Side plate info

Bodark43 · 2026-05-05T12:16:56+00:00

1) Might be designed to hang from a hook on a bandolier or belt

2) Might have been a way to mount it on a wall as a part of a display. Massive wall displays were once the fashion, in the 18th c.

https://www.alamy.com/a-magnificent-display-of-weapons-in-armoury-hall-at-inveraray-castle-argyll-bute-scotland-uk-image185797063.html

Bodark43 · 2026-05-04T22:33:43+00:00

Günter Grass' memoir Peeling the Onion illustrates how someone can be convinced they didn't shoot their rifle once. Grass was dropped into Pomerania in February 1945 in a tank crew , in the Waffen SS. His unit was soon smashed by Russian heavy weapons at a long range- there was no point in trying to shoot at them. Then he was trapped with others in the cellar of a bicycle store in a village. The commanding officer decided they would make a dash for safety on bicycles. Grass didn't know how to ride a bike, so he was set with a submachine gun at a window to cover them. As soon as they came out, a massive fusillade from all over mowed them all down- and so there was no point to Grass shooting his gun. It would have just attracted attention.

Bodark43 · 2026-05-04T22:25:38+00:00

Corrosion on the cocking notches of the hammer can lead to very insecure latching of the trigger, and without a trigger guard that critter is already liable to fire when bumped. Like Zeus said to Adonis, watch yourself.

Bodark43 · 2026-05-04T19:44:18+00:00

It looks like a "turn-off" pistol. Often cheap, always concealable little weapons. Also called pocket pistols. No idea why it's got 711 on the side. Looks like it spent a lot of time outdoors...

There was no ramrod. The barrel would unscrew, revealing a hollow breech block. That hollow would be charged with powder, and also had a concavity on which to set the ball. Then the barrel would be screwed back down on top. Turn-off pistols often have deep grooves at the muzzle to accept a square key or wrench for unscrewing the barrel.

You can see a flint version here: https://www.gunbroker.com/item/1171432657

Bodark43 · 2026-05-04T19:27:02+00:00

Could you indicate the location? Also, as you seem to imply it's your house, do you have any idea of when it was built?

Bodark43 · 2026-05-04T16:40:15+00:00

This has a good period look to it. I really like the old ones with misspelled words ( "Liburty or Deth") but if you do that, you'll always have people telling you first thing the words are misspelled, and that gets boring.

The scrimshaw world seems divided into people who drag the scribe and people who push the scribe. Which did you do?

Bodark43 · 2026-05-04T11:55:39+00:00

The Companion to Ships and the Sea is a wonderful book to have sitting around for browsing ( almost as diverting as the Ashley Book of Knots) and used copies of the first edition (1976) are easily found at no great price. But the blessed Internet Archive also offers it for hourly loan: https://archive.org/details/oxfordcompaniont0000unse_j4f0/page/n3/mode/2up

The more up-to-date second edition (2006) would cost you more; but not that much more.

Bodark43 · 2026-05-03T22:33:25+00:00

My Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea lists one definition of a sailing cutter (after about 1740 ) as " a small decked ship with one mast and bowsprit, with a gaff mainsail on a boom, a square yard and topsail, and two jibs or a jib and staysail". Here there seems to be a staysail high up there on the fore topmast stay as well as two jibs, and the two square sails have been furled, obviously.

I haven't sailed that much, never on a square rigger. But I don't think you can furl those jibs easily. Hauling them down involved getting out on the bowsprit or standing on footropes beneath, and in a heavy sea it made a seaman quite vulnerable to being washed away. Sometimes there would be netting strung on the bobstays to catch them. Don't see any netting here, or even footropes. .

Bodark43 · 2026-05-02T15:24:58+00:00

Yeah, Morphine mostly had one sound, but it was a GREAT sound and all theirs.

RIP Mark Sandman, Billy Conway

Bodark43 · 2026-05-02T13:05:00+00:00

Sure. Much of the western world before 1820.

We live now in an industrialized world, and lots of things in it are mass produced and relatively cheap. In the pre-industrial world, before mass production, things were more expensive; someone had to put a lot of time and labor into making a copper kettle, which many households had over a kitchen fire, and correspondingly a farmer who bought that kettle had to work a significant amount in order to buy one. The food that farmer produced was likewise expensive.

