poor boy

[mario]

Just found this:

http://www.sittingfoxmuzzleloaders.com/ ... y%2032.htm

Might be worth a look.

Mario

[wadedog]

Thanks TomG, I love the idea of watching you on here and following along with the pics and help from this site.

[TomG]

Your welcome Wadedog.
We can all learn together.
Like I said earlier, Im no gun builder, but with the talented members on this forum we can all do this together.
Ill post pics every day and will do as the gunmakers instruct me.
Ill log my time spent on the project, tools I used and will take pics from every angle.

[wadedog]

Thanks Wyosmith, I guess really a southern rifle is what I want.

But like whats been posted here about brass and iron got me to thinking ,how common would a rifle then have iron if it would have been more expensive than brass ?

[Captchee]

as i understand it  concerning iron .
 Some of the worlds largest iron deposits were here in the colonies  and it was as I understand it was mined  extensively. However the Crown place a  requirement and tariff on the iron so that   the pig  iron had to be shipped to England , it would ten be shipped back at a higher cost .
  I read one time that  crown put stipulations on  products made from iron here in the colonies as well as the sale of that iron to other countries other then England .
 And that no manufacturing  or  equipment that could be used in the manufacturing of  to include gun parts  would be aloud
Maybe Rich or one of the others could chime in on this with more specifics  on this but I think it was part of the navigation and Corn laws  of the early to mid 1700’s.

if one does a google search  for " iron laws in the colonies"
 you will find some  reall good information  concerning this . i wish i knew how to cut and past  from an online book but i cant seem to figure it out .
 but if you do the search above you will  come up with  alot of information .
 the first Five book links have some very good discriptions of the laws  but i cant seem to past them here ,
specificly read the first one titled
The History of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations  page 698
 but here are a couple refrances that i could

The successful voyages of these vessels from Massachusetts were regarded with joy, as the harbingers of a flourishing American commerce; and the New England people, especially, looked forward with expectations of much wealth to be derived from the ocean, for they were then quite extensively engaged in fishing. But a navigation act passed by the republican parliament in 1651 gave them warning of English jealousy and its restoration, with more stringent clauses, by the royal parliament in 1660, satisfied the colonists that their commerce was doomed, because it seemed to be regarded as a promising rival of that of Great Britain. After that the attention of parliament was called from time to time to the industries of the American colonies, and laws were made to regulate them. In 1719, the House of Commons declared that erecting any manufactories in the colonies tended to lessen their dependence on Great Britain, and they were discouraged. A little earlier a British author had written "There be fine iron works which cast no guns no house in New England has above twenty rooms; not twenty in Boston have ten rooms each; a dancing-school was set up here but put down; a fencing-school is allowed. There be no musicians by trade. All cordage, sail-cloth and mats, come from England; no cloth made there worth four shillings per yard; no alum, no salt made by their sun."

Later, woolen-goods, paper and hemp were manufactured in New England, and almost every family made coarse cloth for domestic use. A heavy duty had been laid on pig-iron sent from the colonies to England, and the Americans made successful attempts to manufacture it into bars for native blacksmiths, and to make steel. Hats, also, were manufactured and sold in different colonies and small brigantines (square-rigged, two-masted vessels) were built in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, and exchanged with West India merchants for rum, sugar, wines, and silks. Again the jealousy of the British government was awakened, and greater restrictions upon colonial manufactures were imposed, they being foolishly considered as detrimental to the interests of the English at home. It was ordained by a law that all manufacturers of iron and steel in the colonies should be considered a nuisance to be abated within thirty days after notice being given, under a penalty of one thousand dollars. A law was enacted in 1750 which "prohibited the erection or continuance of any mill or other engine for slitting or rolling-iron, or any plating-forge to work with a tilt-hammer, or any furnace for making steel in the colonies." The exportations of hats from one colony to another was prohibited; and no hatter was allowed to have more than two apprentices at one time. The importation of sugar, molasses and rum was burdened with exorbitant duties; and the Carolinians were actually forbidden to cut down a tree in their vast pine forests for the purpose of converting its wood into staves, or its juices into turpentine. The raising of sheep in the colonies was restrained, because wool was then the great staple of England. The interests of the landed aristocracy were consulted more than justice. In the preamble to a restraining act, it was avowed that the motive for its enactment was a conviction that "colonial industry would inevitably sink the value of lands in England." And so, for about a hundred years, the British government had attempted, by restrictive laws, to confine the commerce of the colonies to the interchange of their agricultural products for English manufactures only. The trade of the colonies was certainly worth preserving, for the exports from Great Britain to them averaged, in value, at that period, about three-and-a-quarter million dollars annually. But the unrighteous measures adopted to secure that trade produced (as unrighteousness generally does in the end) a great loss. These acts of oppression constituted the chief item in the bill of particulars presented by the Americans in the account with Great Britain when, on the fourth of July, 1776, they gave to the world their reasons for declaring themselves "free and independent" of the British crown.

