Building My Flintlock with the Gunsmith of Williamsburg
This article is companion to a video bearing the same name:
Given all of the things that I’ll be talking about today regarding this rifle, one thing is true across the board: I’m passionate about history, and I love flintlocks. The source of all my passion is what has made building this rifle so rewarding, and by sharing my own rifle-building story I’ll be sharing a piece of my pride in having built this flintlock. And I WANT to share that pride and satisfaction with you. So join me for a minute as I take you back to LITTLE Alex from FTC, an Alex who knew he liked the Disney show Daniel Boone but couldn’t even figure out how to make a proper pair of moccasins.
I grew up in a small Ohio town that had been touched by the histories of the American Revolution and the War of 1812. A place where the old Ohio frontier didn’t seem so far away. As the son of a history teacher, I took a natural inclination towards Disney’s Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone- I built box forts in the driveway and had to explain the battle of the Alamo to the kids in the neighborhood so they would join in my mock fights. Living history was all around me- where I’m from, the past has always been celebrated. That’s not to say that every kid from Northwest Ohio takes an interest in reenacting. Most didn’t. The catalyst for me was scouting.
My natural trajectory on the trail to Eagle Scout led me to work at a Boy Scout camp during my high school summers. There was a program area there, nestled away in the woods, called Frontier Trading Company, where staff dressed in buckskins and threw tomahawks and raised small livestock among a cabin, forge, wigwams, and other features. When I joined camp staff I carved out a place for myself in that area by using my paychecks to buy my own outfit. Over four and a half summers I spent a pretty significant amount of my life wearing the clothing and generally leading the lifestyle of someone in the 18th-century, and I fell in love with it. I was able to interact with around 3,000 scouts each summer to try and share my passion. But the one thing that was always missing was a rifle. You can’t carry a firearm on Scout property and I could never justify buying a replica with a big gaudy orange tip. I thought it would dishonor the men who fought and died with flintlocks in hand.
My college years have marked an end to my slow summers in FTC. In fact, only one summer after I left for school, the program area was discontinued. But my time at college thus far has given birth to a whole new era of this historical passion. When I got to school some upperclassmen told me about a university program that would grant students 2,000 dollars to pursue some kind of out-of-the-classroom transformational experience. After a year of attending special classes with a cohort of other students, refining a budget, and drafting a 9-page project proposal with a faculty mentor, I applied for and was approved to use university funding as a means to pursue building a flintlock.
During this period, I spent hours watching every scrap of muzzleloading content on YouTube. It was the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was confined to my dorm for months, and my companions became the instructors and historical interpreters who were creating these gorgeous flintlock rifles online, and the older, more experienced guys who discuss these videos in a few different forums. I determined that I would build a Jim Kibler flintlock kit- based on my research, and the input of hundreds of others, his kits are the highest quality on the market, all provided with YouTube videos on his channel and a written instruction manual that makes it perfectly accessible for beginners.
As I tore across YouTube soaking up everything I could, I found myself watching a LOT of videos published by the National Muzzleloading Rifle Association, an organization that hosts a Kibler flintlock building class. A landmark moment in my pursuit of a class where I could get some mentorship and make sure that my university funding was spent right- on a truly transformational experience- occurred in the comments section of one of those videos by the NMLRA. I didn’t know it at the time, but Ethan from ILoveMuzzleloading was behind the keyboard at the NMLRA that day. When I asked whether these classes were open to the public, Ethan sent me to the right webpage and everything started to fall into place.
I made payment for the class and my Kibler flintlock kit the day after my project proposal was approved by my university. When I ordered the kit I spoke on the phone with Jim Kibler. He picked up and said “This is Jim” and I about lost it. I turned into a blubbering idiot over the phone telling him all about how great his videos are and how much respect I have for his work. Jim is a humble guy and he was happy to help me out with the details of my order. Being new to muzzleloading there were some things I didn’t know.
When college broke for summertime I was already home, spending time at the hardware store, preparing my toolbox, and packing my car for a trip to Western Kentucky University. I arranged for a hotel, made a shopping list for groceries that week, fueled up, and took off on Saturday, June 5th. Class started Sunday morning so once I made it to WKU I drove around Bowling Green Kentucky to get my bearings and find out where the class was where I would be meeting everyone the next morning. I fell asleep in the hotel that night rewatching the same Kibler videos that had gotten me through the pandemic.
On Sunday morning I woke up and drove to the bay door that I had scouted out the night before. I was pretty early but one of my classmates pulled up too and we introduced ourselves and started unloading our tools. After a while, more people started to show up… then Jim Kibler pulled up, and slowly we packed out the little parking lot as a stream of other people started to arrive. My excitement level just kept going up and up because these are truly some of the greats. After a while, I took my things upstairs. I found the classroom we were supposed to be in, and when I came through the doorway I was staring Wallace Gusler right in the face. Of course, I had known that Wallace would be my instructor, but I would never totally shake my disbelief that I was there with him in person. Looking back on the experience some years later, it is still hard to believe that I was able to learn from him directly – and now, in retrospect, it seems that that may have been Wallace’s last year teaching at the seminar. For those of you who don’t know, I’ll try and do Wallace a little justice by just sharing a few of his incredible life experiences.
Wallace grew up in Roanoke County, Virginia, hunting arrowheads and developing a fascination for Native Americans and the Virginia frontier. By age 14 he had built his first flintlock rifle. Eventually, Wallace met Howard Sites, a final gunsmithing descendant of a family who had produced guns in Covington, Virginia, since the 1780s. Wallace worked around Sites’ shop for a short time, learning all he could, and after a while, he ended up turning his family’s chicken coop into a gunshop, fixing rifles for folks up and down the mountains. A friend of Wallace’s brought one of his rifles to Colonial Williamsburg. After his work was inspected, an impressed staff offered Wallace a job there. He arrived in 1962 and was named master gunsmith only two years later. By 1964 Wallace was teaching himself to forge weld rifle barrels- an art that had been lost to time. He resurrected it. Wallace became the first person in modern times to recreate the processes of making a rifle with 18th-century technology from start to finish. Wallace went on to become the curator of mechanical objects, then Chief Conservator of Furniture and Arms, and finally, he was promoted to Director of Conservation. Wallace never stopped teaching gunsmithing and returned to the gun shop in 1994. After a career of more than 40 years, Gusler still teaches, and I just can’t express how honored I am to have learned from him – albeit for only a week, and on a kit rifle, which is a significantly diluted experience.
