English style blunderbuss build

After the shell carving, I really did not take many pictures of the stock shaping. Lots of wood removed everywhere, lock panels thinned, baluster wrist extended to about 2/3 into the stock. I left some moderate swelling around the entry pipe as this was a pretty common feature reminiscent of the Brown Bess and other military style blunderbusses. I like the looks of it.

I wanted get into the wire inlay. I only found a couple examples of busses with wire inlay and it was not as extensive as usually found on British fowlers. Here is an example of an original on Tortuga trading website. This gun has been a guide for much of my engraving, especially the trigger guard.

Ok, wire inlay. Pretty cool stuff. I started by making a couple cutters one out of a small screw driver that was shaped into about 1/16 rounded football shape in cross section, and another about 1/8 inch from an xacto blade that I mounted in a palm graver. Thats it. The idea is to separate the wood grain rocking the cutter along your layout lines. I started with some practice projects with .005 to .014 brass and german silver wire. My daughter and I did a shamrock design that she came up with.

Now for my designs, I did not copy any original designs but took inspiration from originals and some of Dave Person’s work. Makes the project move into more fantasy gun territory, but I am really hoping the English influence comes through. The design evolved around a dragon head on the right side of the stock and a white lily on the left. Lots of drawing, doodling, reworking until satisfied. I got some 5/64 pure silver plate for the inlays and .010 pure silver wire along with some .005 and .008 german silver wire and pin stock. I had not worked with soft pure silver wire before, it is much more difficult manipulate, has an almost greasy effect when trying to file it flush. I would recommend filing along in the directory of the flow of wire to avoid jagged edges.


I drew my designs over a traced outline of the stock so they would be correct size to transfer to the stock with tracing paper and carbon paper taped underneath.

I transferred the design to the wood with a ball end stylus. Cut out my inlays with the jewelers saw and inlaid them before the wire. The inlays will have the detailing engraved into them at a later time (when I can engrave well enough).


First line of wire going in. Where the wires meet, I just filed the appropriate bevels on the ends to make them flow together. Many of the joints disappear when filed.

Almost done. I go over the wire with a wet pipe cleaner to swell the wood around the wire after it has been tapped in. The qtips left too many fibers.

There it is. I wetted the wood for contrast, it is not ready for finish, but the wire is in and filed. Some round pin wire was added to the ends of many of the scrolls later for effect. The thinner darker wire is german silver. The bright white is fine silver. All I can say is do your homework, practice and go for it! Scary when you have come this far and don’t want to screw up. Suppose I’ll have plenty more opportunities to mess this up with engraving…

Noeyebrows said:

It’s taking forever..learning as I go.

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Nice clean lines and cuts! I have a feeling you already learned an abundance of how to & skill. WTG
Larry

Hi Andy,
Very good work! If you look straight on the cutting blade of my tools, you would see the blade is football shaped in cross section with the ends rounded slightly. That allows me to step along a curved line without the ends of the blade creating a jagged step-like incised line. I simply use straight line stabbing cutters 1/6", 1/8" and 1/4" in length all shaped as I described. You seem to be doing fine with your tools so I just mention this FYI. Other wire workers like Dave Price and Ed Wenger use gouges of different sizes to incise the curves. If your design has multiple wires converging together, lay the first wire in before stabbing the next line, then lay that wire in before stabbing the line for the next wire and so forth. That prevents chipping out a slice of wood where the wires come together.

dave

Incredible! This is your FIRST time doing this?

Man, we are on the home stretch, just one problem- I have to learn how to engrave good enough to be brave enough to cut some lines on an actual gun. Hopefully in a way that is passable for English engraving. Not a great place to start, as I know now, indeed not recommended. The guild engravers in England were masterful engravers. You can see when you look closely that some of their work was probably completed rather quickly, but the overall effect is graceful! Lines of varying depth and effect, beautiful balanced designs, imaginative compositions, a light touch. I think it would be reasonable for a new engraver to aspire to recreate designs found on many early American longrifles after some basic instruction on sharpening gravers, cutting lines, and a few weeks or months of practice.

Not me! Because I’m a glutton for punishment, or just plain dumb. Regardless, I started engraving the gun last week and it has been a pretty fun learning project. I’ll quickly go over what tools I’m using now and how I prepared and practiced in the next couple posts.

PathfinderNC said:

Incredible! This is your FIRST time doing this?

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I guess I would say you are seeing the tip of the proverbial iceberg. I worked in the carpentry trade for about 10 years before switching to medical. I really think that helped to be comfortable with hand tools. I have a lot of patience. I have been studying flintlock building really in depth for probably 3 years, casually for 10 years maybe. Many many hours of drawing and design study… it is the first time, but I have definitely covered a lot of ground getting here…

I could make a thread at least this long showing a bunch of problems and screw ups, ripping out wire, gouging wood, stupid black walnut splitting, thinking you have permanently glued your barrel to the stock with acraglass. Bleeding and wounds, solder melting through your sneakers. It would make a fun blooper reel. Thank god for super glue. Amen.