1750 - The Iron Act is passed by the English Parliament, limiting the growth of the iron industry in the American colonies to protect the English Iron industry.

.

[Captchee]

1750 - The Iron Act

In American Colonial history, the Iron Act, strictly Importation, etc. Act 1750 (Statute 23 Geo. II c. 23) was one of the legislative measures introduced by the British Parliament, seeking to restrict manufacturing activities in British colonies, particularly in north America, and encourage manufacture to take place in Great Britain
The Act contained several provisions, applying from 24 June 1750:

Duty on the import of pig iron from America should cease.
Duty on bar iron imported to London should cease.
Such bar iron might be carried coastwise or by land from there to Naval dockyards, but otherwise not beyond 10 miles from London.
The iron must be marked with its place of origin.
No mill or engine for slitting or rolling iron or any plating forge to work with a tilt hammer or any furnace for making steel should be erected in America.
Colonial governors were required to certify what mills of these types already existed
Pig iron had been exported from Virginia and Maryland since the 1720s, but little came from other colonies, nor did bar iron. The continuance of this was encouraged, as was the production and export of bar iron (which required a finery forge using a helve hammer not a trip hammer. At this time America was probably the third largest iron-exporting country in the world (after Sweden and Russia), and this was intended to continue and even increase.

Conversely, the Act was designed to restrict the colonial manufacture of finished iron products. Existing works could continue in operation, but no expansion would be possible in the output of:

knives, scythes, sickles and other edged tools as a tilt hammer would be needed to produce thin iron, and a steel furnace to make steel.
nails were made from rod iron, from a slitting mill.
Tinplate, which required a rolling mill. This was the raw material from which tinsmiths made a wide variety of goods from tinned sheet iron.
This was a continuation of a long term British policy, beginning with the British Navigation Acts, which were designed to direct most American trade to England (from 1707, Great Britain), and to encourage the manufacture of goods for export to the colonies in Britain.

The Iron Act, if enforced, would have severely limited the emerging iron manufacturing industry in the colonies. However, as with other trade legislation, enforcement was poor because no one had any significant incentive to ensure compliance. Nevertheless, this was one of a number of measures restrictive on the trade of British Colonies in North America that were one of the causes of the American Revolution.

[Captchee]

here is some other information on the Cornwall Iron Furnace

Cornwall Iron Furnace was one of many ironworks constructed in Pennsylvania during a sixty-year period, form 1716-1776. At least twenty-one blast furnaces, forty-five forges, four bloomeries, six steel furnaces, three slitting mills, two plate mills, and one wire mill operated in the colony. The production of these mills and steel furnaces, irked English iron- and steelmakers because the colonial American iron industry accounted for about one-seventh of the world's output of pig iron, wrought iron, and castings. By the early eighteenth century, England's metal industry depended largely on bar and pig iron from Sweden, mostly because English forests had been depleted by decades of charcoal production. When dependence of the Swedish became burdensome, Parliament passed the Iron Act of 1750 to encourage importation into England of colonial pig iron and unfinished bar iron. The act also forbade the establishment any new colonial sitting mills, plate mills, or steel producing furnaces. Shipment of pig and bar iron across the Atlantic increased and, in fact, restrictions on the advanced iron products made in America were largely ignored, so that the Iron Act was only a minor factor among discontented colonists by the time of the American Revolution.

