[Lin Robinson]

[Lin Robinson]

OK...

I think I now know what this is. I spent a few minutes with my gun restorer friend this evening and he gave me some ideas that I am sure are correct, given his extensive experience.

First, it is almost certainly made from parts from several different guns. The difference in metals, i.e. an iron butt plate with the rest of the furniture being brass is one very strong clue. The military side plate is another. The trigger guard is civilian. The lock does not match a 1750 New England Fowler, most of which had English locks. This lock is almost surely Germanic. Upon closer inspection of the photos, the lock does look like a replacement which fits the mortise fairly well, but certainly not perfectly. But, the rifling in the barrel is the clincher.

According to my friend, who has run across these before, many guns like this one were made starting in the late 19th c., and up to and including the early 1960s. Some were made overseas and shipped here. I do remember that Dixie Gun works once offered a Belgian made smoothbore percussion gun with a back action lock which was made up on antique parts. They also once offered percussion Sharps rifles built on original actions with new barrels and forearms. But, I am moving away from the subject. The rifling of the barrel for an inch or two from the muzzle was done to give the gun the appearance of being a rifle, when of course it was not. The mechanics of loading a smoothbore simply do not allow rifling at the muzzle only to provide any sort of accuracy for a bullet fired from such a set up. The round, passing down a smooth barrel, will undoubtely move from side to side as it would if fired from any normal smoothbore. That would mean that when the ball finally got the rifled section of the barrel, the chances of the patch gripping the rifling dead center and imparting spin to the bullet would be next to impossible. In fact, when the bullet was rammed down the rifled section of the muzzle and dropped free in to the smooth section of the barrel, chances are it would part company with the patch. The bullet, when it hit the rifling, could also act as an obstruction in some cases, causing the barrel to burst. It is quite likely that the rifling in this gun was filed by hand by the person who put it together. One way to tell, if the owner will let you, is to run a large cleaning jag with patch down the bore. If there is any spin to the rifling, then the ramrod should turn, even slightly, from that little experiment. I looked back at the photo of the muzzle that you sent earlier, and those are very narrow walls at the muzzle and the grooves are very deep. Also the lands are quite wide, much wider than usually seen. The deep grooves simply would not be there after over 250 years of use which would wear down the lands.

My friend suggested that a way to tell if the barrel was ever rifled in the normal sense, would be to pull the breech plug and look toward the muzzle. Some evidence of now gone rifling should be there, for example chatter marks where the cutter hit uneven places in the iron barrel. He also suggested that the gun may have had a section welded to it, possibly the muzzle with the rifling, which could be seen more easily on the underside of the barrel, if you took it out of the stock, but which should be evident on the top side as well. Unbreeching would best be done by someone with experience with these guns, iow, someone who won't destroy it in the process.

My friend is very, very knowledgeable in these matters and has done quite a few restorations in his career. I would trust his judgment in this.

So, your friend has an interesting piece, and it, or at least its parts, are probably quite old. The styling does suggest mid-18th c., but this gun is almost certainly a relatively recent creation by someone who was not necessarily trying to defraud anyone, but did not go out of his way not to do so.

[Kenneth Bertschy]

Thanks for the response. There is no spin to the rifling. It goes in for about an inch and stops and blends into a smooth barrel. I used a bore light to look down it and there are no vestigal rifling lands going down the barrel. The folks over at the muzzleloading.com forums are convinced that the gun has a french barrel, lock, and trigger guard and that the name on the lock plate and the rifling were added during the 40s to increase it's value by some unscrupulous vendor. You might want to give their responses a read:

http://www.muzzleloadingforum.com/fusionbb/sh...t/new/#NEW

[Lin Robinson]

[Kenneth Bertschy]

I am going to try harder to convince the doctor to get the gun appraised and to have the gun taken apart and inspected by a gunsmith who knows his way around a flintlock. I give your opinion and knowledge at least as much creedence as the good folks over at Muzzleloaders.com and I am intrigued by the idea that these guns were assembled from parts at such a late date. Are there any clues I can look for to ascertain that late a date for assembly other than the fake rifling? Does the name engraved on the lockplate look out of place to you or is that feature what you would expect to see?

[Lin Robinson]