Hello all. I have a Brown Bess musket that I’m going to turn into Committee of Safety musket. As part of that process I want to remove the lock markings. My question is do I need to weld over the Stowe 1776 and the crown GR before beginning the filing/polishing process? The Stowe 1776 is fairly deep. Thoughts and help on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
You have to weld up pedersoli lock plates, the engravings are too deep and the plate is too thin to file off the markings, welding the plates can be complicated too. If you’re using an oxygen acetylene torch, You’ll need to pre-heat the plates up to a red color and begin welding while it’s red, or else your welds will be diamond hard. Your flame tip should be set to carburizing, as most mild steels used on lock parts are not mild enough for a neural flame, never use an oxidizing flame tip, it will burn up the part, and cause warping and disfigure the metal. For filler metal mild steel generally works very good, coat hangers work pretty well as a filler as does picture frame wire, flux core MIG wire works great too. For flux i use borax from centaur forge, but most flux powders work just fine.
Generally what works best is low amp TIG welding on a pulse setting for lock plates.
Here are a few i recently ddi this year, still working on the Tower Lockplate.
The border engravings are tougher to weld over on a newer pedersoli lock, they’re very deep on this lock I left those
alone.
The lock on the bottom I removed the markings on the original lock which was a miroku bess and makes the lock Wilson, this was for a New Jersey style long land custom project. You can still see some of the engravings under the pan, decided to leave that on there because the area is very hard to polish out and the owner was satisfied with it.
