fallaloosa, That may be, but I have never seen one that didn't have a wooden rod that had been seen by myself, and more importantly others who know better than me. Still thought of as original.
Most any 1st long land patterns, appear to have suffered the ravages of time, and so have been altered.
Many of these alterations, are hard to determine when they occured, and more so when the parts are like ram rods, that break, get lost, or just end up missing.
This appears to get more complicated if you ask me, when what books say are one thing, and what the weapons involved say another.
When a soldier could be punished both in terms of pay, and in phyisical punishment for the loss and breakage of his weapon, well things happen to conceal that fact, and parts would be changed in the concealing of that fact.
A steel ram rod has more uses than a wooden rod has too.
It must be recalled that at the time the idea of a Kings Army was just coming to be, and before wealthy Lords would supply his own Regiment, pretty much as he saw fit.
Before the F&I War event, items like tents were rare for troops. Weapons were expensive, men were not.
Wealthy gentilmen still supplied troops well into the Rev War. With all these overlaps in time, and in weapons that were built of stored parts, not yet guns, it gets very hard to say that on such and such day, in such and such year, ALL of this type weapon had this particular part.
This becomes even more compounded, when certain weapons were supposed to be designed for certain kinds of troops, and certain actions world wide.
I certainly can't write one thing in stone, and say it is completely true.
I understand there were different parts, and if you say take just locks over time, there are a lot of lock makers, we don't even know about yet.
Others we do, and it turns out a unknown father taught a known son. We know there was a standard pattern by the Crown, but that tends to vary as well. Rightly so when this work was done by the hand of man and so can't be duplicted to perfection.