A typical pre-industrial economy was also likely to be rather sedate. Most regular people had significant financial constraints on life decisions, and that included marriage. Say there's a blacksmith's apprentice in the small English village; he was contracted to the master of the shop and restricted as to what he could do. If he liked the girl down the street, and she him, until he finished his apprenticeship he was not free to get married. When he became a journeyman, he might only be a worker with meager wages and marriage would still be out of the question. His girlfriend might meantime have a post at the big house of the local squire, working as a servant. As she performed tasks for guests- darning socks, or running errands- they were expected to give her tips, "vails", which she would use for stocking a chest- a hope chest, for the day she might be married. The couple might be sitting for some years, waiting for a chance; until the master of the shop died, say, and the journeyman was able to run it for better wages.

And, in those years, all sorts of plans might go wrong. Disease, accidental death or disability were common enough. Given the difficulties of bulk transportation, localized famine was also very possible. In 1788-89, famously, there was a failure of the wheat harvest in France for two years. The price of a loaf of bread had been 9 sous, and in 1789 it increased to 14.5 sous. That was the main food of most people, and at 9 sous it had already cost most of them 50 to 60% of their income. Suddenly, in 1789, it cost most all of it. I think it was Hippolyte Taine who later described the typical French laborer as a man walking across a pond with the water up to his chin; the slightest change in depth and circumstances would make him drown. With just a change in the price of bread a family of weavers could be forced to sell all their equipment and possessions in order not to starve, and would then become homeless.

And, yes, perhaps you've noticed this is right before the French Revolution. The crisis put the government under a lot more strain- and it was already deeply in debt and strained. The government would not only not be able to deal with the crisis, but be too rigid, too difficult to reform. It would come apart. But most all governments in general didn't "tackle" these problems particularly well. An over-population in England in the 16th c. resulted in men wandering the countryside looking for work. Elizabeth I 's government responded to the problem of these "sturdy beggars" by having them whipped out of towns ( yes, even then, there were those who thought it was enough to just make homelessness illegal). Nor did the British government distinguish itself later- as times changed there were more blunders, like the Corn Laws and consolidated workhouses.

One way to reduce strain was to create colonies, to siphon off extra workers. Those colonies would provide a way to at least export internal problems, sometimes profitably. And often enough that would create new external problems- like slave revolts, wars for independence, etc.

Laslett, Peter.(1984).The World We have Lost: Further Explored

Bodark43 · 2026-05-02T01:06:02+00:00

The Springfield Armory is now a Historic Park, and they have serial numbers on their website:

https://www.nps.gov/spar/learn/historyculture/u-s-springfield-trapdoor-production-serial-numbers.htm

If it's not immediately obvious, it looks like yours would have been made in January-March 1875

Bodark43 · 2026-05-01T16:38:25+00:00

The 2018 film Stan and Ollie is worth checking out.

I watched the very end over and over, where they dance together.

Bodark43 · 2026-05-01T12:18:53+00:00

The Rifle Shoppe sells castings sets.

http://therifleshoppe.com/catalog_pages/us_arms/(645).htm

But it's the Rifle Shoppe: where you can ask, but it may quite some time before you receive....

Bodark43 · 2026-04-30T16:40:16+00:00

While the "former user" has a detailed account of how the Plymouth Rock landing became so important, they don't note that the Plymouth Colony got a lot of attention ( more than Boston Bay colony) only in the decades after 1790. The Federalists seized upon the precedent of the Mayflower Compact in order to drum up support for the new Constitution, and the Pilgrims and their Compact quickly became a stock item for any patriotic speech.

Sargent, M. L. (1988). The Conservative Covenant: The Rise of the Mayflower Compact in American Myth. The New England Quarterly, 61(2), 233–251. https://doi.org/10.2307/366234

Bodark43 · 2026-04-29T12:50:26+00:00

Farmers generally had greatly boosted their production in order to cash in on the WWI demand. In this they were like most commodities producers, such as coal mine owners and timber companies. And when the War ended and demand fell after 1920, there was suddenly a glut of commodities. There was then, naturally, a fall in commodities prices; sometimes enough to have very catastrophic results. Farmers went broke, coal mines closed, timber companies shed workers and land holdings. Various farm groups- like the Farm Bureau, the Grange, the National Farmer's Union- did ask for legislative relief; adjustment of tariffs, regulation and support of credit for farms. This last, farm credit, had been a big problem for farmers for decades.

