Touch holes on Queen Annes and boxlocks

[WRussell]

I've just been rambling over on the thread about the brass barrel Queen Anne and realized I should start a new thread.

First of all, I'm talking about the Queen Anne that has the lockplate and the trigger plate forged in one piece with the breech:

The chamber is smaller in diameter than the barrel, so the wall thickness at the pan is excessive and the touch hole is long. Slow ignition. Queen Annes died out around the time lock speed became the focus of the better gunmakers - I'd guess that was the reason. I have a couple of Queen Annes in the works, and I'm thinking about how to make that touch hole shorter. You can't just drill a big hole into the chamber and put in a coned liner because the pan is in the way. Maybe drill the hole high, so the drill bit clears the pan, put in a plug, then when the plug is seated and you have the alignment, pull it out and make it into a coned liner, just off center so the touch hole comes out right with respect to the top of the pan.

And... boxlocks were a direct outgrowth of the Queen Anne design - just add a top and the other side and move the cock to the middle by putting the tumbler on the bottom of the cock.

One problem with the boxlock, and the reason they were mostly a pocket pistol design, is that the pan is now on top of the breech, with a long touch hole going almost straight down to a small diameter chamber. When you prime the pan, the touch hole fills with powder - you can't avoid the fuse effect.

I'm thinking of putting a coned touch hole liner in the bottom of the pan. Load the main charge first, put the ball on top and screw the barrel on, and the fffg should be right up at the top of the cone. Prime lightly, or even make the liner stick up a bit in the pan so there can be more primer without covering the hole.

Wouldn't this work?

 

[mule ear]

I'm not familiar with Queen Anne pistols, but .... could you drill in from the side opposite the touchhole and cone it from inside with a slightly larger drill size, then fill the new hole by threading in a plug? This is how the Nock flint and precussion breeches were made. A brass screw could be camoflaged rather well, esp if it were peened-over & burnished.

 

[WRussell]

Good idea. That's the other way to go, probably easier and better. The only disadvantage is that messing around on the frizzen side is somewhat concealed by the frizzen, while the opposite side of a Q. Anne (integral breech type) is totally exposed.

I'm working with steel, so I could weld up the plug, and if the touch hole needed work in the future, I could just drill it out and start over, I guess.

 

[mule ear]

Welding over would work - if you used the correct rod. I have seen some welds that stood out like sore thumbs after the metal was finished because of using the wrong rod. The irregular outline is often problematic, also. You could try it on a scrap piece first. A nice, circular "defect" is preferrable to me, and is probably more PC. It can also be integrated into the decorative theme much easier.

 

[WRussell]

Good thought. I'll likely be putting engraving there. I'll be finishing bright though, so there shouldn't be much problem if the rod (or the plug) is a different steel.