A sizeable labor force was required to keep the iron plantation running smoothly. Thirty to sixty people worked twelve-hour shifts at the furnace. In addition, the iron works employed a company clerk, teamsters, woodcutters, colliers (charcoal-makers), farmers, and household servants. "From most account, the workers were well-treated," says Strattan. "However, there was a huge gap between the workers and the owners." At the opposite end of the social and economic spectrum from the laborers was the owner, or ironmaster, ruler of a self-contained head of a community not unlike an Old World feudal barony. He and his family inhabited a mansion of vast acreage, and styled their way of life much like that of English gentry.

Because this first stage of iron-both pig and cast-is brittle, it was best suited for products that would not be subject to continuous stress or repeated impact. Carbon-rich cast iron was, however, suitable for heavy containers and objects made to withstand fire. Reliable cannon barrels were also made of cast iron. For items that required tougher iron, bars of pig iron were transported to a forge where they were further refined by heating and pounding. This stronger iron, known as "wrought iron," could be forged into shapes, such as horseshoes, or sent through a rolling or slitting mill to make plates, bars, or nail rods.

What an impressive-though not necessarily pretty-sight the furnace was when "in blast," which was twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, unless repairs were needed. From the huge barn, buggies full of charcoal rumbled beneath the protective roof of the connecting shed to the furnace building, then back for another load. At the same time, creaking ore wagons drawn by teams of horses or mules lugged iron ore up the road ascending to the furnace. Loads of the components were carried across a horizontal walkway to the open top of the towering furnace stack, where they were dumped.

A large wooden waterwheel drove a twenty-foot-long bellows, furnishing the air blast necessary to intensify the heat to smelting temperatures. Eighteenth-century furnaces came to be termed cold-blast to distinguish them from a nineteenth-century improvement in which escaping inflammable gases were turned around to pre-heat the air blast before it passed through the tuyeres. During the nineteenth-century, some furnaces were hot-blast while some were the older cold-blast type.

Eighteen to twenty charges a day resulted in output of twenty-four tons of iron each week. At the base of the furnace, guttermen raked the sand and dug channels for the molten pig iron, then stacked the bars outside. Working conditions were brutal; temperatures inside the casting house could reach as high as 160 degrees Fahrenheit.

Three classifications of workers were employed at the Cornwall Iron Furnace: free labor, indentured servants, and slaves. While slaves were employed, there was opposition to their importation. Throughout the eighteenth century acts were passed restricting slave traffic, culminating in the 1780 act for the gradual abolition of slavery, in which Pennsylvania prohibited the importation of slaves. The hiring of indentured servants proved problematic. Most of the redemptioners were unskilled workers from Germany, England, and Ireland. Despite their indenture, these servants ran away with alarming frequency; perhaps for that reason they were hired in small numbers.

Curttis and Peter Grubb, who had inherited Cornwall Iron Furnace from their father, Peter Grubb Sr., upon his death in 1754, supported the American Revolution. Their furnace cast cannon, shot, and ironware for the Continental cause. Labor was in such short supply that the Grubbs and other ironmasters received permission to use Hessian prisoners of war as workers.

Robert Coleman, who rose from the ranks and took over Cornwall Iron Furnace and much of the mine from the Grubbs by 1798, was the first of four generations of Colemans who would dominate Pennsylvania's ironmaking industry. Coleman arrived in Philadelphia from Ireland in 1764. In two years he rose from a clerkship in a prothonotary's office to a position as bookkeeper for Curttis and Peter Grubb, during which he leaned about the business and technology of ironmaking. He next served as a clerk for ironmaster James Old at Quittapahilla Forge in Lebanon County. He married Old's daughter Ann in 1773, the same year he leased Salford Forge near Norristown, Montgomery County.

[tg]

I would definately stay with brass untill post 1800 it is much easier to validate after that date.

[wadedog]

Great reading captchee.thanks for that.