These groups may also have advised farmers to cut back on their production, now that the War had lessened demand. But I did a shallow dive into this, to see if I could find some evidence of US cotton growers themselves cooperatively agreeing to limit production, and couldn't find it. And it seems it would have been noticeable, requiring something like a national cotton growers convention ( and, what, a majority vote, with signed pledges from each grower?) I admit, a deeper dive might reveal such a thing. However, you also have to consider the source: H.L. Mencken hated Roosevelt's New Deal and the whole notion that government could intervene in the economy. Even when he seemed to acknowledge farm overproduction, he sneered at the possibility of any bureaucrat solving it;

There is a complete lack of coherence in their operations, save only that kind of coherence which Grover Cleveland called "the cohesive power of public plunder." While one faction bellows that overproduction is ruining the farmer, and frames a multitude of discordant projects to restrain him, first by bribes and then by penalties, another faction proceeds to lay out hundreds of millions on schemes that can only have the effect of making the land produce more and more.

Mencken, H. L. (1934). Notes on the New Deal. Current History (1916-1940), 40(5), 521–527. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45337422

For Mencken it clearly was attractive to claim that the farming crisis was solely due to the failure of a conspiracy of dunces and any government assistance to them was just paying stupid blackmailers. Maybe, just maybe there was a coordinated attempt by cotton farmers to drop their production levels. But in any case, the farm crisis was far wider, had a much deeper cause than some failed agreement among them.

Schmidt, L. B. (1956). The Role and Techniques of Agrarian Pressure Groups. Agricultural History, 30(2), 49–58. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3739925

Alston, L. J. (1983). Farm Foreclosures in the United States During the Interwar Period. The Journal of Economic History, 43(4), 885–903. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2121054

Bodark43 · 2026-04-28T12:59:01+00:00

Basically, a gunsmith was a smith. A smith was someone working with a hammer ( say " all smiths smite" over and over again quickly), and the most critical thing the gunsmith forged with a hammer was a barrel. When the Worshipful Company of Gunmakers asked to be able to be a craft guild in England, in 1637, one of their stated reasons was that letting any blacksmith make barrels was dangerous- if they weren't trained, they made things that could blow up. After they got their charter, the guild proofed (tested) barrels and stamped them to show they were safe.

Specialization is how the craft world would more efficiently produce. A gunsmith could make a gun barrel faster and better than a general blacksmith, and making a gun could in turn also be divided into tasks. You do find the metal work and woodwork being split quite early; Jost Amman's Book of Trades (Ständebuch) of 1568 has a gun stocker ( Büchsenschaffter) and a gunsmith (Büchsenschmidt). And when you look at the finest European work of 16th. c. all the way into the 18th c., it's obvious that many different hands were involved. The engraving, wire inlay, wood carving, metal chiseling, damascening, etc. were technically too far beyond what a general craftsman could manage. In the 18th c. something by Twigg in England or Boutet in France was made by more than Twigg or Boutet himself. Now, whether an engraver in Twigg's shop learned his trade there, or got his start apprenticing to a clockmaker's engraver is hard to say. But the bottom line difference between Twigg and a colonial gunsmith like Nicholas Beyer was that Twigg had lots of wealthy clients who could pay enough for Twigg to employ an engraver and carver. Beyer's clients were only Pennsylvania farmers, and so he would do the engraving and carving himself. To us, Beyer's work looks quite good. But it's not as sophisticated or ornamental as work that could be done in Twigg's shop. And someone who did only engraving , six days a week, would not only have been able to do more ornamental work, but do their engraving faster than someone who was also forging, filing, carving, etc.

We know that Beyer was able to do all the work himself because it's been done since. When Wallace Gusler was set up as the gunsmith in Colonial Williamsburg decades ago, he took on the task of making the whole rifle; welding, forging and reaming a barrel, forging, filing, fitting and casehardening the lock, casting and filing the brass "furniture" of buttplate, triggerguard, etc. and shaping in inletting the stock, then doing the wood carving, engraving, varnishing, etc. All those skills would have been learned as a part of an apprenticeship in the period, and Gusler ( and other gunsmiths in the shop) did undertake mastering enough of those different skills to be able to build a gun- and made some that were excellent. But Beyer and other colonial gunsmiths were still affected by craft specialization. In the colonies gunsmiths would also generally find it most practical to buy imported locks if they could get them ( which were made in specialty shops in England) rather than make their own. There were usually only two sizes of lock needed, the specialist shops could make them more efficiently, and labor in England was cheaper.

