Flintlock ignition question

[toot]

before shooting rub the frizzen with alcohol and rub the flint & frizzen in between shots- keep it clean.

 

[Britsmoothy]

Believe me, there is nothing up with that frizzen! If some on here saw mine they would scream !!

 

[stink koat]

Doesn't look all that bad to me. A Siler frizzen should be hardened through.

How many strikes have you made with your flint? My first thought would be to try a new sharp flint.

My 1st rifle was a flintlock with a Siler large flint kit that I built and heat treated myself 45 years ago. NEVER had to "dress up" or do anything to the frizzen, the ONLY thing I have to do when the sparking gets weaker is to touch up or replace the flint.

 

[Grenadier1758]

Thanks for the advice it has some pits or dings in it. Here is a pic of the frizzen. What do you guys think.View attachment 52492

I've had a bit of time to think about my advice. From your picture, I don't see anything but what I and @Britsmoothy would consider normal wear. A soft frizzen would have much more of a washboard appearance. Still, early Siler locks often were kits assembled by builders of varying skills with respect to hardening parts and your frizzen could have gotten only a thin case hardening. Who assembled your lock and installed it on your rifle?

You, @Curley 50 cal, have replaced the flint with no improvement in sparking. Have you used a file on the frizzen face? With a properly hardened frizzen, the file will slide across the face of the frizzen. A soft frizzen will show cutting with the file. If the frizzen test comes back as hard, then you have an issue with the flint. It is either not sharp enough or the striking angle needs to be adjusted to be more of a glancing pass than a direct bash. A match stick under the back edge of the flint will alter the striking angle to be more glancing.

A search on the Forum for knapping a flint will reveal many methods for sharpening your flint so you have a good, sharp edge on your flint. That edge should feel like the edge of a very sharp knife. Many of us have scars on our thumbs from testing the edge of our flint.

Did the production of sparks start after a complete cleaning with the lock removed from the stock? Could some the moving parts inside the lock mortise be rubbing against the wood after tightening the lock in place? How does the lock spark with the lock removed from the mortise? Any signs of rubbing in the mortise?

Sometimes the simplest solution is not the most likely solution and we have to work our way through all the likely and unlikely causes of this problem.

 

[Belleville]

Have had several F/L's over the last 55 years or so. Have a F/L Siler lock on my primary rifle. When I can feel roughness on the frizzen face with my thumb, I dress it very lightly with Emery cloth, just to where where the roughness is smoothed out to touch. You are just smoothing out the roughness and no more. It takes years to roughen and expect years before you may have to do it again.

Don't know about the current Siler frizzens but the early ones only had just enough carbon content to harden them through with a carbon heating source such as gas or coal. If using an electric furnace to heat them, the carbon cooked out and then they had to be case hardened. So it is possible your frizzen is case hardened and you have worn it through, but unlikely.

Doc S.

 

[Howard Pippin]

Doc, has anyone ever attempted to use hard surfacing Rod on the face of the frizzen? I have applied hard surfacing rod to many objects, With good results as far as wearability, but I've never tried one to see if it would make a spark when struck. Has anyone ever had any experience with this? Studite? ( bad spelling) made a rod that was quite easily applied with a torch, and I think it contained carbide particles. Anyone have any idea if this would work? Could be applied in a very thin layer. I still have several rods left over for when I worked with this is as a millwright.
Squint

 

[M. De Land]

Doc, has anyone ever attempted to use hard surfacing Rod on the face of the frizzen? I have applied hard surfacing rod to many objects, With good results as far as wearability, but I've never tried one to see if it would make a spark when struck. Has anyone ever had any experience with this? Studite? ( bad spelling) made a rod that was quite easily applied with a torch, and I think it contained carbide particles. Anyone have any idea if this would work? Could be applied in a very thin layer. I still have several rods left over for when I worked with this is as a millwright.
Squint

I've not tried surfacing rod on a frizzen although I tried kasnite on various parts but this only produces a very shallow case hardening. What is needed is for the parts to be packed in bone charcoal and heated for several hours at 15-16 hundred degrees then quenched in water or oil to get the carbon really cooked in. I've read that one can only infuse carbon to about .035 depth from a practical standpoint and still have a malleable core for strength.
When I case color the carbon is only infused a few thousands as you loose color past about 1425 degrees F and carbon infusion does does not penetrate as deep at these lower temperatures.
I would think that soldering on a spring stock shoe would be a more practical solution than would welding on hard rod and reshaping the frizzen after words.

