As a member of the Sons of the American Revolution, I regularly do living history presentations to schools and youth groups. As my ancestors during that war were Pennsylvania riflemen and gunmakers (Newhard, Kuntz and Moll), one of my classes is on the evolution of the long rifle from the original German Jaeger. Not owning a Jaeger, after a long search I purchased this percussion conversion in an internet auction as an inexpensive, rusted-out relic to pass around in class. Imagine my surprise to find this gem arrive in much better condition than I thought, so in addition to conservation efforts necessary for the piece will survive another 200 years, I’ve gone a step further to put it back into firing condition. I’ll detail all those steps, but first a before and after preview:






The first phase is dismantling the rifle, which in an old, pinned muzzleloader is a delicate process, as wood dating to the days before central heating has since shrunk around the inletting, and a combination of age and environmental conditions has deteriorated the lignin – the natural glue that holds the wood fibers together. The consequence is that old wood is tight and perhaps rust-bonded to the metal, is brittle and splits and chips very easily. Further, every time storage temperature and humidity changes significantly, the metal sweats moisture into the inletting, and when combined with petroleum compounds used to prevent rust, often causes the fragile wood of the inletting unprotected by finish to become punky and soft:



Often there are tradeoffs between getting the gun apart, which is necessary to conserve it, and causing some controlled damage, and I’ll show some techniques to minimize problems. First, I use Kroil penetrating oil liberally around the edges of all the inletted metal parts as well all pins, screws and bolts and allow them to soak overnight. I find this product to be among the best in its ability to break rust bonds between metal and metal and also metal and wood. I’ll clean it out of the inletting later.



Screw slots are cleaned of loose rust and debris using penetrating oil and dental picks, driver bits are fitted carefully, altering them on the grinder if necessary, and tapped with a hammer before applying torque. A light to moderate tap with the hammer often breaks the rust bond, preventing a damaged screw. Driving out rusted pins requires supporting the surrounding wood using padded clamps to prevent a bent or rusted pin from catching on the far side of its hole and splitting the wood.



Once I get into these old guns, I rarely regret dismantling them completely, as the amount of active rust here makes it clear this rifle wouldn’t survive another 200 years without proper attention.



Also interesting is attempting to date this rifle. The lock and drum are from circa 1850, but the screws were all hand-made using a screw plate, and date from well before 1840. The swamped barrel is extremely soft iron, and also is an earlier example. Yet I can’t find any evidence of the lock having once been a flintlock or being re-inletted into the stock. Nor can I find any information about the builder, whose largely illegible medallion shows a crown with the name IP (or JP) Roos-bach (or Roos-back) beneath. Further, it’s clear that the lock bolts have either been reused from the previous lock or were salvaged from another rifle, as they don’t fit the lock well. Hence I suspect a circa 1800 rifle needed restocking, and while they were at it converted it to percussion using a new lock with the original barrel, fasteners and furniture.




The worst case in disassembly is when a previously bent or rusted pin drives out the lug with it, causing further damage to the inletting. If a pin won’t budge after soaking, don’t force it. Use a Dremel Tool with a cutoff wheel to cut two slots in the ramrod channel to cut the pin so as to free the stock from the lug. It’s better to repair the minor resulting wood damage than to risk shattering the stock. In a firearm built or repaired prior to around 1900, any parts that are glued to the stock like this horn nose cap remnant, or suspected of being glued-in were done using hot hide glue, and the glue bond is easily released using light heat and a chisel to pry it free. Later repairs done using modern glues also respond favorably to heat (or steam using a sopping wet rag applied to the joint and touching the rag with a soldering iron), but sometimes they have to be cut apart, rejointed and reglued.



Before I stress the forestock by jointing it for the patch required at the muzzle, I repair the several minor cracks up and down the barrel inletting by coating the barrel with paste wax as a release agent, and cleaning and gluing the several old cracks using marine epoxy with the barrel mounted so I have something substantial to clamp to. The cracks are cleaned with trichloroethylene solvent and a toothbrush, are allowed to dry, followed by an application of walnut-dyed epoxy in two coats. The first coat is applied thin and allowed to soak in for 15 minutes, followed by a second coat thickened with a high-density filler like cabosil. I prefer West System, but others will work as well, including Acraglass. Paste wax works well as a release agent, and is easier to use than the alcohol-based commercial preparations. Wild tales about gluing actions to stocks and having to whittle them off are exactly that, because releasing epoxy-metal bonds is easy. Raising the temperature of the metal to 200 or so degrees using a soldering iron or torch easily releases the bond to metal, and with no ill effects to the epoxy. If this rifle were going into a museum, I’d use period hide glue. But in private hands, I can’t predict its future, and this thin forestock of brittle old walnut needs all the help it can get if this rifle is to be fired again regularly. In addition to high strength and not requiring clamping pressure, epoxy also glues to its old residue similarly to hide glue. So if these repairs ever crack again, they can be reglued without further damage. In turn, never, ever use polyvinyl acetate glues like Titebond on a valuable antique, as they can’t be successfully reglued or even reversed. While the glue is curing, I perform minor tasks like cleaning the old tallow out of the patchbox.



Next I measure and cut the patch for the muzzle (here you can see my previous epoxy repairs in the old cracks). Saving period wood scraps salvaged from previous antique repairs is useful, but the most important factors when making a patch are accuracy in matching the grain and cutting the joint, and the easiest material to acquire for this purpose is a turning square intended for lathe work. A turning square of the same visual grain density provides a long length of two vertical and two flat-grain faces to find a section of grain that best matches your needs, and you can always age and dye the final, sanded surface later to get the color right. As they are relatively inexpensive, you can purchase several from different vendors to have a better selection of natural colors and grains. Here I’ve selected the section of a turning square that best matches the forestock, and have turned it down on the lathe and bored it using a Forstner bit to save time over gluing on a larger hunk of wood and having to whittle off everything that doesn’t look like the forestock. As the gluing surface is small and the old wood relatively fragile, this is the best approach for this rifle.



Here I’ve jointed the broken surface to dead straight and flat using a block plane, and am carefully fitting my vertical-grain patch to align it with the grain of the forestock.



Enough can’t be said about grain alignment in regards to both strength and cosmetics. The stock on this Jaeger was expertly cut from a tree crotch – when the forestock is aligned with the strips of my laminated benchtop, you can see the bend of the buttstock’s grain at the wrist, aligning the grain (and strength) of the wood perfectly to the moment of effort and stress of the stock. This also prevents the cracked toes so commonly seen on full-length rifle stocks. When making a full-length stock from scratch, if you can’t find a blank cut from a proper crotch, you can achieve the same results by rough-shaping the wrist and heat-bending the stock. I have a detailed article on how to do this on Wiktor Kuc’s “WK Fine Tools.com” website. After glueup, the first step in fitting the rough patch is inletting the barrel, which isn’t straightforward with a heavily-swamped barrel. Hence I’m using an alcohol lamp burning mineral spirits to apply soot to the barrel to mark the high spots for paring, a slow but accurate process.

Continued...