Rising Bite, Bar-in-Wood, Sidelock, Sidelever, 28 GA (#008)

Or, it will be in the near future.  Another one of my own design, from scratch.  Aside from the bar-wood action, the rising bite and the sidelever, it's going to be pretty conventional.  A hammerless, breechloading homage to the percussion-era, when British guns reached their aesthetic zenith.
The barrels are 28 inches, it will sport a straight hand stock with Westley Richards-style grip safety, splinter forend (wedge retained, of course) and the target weight is five and a half pounds.

The rough tubes, raw on the left, rough filed on the right

The breeches are of dovetail lump construction.

Clamped for brazing, I know, black iron wire is "traditional"but for the task of brazing (and the temperatures involved) it simply doesn't compare to stainless worm-drive clamps.

The frame

The barrels and frame are jointed.  The blocks soft-soldered to the barrels are temporary.  They are machined to be parallel and square to the lumps and barrel flats.  Their purpose is to facilitate clamping in the mill and bench vise.

The frame is machined for the striker bushings.

The start of the forend iron

Machining the extractor bed

The forend lug is made and silver brazed in place and the forend iron is rough-shaped.

The triggerplate is started.

The triggerplate and inboard portion of the sidelever.

The outboard portion of the sidelever blanked.

Making the swivel for the spring that will power the sidelever and bolts.

Making the triggerguard bow.

All of the parts of the bolting, sidelever and extractor mechanisms.

Jointed, bolts fitted and extractor mechanism fitted.

Time for some hammer and chisel work!  The left fence is roughed in.

A little  further along with the shape-up.

Triggers are made and hung.  The safety mechanism is also made.

Time to make the lockwork...
First, the tumblers and stirrups

The bridles and mainsprings

Almost done, the sear springs remain to be made and installed.  I didn't take any photos of the sears, screws etc., I was too busy filing.

Here's a video clip of the right lock.

Making the left lock

Both locks made, but not finished

I wanted something other than the typical "cocking indicators" on the exposed ends of the hammer pivots, so....

Now on to the triggerguard, that all-important piece that can either make or break the looks of a gun.  After forming the bow and strap, they're TIG welded together and final shaping and fitting can be done.  I wanted to do something different here but it had to be subtle.  What I came up with looks simple, I assure you it was not simple to do.  I'm pleased enough with the result that I've decided to forego the planned grip safety.

 Here are a couple of shots of the gun assembled into the pattern wood (minus the lockwork guts).  Once I make the forend wedge and escutcheons and the forend tip/finial, I can begin stocking it.  All of the external screws are "work" screws.  The final screws will be made during stocking.  There is nothing in the photo to give the gun any scale, so the dimensions may help.  The width at the fences is 1.75 inches, and the height from rib to triggerplate is 1.8 inches.

This is the blank that I had planned on using (though now I'm not sure) and a photo of the metalwork on it.

While some of the finish screws can't be made until the gun is stocked, the "metal-to-metal" screws can be made prior.  These include the triggerplate screw and the lockplate screws.

The frame shaping is done, forend hardware is made and it's ready for stocking to its owner's dimensions.

The more I looked at the stock blank that I'd originally intended to use, the less I liked it.  After some looking, I found a blank that I liked.  This will do nicely.

 

And, the internal finishing, all done by hand.  You will find highly polished beveling (anglage) around the edges of the bridles, watchmaker style screwheads with flat heads and beveled edges, Cotes de Geneve (Geneva stripes) on the flats and matte graining on the sides, along with matted lockplate flats.  It all must be done by hand in order to maintain the contours and flats of the parts because flexible buffing wheels would ruin the flats as well as the edges.  The tumblers (hammers) and sears are gold plated.  The finishes were inspired by one of my favorite watches (the Lange & Sohn Zeitwerk).  Notably absent is any of what is incorrectly referred to in the gun world as jeweling or "engine turning", correctly called perlage (or "spotting").  I loathe this finish and, in my opinion, it only looks good on the bolt of a bolt action rifle.  Too many makers employ this finish as a dazzling distraction from poor quality workmanship, which is effective because of its "busy" appearance.  I prefer finishes that highlight the workmanship, rather than hide it or distract from it.  Is any of this necessary?  No, and that's the whole point.

