The blackpowder rifles that come out of Hershel House’s workshop hidden in the Kentucky backwoods aren’t just exacting, made-from-scratch re-creations of true frontier guns. The home-forged springs and screws, the hand-carved stocks, the focus on function and reliability embody the history of America. By 1780, the American frontier was changing. In Kentucky and Pennsylvania and Virginia, in much of the old Ohio Territory and the big woods of Tennessee, the baddest of the big game was largely gone. The eastern wolves that terrorized the earliest settlements had nearly vanished, and so, too, the elk and bison. Bear and mountain lion remained, and deer. But anywhere the ring of an ax was heard, the report of the blackpowder rifle followed. The frontier had opened up. A man no longer needed a gun designed to hurl a thumb-size hunk of lead into the nearest redcoat or hidebound predator or painted Shawnee warrior. He needed a gun stingy with lead and easy to fix and accurate enough to fill a bag with squirrels so he could feed all his kids who busied themselves clearing trees for another field of corn. Once the scary animals and natives were pushed from the verges of the American frontier, a man no longer needed a big-bore thunderstick. He needed a rifle like the flintlock Hershel House makes today, in the 21st-century hills of central Kentucky. Wood, Iron, and Flame Hershel House (above) is among the world’s most celebrated flintlock rifle makers. He lives on a wooded knoll overlooking the broad Green River floodplain valley just outside tiny Woodbury, Ky., where he was born and raised. His heavily timbered property is littered with relics. Swages and coal forges crowd together under shed roofs. Parts, pieces, and entire Model A’s are stored under soaring oaks. His workshop is like a cluttered, narrow grotto, situated on the other side of a dogtrot porch of a hand-hewn.
Creating a Sliding Wood Patch Box Back By Jerry Crawford, Alfred, Maine I’m a novice at gun building. This is my very first scratch build gun, if you don’t count the still unfinished gun I used as a class room learning tool at my masters shop a few years ago. Now working on my own at my home in Maine I have occasionally been daunted by some of the small steps necessary to put together one of these beautiful guns. Luckily I can get on the internet now and ask questions here on the American Longrifle web site and from friends around the country who are masters at this hobby. I wanted to share my learning curve with you about one of the mysteries of gun building; the sliding wood patch box lid. This article describes my progress in photographs and text. Along the way you will notice some methods-of-work tactics that may seem unusual for gun makers but are fairly common place to cabinet makers or home grown woodworkers such as myself. The use of the Dremmel as a router is an example. Not only is it a time saver in the hands of an experienced user, but in the case of this wood in this particular gun stock the router made short work of the knarly grain which is hard as rock and very prone to splintering or chipping. For the same reason I also have a box full of “special” files that I have bent to conform to special shapes or fabricated into floats for molding, and a few bottoming chisels I learned I needed to inlet locks. There is a down side here however; in inexperienced hands the Dremel can be very destructive. In an instant it can ruin a piece of wood or a gun stock. And, you spend a lot of time creating different shaped chisels or file floats you might not use again. I suggest before you begin to make a sliding patch box lid read everything you can get your hands on about it. That will begin to give you an intellectual foundation for the task and it is how I learn best.
I’ll gladly shoot anything that goes bang! I own my share of modern firearms and I enjoy shooting them, but, when I was 17 years old, I shot my first blackpowder gun and I was hooked. It was slow, messy and smelly in other words it was totally fun. By the time I was 18 years old I owned my first muzzleloading rifle, and it was just the first of many. I was always striving to get more authentic looking rifles, but I quickly discovered that all of the commercially available, mass-produced flintlock rifles were sadly deficient in the authenticity department. I really wanted a custom longrifle. Unfortunately, custom-built longrifles are expensive. My solution was to make my own, and over the years I’ve built a number of muzzleloading rifles. I’ve gotten to the point where I can make a longrifle that doesn’t cause me to hang my head in shame, but I’m not even close to being a master craftsman. For a long time, my desire for a custom-built flintlock rifle was shelved in favor of things like putting food on the table, shoes on my kids’ feet and funding a pair of college degrees. But, as time passed by, the boys finished college and got themselves jobs. Pretty soon, they had their own places and were buying their own shoes and hamburgers. And lo and behold, I started seeing something I wasn’t used to—money in the bank at the end of the month. So, on my 59th birthday, I decided that I had waited long enough for a custom rifle. I called up David Crispin, who lives about an hour away from me, and set up a meeting to plan out my custom rifle. To reach out to David Crispin and learn more about his custom shop, please email dpcrispin@gmail.com or call. Researching The Build These days there are probably more people handcrafting flintlock longrifles than there were in 1776. Many of these craftsmen are turning out exceptional work. In fact, a good number of them are as.
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