I guess wyosmith, i'm looking at the era of 1790 or slightly earlier for myself.
The area is for around here in southern ohio but the person could have come either from new jersey or virginia exploring the northwest territory that had just passed the congress of the confederation in 1787.

does that help to explain what gun he would have used.

i'm building a persona for myself ( trying anyway )

[wadedog]

wow thanks steve, those are great rifles.

http://www.traditionsfirearms.com/eshop ... Code=R2100

This is what I already have from a few years ago, it's in percussion though.
I really like the gun alot but i'm not too sure how period it is for my persona, and I hate to scratch it up but since it's not worth nearly as much ( and probably not as good ! )as a custom gun from you or capt ,maybe I shouldn't worry about it.
I wonder how well a built gun fits for a person than a store bought one.
would a custom gun had been available to the average guy back then and be fitted for him?
Maybe I could just replace the lock from them or a L&R lock ,are they any good ?

Or maybe trade someone here for a better gun.

[Kirrmeister]

Got my original smoothie back from the gunsmith yesterday. It is now again reconverted from cap to flint. It has an early english lock from Davis. Looks great and ignition is very good. At 30 m 1'' groups and at 50 m 3'' groups with .495 RB, lubed patch, .54 bore button, 60 grs WANO PP.


Regards

Kirrmeister

[Captchee]

wadedog
 i once had a traditions Pen , flintier.
 Not a bad rifle  it  fired ok after I fixed the issue with the touch hole  by deepening the pan . The inletting was good and the finish nice .
  My problem with the rifle was that  the Roman comb  just beat the heck out of my cheek bones  every time I would shoot it   leaving my face black and blue .
So I hung it on the wall and eventually  gave it as a drawing prize for a fun riser we were having .
 Not a bad rifle

As to custom guns and the differences.
 I don’t think  a lot of folks had guns specifically built for them . A vast  amount I think would buy a used rifle that fit  properly and was in suitable shape . But then most everything would have been some time of hand built rifle . Even the production trade rifles and  trade guns  would fall into this to some degree , even though they were build also on a standardization
 
As to fit
 Yes you get a lot better fit with a custom style rifle .
 See we live in a one size fits all age  and that includes  fitting of guns .
 Most all production rifles are cut for a standard average pull of  14 inches .
 For smaller rifles , they drop to 12 ½ or there about and that’s you choice .
 They don’t alow for  changes in body build , like neck length, and such .
 Now  some do but they are higher  cost products and mostly found in tournament  shooting circles  .

 As such what happens is folks say ; AHHH I want ,,,,,, a Mossberg, or Remington  and they go down to the local store  and ask to see one  on the gun rack . They heft it , look down the barrel , yep the sights are there . but they don’t have any real idea  what a proper fit is . So they base their  purchase on looks , maybe weight, caliber ,   . Ill take it they say . Sometimes  that rifle  is the one they take home , other time  the sales person  says let me put it in a box for you . Then goes in the back and   brings back out a  new in the box rifle , never saying the one on the rack is a display piece .

 With a custom rifle , you get  the correct cast off , pull / draw  and drop for your body . All the other niceties are just that , pure cosmetics . A simple rifle shoots just as good as a fancy one . Sometimes better  if the rifle its being compared to is overly decorated in the wrong areas  .
 Basicly  the comparision of custom to production  rifles is   Something very much like a set of gloves that fits you properly Vs  the ones grandma would give you ,where the fingers were to long or they were to small . Sure they worked  But .

[sse]

Steve - Did you build all of those rifles?  Wow!

[sse]

Double Wow!

[wadedog]

It's hard for me to belive that artist like you wyosmith and captchee can make such fantastic guns.
Those are in my opinion better than any guns I have ever seen in museums, I looked through the build a gun section and saw capts guns too.

Yes I kinda figured my rifle was a little late period for me, with the styling and roman nose butt.

I bought it way before I even thought of re-creating living history.
I guess I'll try and sell or trade it to what I need.

Also In looking up tvm on the web there are two tvm's, a tennesse valey manufacturing and a T V muzzleloaders, which one is the one you guys have been talking about before.

Also captchee and wyosmith, do you guys build guns from a customers measurements through emails ? I guess you know what youre doing and can get close enough, just curious.

I'll wait a little longer and see how the build comes with TomG, maybe i'll find a buyer for my penn longrifle by then.