62 grains, but what kind of powder?) and the 520 grain (= service weight) bullet produce clean-cut holes in the black. With optimistic eyes one can almost see the 7-sided profile. At least the keyholing is eliminated, so that it would now be possible to try 50-meter shooting without unnecessarily hazarding the target frame. But for that, the rifle must be fitted with an adjustable backsight – which will be another story.

BTW, unless someone out there knows otherwise and is keeping very quiet about it, this is the only example of this rifle that has been used for shooting in recent times, maybe since the 19th century. The imprecise indications of the caliber in the literature, made from muzzle measurements on more-or-less worn museum specimens, suggest that no-one before yours truly has actually taken the trouble (or risk) to dismantle one of these rifles - which does not surprise me greatly, in the case of real museum specimens – or even to measure the bore with a plug gauge - which does surprise me, as it would not in any way harm the originals.

More to come, hopefully in less than a year’s time!


** Sorry, too pessimistic! - Only half a year!