| Building a Muzzleloader - Polishing and Fitting the Nose Cap | |
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I'll tell much of the story with photographs, so each page may be a bit slow to load. Click on any photo for a larger image.
Working the rough brass parts down and finally polishing them was one of the most tedious parts of building this muzzleloader. The parts furnished were only very roughly shaped, and still wore many mold marks.
What buffing had been done at the factory was very rough and uneven, with low spots here and there and mold marks left in.
Most of the initial work was done using an eight-inch flat mill bastard file, on the flat portions and on the nose cap. Round and half-round needle files were used also, in the tight spots and holes.
The first step was to remove the mill and mold marks, keeping things as square (except on the curves, of course) and balanced as possible. I then moved on to progressively finer sandpaper, steel wool, and finally some Flitz polish.
I'm not a fan of gaudy guns, and as soon as this article is completed and all the photos are taken I'll allow the brass to grow dull. I polished these pieces to a fairly high sheen because I needed to try out the Flitz, and I wanted to show folks what can be accomplished with a little time and elbow grease.
This is the nose cap before I started working it. As you can see, there's quite a lot of work to be done. All those uneven mold marks must be worked out. What the pictures don't show very well is that the areas that look roughly polished are actually quite uneven. For that aggravating step in the face of the cap, I used a dowel (actually an old shotgun plug) wrapped with emery cloth.
A view from the front and rear. The slight polish on the rear face is where I've started to face it, using 120 grit sandpaper on a wood block -- much the same as I did with the buttplate, for which I used a file. I used that same method on the face, where the screw holes are. Notice the rounded edge of the rear face at the bottom left, which I'll have to work out so it'll properly mate with the stock.
The cap, after being worked with the file and 120 grit sandpaper. It will live on the stock throughout the sanding process, same as the buttplate, to keep things flush. As you can see, more wood will need to be removed from the left side of the stock than the right (directions are reversed in these pics, as we're looking at it from the front). The stock was square enough (and I'd kept the cap square enough) that I didn't have to do much with it to make the cap fit well.
Before and after sanding the stock. I sanded the cap in the same increments as the stock, once I got the stock worked down initially with 100 grit paper. From there I went to 120, 220, 400, 600, and finally to medium steel wool. At each step I worked until I removed all deeper marks left by the previous, rougher, sandpaper.
The rounded rear edge of the cap is coming back to haunt me. These shots show it before...
...and after I fixed it by sanding down the wood and brass. I used a sanding block to keep things even, and sanded the whole length of the forearm to prevent unduly narrowing the very end of it.
The finished product. After the 600 grit paper and steel wool, I went to "Flitz Maximum Strength Metal Polish Plus Corrosion Protection." It does a fine job! I used an old T-shirt as a polishing rag, which worked well. Obviously, I removed the cap from the stock for this step.
Front and rear views of same. I didn't bother polishing the inside of the cap, there's no reason to. I also refrained from fully working the mold marks out of the area abutting the barrel for two reasons -- it will be covered by the barrel anyhow, and I would have had to remove too much material, which would have made for a terrible fit between cap and barrel.
Next page - Polishing and Fitting the Trigger Guard.
- Russ Chastain
