Several moves and several houses later, my dad fell into ill health and the rifle was sitting on a shelf in the basement collecting dust. I had been thinking a while on what we could do to preserve it. For father's day I decided to do a 'stabilization' of the wood and metal. The wood was so dry in places it was in danger of crumbling at the toe and all the iron parts showed a thick patina of rust and dirt. I consulted a few sources on how to go about cleaning up the old gal, and my brother and I built a display box to keep the dust and spider webs off of it.
One of the most interesting things you may note is a BULLETHOLE through the stock of approximately .22-25 caliber. We can't say if this was caused by a ricochet or by 'unfriendly fire' as the cause of it has been lost through the ages.
The ram rod was replaced sometime before 1900, and the nose repaired with brass (and not by a gunsmith, clearly a ‘home fix’) from the original iron fitting. The front sight appears to be silver and original to the rifle. The rear sight is pretty well worn but it points well, for being enormously front heavy.
After a good wash with a hot mix of Boiled linseed oil and turpentine the figure of the wood came out and you can see what a nice stock was under almost 200 years of dirt and grime. You can also clearly see that is indeed a bullet hole. I spent a couple days working slowly with paper towels and fine steel wool to get the gunk off and work that mix back into the stock and metal. The nipple is firmly rusted shut and the lock no longer works, though the set trigger does. I checked it for a charge by measuring the rod, and even dribbled some of the mix down the bore--but as you can imagine I don't HAVE a cleaning rod long enough to scrub it out completely.
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