 

[Britsmoothy]

Doc, has anyone ever attempted to use hard surfacing Rod on the face of the frizzen? I have applied hard surfacing rod to many objects, With good results as far as wearability, but I've never tried one to see if it would make a spark when struck. Has anyone ever had any experience with this? Studite? ( bad spelling) made a rod that was quite easily applied with a torch, and I think it contained carbide particles. Anyone have any idea if this would work? Could be applied in a very thin layer. I still have several rods left over for when I worked with this is as a millwright.
Squint

Don't they have some chromium and manganese in them hard facing rods?. I'm not sure if it would undo some of the sparkling abilities of steel.

 

[Rató:rats]

Believe me, there is nothing up with that frizzen! If some on here saw mine they would scream !!

Hi Brit
Are any of yours as bad as this?

This is the round faced Chambers Virginia lock. It was shot infrequently until I bought the gun from the builder. The frizzen was neat and tidy for months but lately it’s been getting gouges even though I haven’t changed flint sizes or orientation or alignment. Has my steel gone soft?
Stephen

 

[Britsmoothy]

Hi Brit
Are any of yours as bad as this?
View attachment 52828
This is the round faced Chambers Virginia lock. It was shot infrequently until I bought the gun from the builder. The frizzen was neat and tidy for months but lately it’s been getting gouges even though I haven’t changed flint sizes or orientation or alignment. Has my steel gone soft?
Stephen

Mine do look like that.
Others know more than me but many builders just case harden to keep the frizzen from being to brittle.
Yours looks fine to me. It's when it stops sparking you have an issue.
One of mine stopped....well it was lousy from the get go but in my ignorance a kept using it for a while until I learnt, anyway it got a deep gouge in it eventually, not like yours, far worse! I had to grind the frizzen and hardened it again myself. Thing is still going strong.
If yours is sparking well don't worry

In fact, yours looks perfect!

 

[Kansas Jake]

Doc, has anyone ever attempted to use hard surfacing Rod on the face of the frizzen? I have applied hard surfacing rod to many objects, With good results as far as wearability, but I've never tried one to see if it would make a spark when struck. Has anyone ever had any experience with this? Studite? ( bad spelling) made a rod that was quite easily applied with a torch, and I think it contained carbide particles. Anyone have any idea if this would work? Could be applied in a very thin layer. I still have several rods left over for when I worked with this is as a millwright.
Squint

Back in the 1970s I bought a CVA(Jukar) flintlock rifle kit and assembled my first flintlock. The frizzen was soft and absolutely would not produce a spark. I tried to harden it with Kasenite etc. without luck. I had one of the welders in the tool room at the factory where I worked put surface hardening on the lock. It still didn't spark. I think he used a too hard compound. Back then in the location where I lived there was very little information available on those guns and it was long before the internet. I later got a different frizzen and it worked, but my disgust was such I had already moved on to TC Hawken cap lock.

 

[FishDFly]

I often wonder how many times that happened then.

 

[Howard Pippin]

Don't they have some chromium and manganese in them hard facing rods?. I'm not sure if it would undo some of the sparkling abilities of steel.

if I'm still interested in this idea when spring comes, I might put a couple of beads on a piece of iron and then see if I can make it spark with a file. Could make for an interesting discussion.

 

[GREENSWLDE]

As M de Lands suggests. Refacing with Spring steel strip is the way I go. CS75 strip is usually held at Model Engineering Stores in different widths and thicknesses. 0.030" is about right. Either form the shape ,harden and Cement in place or Silver solder in place and harden from soldering Temperature face down in water.

 

[Phil Coffins]

Curly has lost interest I this thread judging from his absence. None the less modern quality locks use a threw harden steel that doesn’t require hard facing.
Here‘s my Siler frizzen.
A78DC917-6454-43EA-97A2-D0B38526B11F by Oliver Sudden, on Flickr

 

[M. De Land]

