Reproductions of historical ball bags

[BillinOregon]

Harry, good grief those are lovely mallets! If the manzanita and redwood are local you must be in northern California or southwest Oregon.

 

[Harry Marinakis]

Here's another colonial ball bag, ca. 1770. It's not the prettiest style of ball bags, but I'm going through and reproducing as many ball/shot bags as I can. Including this ugly duckling.

Making this bag presented me with a conundrum. The bag is all leather, except for the stopper. That means the leather throat provides all the support to keep the stopper in place. So the leather has to be thick and hardened. But the bag is constructed with hidden seams, which means you sew the bag wrong-side out, and then you turn the bag inside out when you're done. So the leather has to be thin enough to turn it inside out. Given the narrow width of the bag, I settled on 2-3 oz. veg tan.

The bag is one piece, folded over, and sewn along the bottom and one side.

The tapered stopper is completely hidden down inside the throat. The stopper has a leather thong attached to pull the stopper out of the bag.

All in all, this is a really poor design for a ball bag, for a few reasons:

1. You have to use a thin leather, which means you can't really harden the leather. The throat offers little support for the stopper, and the bag is flimsy.

2. From a craftsman's perspective, it's complicated to make and not aesthetically pleasing. It has the nice hidden seam around the bottom and side, but then it has an exposed seam along the stopper.

3. It's a lot of work just to make an ugly ball bag.

Given the dimensions stated in the reference book, and the photos, I can calculate the size of the spout, plug, etc., by doing a proportional analysis.

Bench work to shape the Maple stopper. I prefer rasps if I can, instead of chisels or carving knives.

Stitching the bag on my home-made stitching horse.

The hidden seam

The stopper is completely hidden inside of the bag.

 

[Harry Marinakis]

This is a ball bag for large balls (.50 - .70 cal), ca. 1780.

It's thick hardened leather, 3-1/2 inches in diameter. It's way too big, IMHO. It will easily hold a hundred .50 caliber balls. I may make one of these for myself, but only about 3 inches in diameter.

I sewed the two halves together with a double-needle herringbone stitch (baseball stitch), That was a total cluster f--- trying to keep the two threads from tangling, and I screwed it up badly. I missed holes, but I didn't want to pull out all the stitches. And I couldn't really pull the stitches tight enough. Next time I will use a single-thread, single-needle herringbone stitch.

To harden the bag, I got the bag soaking wet. Then I cut a old rag into a 2-inch wide strip in a spiral pattern, so the strip was about 5 feet long. I stuffed the strip into the bag with a dowel until the bag was as full and as distended as possible. Then I heated the wet leather with a heat gun until the leather was really hot. (You can melt the leather if you get it too hot - and like plastic, leather will melt suddenly without warning.) Then I set the bag on the warm exhaust vent of my dehumidifier overnight to fully dry the bag. By morning the leather was really hard.

You can also harden leather in the oven at 180 - 190 deg F. Set the leather on a block of wood, or the cooking pan will scorch the leather where there is contact. The leather will still be pliable when you remove it from the oven. Set the leather in the position you want, and let it dry. It will harden up. And don't let the leather melt in the oven.

 

[Harry Marinakis]

I made a smaller version of the gourd-like ball bag above. This one is for me, and I extended the spout so that the stopper is more secure. It's just under 3 inches in diameter, excluding the spout. It carries three dozen .50 caliber balls, and sits nicely inside of my shooting bag.

 

[Harry Marinakis]

This is another simple bag ball, ca. 1800-1810, for balls up to .45 caliber.

There's not much to it -- just a turned 2-inch tall Maple spout/stopper and folded over 4-1/2-inch deerskin bag. I didn't quite duplicate the spout in the photo, but too bad. The original bag had a welt sewn into the seam, so that's what I did here.

The top of the original stopper had been bitten off from use. I made this stopper nice and tall and easy to bite.

The flared end of the spout helps to hold the bag in place, but I also added a drawstring stitch, a technique that was commonly used on the historical bags. Basically you run the linen thread in and out around the throat of the leather bag, pull the string tight, and tie it off.

 

[ZUG]

You do nice work. I like the wood spout and plug combo the best. I've made all leather ball bags and never liked the leather spout style much.

 

[Harry Marinakis]

You do nice work. I like the wood spout and plug combo the best. I've made all leather ball bags and never liked the leather spout style much.

Thanks!

Seems like most of the historical ball bags that have survived have bone spouts. I'm gonna get some bones next month, and try turning some bone spouts.

Until then, my ball bag work is on hold, too busy.

 

[rp77469]

Muzzleloader Magazine has Smith's book for sale at half price. Just ordered a copy.

My copy arrived the day after Hurricane Beryl went over my house, and I just opened it. WOW! Initial reaction is: Best $15 I have spent in a looong time