I’ve been building guns for (Gawd!) about 30 years now. I’ve done a couple modern guns, but mostly I build flinters. Started out with longrifles, sort of to carry on the tradition of my ancestors – the Pennsylvania Germans who built the original longrifles. My reason was that I was having a hard time enjoying killing deer and I thought that hunting with my own handmade flinter would bring back the thrill - it didn't. I discovered that a good flinter is every bit as effective and deadly in the field as any single-shot iron-sighted modern rifle.
I built a few on my own in the early 70’s – they were pretty awful, but I was able to sell them for enough money to buy parts (bbl, wood, brass, etc) to build the next one. In an effort to accelerate the learning process, I served as a unpaid “apprentice” to a professional flintlock gunmaker for a few weeks - took vacation, parked my camper in his driveway and worked for free in his shop (attached to his house) all day – everything from sweeping floors to learning the colors when making a spring. Things began to improve after that and I made a bunch of longrifles.
Eventually, I got to the point where I didn’t enjoy the grunt work of gunmaking – roughing out a stock, laying a swamped bbl into the wood, etc, and as much as I enjoyed the finish work (relief carving, chasing and engraving). So, I started studying and making the much more elaborate German Jaeger rifles. As you may know, one man pretty much built the early longrifles – doing everything from forging the bbl to the final carving and engraving. But, in Europe, there were guilds – one group did the lock, another the bbl, still another the engraving, etc – so the guns were much more sophisticated.
Anyway I build Jaeger rifles these days. Generally, I find an original that I like and try to reproduce it exactly (except for a longer LOP to fit modern humans).
It’s been a while since I finished a rifle, but here are some pics of my most recent rifle – it takes me several years to build one – I can’t stand TV, so work on them at odd times when I get the urge, like at night. This is an exact copy of a rifle made circa 1690 – a very early Germanic rifle. Interesting because it has the sort of fluting on the buttstock that one see in more southern European guns of the period, but has the classic Germanic architecture. Also very elaborate finishing. For example, if you look very closely at the sideplate, you can see a little guy in 17th Century dress with this very rifle slug over his shoulder. I have a LOT of hours into that sideplate.
Rifle with Hirschfanger (period hunting sword):
View of handmade, engraved lock – note large, rounded lockplate and unbridled frizzen – both features of very early flintlocks:
.62 caliber business end. The rifle shown here is the upper one – the lower one is a simple military Jaeger like the one carried by one of my ancestors, who was a "Hessian" rifleman (Jaeger) captured at Saratoga in ’77 and brought here as a POW.
View of chased trigger guard – note figure holding this rifle:
Poor view of buttstock carving – again this is the upper rifle – the lower one is a simple military rifle.
Sideplate:
Detail of sideplate:
Butt tang
Rear ramrod thimble:
Front trigger guard tang:
At one time, I did quite a bit of flintlock rifle, pistol and musket competition – traveled all over the place doing this. In recent years, I have the time and means to follow my true life long passion – my beloved pointing dogs and upland wingshooting, so I don’t do much flintlock shooting any more. The one exception is that I still do use a longrifle for our local PA Dutch live turkey shoots each Fall – partly to keep up the traditions of my ancestors and partly because they really are superb offhand iron-sight target rifles that can pick off a turkey’s head at 100 yards with no problem.
Once I built a cool 16 bore English officer’s fusil (think a miniature Brown Bess with some fancy refinements) to use for bird hunting, but I discovered that: (i) it was not really any different in performance than any other single shot 16 gauge; and (ii) it was an enormous amount of hassle to deal with while trying to work active dogs, etc. Gave that up.
Regards,
Greg