So with, probably, the most qualified and all-in-all best instructor in the world, let’s just say I was excited to get started. I laid out my tools, met my classmates, and unboxed my kit. I was really excited to see the stock that Jim Kibler picked out for my kit. I had ordered Kibler’s extra fancy curly maple- a highly traditional, but rare and expensive piece of wood that has a harsh, wavy pattern running perpendicular to the grain itself. It’s a rock-solid piece of wood and it’s hard to carve, but once you’ve worked with this stuff you can easily see how frontiersman could have swung their rifle from the muzzle like a club. As I slid the lid off the box I caught my breath a little when I saw the striping and curl in this piece of maple. It was perfect. Beautiful. The fact that nature can produce something so intricate just absolutely blew my mind- it felt like a privilege to even have it there in front of me to look at, let alone work on. Before we really started working on the kits Wallace led our class down to the gun room, where various instructors and students had brought actual period guns and pieces of their own for us to inspect and use as inspiration for our own work. We asked questions and listened to stories for an hour and a half. I gained a lot of valuable insights during that conversation that will undoubtedly bleed into future videos. When the gun room was locked back up I went back to the classroom and worked through the lunch break, inletting the barrel.
Inletting occurs anytime you fit one thing into another. In gunsmithing, it alludes to a process of applying some kind of transfer color to one object before inserting it into another. In a flintlock, the barrel, for example, fits down into a piece of wood. The wood doesn’t come perfectly carved out, although Kibler kits are made on a CNC machine. CNC stands for computer numerical control, and it means that the stock and some of the metal pieces were made by a machine using a computer program. Jim Kibler’s CNC machines have incredible tolerances down to the thousandth of an inch, so the barrel did fit into the slot- but the humidity had made the wood swell a little, so I had to shave off minuscule amounts of wood to get a perfect fit. You do this by brushing on a thick, oily dye, called transfer color, to the bottom of the barrel and the upper part called the tang. Then you seat the barrel into the stock, clamp it so that it is tightly seated in there, and remove it. The dye marks the wood wherever there is contact, and then you shave it off in paper-thin amounts with a chisel. You keep doing this until the dye is coloring all of the wood evenly, which means there are no discrepancies and your barrel has a tight fit. In the period, gunsmiths used a candle flame to transfer soot onto the metal, then pressed it into place to achieve the same stamping effect using the carbon from the flame. Many muzzleloading gunsmiths still do this today. You do a little inletting for all of the metal pieces, like the trigger plate and the area where the entry thimble makes contact with the gun, or where the trigger guard fits into the stock, but the barrel is most important. If there are gaps here, along the tang or breach of the barrel, the barrel will have room to kick, and over time, the concussion can chip and splinter pieces of wood. You want the barrel to fit seamlessly with the stock.
Now for all this talk about the barrel, it stands to reason that I should provide a little more detail on it, too, since it is primarily the lock, stock, and barrel, that make a rifle. I got a 50-caliber rifled barrel, which means that the gun will fire a half-inch spherical lead ball. As the gun fires, that ball is pushed up through the barrel, which is rifled. Rifling is a series of grooves inside the barrel that spin the ball as it travels down the barrel. The ball will maintain this spinning motion as it flies through the air, giving it enough energy to stabilize it as it travels against wind, and at the end of its flight, a target. Rifling allows bullets to travel further and longer, and it was quite a technological advancement at the time. The common footsoldier for militaries in the 18th century would have carried a smoothbore musket, meaning the barrel was smooth on the inside, and these guns were inaccurate- line a bunch of men up, though, and fire lines of lead at each other, and you start to become deadly… the rifle is such an iconic piece of Americana because it allowed Americans, especially frontiersman and other backwoods characters, to break away from the traditional means of fighting in lines in open fields and better use the land: fighting from swamps, forests, mountains, and other areas where large European armies had a hard time maneuvering.
Once I had gotten the barrel to a snug fit, I turned my attention to the trigger plate, which didn’t take much, and then I filed any little burrs or machining marks off the trigger itself that were keeping it from moving easily in the trigger plate slot. The next step was a little daunting. With the barrel properly inlet, you want to insert it as soon as possible, because the wood that runs up through the muzzle is very thin, and every minute it spends in the open air, without a barrel to give it support – especially in a shared workspace – creates a lot of anxiety. I actually remarked to Wallace that if I were to break that, I would probably fall down and cry, and that’s not an exaggeration. I felt an intimate connection to that piece of wood the moment I saw it.
To insert the barrel and keep it there, they used pins in the 18th century. There is one screw in the tang of the barrel, at the breach, which connects to the trigger plate, putting a firm tension on the assembly where the actual explosion happens inside the barrel. The rest of the barrel, though, is held in with pins… The pins are a 16th of an inch in diameter, cut to the length of the barrel and stock combined, and inserted throughout the length of it. The pins don’t run through the actual barrel, of course, but through underlugs – little metal tabs that stick out of the bottom of the barrel. You fit these tabs into slots in the stock, drill holes through the stock and underlugs at the same time for the pins, then insert the pin stock and cut it down to size. I did this quickly without filing down the pins much because I knew I would be taking the barrel in and out throughout the build. I just wanted to make sure that the wood was protected. As I inserted the pins it became apparent that if the wood were to expand and contract with temperature changes, it could splinter around these pins, which were so tight in the hole between the wood and the underlug that it already made me nervous hammering them in an air-conditioned room, let alone a hot, muggy day in the field where the wood would be so swollen with moisture that things could get ugly fast. To mitigate the concern about expansion and contraction, gun builders insert a jeweler’s saw blade into the hole in the underlug and saw out the underlug so that it forms a slot, rather than a hole. This way, if the wood moves around the barrel, the pins can move with the wood. Using the jeweler's hand saw was difficult and tedious. I broke a few saw blades and gained an even greater appreciation for fine metalwork. That concluded my first day of class, but before I left the WKU campus that day I wandered around to other classes going on and peered inside, and got to chat with Wallace a little more.
