The Scottish Pistol Project: Part V – Engraving the Stock.

The Scottish Pistol Project continues!

Our research project to make a pistol in the style of the 1740 Pitcarn Pistol has continued through the summer of 2010. During the first year of summer Saturdays the team rediscovered how to make the hollow steel stock. The second year they forged, welded, and reamed the barrel. The third year they made the intricate parts of the lock mechanism. Finally, in the fourth summer of the project, they have been fitting, assembling, and engraving the components. Here are two pistols that have been filed smooth and white but are not yet engraved.

They are still a work in progress. The engraving is done by hand in the blacksmith shop using a chasing hammer to strike a tiny chisel called an engraving chisel. Here is the engraving on one side of the pistol.

Here is the detail of the engraving on the rams-horn butt of the the pistol grip.  This work is exacting and slow.

This shows the engraving down the spine of the pistol grip.  The piece is continuously curving which makes the engraving very difficult.  As the angle of the metal changes, the angle of the engraving chisel must also continuously change.

The work on the pistol is continuing on Saturdays through the end of October 2010.  If you visit The Farmers' Museum, come to the Blacksmith shop and see the techniques used in this project!

Cleaning in the Blacksmith Shop

It was busy summer full of projects and visitors at Field's Blacksmith Shop. Now that fall is here, it is time to tackle the dirt and clutter that accumulated in the corners and the windowsills. A shop using coal forges has a lot of dust and grit. On most days our doors are wide open for the public to visit as well . That contributes to grit and leaves blowing into corners of the shop. It take some work to get it all cleaned out!

Our museum's maintenance department is very thorough at keeping our shop looking good. Over years of work, many parts of projects, scrap iron, and display pieces had accumulated on the flat surfaces in the shop. Recently, we sorted and stored several hundred pounds of tools, scraps, and half-completed projects that were cluttering the windowsills and corners. That provided room for the cleaners to get to our beautiful windows. Coal smoke and dust had given them a frosted glaze. The Maintenance crew gave the windows a thorough cleaning. The result was a startling improvement! I hadn’t realized the windows were that dirty.

A youth volunteer spent the morning of one day sorting and sizing the nails we made this summer. He neatly stacked them in the appropriate bin. Now we are ready to provide nails for internal building restoration projects and repairs.

The fall cleaning improved the working conditions in the Field's Blacksmith shop.  Light is always at a premium in a historic shop.  Now we have more elbow room and more light with which to see details of our work.

Fall is in the air at The Farmers' Museum.

The summer of 2010 set a lot of heat records here in Cooperstown. July equaled past August records for the number of very hot days, and then August was even hotter. But now in the wake of Hurricane Earl a Canadian cold front has swept through town. The high temperature dropped from 97 to 67 in one day!  Our staff are busy with all of the chores that need to be done before Fall fully arrives.

The end of summer tends to be right around Labor Day in this part of New York. The trees are turning to fall colors. Sunrise is coming late, and the shadows are still long as I roam the Museum grounds in the morning.

The hay and corn are turning from green to rich brown and grays as they dry in the fields. Our oxen have been putting on their winter coats even though the days were in the 90s! Autumn is coming regardless of the weather today.

Scottish Pistol Part IV: Lock Mechanism.

The summer of 2009 was the 3rd year of our Scottish Pistol Masterpiece Project. The 4 smiths working on the project had completed a barrel the previous summer, with the finish work occurring over the winter. Now it was time to make the flintlock mechanism for the pistol.

The lock mechanism is both complex and finely fitted. Every part was forged from wrought iron bar or steel. For this style of pistol, the lock plate has a standard shape, but not a set size. The forged and filed lock plate is fitted precisely to the forged and filed stock.  The internal parts of the mechanism are forged from iron bar and then filed to shape as well.  Here are rough forgings for the springs.

The end result needs to fit so precisely that engraving can flow over the stock and right onto the lock plate as if it were only one piece of metal.  The pivot points were located and drilled. Then work began on making all of the parts.  Illustrations of how a flint lock mechanism works can be seen at here.

On the outside of the lock mechanism are the hammer, the pan, the frizzen, and the frizzen spring.

Another array of parts are located on the inside of the lock plate and are responsible for making the hammer fall when the trigger is pulled. The sear and sear spring connect the trigger to the hammer mechanism. The sear’s job is to prevent the hammer from being actuated until the trigger has been pulled. Once the sear is tripped, the mainspring throws the hammer and flint forward into the frizzen, and hopefully creates sparks that fire the powder in the pan and the main charge in the pistol.

Each of these parts has been forged from wrought iron or steel. The rough forging is shaped to the final size in a long, slow, painstaking process using files. Sometimes it isn’t clear how to best forge the piece. In that case several methods and multiple blanks are forged until one is close enough to create the final part.

Creating the lock for the pistol is a very challenging project. The shape of each part and the location of each mounting hole and each screw effects every other part. Changing the shape of a sear, hammer, or spring by 1/32th of an inch can make the difference between a pistol that fires and one that doesn’t.  The Scottish Pistol Project has been an exciting chance to research and build a lock using the same materials and tools as  the Gunsmiths in Doane, Scotland in 1740.

