Project Gun - CO2 Discharger Use -CVA Hawken

[Zonie]

To add solder to the bottom of the sight you will need solder. The kind with some silver from your local hardware store will work best*.
Often this low temperature silver solder comes with a tube of flux. If it doesn't buy a small tin of it. Rosen flux by the way won't work for steel. It is made for copper wires.

The surface must be spotlessly clean. Lightly sand it with some 220 grit black wet/dry sandpaper.

Heat the metal with a propane torch or a kitchen stove, apply the flux then heat it a bit more. Touch the surface with the solder every little bit. You want the metal to melt the solder, not a flame from a torch.

When the solder melts on the surface move the solder around to cover the entire surface.


*This method IMO is kinda "iffie". Because the solder is soft it will be scraped off of the surface when you re-install the sight.
A better method is to slightly "ding" up the sharp edges of the dovetail a few places or using a hard punch create a few dings on the bottom surface of the sight to displace some of the metal. This will give you a steel to steel joint working to hold in the sight in place.
zonie

 

[LFC]

Thanks--I may try your "dinging" the metal a bit first--though I question whether it'll work. The guy who put the kit together (more or less) before me seems to have been a decent woodworker, but you can tell he's already sort of had his way with the front sight dovetail, and that's not as pretty as his carpentry; there's quite a bit of play with the sight--like, I could wiggle it all over the place with just finger pressure--so I may really need to add some metal with the soldering method.

I'm also glad I read your suggestion about banging up the metal of the notch before applying my final coat of browning solution!

 

[gmww]

FWI to everyone here is the link to

Laurel Mountain Forge browning directions.

I didn't check to see if this was in the useful links area but if it isn't it might be a nice add since this question comes up from time to time.

 

[LFC]

Just an update: work and family stuff have slowed my work on this, but I've managed to get 5 or 6 coats of Laurel Mountain Forge browning solution onto the barrel, tang, and rib now. It's now looking pretty good. I notice that the browning solution seems to keep working for some days after I scrub the barrel down, generating some fairly coarse scale over the course of three days or so. The barrel is now pretty uniformly brown, though there are some slightly bluish streaks here and there that I'm pretty confident will fade into uniformity with the surrounding brown after another coat or two. The fact that the solution seems to work noticeably even after a scrubdown makes me think that I'd best give it a very good, and maybe somewhat long, bath in baking soda solution when the time comes to kill off the browning reaction, and probably allow a couple of days for this to cure further before I take what I gather is the final step of heating the barrel and applying motor oil to sort of finish it. Incidentally, though the instructions suggest using a torch to "heat the barrel uniformly to 120 degrees" or thereabouts, just putting it in the oven set to about 150 for a little less time than it'd take to get the barrel to 150 seems to me like an easier way to get a consistent and somewhat-controlled temperature. Comments, anyone?

Meanwhile, the after-market percussion nipples seem to fit better than the rust-removed one that I'd finally unstuck from the drum using electrolysis, so the "can't get the nipple tight" problem seems to be going away. Deer Creek provided cleanout screws that they say will do the trick (though I've not yet had time to test that assertion). Next on the agenda, I think, will be stripping the old finish off the stock, reshaping a bit for better fit and looks, staining, and refinishing. That, plus maybe pinning the ramrod, should get it ready to go.

 

[LFC]

Browning project is proceeding--though slowly. Very low humidity (and the fact that I was only leaving the browning solution on for 3 hours [the minimum] instead of a few hours longer) has somewhat lengthened the process. I've begun doing the scrub-after-each-browning-application with 0000 steel wool, as it was beginning to get a little coarser than I like--but it's smoothing out and evening out nicely, I think. I disassembled the hardware from the stock in preparation for removing the old, very light finish (with acetone?) and re-staining.

Thanks to all those who gave advice on eliminating the extreme wiggle of the front sight! A little peening of the barrel dovetails with a screwdriver seems to have tightened it up nicely.

 

[LFC]

Laurel Mountain Browning Proceeds;
Acetone Dissolves Gloves, But Doesn't Touch Old Finish.