On Monday, day two, I set about installing the buttplate and ramrod thimbles. The barrel would require finishing work later on, but that comes at the very end because you’ll be touching it throughout the build and it’ll just keep rusting up because of the oils on your hands. So my work with the brass buttplate and ramrod thimbles was really my first experience doing any kind of filing or metalwork of any kind. I had to do a small amount of inletting to properly fit the buttplate, and I just touched up the CNC holes with a file to get rid of some tooling chaff so that I could fit the thimbles. The real chore with those parts is filing off the rough exterior and large extra pieces called gates.
Brass pieces are made by pouring molten brass into a mold created by imprinting a finished piece into two blocks of damp sand that have a little structure to them. The sand blocks are combined and the brass is poured in, filling the imprint of the original. When you break those blocks apart there is a stem attached to the final product from where the brass was poured in, and that stem is cut off- but it leaves what’s called a gate- the base of the stem of metal from where it meets the finished piece- and these have to be filed down flush with the rest of it. The buttplate had two big ones. The brass itself is also a ruddy, dull color, and needs to be filed down the progressively finer files until it can be sanded lightly and polished to a shine.
I really started to get a feel for Jim Kibler’s experience and attention to detail that goes into every kit as I worked on the buttplate. To fit all those curves together is just so impressive- and the hole for the screw that holds the buttplate on from the top is slightly offset forward to help pull the buttplate hard into the base of the stock as you tighten it. Whatever little gaps were left along the edges were hammered down with the ball of a ballpeen hammer. Wallace helped me a lot throughout the brasswork since it was my first time working with metal. He also taught me how to file, since I had never done that on metal before- especially curving metal, like the buttplate, or fine bands of metal on the thimbles. As I learned, Wallace let me borrow his own files, which was an honor in and of itself, considering the spectacular guns those same tools have helped shape.
During lunch on Monday I stuck around the building at WKU and started to snoop around what other classes there were. There were people doing quillwork, building Jaeger rifles from scratch, and learning to carve rifle stocks. I also heard about another class that was learning how to forge shooting implements and tools.
After lunch, I attached some of the brass parts. Again, these are attached to the stock with pins, so I had to insert and cut down more pin stock. At this point, I had enough pieces attached to the stock that things were starting to look like a rifle. My brass still needed a lot of polishing and there was plenty left to do before the flintlock became operational, but under Wallace’s supervision, I attached the lock, fit the trigger, cocked it, and fired- making sparks. I was smiling like an idiot. It was my first time ever cocking a flintlock or pulling the trigger on one, and I loved the sound of the lock mechanism firmly clicking into place and I was really surprised about how much force was in the lock as I tested it and moved it from rest position to half and full cock. It’s a lot of energy in there. I was able to test the trigger and lock for the first time. I was really excited by how many sparks I got and how fast the lock was – there is always a slight delay between the trigger pull and the actual firing since a few things have to happen to ignite the powder. Still, the lock was so lightning fast that I knew the hangtime between pulling the trigger and firing the rifle would be minimal. I took the lock back out, heart racing at the realization that I was well on the way to having my flintlock rifle, and inspected the inletting- I had applied a real thin layer of transfer color to see if any of the lock’s internals were rubbing the inside of the stock. I have to say I was amazed that the lock fit right into the stock and barrel without needing any inletting at all. Some kits do, but mine happened to line up perfectly along the fine edges and aggressive drilling pattern behind the lock itself. I turned my attention to the trigger guard, filing and polishing it, then bending it slightly as needed to fit the two inlets where it is pinned into the stock. I also polished up the sideplate, which screws through the stock to hold the lock onto the side of the rifle. As class ended that day I made my third round past the other classes, this time asking people about their names and their work, making notes to google them all from the hotel so I would know whether they were really students or experienced craftsmen. I really didn’t want to fail to recognize someone if they had talent or skill- especially if I had seen or read about them before.
I kicked off Tuesday by making a beeline for the classroom and getting to work on polishing more brass. I also disassembled and polished the lock- the lock didn’t require any filing, but I did hit it with some abrasive paper to shine things up a little bit and smooth out any larger, flatter surfaces. Under a combination of Jim Kibler's and Wallace’s supervision, I disassembled the lock for the first time. At this point in the week, Jim Kibler was beginning to leave his carving class unsupervised for short spurts of time since they had become pretty self-sufficient and Jim was spending a little more time with us upstairs, answering questions about the kits and helping with small tasks. I learned a lot just from watching Jim demonstrate things to my classmates and I began to get more curious about his carving class. Jim had taken Wallace’s carving class back in the day, and when I figured that out I decided I would have to stop in downstairs and get a look at this multi-generational carving class going on. I spent a large portion of my morning and a piece of my lunch break with the quill working class after one of their students topped into our classroom and invited me to come take a look.
