SgtErv said:
It's going to take some experimentation to keep the dang flint in the jaws. I tried a couple of different thicknesses of leather today but was having trouble keeping it in there.
I'm using a 1 1/8" English flint. Might have to drop it down to an inch and see how that works. The flint wore well, though.
Shooting cartridges is a ton of fun!!
When I "came back" to 18th century reenacting in the late 90's here in Virginia, I was surprised how few reenactors did much actual live shooting with their Brown Besses. I had come from much more of a background of shooting live rounds in my Brown Bess Carbine than firing blank rounds, back in the 70's. Many, if not most of the guys in the Major's Coy of the 42nd RHR had never fired a live round, though they had fired many hundreds, if not thousands of blank rounds.
Now, as the "new guy," they often commented on how certain my musket was in firing. Of course they were not used to having a new recruit that had a background like mine.
We had one other retired Marine who had reenacted with our group for many years and who had superb luck using a lead flint wrap around his flint in his Jap/Miroku Bess. However, I had found it much better to use a rather thick and wet molded leather wrap with a somewhat shorter flint than some use, from live firing in my Pedersoli and other makers of Besses.
So I wound up going over many of the muskets in our group. I re-hardened frizzens, fit frizzens to pans, did other lock work and especially checked each musket with different thicknesses of leather and lengths of flints that sparked the best and longest. Now, this was possible for me because I had made leather items for years and had/still have a lot of scrap leather in different thicknesses.
After I found the right length of flint and correct thickness of leather, I wet molded the leather around each flint in each lock and kept the combination of flint and wrap together for replacement "as an assembly." I did this by wrapping Saran Wrap around the cock, top jaw and top jaw screw where the leather wrap would contact it and thus keep it from rusting those parts as the leather dried. I have NO idea if wet molded leather flint wraps were HC/PC, but someone else
had to have come up with idea well before me.
I found the combination of the wet molded leather wrap and tightening the top jaw with the pin punch from a repro "Y" tool very effective in holding the flint for the best sparks. However, I learned to ALWAYS try to tighten the top jaw screw on the morning of each day I was going to use the musket because the flint can come loose just from carrying or handling, and especially when practicing the manual of arms a good deal.
Gus