Hi Andy,
Yes, there were masterful engravers in London; however, they pumped out the work fast and sometimes it was not so masterful but effective nonetheless. If you are trying to be authentic to the 18th century, do not use extensive precise cross hatching for shading as shown in Schipper's book. It is so inviting but it does not look right for an 18th century English gun. So much engraving on modern recreations looks well done but is totally inappropriate for the period it is supposed to represent. For the English work you are doing, you only need 3 gravers, a small square, a small flat, and a small round bottomed cutter. If you choose to do nick and dot borders as Schipper describes, which is a good way especially if you are doing a lot of nick and dot borders, you will also need a 124-126 degree square cutter for the nicks. For deep shading, use the round bottomed graver to cut some deep relief or simply take your square graver and cut lines converging into the depths.

Good luck,

dave

dave_person said:

Hi Andy,
Yes, there were masterful engravers in London; however, they pumped out the work fast and sometimes it was not so masterful but effective nonetheless. If you are trying to be authentic to the 18th century, do not use extensive precise cross hatching for shading as shown in Schipper's book. It is so inviting but it does not look right for an 18th century English gun. So much engraving on modern recreations looks well done but is totally inappropriate for the period it is supposed to represent. For the English work you are doing, you only need 3 gravers, a small square, a small flat, and a small round bottomed cutter. If you choose to do nick and dot borders as Schipper describes, which is a good way especially if you are doing a lot of nick and dot borders, you will also need a 124-126 degree square cutter for the nicks. For deep shading, use the round bottomed graver to cut some deep relief or simply take your square graver and cut lines converging into the depths.

Good luck,

dave

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I completely agree about Schippers work. I do not regret getting his book at all. His work is great, but it’s not quite right for this period english engraving. I don’t even consider some of the original english work to be aesthetically superior to Schippers. I do want this project to look right. I’m hoping my work falls in the “not masterful but effective” category. I’ll post some of my engraving in the next post, I would appreciate your critique. Thanks Dave!

I started toying around with engraving about a year ago after buying Schipper’s book Engraving historic firearms. It was a pretty good investment. The book is a little pricey, but you can find it on sale sometimes under $100. John explains things clearly and the sharpening and graver geometry theory are probably worth the price of the book. Sharpening is everything. I don’t know a whole lot about engraving, but I get a sense that Schipper’s terminology and technique is maybe a little outside of the mainstream engraving consensus. He has a specific way and style that are his own.

I also purchased Sam Alfano’s Old School hammer and chisel engraving video from his website to stream on the computer. It cost about $60 for an hour of instruction. He covers sharpening a square graver, lines, leaves, 2 types of scroll, borders, roman lettering. Very helpful. Sam also sells a hammer and chisel starter set with graver blanks, chasing hammer, chisel handle and practice plates all on GRS website. It is expensive, but looks like high quality stuff. I did not purchase this set.

Everything I am using now I purchased through Steve Lindsay’s website. 3/32 HSS blanks, a stainless steel chisel handle that holds the blanks with a set screw and three different templates. A 116 deg universal, 90 and square template. I really like his sharpening system. I am finding that his templates are far more versatile than they seem initially. If you follow the instructions you will get a patented Parallel heel geometry. If you don’t grind the 2 low bottom relief facets you can get a traditional heel. If you shorten the length of the graver protruding from the template, you can get a higher heel and face angle that lets you drive the tool higher above your work. The higher angle has worked better for me and it may just suit hammer and chisel engraving better in general. I’ll get to some pics in the next post.

These are from Lindsays website. The templates are made to be used with a 1/2 inch high diamond stone or the angles will not be as advertised.

This is the original buss I modeled my trigger guard engraving after. The wild rose and acorn finials were very common. I worked on several practice plates first. If you spent a week working on consistent straight lines, it would be worth the effort. Even now I warm up on a practice plate for about 10 minutes before I work on the gun.
Here are a couple of my latest practice plates. The top is a Sam Alfano design, the bottom is referred to as Schippers’s number 1 design. Notice my straight border lines are still not very consistent. He encourages you to draw and engrave this design a hundred times until you can do it in your sleep. I haven’t engraved it 100 times, but I did draw it 100 times!

Here is the trigger guard finished. I started with the acorn checkering and moved on to some knick and dot bordering below the acorn and the long end of the guard. I fussed with drawing the rose several times until I was happy before I engraved it. Notice the petal lines don’t always connect with each other or the center of the flower, the shading is what pulls it all together. For the knick and dot, I did not use Schippers method of a wide angled graver to push into the border line. I use a flat graver where the corner rides in your border cut and you roll the graver in and out of the line to make the triangle shapes. Tricky to get them consistent, but it looks like that is how the originals were done.

Barrel engraving is going a little better than expected. The graver is pretty much doing what I want it to do. Moving on to the entry pipe, silver inlays, the butt plate. Then a little metal aging and a couple more coats of finish and we will call this one done.