Forging ahead with the fowler, decided to hold off installing the White Lightning liner and had a 1/4x28 liner handy. I Nikal (superb hi-temp anti-seize) lubed the breech plug and homed it, then Nikal lubed and screwed in the touch hole liner, then drilled its hole to .060".
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To properly set up the front sight, I flipped bbl over on a dead straight surface (Corian kitchen counter top), put a file on top of a piece of paper, set the file under the bbl near the muzzle and moved the paper and file back and forth a few times. The resulting bbl file mark is dead center and will be used to align the sight during soldering.
While the bbl was out of the stock I wicked in water thin CYA to the barrel channel and the lock mortise. This both seals the wood and hardens it at the same time.
I put back the bbl and lock, polished up the brass side plate that just arrived, along with the nickel-silver front sight, but forgot to order another lock bolt as the original is 1/16" too short and only a few threads capture the lock. So, off with the side plate for now.
The nickel-silver sight was well rusted, so after cleaning if off with an emery board I put some 600 grit production paper over the bbl and pushed the sight base over the paper to both clean it up and conform to the bbl's radius. After adding soft silver solder to its base, I secured the sight with some wire and hit it with the propane torch.
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Swapped the trigger guard screws for some iron screws that I modified on the grinder ...
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Getting there ... time for a test run.
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