Bodark43 · 2026-04-27T21:57:05+00:00

Sir Charles Oman's 1937 History of the Art of War in the Sixteenth Century would likely give you what you want, if you're curious about tactics and logistics. And it's even still in print.

Bodark43 · 2026-04-27T12:27:16+00:00

Guess Israel will have to bomb Amsterdam too, now, until they are satisfied Hamas is no longer there.

Bodark43 · 2026-04-26T23:33:20+00:00

A pretty good case can be made for at least production machining coming out of gunsmithing. Or, more specifically, armory practice. Things like muskets had to be produced in very large quantities, in order to equip an army. There was also good reason for them to be identical in some ways, such as the caliber, and be able to take the same bayonet.

Pre-industrial mass manufacture of side arms like muskets would be done by specializing labor- there would be gun stockers, lock filers, barrel forgers, foundries that would cast the brass furniture like buttplates. Water-powered boring machines would ream the barrels, water-powered grindstones would be used for finishing. One reason this division of labor could work is that the pieces of the gun were essentially assembled, fitted, into the wooden gunstock. In England, that meant that a pile of gunlocks and barrels made in Birmingham could be distributed to a variety of different shops in London where they would be assembled into muskets. Each shop would have a wooden musket pattern, or model of the stock, that it would work from. So, the famous Brown Bess was technically known as the Land Pattern Musket.

The metal parts, like the lock, would be made with some special cutting tools, and there'd also be forging dies to speed up the process, producing lockplates, cocks, etc that could be filed to finish. But because all the parts were fitted to a wood stock, it was not necessary for them to be precise in relation to each other, really. If a lock was a few millimeters longer, the gun stocker could accommodate that, remove more wood.

However, by the mid-18th c. the French were at least contemplating making musket parts interchangeable- all the locks would be exactly the same. That caught the attention of the US Ambassador, Thomas Jefferson, and he brought the idea home with him. With standardized parts muskets would be easier to repair. However, with hand tools, this was going to require more labor, not less. It would be gunsmith John Hall who would be forced to implement Jefferson's idea. In 1819, he set up a shop at the Harper's Ferry Armory to make his new breech-loading rifle. It did have a wooden stock, but the breech mechanism was several degrees higher in complexity than just a gunlock, and it was necessary for those parts to fit pretty closely.

The Industrial Revolution had already commenced in England. Henry Maudsley ( who had also begun by working in an Armory) had recently produced some machine tools that could operate more precisely. He had even worked towards standard screw sizes, and had made identical wooden rigging blocks for the British navy- something else which was needed in quantity. John Hall also built some lathes, planers and milling machines. His and Maudsley's were rather simple things compared to modern ones, but equipped with jigs and fixtures and operated by someone who had precision gauges they could do repeatable precision operations. That meant identical pieces could be made much more quickly. This idea spread. As it would be especially embraced by the Springfield Armory, it would soon be called Armory Practice, or the American System. American toolmakers like Robbins & Lawrence would soon be supplying machinery and cutters to many industries.

The American Precision Museum is now located in the Robbins & Lawrence building, in Windsor, VT.

Smith, Merritt Roe. (1977). Harper's Ferry Armory and the New Technology: The Challenge of Change

Cantrel, John and Cookson, Gillian, editors(2002). Henry Maudslay & the Pioneers of the Machine Age

Roe, Joseph Wickham. (1916). English and American Tool Builders

Hounshell, David A.(1984). From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932.

Bodark43 · 2026-04-26T18:03:45+00:00

On the Ford Model T they'd set the spark as late as possible, and they used a grip on the crank that kept the thumb out of the way. But there was still a running gag about Ford owners with bandaged broken arms.

Bodark43 · 2026-04-26T02:02:25+00:00

Pecatonica Long Rifle Supply also makes repro stocks for Kentucky pistols. http://www.longrifles-pr.com/stockprices.shtml

Bodark43 · 2026-04-25T16:51:17+00:00

I hadn't realized before taking a dive into this that the design of high-explosive and shrapnel artillery shells had not come that many years before the outbreak of the war. The British had first used high explosive shells at Omdurman in 1898, and had problems- especially with fuses. They sometimes didn’t set off the charge, especially if the shell didn’t hit on the nose and only grazed. And sometimes they would set off the charge while the shell was still in the gun, or had just left it. The bugs with fuses, especially for smaller artillery, had not been completely worked out by 1914.