In spite of the near-zero humidity around here lately, and huge amounts of work, and the need to take care of a morning-sick wife and 4 other kids with a stomach virus, I've been able to sneak out occasionally and get some Laurel Mountain browning solution onto the barrel. After a couple of coats each time, left on for about 3 hours in a sealed tub with some water in it for humidity (barrel propped up on sticks to keep it out of the water), I'd been rubbing the barrel down with a wet cloth and then scrubbing with a thick cloth to remove the rust. I'd noticed that the Laurel Mountain solution continued to rust the barrel a bit after I'd cleaned and dried and rubbed the barrel--such that I'd finish rubbing and have a smooth barrel, but a couple of days later I'd go and it'd be more of an even brown, but with a rust coat I could feel on it. As this seemed to be detracting a little from the smooth, even brown I was after, I tried upgrading my "carding" or rub-down material from pillow ticking to 0000 steel wool, brushing lightly with that.

The steel wool did indeed even up the coating a bit, but it also tended to take the browning off a little more on the corners of the octagonal barrel than it did on the flats. I wasn't scraping hard enough to remove all the brown even from the corners, but I think I saw it getting just a little thin. I tried another coat of the browning solution. I may be up to a dozen by now, but it's looking more even now, and I may be about done, if the next coat evens up the corners a bit.

Meanwhile, I had a go at dissolving the old stock finish with acetone, as suggested by a poster above. It made no discernible impact on the finish, but I noticed a cold sensation in my fingers, and observed that the acetone was eating holes in the tips of my vinyl disposable gloves. Stopped that process quickly, washed off, and decided to try again at some other time with: (1) something better than acetone,which didn't even make the old finish tacky; and (2) some other kind of gloves. If anyone has any suggestions, I'm listening.

Thanks in advance for your suggestions!

 

[Zonie]

You could always use a paint stripper that is made for removing paint and varnish.
Yes it is toxic (but so is acetone), so if your kids are around, tell them, "Don't touch this stuff even a little bit! It will EAT your skin off of your body's!"
Then use your rubber gloves when you apply it and scrape it (and the finish) off of the gun.

 

[LFC]

New discovery, regarding material to use in scrubbing the "scale" or loose rust off a barrel during the browning process:

Brown paper from a shopping bag. It's remarkably coarse and tough, and does a nice job of smoothing the surface rather quickly. Seems to beat cloth and other kinds of paper.

 

[Bon Sauvage]

I suggest that you try Minwax Antique Furniture Refinisher or Formby's Conditioning Furniture Refinisher. They are both about the same formula.
I have used the Formby's stuff and it is rubber glove friendly. It won't remove poly or paint but I have had good luck using it on my gunstocks in accordance with the directions on the can. I buy mine at Lowe's.

Ogre

 

[LFC]

Am trying to strip the old finish from the stock again, this time with nitrile gloves and Citri-Strip.

Barrel is just about done. I wiped it down last time with baking-soda solution, and this time there was less rust scale after half a week than before. (You'll recall that the Laurel Mountain browning solution had continued to create some scale after I'd washed it off and rubbed the scale off--I'd come back to it a few days later and find a little more scale, even though the barrel was hanging in a bone-dry place indoors.) Now there's a little light scale forming after 4-5 days on some parts, but most of it is staying smooth and brown. It's a very nice antique brown now.

 

[LFC]

Progress report:

The baking-soda-solution rubdown I'd given the barrel last weekend (or so) seemed to have stopped the formation of scale on the front half of the barrel, but there was a bit still forming on the rear half. Had an idea. Used an old toothbrush to scrub the barrel with some toothpaste that had baking soda as a main active ingredient. This let me do a better job on parts with sharp angles and little crevices, such as the under-barrel lug and around the drum. (Look, Ma--no cavities!) I finished off, after rinsing off the toothpaste residue, by polishing with scraps from a paper grocery bag. It's looking pretty good.

 

[LFC]

A couple of days later, the baking-soda-toothpaste rubdown seems to have done the trick: barrel's smooth over its whole length.

 

[LFC]

A couple of weeks after the last Laurel Mountain Browning Solution application, and my aforementioned scrubdown of the barrel with baking-soda-containing toothpaste, I'm happy to report that the rusting seems to have stopped. Next step for the barrel will be heating it a bit and applying oil (I may use pure tung oil, since I figure it's likely to set up eventually a little better than motor oil and bind a bit better with the browned finish. As mentioned elsewhere, I'm a bit leery of the heavy-metal drying additives in "boiled" linseed oil, so some extra drying time isn't as much of a pain for me as it might be for some.)

I notice that the escutcheon plates for the under-barrel wedge are not inletted into the wood of the stock; there is no inletting; apparently the previous owner simply screwed them on to the sides of the stock.

I'm kind of inclined to leave them as they are. The screw-holes for the plates already go all the way through into the channel that the barrel goes into, and I think that the wedge is plenty long enough to go through both escutcheon plates and the stock without the narrowing that would result if I inletted the escutcheon plates.

