I'm building my first "kit" rifle from TOW. It is a Vincent Ohio rifle. I'm having a fun time learning about building rifles. Tried pouring the forend cap out of pewter today. As usual, it was a lot more difficult and time consuming than I thought it would be. Spent most of the day pouring, shaping, and sanding down the cap. On my first attempt, I didn't get the pewter hot enough and it soldified on me after I poured just a few drops out of the dipper. Had to cut off the mold and redo it. Fortunately, I didn't get very far, so it was pretty easy to remove the pewter from around the end of the stock. My second attempt was much better, but had a big gap on one side all the way to the wood. I tried "soldering" some pewter to fill the gap, but when I heated the piece of pewter to fill in the gap, more pewter ran off the end of the forend. Before tearing everything off and starting over again, I decided to make a dam out of cardstock and pour in hot pewter to fill the hole. Ended up with a big lump on the side of the cap, but it was apparently hot enough to fuse to the original pewter. After sanding and shaping for a couple of hours, it doesn't look too bad. There is one small slit-like gap in the ramrod channel, but it shouldn't be too hard to fix. I'm a little apprehensive about trying to fix it though, as I'm afraid I'll just make it worse. Here's a picture of the work that I did today. It took about 6 hours of work to get this far. One thing that a project like this does for a person is to develop an appreciation for how much work goes into building a rifle by hand.
I still need to do some more shaping and polishing, but I don't think it looks too bad. (The rear ramrod ferrule isn't pinned yet, which is why it isn't tight to the stock). ::
I still need to do some more shaping and polishing, but I don't think it looks too bad. (The rear ramrod ferrule isn't pinned yet, which is why it isn't tight to the stock). ::