 There were some detail changes as the gun progressed.  In keeping with the watchmaking-inspired lockwork finishes, I incorporated ruby jewel bearings for the pivots in the lockplates, as well as crystal cocking indicators (I like the idea of a "window" into the inner workings).  The floral patterned screws were replaced with less "busy" looking (and, I think, more tasteful) watchmaker-style screws.  The tapered, beveled and polished "trim pieces" around the lockplates and the recoil pad add a bit of distinctive, yet understated, automotive-inspired "pizazz".  The recoil pad is covered in black kangaroo leather and the stock is, obviously, Turkish walnut.  The forend retaining wedge is "headless" in the interest of symmetry, its internal retaining pin also acting as a stop pin, so there is no need for a large head on one side of the wedge.  The name "badges" on the lockplates (another automotive influence) were cut from .020" nickel sheet on my pantograph.

Another Elephant Rant

I know, but it's my blog.  Don't agree with me?  Feel free to edify me in the comments section with reasoned, factual arguments.  Ad hominem attacks will receive no response.

I came across this quote the other day:

Already I was beginning to fall into the African way of thinking: That if
you properly respect what you are after, and shoot it cleanly and on
the animal's terrain, if you imprison in your mind all the wonder of the
day from sky to smell to breeze to flowers—then you have not merely
killed an animal. You have lent immortality to a beast you have killed
because you loved him and wanted him forever so that you could always
recapture the day - Robert Ruark

That last line sounds more than a little bit psychopathic to me.

Killed him because you loved him?

You're not going to "remember him forever" because you're not immortal.  A mortal being can no more grant another being immortality than blood can be had from a stone.  It also seems counter-intuitive that ending a being's existence is the method of granting immortality since immortality, by definition, means to never die.

It's been repeated, ad nauseam, that the "economic value" placed on these creatures is a good thing since that is what will "save" them.  Is not their economic value precisely the reason that poachers kill them?  Based upon most of the corpses left behind by poachers, they're not killing them for meat.  They are killing them for the "economically valuable" ivory.  The very fact that ivory has any economic value in this day and age doesn't speak very highly of the maturity of our species.

Poaching seems to be a hazardous occupation (sadly, not nearly hazardous enough) so one can assume that these people are doing it for monetary gain, not for fun.  It's the trophy hunters that kill them for fun, for the adrenaline rush, to pretend that they're living in a time that's past, whatever the reason.  The days of Ruark and Taylor are long past.  In their day, there were many more elephants than there are now, not that that makes their "adventurous exploits" any less vile.  Elephants are an extremely endangered species with less than three quarters of a million African elephants and forty thousand Asian elephants in the wild.

This begs the question, is it better to kill an intelligent, endangered creature to get money or, pay money to kill that same creature for a fleeting thrill?  Either way the elephant loses.

I understand that there are other factors besides poaching (illegal killing) and trophy hunting (legal killing) contributing to the seemingly inevitable extinction of the elephant, like habitat loss, human encroachment, "revenge" killing, etc.  I fail to understand how "legally" killing these animals is seen as "helping" them.  The elephant population is a zero-sum game, there are a finite number of them.  They are being killed faster than they reproduce, killing ANY of them, legally or not, is still shrinking their numbers, it doesn't take spherical trigonometry to figure this out.  Why not take the fraction of a percent of the money from a hunting permit that actually makes it to the "conservation efforts" and give it to an actual conservation organization and maybe, this is going to sound nuts, not kill the elephant?  With that, you've actually made some difference and spared a creature that you claim to love and respect.

So Long UPS

Apparently, the new policy at UPS is to COMPLETELY open and UNPACK ALL packages prior to acceptance, for security reasons of course.  I don't spend my valuable time packing guns that are worth sums that most UPS employees can't even comprehend so that some unskilled, weak-minded member of the UPS flock can "comply with company policy" while probably damaging said guns.
I was told this at the UPS Customer Center/terminal just today and verified it with UPS customer service.  I guess DHL and FedEx will be getting my business from this time forward.