yup, I have one I bought as a kit in 86 from Curly Gustomski, who has passed to the happy hunting grounds... It came with a full scale plan, which I still have somewhere.
It wasn't a finished in the white kit ready to stain and mount either, and it took me 9 months of tinkering to carve and assemble.
I carved acorns and oak leaves in different places, but this is the only piture I ever took of it so far.
I mix and match loadings in real FFg Goex powder to suit the tasks. For hinting deer with one .600 ball it eats 80 grains of FFg. For bench swept shot it eats mixed sizes of shot from a real antique Irish Snake charger I made a new leather tube for, which can varry shot loading amounts, and usually 60 grains of powder does that well enough to put birds in the oven.
Once I took a deer and somehow lost my knife, which that day was just my patch knife, so i skinned and gutted the deer with the flint. That worked as well as any knife anyway, so I was put out much.
Sometimes I use it for starting fire, and if it is loaded I stuff what's left of a feather in the vent, and use no powder at all, just a pinch of char cloth or touch wood if I happen to have any in my possibles.
It rains all the time in NH unless it is snowing, and so far this gun just works..
The English stock makes it something of a mule butt kicking SOB, but you can get used to it. The worst of that comes when you forgot you loaded it and go and load it again..
I did saw and file cut a rear dovetail for a rear sight, and so at events can't use any rear site, which caused me to make a spacer to fill the void when no rear sight is mounted of sterling silver.
Also I tossed out the steel ft site as ugly and made a sterling acron and added a blade to that which is soldered on.
The hardest part of the hit is soldering the "T" tabs on and inletting, then drilling for the pins. Take your good time there to make sure you will drill thru the stock and the tabs the first time.
I did, but have repaird guns like these for others who missed. That taught me how to braze on a soldered joint and not melt the solder, but it is a little tricky to heat sink off the heat and still get brass to flow.
Once the pin holes are drilled in the tabs, matching the wood it is a good idea to oval or elongate these holes fore and aft, which will prevent bending the pins and damaging the stock in recoil.
Another tip is to make a brown paper bag gasket at the breech end. This is easy to do. You trim down a papaer bag so it is longer than the lock mortice, and lay it in the breech channel of the stock, leaving the paper wider than you need..
Once you are ready to install the barrel again, wet the stick and the paper with boiled linseed oil and press the stock in. Install the tang screw, and the barrel pins and with a razor blade cut away any paper left hanging out.
The very last step in making the gun is drilling the touch hole. Make sure to mark the ram rod with the gun empty and compare that marking to the pan, to make sure the breech block is back far enough.
Then make sure your drill bites in higher than the bottom of the pan, so the hole is up a fair ways.. better than 1/8th up from the taper in the pan. Higher if the frizzen will allow it. This helps keep the priming from laying along side the vent, which if this occurs slows the firing a lot.
My Nor' West gun will go off if held upside down, before the prime can fall away.
Other notes are to drill for the butt plate nails before you go and drive them.
One tool you will want and is easy to make is a 1 inch wide flat file, a common bastard file, but you won't be filing with it so it can be old and rusty, clogged up and nearly useless. First gring the working end to a rounder shape, then heat that tip red hot and bend it to almost 90 degrees... You will have ruined the temper, but for the job it does it won't need to be tempered again. Then grind the rounded end on a step bevel of at least 60 degrees, and you just made a stock scraper which is used to woden and deepen the barrel channel in the stock.
A candle helps to blacken the barrel and show where the stock has any high spots, which you use that same tool to scrape off wood.
If the hit has walnut it is a medium hard wood, and the straight grain is easy to mess up in the dragon side 1/2 way inletting you will do, so again take the time to cut deep and sliver way easy.
You can expect the forward lock screw to mess up the fitting of the ram rod. Since you can't see and measuring inside the area is all but impossible i use a bit of candle wax, stuck to the ram rod and smoked in a candle to 'gauge' the area the screw is, where I can't see, and file a 'U' notch in the screw.
Some people file that U notch all the way around the screw, but I don't like the idea much. That makes it very easy to break off that screw.
The ram rod must be pulled out of the stock anyway before the lock screw can be removed.
If for any reason the ram rod hole isn't drilled already take great pains to get what ever you add to a electricaians bit to be all dead straight. Any wobble at all will drill off center and there is no telling where that will be!