As soon as I walked in I started bumping into the people I had been reading up on online the night before. I shook hands with the folks responsible for the powder horn straps in the movie Last of the Mohicans and pieces of Mel Gibson’s outfit from the movie The Patriot. I met the owners of Crazy Crow Trading Post. I was amazed by the distances some of these people had traveled to be here- and they were all happy to provide dozens of insights on interpreting history and keeping old-school arts alive. I also met Simeon England, who has been featured on a few Townsends videos- I have followed his media for a long time and have a strong admiration for his work. It figures that he was a friend of Wallace’s. I followed Simeon and Wallace into the gun room to listen in on a discussion between two pretty learned individuals as they handled and inspected a few period pieces. Just listening in was very educational and I was able to soak up a lot of knowledge and begin to adopt the perspective that the professionals have. By this point in the class my amateurish excitement was beginning to change into a reverence towards the hard work and detail that goes into these rifles today- but especially a reverence towards the builders of the 18th century, who did all of what I was doing with old fashioned tools that they made themselves.
That day on my way out I made a point of spending about an hour in the stock carving classroom. Jim Kibler had already left for the day but many of the students liked to stick around. Never in my life have I seen such intricate work- but when I tried to compliment the men responsible they pointed out that they were simply copying the work of Wallace Gusler- there were a few plaster casts of rifle stocks floating around on the tables and one gentleman pulled out a laptop full of photos of original carvings that he was using for inspiration. In the Jaeger class next door I got to check out the incredibly detailed flintlocks that they were building up from stock blanks. There was a lot of really fine metalworking and engraving done on those, and one guy was even working on a double-barrel Jaeger- it was only his second build after a Kibler kit he had made, like mine. It was really inspiring to see younger students like him working alongside much older, more knowledgeable guys who had been in the world of muzzleloading forever. Everybody came together for this class, willing to help those who needed it while taking care of their own business, too. It was a great atmosphere in those other classrooms.
That night in my hotel room I started putting together a list of all the shooting supplies and equipment that I would need. I intended to show Wallace Gusler this list and let him cross things off or add to it. My writing this list actually turned into a whole separate trip to the NMLRA Spring shoot, but I’ll get to that later.
I kicked off Wednesday morning by starting a few new pursuits that had gone by the wayside as I got the main body of the rifle assembled, those being attaching my ramrod tip and installing my patchbox. These are quick, simple tasks for experienced builders, but it was all foreign to me. I’ll start with the more time-consuming of the two: the patchbox. Patchboxes are built into the stocks of some flintlocks as a functional little box for storing different shooting supplies. To the best of my knowledge, there aren’t many sources to verify EXACTLY what they carried in here, but by eliminating things by size there’s a pretty short list of shooting equipment that actually fits inside. Now, the box itself, this was actually carved out by Jim Kibler’s CNC machine- and the sliding door came pretty much as it appears now. Back in the day, this would have taken quite a bit of time- the dovetailing has to be cut and filed into the edges of the box and the lid, and the box itself would have been drilled with a hand drill and then chiseled out into a square shape. Sometimes patchboxes had a wooden lid, like mine, and sometimes they had a whole inlaid brass fixture around them, and a matching brass lid. The brass lids were commonly attached on a hinge and featured a spring release mechanism so that pushing a facet of the hinge of a false screw would pop the patchbox open. Builders liked to get artistic with their patchboxes and the little mechanisms inside, and camouflaging the release was popular. With patchbox lids made of wood, like mine, the release is really very simple, and there isn’t any camouflaging it. When you pull up on this little spring here, a little lip on it stops catching on the edge of the buttplate and allows the lid to slide out.
There are really small upgrades across this flintlock that I worked hard on and am really proud of, and the back on my patchbox is one of them. Some patchbox lids had smooth wooden backs, and slightly fancier ones had the brass to match the buttplate. I really like the aesthetic of the brass back so I asked Wallace to guide me through the process of affixing one. You start all this out by taking your patchbox lid- which, at this point, fits in the box nicely and moves in and out without any problems- and setting it on a piece of sheet brass. Then you trace the outline of it, including the little dovetails, and cut it out as close as you can with tin snips. From that point, it becomes a game of filing as you begin to get the brass to the shape of the piece of wood. This means filing down the sides, but also capturing the slight curve of the buttplate so that the patchbox lid doesn’t stick out so much. The notches in the dovetailing and the curve around the top are pretty hard to get perfect, so at a point, it becomes necessary to stop and attach the brass to the wood. You mark two holes, drill out the brass, and then reposition it on top of the lid and use a pencil to mark through the holes onto the wood. Then you predrill those holes into the lid itself. Once all your holes are drilled through you need to get two brass tack nails. You countersink the holes in the brass plate to accommodate the bottom half of the heads of those nails and then cut little barbs on the nails to keep them from ever sliding out of the hole, you hammer them in and use a rounded rivet peening tool to seat the heads of the nails into the countersink that you dug. After that, your brass is affixed, so you file down whatever edges are left, giving the brass that nice flat edge that aligns with the lid. The final step is filing down the heads of the nails so that they lay flush with the box lid.
The second pursuit that I mentioned was installing my ramrod tip. This piece is very functional because it contains the threads that will allow you to screw in attachments that you use while shooting and during the cleaning process. Your ramrod can take a beating, so it's also important that this tip fits on tightly. Once again, you attach the ramrod tip by drilling a hole through the metal and the wood, this time doing all of it at once, and then by countersinking the hole. The difference now is that you are countersinking, peening, and filing down the nail on both sides. This is pretty easy on the side of the nail with the head, because there is already some extra material there, but the side with the point is a little harder. Once you cut the nail down to size, you have to peen the metal so that it blossoms outward and into the countersink. I was really having a hard time with this, and Jim Kibler happened to have stopped in, so he took it away and got the metal peened out and into the countersink for me. I loved watching him work, I think his connection to every single one of these kits shows when he gets the chance to work on one. Once you’ve gotten it secured, you finish by filing, and since this is going inside my barrel I also hit it wish some abrasive paper to make sure there wasn’t anything jagged left over.