I'm pretty new to lock and frizzen work but have a mechanical mind and can usually figure stuff like this out fairly fast from reading and observation.
Soft frizzens can and do occur but given the fact that chert on a diamond hardness scale of 7 is always going to be harder than the steel it is cutting into for spark production, needs consideration. Having said this I'm setting up a discussion for what I think is a rather common fault with lock geometry and that is the flint hitting the frizzen face to strait on initially and is the main reason the gouges occur. It is said that the contact should be initiated at about 1/3 down from the top and that might be a good rule of thumb but I think more important is the angle of contact and where the spark shower is directed into the pan from this realationship. This is established by cock angle, swing radius and frizzen curve which seems to me to be a good place to focus on for adjustment and tuning.
There is no question in my mind that the best contact angle to initiate the spark , minimize gouging and maximize flint scrape area is the way to proceed.
I have messed around with changing the cock angle and it has worked for me but this can quickly be over done and requires annealing and re-hardening of the cock arm . Bending cold is never good with case hardened parts nor is leaving them annealed after bending. One thing I've given some thought to but have not experimented with yet is changing the frizzen curve. I'm looking at gun shows for a orphan lock to experiment on to see the feasibility of this idea. I am quite sure that a bit of frizzen curve angle increase may often be of benefit but will need to do some experimenting to prove it out one way or the other. I think I have figured out that the swing arc of the cock jaw should approximate the curve of the frizzen factoring the shortest and longest flint length the lock can successfully utilize. Bending the cock jaw angle directly effects the arc swing radius. Quite a balancing act right here at this interface and I think one of the most important tuning opportunities usually over looked.

 

[Grenadier1758]

You can change the striking angle o the flint to the frizzen by placing a short piece of a match stick or short piece of leather lacing under the rear edge of the flint. Most of my locks will have a strip of leather lacing under the back edge.

 

[M. De Land]

You can change the striking angle o the flint to the frizzen by placing a short piece of a match stick or short piece of leather lacing under the rear edge of the flint. Most of my locks will have a strip of leather lacing under the back edge.

I make my own flints from flakes instead of blades which eliminates the hump and the need to bevel up or down. What I want to do is establish a fixed flint body position in the cock jaw that stays on the same angle plane in regards to the frizzen arch. This is accomplished by maintaining the edge profile through pressure flaking a level row of minuscule chips and their supporting scarfs which strengthens the flint edge, increases sparking efficiency and longevity . Each row of chips removed will raise the edge the height of the preceding scarf formation which keeps the contact angle moving on the frizzen face in the same plane (more or less) to minimize gouging and maximizes frizzen face longevity. When the edges (through pressure flaking gets to the top of the flat, flake, flint (which is quite thin by comparison to a blade formed flint), it can then be flipped over and the pressure flaking of the edge resumed from the bottom. The flint body stays on the same plane in relation to the cock jaw purchase, only it's length is changed as it wears back. This maintains a more consistent spark shower , minimizes lock and frizzen wear , maximizes flint life and resists the tendency to gouge the frizzen face.

 

[JCKelly]

An old way of fixing a worn or gouged frizzen face is to braze or soft solder on a piece of hardened steel.
My background is 1/2 century + working as a metallurgist, with a lot of interest in how guns used to be, and are today, made.
I would suggest as best bet, here in the USA, an old hand saw, or cheap circular saw blade. These things are hard enough to give a spark when little curly chips are cut off by a flint striking the steel. In my view, unless you are experienced at home heat treating, soft solder is the best bet, as it will not draw the temper of your wood saw blade.

In the old days many frizzens had a steel striking face copper brazed on to a wrought iron frizzen. If you can do the braze and properly harden the whole thing after, this is just fine. But for most of us the brazing and hardening required is a recipe for needing a whole new frizzen.
Photo is an original flint rifle from Capt. John Dillin, showing a brazed frizzen face,

 

[M. De Land]

An old way of fixing a worn or gouged frizzen face is to braze or soft solder on a piece of hardened steel.
My background is 1/2 century + working as a metallurgist, with a lot of interest in how guns used to be, and are today, made.
I would suggest as best bet, here in the USA, an old hand saw, or cheap circular saw blade. These things are hard enough to give a spark when little curly chips are cut off by a flint striking the steel. In my view, unless you are experienced at home heat treating, soft solder is the best bet, as it will not draw the temper of your wood saw blade.

In the old days many frizzens had a steel striking face copper brazed on to a wrought iron frizzen. If you can do the braze and properly harden the whole thing after, this is just fine. But for most of us the brazing and hardening required is a recipe for needing a whole new frizzen.
Photo is an original flint rifle from Capt. John Dillin, showing a brazed frizzen face,

What is the proper name for the cocks with the holes at the top that look to me to be a good bit more sturdy and less likely to flex than the styles without.