Anything wrong with leaving the plates un-inletted?

 

[LFC]

Post-Holidays Update

Well, the "two-week vacation" in which I'd looked forward to cleaning up the house, fixing all manner of maintenance issues, sorting through piles of old paper, and finishing that gun has come and gone. Ended up being somewhat less than the hoped-for time, but, hey, I got a few much-needed days off.

After a couple of hesitant applications of Citri-Strip (a supposedly-less-toxic stripping solution for varnishes, etc.), I discovered that the too-light-for-my-taste-and-not-applied-too-well finish that the previous owner had put on was very superficial, and came off with sanding and a good bit of elbow grease. (My wife insists that this took hours--didn't seem like it, but she might be right.) (The avoidance of toxic chemical use is of great interest to me, in that many stripping solutions, even Citri-Strip, contain chemicals that are said to cause birth defects, etc.--and with a baby on the way, and the tendency of stuff to get all over even when you take precautions, I'd rather be safe than sorry.) After sanding, I noticed some daylight between the buttplate and stock, and so demonstrated to my kids the art of using candle soot to blacken the brass, observing the spots on the wood where the black rubbed off, and taking the wood down with a rasp until the fit was appropriately close. After sanding, I smoothed the whole thing with 0000 steel wool, then stained with Birchwood Casey walnut stain. Went back over it with steel wool to re-smoothe it, and noticed a few of the high points losing their stain a bit faster than some of the lower ones. Re-applied stain, with special attention to the lighter spots, this time also using a Q-tip to get the ramrod entry hole and nooks and crannies elsewhere a nice dark brown--then let dry, and went over it again with the steel wool. It's now smooth, and a nice, warm, old-looking medium brown.

Between "honey-do" projects, mornings spent cooking for the 4 kids while the wife slept and gestated #5, and multiple family and church Christmas get-togethers, I also managed to put the barrel in the oven at maybe 120-140 degrees (with some aluminum foil covering the bottom, so it didn't get any funky chemicals on the oven rack). Before heating it, I'd attached a coat hanger, bent to serve as a strong, long hook, to the under-barrel lug. After everybody else went to sleep, I hung the barrel up outside from an eave of my house, and spread a nice, even coat of Old Masters' 100% pure tung oil over the whole barrel exterior, including breechplug and drum. Went out an hour or so later and ran a cloth over the whole thing to remove excess, and ultimately hung it up in the laundry room to finish drying. Rather to my surprise, it was almost completely dry a day later. I've not had a chance for a minutely-close look yet, but it appears beautifully smooth, with the Laurel Mountain brown maybe darkened just a bit by the oil. I may try a second, touch-up coat, just to address any nooks and crannies I may have missed with my previous midnight oil application. (I've also got to go back and apply oil to the rib and the tang, which I forgot in the initial application and left hanging up in the laundry room. :shake: )

The stock is also almost ready--I'm planning to apply some additive-free linseed oil varnish (though the success of the tung oil has me impressed enough that I'm thinking of using that instead). In fitting the pieces together, though, I noticed a small gap between wood and lockplate just above the hammer--I'm guessing the previous assembler took off a bit too much wood in fitting the lock to the stock. I think I can probably address this by building up the wood with a little epoxy--end result shouldn't be noticeable, but I don't want whatever flying smoke and whatever drifting into the lock innards and rusting them. Not so much of an issue with a percussion gun (which this is) as with a flintlock, since I know I won't get priming powder building up inside the lock and making the thing into an 18th-Century grenade :shocked2: --but I figure I ought to address this before I apply a final finish.

The brass had a pretty good 20-year patina to it--not dark, particularly, but just not bright, either. I'd originally hoped just to leave it "as is", for aesthetic purposes, but I now think that I've got to remove just a bit of brass here and there to make the fit ideal. While I'm doing that, I may go ahead and convert the brushed finish (which may have been how it came from the factory) to a more-polished one using green Chromium buffing compound and a Dremel-like tool or my rotary drill. I could then leave the brass shiny (which the wife and kids might appreciate more), or maybe I could darken the brass into sort of a browned-brass look (which would yield a very interesting look: the barrel would then be a dark brown; the wood, a medium walnut brown; the brass, whatever brownish color it'd turn) by soaking the brass in a baking-soda-and-water mix. Your thoughts, guys? How does a baking-soda treatment look on brass? Any pictures? Advice?