My work between the patchbox and the ramrod tip was broken up by the lunch break. During that time I had the opportunity to meet Jim Wright, founder of American Pioneer Video- the source of the infamous Longhunter DVD Volumes. American Pioneer Video has produced around 40 DVDs preserving the skills of America’s pioneers, featuring a laundry list of the best artisans and craftsmen living today, like Wallace Gusler, Herschel House, Mike Miller, and more. American Pioneer Video is now owned by Jason Gatliff, the publisher of Muzzleblasts magazine. I got to talk to Jim Wright and Jason Gatliff about their DVDs, and I was able to see the rifle built by Mike Miller in the making of the “Building the Daniel Boone Rifle” DVD. It was great to meet Jim and Jason and when I briefly shared that I had a YouTube channel of my own, they promised to give it a look. At different points throughout the rest of the class, I bumped back into both Jim and Jason- both told me my channel was looking great and encouraged me to keep on learning and growing. BOTH of these men insisted that a key piece to my growing was attending an NMLRA shoot. Shoots are more than shooting matches- they are huge fairs with vendors, reenactors, flea markets, food trucks, black powder sales for NMLRA members, and most importantly, an opportunity to buy all of the shooting accouterments that I needed from actual people- not their eCommerce stores- which would be tremendously important as I tried to figure out what to buy, compare prices, and seek advice. I promised Jason that I would find his booth at the Spring shoot at the end of the week, which would mean an overnight detour into Indiana on my way home from the rifle building class.
After lunch, I went back to finishing my patchbox and then sanded my ramrod down to a smoothness that would take stain. The afternoon was broken up by two lessons from Wallace. First, Wallace explained why curly maple has curl, and how to find it, harvest it, and turn it into a gunstock blank. It was a fascinating explanation that took about 25 minutes and involved a lot of drawing on a whiteboard. One of my classmates was a forester, and he shared a few insights, too. Throughout the class, I was struck by the way all of our skills combined to bring value to the experience- with a class of only three students, we had plenty of time to share our stories. Wallace also took some time that afternoon to pull the class into another room and show us some other artifacts. Once again I had the opportunity to touch real 18th-century history- this time of a Native American variety. I can’t thank Wallace enough for sharing that experience with us.
As class wound down on Wednesday these little slips of paper with Hershel House’s address started to circulate through the classrooms. Herschel House is another flintlock building great –it seems like everyone in the House family has made some kind of enormous contribution to the 18th-century historical community in some way. I won’t bore you with a full biography again, but suffice it to say that Herschel has been building rifles from scratch, full-time, out of a bunch of log cabins in the woods, since 1967. He’s a venerated member of this community and considered one of the best. So, to have an invite to a picnic at Hershel’s place was a huge honor. Everyone from the class was invited. As these little slips of paper with his address circulated, so did word that a whole other class had been out at his place building rifles from scratch for the whole week- some, even longer- and so this turned into not only a picnic, but an opportunity to see the entire Hershel House operation at full volume, with guns on every bench and all the cabins wide open.
It took about 45 minutes to get out there, into some pretty primitive, rural land- but this was an experience that instantly validated the drive. First and foremost I was struck by the number of people out there. Prit-near everybody from the various classes had shown up, and the House family hospitality was on full display- we had a huge potluck-style meal with drinks and desserts, all under tents and the canopies of big old trees that shaded all the cabins in Hershel’s backyard. After dinner, I asked for permission to film, which was granted by Hershel himself. I was able to shake his hand and we took a few pictures together, and I and a classmate thanked him for his contributions to muzzleloading and the preservation of American history.
From that point, I spent the evening meeting some very talented artisans, like Ian Pratt of my home state of Ohio, and others who had been out at Hershel’s place for days now working on rifles of their own. The flintlocks they were working on were being made from stock blanks up, like the Jaeger class back at the WKU seminar. I got explanations and walk-throughs of pouring a pewter nose cap, shaping gunstocks from wood blanks, shooting bags and powder horns, knives, general shop rules, and all kinds of insights on good old-fashioned backwoods living. The cabins and workspaces were crammed with tools and supplies, projects in various phases of work, and admiring students like myself. All in all, the scene was like some kind of hybrid between the 18th and 19th centuries with a few modern touches- my overall impression from this experience, as I thought about how little had changed on this property for the last 100 years, was that we really aren’t so far off from the past: a realization that is uncomfortable in that it discredits most of today’s innovation- but comforting in that there are still people living and working in the old ways, keeping those trades and techniques alive. If you like the whole Hershel House atmosphere, go check out their Facebook page- I’ve left a link to it in the description section of the video, and I promised the gentleman who runs it that I would send them a little traffic from my channel in exchange for letting me film throughout the night. As Wednesday came to a close I drove back to my hotel and fell asleep thinking about how nice it was to sit in Hershel’s biggest cabin, where the only light was thrown from a dying fire, and to look around and see nothing but flintlocks and the people who build them. I was really starting to get immersed in this world.
I kicked off Thursday morning by feverishly working to finish the polishing on my patchbox lid. With two days left, I was starting to count down the instructional time I had left with Wallace by the hour. Despite feeling rushed, I managed to keep every movement calm and didn’t show my impatience to finish the bigger, more important tasks, while I was there with Wallace. I remembered how excited I had been on the first day, and how Wallace had taken us to the gun room instead of diving into the kits, and so I did the unthinkable, and with about 12 hours of instructional time left, spent half an hour in the gun room. Having seen the hard work invested in years of decorative carving skills being shown off in the carving class downstairs, I didn’t have any delusions about carving up my stock while I was there in the class. I did want to get some simple moulding onto the rifle stock and patchbox lid, though, loosely mirroring some work Jim Kibler had done on one of his kits owned by Dr. Terry Leeper. Dr. Leeper was supervising the gun room and allowed me to look at Jim’s work. I returned to the classroom with a vision in mind and started by carving the moulding into the face of my patchbox lid. To do this I used a trick of Wallace’s- I took a thin piece of wood and drove a nail through it about half an inch from the end of the wood, then hammered the tip of the nail down so that it bent at a 90-degree angle. Then I sharpened the tip of the nail with a file so that it had a sharp edge instead of a pointed tip. By sliding this jig up and down the length of the rifle I could get perfect, uniform moulding lines that only had to be deepened with my knife and v-tool.