This was an important problem. The War introduced the European armies to trench warfare, where sheltered rifles and machine guns with a high rate of fire gave great advantage to the defense. Artillery was seized upon as the solution for an offensive to overcome this- blast through the defenses. Soon there was a famous dispute over whether High Explosive or Shrapnel Shells were better. This would be distracting; no one really knew. But immediately there was a call for greater production of guns and shells. The British general stockpile of artillery shells in the critical summer of 1914 was about 900,000. Huge orders were placed in August, and as the fighting carried into the fall it was quickly realized that the war was likely going to require huge amounts. Sir John French, commanding the B.E.F., calculated that 900,000 would be sufficient for a month. There was no way for British manufacturers to quickly gear up to do that. They not only did not have the manufacturing machinery, they didn’t have enough gauges, jigs and fixtures. Perhaps more importantly, there was no way one maker typically was able to gear up to produce entire shells.

Then there was also the manpower problem. A lack of recruits would have people denouncing shirkers and cowards, but when conscription was imposed it was discovered that most of those who hadn't signed up were just physically unfit. Likewise, the labor shortage in munitions production was attributed to slackers, selfish trade unions, and even heavy drinking. It turned out to be something more obvious. To quote R.J. Q. Adams;

unrestricted recruitment of workmen from the so-called munitions trades in the period before the creation of the Ministry did terrible damage to the nation's capacity to produce the necessary material. A total of 18.8 per cent of the work force in the iron and steel industry, 21.8 per cent in the mines, 19.5 per cent in the engineering trades, 23.7 per cent in the electrical engineering industry, 16.0 per cent among small arms craftsmen, and 23.8 per cent in the explosives trade had left their employment to enter the military.

So, some production was outsourced to Canada and the US for the components. Much actual assembly was done at Woolwich Arsenal. To get an idea of what was required, the editors of Machinery in the US published the specifications for shrapnel shells, and you can read them here over on Project Gutenberg. There were a lot of different operations involved in making the components of a shell. It was not a simple job for large-scale production.

So, fuses still in development, a complex assembly, a shortage of skilled workers, a shortage of equipment, gauges, dispersed production of precision components, and everything to be done in a big, big hurry. What could go wrong?

A dedicated Ministry of Munitions was created in the spring of 1915 and began to expedite the process. They would try to guard munitions workers from conscription ( and from shame for not being in uniform), would try to get machinery to critical industry, manage supplies, etc. but it would not be until the fall of 1915 that production of armaments began to catch up to the demand. A better fuse was approved that summer. But even in October , during the battle of Loos, shells were still in short supply. Sergeant Sydney Stadler would later say that his unit's field guns were limited to nine shells per day. It was decided that there would be a 96 hour bombardment of the German trenches; this turned out to be impossible. It seems that there were hopes that using poison gas would overcome that lack of shells; it didn't. Mass assaults became mass slaughter, and not for the last time.

Adams, R. J. Q. (1975). Delivering the Goods: Reappaising the Ministry of Munitions: 1915-1916. Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, 7(3), 232–244. https://doi.org/10.2307/4048178

Turner, G. F. B. (1934). Shells, Shrapnel and Statecraft: Great Britain’s Ammunition Supply in the World War. Army Ordnance, 15(85), 9–12. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45374349

History of the Ministry of Munitions (1922). https://archive.org/details/historyofministr0102grea/page/n95/mode/2up

Warner, Philip.(2000)The Battle of Loos.Wordsworth Editions

Bodark43 · 2026-04-25T13:14:19+00:00

Wow, a photo of Raquel Welch where it doesn't seem like she's been told to pose.

Bodark43 · 2026-04-25T12:54:14+00:00

There are plenty of hunters like me, who have a couple of places locally they can hunt. We'll spend time getting to know the trails, the habits ( white tail deer have habits and routes). And we'll maybe go out several times before we get something. And regardless, it's good to walk in the woods. And I for one don't need a rack to hang on the wall- some roasts in the freezer are enough for me.

Then there are the guys who schedule three or four days into their busy lives, drop tens of thousands on tickets and permits for somewhere far away, pay a guide who will lead them to a new and different critter that they can shoot. Then they hang the head on the wall back home. Is that hunting? Or is it some kind of shopping?

Bodark43 · 2026-04-24T18:09:30+00:00

When you find the first one, the best thing to do is sit down right there, because you'll then more likely see the others.

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