Traditional Hinges on Doors and Gates

The repair and replacement of historic hardware is a steady part of our job at the Peleg Field Blacksmith Shop. When a garden gate needs new pintles to hold the hinges, or a barn hinge needs repair, we do what is needed. Here is a pictorial tour of some of the many kinds of hinges at The Farmers’ Museum.

Dimmick House gate with beveled barrel, self-closing pintle hinges.

The solid and workmanlike hinges on the Field Blacksmith Shop door.

Dr. Thrall’s Pharmacy Garden gate with a graceful pintle and gudgeon:

The Lippitt Farm Smokehouse door.

And the 4-hinge split door to the sheep pen in the Brooks Barn, with sheep!

As you can see, traditional hardware is alive and well at The Farmers’ Museum.  It is not complicated to make, is easily maintained, and lasts for centuries. If the hardware on your garden gate should fail, don’t come unhinged! Fire up a forge and make some traditional pintles and gudgeons.

Scottish Pistol -Part III - Welding the barrel.

Our Masterpiece Project from 2007 to the present (2010) is a long-term research project to rediscover the methods used to build an all iron and steel Scottish Pistol. The previous articles of the Scottish Pistol Project discussed the history of the Pitcarn Pistol, it’s role in our Revolutionary War, and the first challenges of making our pistol.

After completing the stock, the next challenge was to forge-weld a barrel for the pistol from wrought iron. The raw material was real wrought iron reclaimed from an old ox cart wheel's tire. Wrought iron forge-welds well at a high temperature, and is somewhat self-fluxing.  The iron is taken to a high welding heat in the coal forge, fluxed, and then forge welded into a tube using the anvil and a swedge block.  The logitudinal bending is started in a swage block or between the face and step of the anvil.  About one hammer width is rolled at a time, trued up, and forge welded.

The wrought iron is welded into a tube with a small pilot hole down the center.  After welding, a pass in the swage block helps to create a smooth, cylindrical barrel.

The next step is to turn the now round bar into a barrel. These pistols were smoothbore, so we don’t need to worry about rifling. The small pilot hole must be enlarged to make a finished bore. Our only “power tool” is a foot-treadle lathe. It isn’t able to generate the horsepower to drill out a .52 caliber bore. Instead we remove a small amount of metal at a time using reamers.

A succession of 6 or more reamers are used in the foot treadle lathe to turn the initial welded pilot hole into a round and true bore.  This takes up to 45 minutes per pass and up to two days for the whole process.  At the conclusion of the process the barrel has progressed from an irregular .30 caliber bore to reach our target bore diameter. 

If there is no visible weld seam, the barrel may pass.  A visible seam at this stage will condemn a barrel to display status.  Here is one that failed inspection.  Note the spiral line.  That is not rifling, but rather is a flaw in the wrought iron.  This barrel had internal flaws and slag inclusion in the iron.  The only thing to do is to start over with another piece of iron and forge another barrel.

Here is the interior view of a barrel that passes inspection.  Hurray!

Once a barrel has the desired interior bore, the work commences on the exterior!  These pistol barrels are highly ornate.  They are turned on the lathe to true the interior to the exterior.  Then the round rings or “wedding bands” are turned.  Much of the rest of the fluting, carving, and design is done with files and engraving chisels.  It can take several days to complete the exterior of the barrel.

 

The next step is to carefully make the breech plug and to file the barrel to precisely fit into the forged stock.  That has been done on the barrel above.  Our next article on this project will discuss making the lock mechanism that will fire the pistol.

Scottish Pistol Project - Part II

Field's Blacksmith shop is in the last quarter of a project to reproduce a traditional Scottish Pistol.  You can read about the start of this project here.  The task of the first summer of the project was to rediscover how the stock of the pistol was created.  Hollow, and made of one piece of sheet iron, the secret of how the apprentices and master gunsmiths of Doanne, Scotland constructed this pistol, remains a secret.  The Smiths leading the project researched and developed a pattern for the stock.  It took a lot of trials and adjustments. 

Here is an image of the pattern for the stock:

The stock, or frame, of this style of pistol is forged from one piece of flat steel. There is no wood in the pistol. This form of pistol frame involves bending, folding, and stretching a flat piece of steel to create a hollow 3-dimensional frame. The secret method of making this part would have been passed from master gunsmith to apprentice in the gunsmithing community of Doane, Scotland. Their method does not seem to have been leaked or written down, so we had to rediscover it by trial and error. This took a year of Saturdays and involved making over a dozen tools that would be needed to re-create the frame. The pattern was adjusted again and again until it yielded success.

This was particularly difficult due to the need to create both the pattern and the tools needed to shape this complex piece.

The next step is to file the stock smooth and begin the engraving.  The engraving is laid out with a pencil or a scribe, and then is engraved into the steel. It is a precise job that requires patience and skill.  It will take most of the Saturdays of 2010 to finish the engraving and the final fitting of the pistol.

This has been a long term project. We only work on it in the shop on Saturdays during the summer. We are now entering our 4th, and hopefully final, summer. The pistol frame is fully formed, filed, and is slowly being engraved. If you visit this on a Saturday this summer (2010) you will see the smiths at work finishing the engraving and final fitting for our Scottish Pistol Project!