With that jig made up, and having carved the patchbox lid, I felt enabled to pursue the rest of my carving at home, which I mentally outlined as starting around the ramrod entry thimble and extending to the muzzle. As I quietly worked on my carving, Wallace talked about how to best care for your lock, and how to maintain the mechanism. He also spoke at length about the process of smithing one from scratch. After a while, Wallace left and returned to the classroom with a small glass case containing a few other artifacts, one being an original Virginia shot pouch. Throughout the class, Wallace and many of the other collectors had requested that we not publish any film or photos of their pieces- and this being an original piece made of LEATHER, which is SO rare, I know you might want to take a look at it. While I am not so bold as to disrespect my teacher or any of the other instructors and collectors from the seminar, there are many who have posted photos of the “Wallace Gusler Shot Pouch” online, so a quick search on the internet will bring up a picture of what I’m talking about. We discussed many of the features, like the adjustable strap, the button reinforced with an antler slice sewn into the leather, and the size and construction of the bag. I intend to make a bag like Wallace’s original soon, as my first shot pouch. I also took a look at some antler powder measures, a tow worm, which is a cleaning implement that attaches to the ramrod, and a few other pieces. Once again, I can’t explain what a privilege it was to handle and examine these pieces, especially since I have an eye for making my own in the near future.
At some point, the conversation returned to locks, and one of my classmates commented on how slippery a leather-wrapped flint is inside the jaws of the cock- the piece that falls forward when you pull the trigger to make sparks. Wallace answered by demonstrating metal engraving and allowing us all to try using his own tools, then, when I asked him, he carved sharp teeth into the jaws that hold the flint so that the leather wouldn’t slip around and cause the flint to fall out of the lock.
Opening up his box of engraving tools meant digging through a larger box of carving tools, and for the entire week up to this point, Wallace had been meaning to give us a lesson in sharpening and using chisels, gouges, and other woodcarving tools. Wallace’s tools were accumulated, built himself, or gifted to him by equally established artisans over years of working at Colonial Williamsburg. Where most carvers will use a single tool for a few different uses, Wallace had had the time to collect a tool for every single possible application. As a class, we learned about sharpening and proper care techniques, where to buy the best sharpening stones, and got to hear more stories about Wallace and his friend Gary Brumfield.
As we talked about carving, I commented that I was interested in adding some decoration to my cheekpiece, which is the little rise on the side of the stock that faces your cheek as you sight down the barrel. Wallace got out a book with photos of various rifles and I flipped through the pages until I found something that really spoke to me, which happened to be some cheekpiece work by John Philip Beck. I helped draw some of the lines for carving, but it was Wallace who stepped in to do most of the shaping of the cheekpiece itself, especially the deep filing that had to be done off the bottom corner- which I was afraid of slipping up on and marring the stock. Decorating the cheekpiece was one more thing that I was proud of because it made my rifle stand out from the simple trade guns and poorboy rifles of the time. The remainder of my time on Thursday was spent tidying up small pieces of the build using tools that I knew I wouldn’t have at home, like Wallace’s finer files.
By Friday, I had the remainder of my work cut out for me. I started by repolishing the lock since it had lightly rusted since I initially disassembled it earlier that week. Once I had shined things up again, I took the lock pieces to the bathroom down the hall and blued them in the sink. Bluing is a chemical process that helps protect raw metal from rust and adds an attractive, dark tone to the metal that we are used to seeing on gun steel in modern times. Back in the 18th century, people would charcoal blue their gun barrels, which leaves a spectrum of color like a puddle of oil, or even brown them with rust, which is essentially embracing the inevitable. I had seen many of my classmates do this bluing step already so I felt pretty confident with it- that confidence was aided considerably by the fact that I could strip the bluing off with some abrasive paper anytime and redo it. Jim Kibler had stopped into our classroom when I got back, and he approved of my lock bluing and discussed my options for bluing the barrel at length. Hesitantly, I concurred that the best option for barrel bluing was doing it at home, so while I put that off, I did require help draw filing my barrel- a process that smooths out the raw steel, removing any rust that has built up, and gives it a bright shine. Draw filing must be done at a perfectly horizontal angle to the steel so that the teeth on the file remove material uniformly. I was having some trouble with this initially, so Jim Kibler helped me draw file one of the octagonal facets in the barrel before stepping back out of our classroom to attend to his carving class downstairs. Drawfiling the barrel took me about an hour and a half, but it left me with a beautiful piece of steel to reinsert into the gun.
I knew I was bluing the barrel at home, but I wanted to keep the thin end of my gun stock protected, as I mentioned earlier, so I was anxious to pin the barrel back into place. I couldn’t put the barrel back yet, though, because it was time to sand the rifle stock. Sanding is a long and arduous process. You begin with a pretty low-grit sandpaper, which is courser, and get any dings or marks or dents out of the stock. Then you come back with progressively smoother sandpaper until the wood is so finely sanded that it feels like glass to the touch. At that point, you might think that the stock would be ready to take stain, but it's not- changes in humidity and the presence of moisture can cause the grain to rise and fall and become rough again. So to prevent a change in temperature or humidity from making the wood grain move, which would deface the finish, you wet the stock down once it has been sanded for the first time and then sand it again. Sure enough, the grain came rising up, and the wood gained a texture as though it had never been sanded. Once again I started with a course grit and ended with something smooth, and this time adding a coat of water didn’t cause the grain to rise so much. Some builders will do a few coats of water, but I was satisfied with mine the way it was at this point. A lot of my sanding was actually handled by one of my classmates, who saw that I was starting to get crunched for time and offered to handle a little bit of that grunt work.
