Shine said:
I have an iron mounted transitional rifle. How far back are iron rifles documented? I need to shorten the length of pull on it. While I have the thing apart im thinking of switching to brass furniture. Im also thinking of redoing the patch box I don't like the sliding wood one im always dropping the lid.
Iron mounted rifles date back to the first rifles made in Europe, at least as far back as wheellocks. If you mean, "in America, made in the colonies", we don't know when the first iron mounted rifles were made here by colonial gunsmiths as a "regular style being made". Of course there was much re-use of parts off old and broken down guns, so there must have been some restocking with iron mounts, which were much more expensive than brass mounts, and so would have been re-used, especially since they could not be melted down like old brass mounts. Based on remaining specimens, period accounts, etc, we can say that rifles made in the colonies with iron mounts forged here or with new imported iron mounts were not prevalent before the 1790's although some few were apparently made during the Revolutionary War period. I say few because where they were made, there were no large manufactories like in Allentown, Lancaster, or York Pennsylvania, where some real war production of rifles (brass mounted, of course, from that region)is documented. The earliest surviving example of an American made rifle with forged iron furniture is estimated to be a 1770's rifle by Wallace Gusler. There are earlier accounts in newspapers of iron-mounted rifles but of course there is no way to know if the rifles were made in Europe or here, or whether the mounts were Euro style or forged here in simpler forms. The Appalachian "mountain rifle" or "poor boy" as some like to call is, is largely a post-1800 phenomenon.
Also, regarding the casting of brass versus forging of iron: it is more expensive and challenging to forge from iron than cast brass mounts, most mounts seem to have been purchased as imports or from a regional gunsmith who casted them regularly, and it was no harder to obtain cast brass mounts than it was to obtain barrels and locks, which the majority of gunsmiths bought instead of making. The "remote gunsmith" is mostly a romantic concept, unless they were in the employ of a fort or trading company, where they mostly fixed guns. Most gunsmiths worked in booming or emerging market centers, where folks came to get all their needs met. High quality trade goods were available in Ohio and beyond to Indians, so we don't need to imagine the lonely gunsmith chopping down a tree and forging a lump of iron into all the needed parts. Using that approach he'd be limited to producing 3-6 rifles a year. He'd also need specialized skills worth much more in a gunmaking center. A locksmith could demand a higher wage than a gunstocker.