I guess that at this point, then, I have four questions for the forum:

1. To darken the brass with baking soda, or not? If so, how? If I do this, how will it look? Can I polish it at all after using baking soda, and have the final surface still retain some of the browned color, or will any polishing instantly take off all the coloring?

2. For the wood: no-additive linseed oil / varnish? Or tung oil? What will be the difference in final look?

3. The hammer has some rough, red, rusty spots on it. I'd like to remove those, but without removing all of the oxidation from the hammer (which gives it a good, aged appearance); my idea is to get just the clearly-just-rust parts cleaned of rust, probably then oiling to prevent further rusting. Best way? (I'd like to avoid taking the hammer off, as I'm not confident I'd be able to put it back on easily, and I'd also love to save time--since the aforementioned wifely "honey-do" list is jealously maintained, and free time for gun-related projects is a scarce commodity indeed.)

4. Any tips on building up the wood to eliminate the gap between wood and lockplate? The buildup will have to be both horizontal and vertical, as there is just a sliver of gap that can be seen over the lockplate when you look at the gun from the side). I'm not inclined to go for perfection that'd fool a gunsmith with a magnifying glass, but am content with something reasonably durable, and I'm confident that the relatively-hidden location will keep any repair of this nature from being readily visible and compromising looks.

 

[LFC]

Okay--it's been a while. A LITTLE progress report.

When last I wrote, I'd gotten the stock pretty much shaped the way I wanted it, and the brass fits pretty well. I'd stained the beechwood stock nicely with Birchwood Casey walnut stain, and had browned the barrel with Laurel Mountain browning solution. Looks really nice. After some inquiries about the potentially-toxic stuff (including lead and the carcinogenic cadmium) they put in "boiled" linseed oil to speed drying, I'd begun asking around and have now been told that Old Masters 100% tung oil, though it has driers in it, uses manganese instead of lead or cadmium. So, I may be using that. I've already used it over the Laurel Mountain browning on the barrel, and it looks quite nice. A little more of it on the tang and under-barrel rib and I think it'll look quite nice.

I'd noticed that there was a bit of a gap between the (percussion) lockplate and the wood toward the rear of where the lockplate goes. I tried building up a horizontal bead of epoxy on the wood, with the top of the epoxy line even with the top of the lockplate, just to fill in the gap so that smoke, etc. from the caps wouldn't get into the lock and corrode things. I got that done, but then, on putting the barrel into the stock, saw that there is a gap between the barrel and the lockplate. So, I now believe that the real problem is not that the former kit-builder removed too much wood, but that the stock needs some more inletting to get the inwardmost parts of the lock to seat right up against the barrel.

So, how do I do this? In particular, I figure I'm going to need to remove some wood very selectively within the lock inlet, but I'm having trouble figuring out exactly where. For the external brass fittings, I used candle soot to coat the metal parts, then seated them against the wood, noticed which parts of the wood were blackened by the soot, and then rasped, filed, and sanded the black parts of the wood until the brass fit. I'm not so sure about doing the candle-soot thing with the lock, since I'm not sure about the advisability of getting extra crud in among the moving parts. I guess my question here is twofold: first, is candle-soot good for this, or is some other material better in this context? Second, I probably ought to concentrate first on the likeliest spots to need wood removed. Can anyone tell me which parts of the lock are most likely the ones hanging up and keeping the lock from seating as deeply as it's intended to?

In all of this, cheap and readily-available are good characteristics. Like much of America just now, we're feeling the financial pinch. Also, my good wife is begrudging the time spent on the project. What I'd originally contemplated as a one-or-two-weekend project with the kids has dragged on unbelievably. Looking back at when I began this thread, I realize how much time has passed. I fathered my fifth child a couple of weeks after this project began, and now the gun is in pieces scattered around the house and in a box in the kitchen, and that baby is now more than half way on the way to birth. I'd kind of hoped to have the gun ready by the NMLRA Western National Shoot, but that came and went last weekend. Sigh. I'm sure you all know how it goes.

Anyway, let me know your thoughts on the fine-tuning-inletting of the lock to the stock. Once that's done, I think I'll polish up the brass a bit better, tung-oil the stock inside and out, and then the kids and I can assemble the thing and go sight 'er in. I predict that they will love it. Originally I'd hoped this would be a good "dad-and-kids" project, but up until now it's involved a lot of messy and sometimes toxic chemicals that I've thought it best to keep away from my young'uns (aged 7, 6, 4, and 1).

Mind you, I'm not complaining in the least. I've had a load of fun--and am learning quite a bit about antique gun building in the process.