At lunchtime, we all stopped and everyone who had been in a class on the WKU campus came together in a lecture hall to discuss what had gone well and what could be improved in future classes. Dr. Terry Leeper of Western Kentucky University was a driving factor in organizing the NMLRA seminar at WKU and one student presented him with a gift. It was a good discussion and as a new student, I was able to contribute a little to the conversation. Once that ended I took off for the classroom again. It was only the early afternoon but a lot of my classmates were packing up and leaving. Wallace reassured me that he would stick around and see to it that we finished Friday at 5 p.m., so that I got what I had paid for. On their way out, a few other students remarked at how Wallace was a man of his word – and I have to say that it meant a lot to me that he was willing to stick around for that three or four hours, especially given how much time he had already spent away from home. I knew he wanted to get back on the road.
We prioritized the attachment of my nose cap, which was affixed to the thin piece of wood at the top of the rifle in the same way that the ramrod tip had been attached- by drilling through the metal and the wood and attaching the tip with brass nails, cutting off and peening the pointed side into a countersink. During these few hours, Wallace also finished sorting through the list of supplies that I had written up earlier in the week, which meant that I could make the detour to the NMLRA Spring Shoot in Friendship, Indiana, on the way home, with a solid list of supplies that I would need to buy.
By around 5:00 I was packing my tools up and getting my rifle parts assembled and put into bags in anticipation of staining and finishing the gun and then assembling everything back home. The last thing I did before I left was ask Wallace to sign my stock someplace nondescript. He added his signature in the barrel inletting- the same signature he normally engraves on the barrel itself. With that done, I put my rifle into its box and carried it downstairs to the car, and helped Wallace carry his things down to his car, too. We shook hands before he left and said a few parting words and then I got into my car and started an uncertain drive to Friendship, Indiana, where I had been told there were no hotels, but that there might be a few sites open in the campgrounds there. I ended up finding a place to spend the night, and the next morning I was able to reconnect with Jason Gatliff from American Pioneer Video and Muzzleblasts magazine. I also met Mike Miller and ran into Simeon England again. Throughout the day I was able to get all of the supplies I had set out for… and I got some really top-quality stuff, too, like a bag mold for making bullets from Larry Calahan, who’s considered the best in the industry. I learned a lot from my discussions with different vendors and even managed to pick up some black powder from the sale there- which is restricted to NMLRA members. After about 5 hours of time spent at the Spring Shoot, I made the rest of my drive home.
The next day at home I started a new battle. I didn’t have a workbench or a shop, or even a vice- so it took me a little while to recreate the necessities from the classroom at WKU. I blued my barrel easily enough- I just cleaned it up again, degreased it, hung it from a tree branch in the backyard, and then hit it with the bluing solution. With the barrel finished I installed it in the rifle and then tried to remove it as little as possible.
The staining and finishing process for a rifle is a curiosity to almost everybody. There’s more than one way to do this, but one of the most traditional ways to finish a longrifle is using a solution called iron nitrate. Iron nitrate is also called ferric nitrate, or aquafortis in the gun building community- but chemically it is all the same: a combination of iron shavings and diluted nitric acid. The iron nitrate is brushed onto the sanded wood, where it dries, staining the wood a deep brown color. The stain seeps deep into the softer stripes of the maple grain and stays more to the surface of the harder ones, accentuating the natural light and dark striping and giving a rich color to the curl throughout the piece of wood. Once the stain is applied, though, things are a dull, milky sort of color. The entire gun stock adopts a muted green color, which is terrifying because you’ve put so much work into this project- but you have to stay calm and let the chemicals work. Once the Iron nitrate dries you can add another coat or continue forward in the process- I had done some experimenting on the back of my patch box trying to find the color I liked best, so I did put another coat on- which seemed to lighten the color instead of darkening it.
Then it comes time for the heating. A lot of you probably just cocked an eyebrow, but yes, I said heating... Iron Nitrate, when exposed to heat, deepens to a rust-brown color- at which point you can see the striping beginning to come out. The rifle is still nowhere near the glassy appearance that it has now, but at least it turns brown… I was feeling better and better about things as I waved my heat gun back and forth and watched that green color begin to fade. I was also careful not to burn any of the wood or scorch the chemical solution. You also need to take care not to get the solution into the inletting. Despite having a finish over top of it, the finished Iron Nitrate still has the ability to rust – any steel that touches it for extended periods is sure to rust up. For example, if you hit the lock inletting with iron nitrate, the interior of the lock could rust up pretty fast. Over the lifetime of a rifle rust at that volume could ruin the piece.
With the iron nitrate on and browned, and having been careful to keep it out of any inletting, I started to rub on a Permalyn finish. The finish is what gives the gun a shine and brings out the deep colors in the stain. When I first rubbed it on I caught my breath as the colors exploded across the stock. It was complete and total validation for the hours of research, experimenting, and hard work that went into the finishing process. I felt like the finish was worthy of the rifle and brought out its character. The coloring took a little different to my hickory ramrod but generally, the two colors were similar enough that I wasn’t too upset about it. This process takes a few days, as you apply iron nitrate, let it dry, then apply coats of finish which also have to dry- and you can’t speed up the process by putting the rifle in front of a fan because the force of the air will push any dust or particulate in the air into the finish of the rifle. I put on three coats of Permalyn sealer and didn’t add any finer finish, which is reminiscent of most firearms in the day, which were generally dull colors with low gloss so that they would best blend into the woods.
We don’t know everything about those period guns, though- there is still a debate over whether builders most commonly put finish in the inletting to seal out moisture or whether they left the raw wood exposed. One of the period pieces from the gun room at the WKU class didn’t have any finish in the intletting, so I didn’t seal mine- which means I might be vulnerable to humidity and things like that, but if they did it in the 18th century I can most certainly do it today. While I waited for the various coats of finish to dry I got out my wood-burning pen and burned Wallace’s signature into the barrel inletting, carefully marking directly over his pencil marks. It is a permanent but hidden reminder of all that Wallace taught me, and I really value knowing that his mark will be forever a piece of my rifle. Honestly, it sounds cliche, but it was such an honor.
With the whole stock finished it came time to reassemble everything, oil any metal, add grease to tension points in the lock, and pull the trigger on the assembled rifle for the first time. The lock snapped shut perfectly, throwing sparks, and the rifle felt solid in hand. They say any mistakes come out in the finish to haunt you, and mine did- there are a few areas of the stock where you can see where I had used a card scraper- which is also seen on period pieces, so I don’t feel so bad. There are a few minor dents, which I also don’t feel bad about, given that I have another 50-60 active years to pursue this hobby and put this rifle through the wringer. I still have a few things to finish up, like filing down the roughly sized pins and the front sight, but those are cosmetic changes that could go undone for the life of the rifle without affecting its function. I’ll get them done soon, though, and then the rifle will truly be complete.
I fired my rifle for the first time on July 25th, more than a month after leaving the class at WKU. That’s not to say that I didn’t finish it much earlier, but I was stumped as I looked for a local mentor to walk me through the shooting process, and I couldn’t find a piece of land with owners who were willing to let me shoot. But when I did get the chance to fire the rifle for the first time, I was in love... What an awesome experience, to fire a ball out of a rifle that you built yourself. One of my most prized mementos, then, is that first round, which I sunk squarely into the center of a split oak log about 30 yards away. I dug the ball out the next morning and it sits on my desk in my dorm room at school as a reminder of the entire build experience.
So, chronologically, that is the entire story of my building a flintlock. The experience didn’t stop with a finished rifle, though. I think back on the class every day and am staying in touch with Wallace and a few other big names that I met at the class. More importantly, as I reflect on the experience, I continue to extract lessons that I can apply throughout life.
First and foremost, I learned that experiences matter more than end results. I arrived at my class expecting step-by-step lessons on how the pieces of a flintlock come together. Instead, veteran instructors were more inclined to explain how things worked and why, only providing guidance on the physical work – that being how to actually assemble the gun – when it was necessary. This method of instruction sets the experience apart from all other workshops because the aforementioned ‘how’ and ‘why’ are the result of years of these instructor’s experimentation and research- so the true value in working alongside these artisans was the educational experience, not the finished product.
Second, I learned that no knowledge is useless. This was especially relevant as Wallace halted the class to provide more background and insight on flintlocks- at one point he stopped us all to explain how maple trees grow. I was impatient, I’m not afraid to say it- Wallace could probably tell- but I relied heavily on that lesson later when I began carving my rifle stock. Paying attention is returned with interest. Third, I came to understand that true perfection is unattainable. There is more to be desired in the attainment of all things. Even among the best craftsmen in the world, there are still imperfections, inefficiencies, and gray areas. There will always be uncertainty in the pursuit of perfection, but it is the above-mentioned experience and the knowledge gained along the way that brings excitement and purpose to the pursuit, not the actual achievement. I am of the impression that man’s purpose is rooted in pursuit rather than attainment, and to my mind, this class only reinforced that concept.
Now this might sound overly dramatic, but I view the assembly of my flintlock rifle as a microcosm of my own journey in life. A flintlock is a uniquely American piece of the past that I will carry with me into the future, just as I carry memories of my own past and my own family legacy to fuel the pursuit of my own American dream. The completion of a project that I perceive as being so closely related to my pursuits in life has brought me a tremendous sense of satisfaction and assurance in my ability to succeed as I venture into the frontiers of the personal and professional paths that I have chosen in life.
A constant theme throughout this project was exercising my maturity and developing social skills more fitting of an adult. A cluster of grown men working together in a machine shop building guns is exactly what it sounds like, and the social scene is what you might expect. As a 20-year-old, I learned to find commonalities with men who were between two and four times my senior. While I could not identify with complaints about arthritis pains, for example, I found that I had more in common with many of my classmates than I would have expected. I emerged from the workshop with new friendships forged in mutual respect, despite a vast difference in age.
Alongside the development of respectful relationships with adults, came the challenge of bonding with professionals and establishing rapport despite being an amateur. I was most definitely the only student in attendance at this workshop that had never actually fired a muzzleloading rifle before, and perhaps the only student who had never built one. I found a middle ground between asking questions and utilizing my own resources, like Kibler’s videos and the research I had done in preparation for the class. The workshop became a harmony of confronting my own uncertainty with trial and error and knowing when to seek mentorship.
Exercising my maturity and learning to confront my own uncertainties go hand in hand, but doing so while in the pursuit of something I am passionate about is what enabled me to gain a deeper understanding of myself and my place in the world. I truly believe that I would not have applied myself to these challenging lessons if they were anything but a flintlock-building class- this is a unique passion of mine and I hope it continues to enable growth for the rest of my life.
Finally, though I am intensely passionate about the time period, I was thus far under the impression that 18th-century arts are not a lucrative pursuit. I was wrong. During my class with the NMLRA, I was exposed to collectors who quietly shared the exorbitant figures associated with past deals on artifacts and artwork. I received direct instruction from craftsmen who regularly turn simple natural materials into dazzling pieces of America’s frontier past: rifles, tomahawks, beadwork, and quillwork -- some worth tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. An abstract and shockingly expensive hobby that I mistook for a money pit has been revealed to me as a highly respectable and very lucrative pursuit worthy of lifetime artisans. I hope to continue seeking mentors and spending time honing my skills until eventually I can begin commissioning projects for other people too, as a way to exercise my passion and provide people with historically accurate wares. This aspiration comes in conjunction with my desire to start a week-long historical experience in retirement, at the summer camp where I got my start in all this, which is an aspiration that I detail in my channel introduction.
