I recently picked up a new musket from a friend who wanted to pass it to a good home after not using it for ages. It's the twin to one I already own, a replica of the Spanish M1757 musket, which was a copy of the French Model 1745 Charleville with some minor differences.
The new musket had been stored for a long time, and was in a bit of a sad state. I cleaned up the barrel and brass-work before thinking of taking some photos and making a post about it, so in this post I will focus on just the lock mechanism.
These first three photos show the poor state the lock was in before I started work on it.....
My goal was not to make it look brand new, there was too much rust and corrosion for that, it was to clean it up as well as I could and focus on making it functional. Additionally, I wanted to check it for safety.
I must admit I didn't take as many photos as I should have done, so this isn't going to be a photographic step-by-step ! A lot of it was filthy dirty work, and handling a phone to take pictures with my hands covered in oil, solvents, rust and crud isn't ideal.
The cleaning process started by spraying the lock with lashings of WD40, to wash away loose rust and debris and start soaking into all the nooks and crannies. After wiping this away, the plan was to take everything off, stripping the lock down to it's components. Well that failed.... with the exception of the two screws holding the bridle on and the screw on the hammer, everything else was seized solid.
This was the first attempt to get the frizzen and frizzen spring off. Both screws wouldn't move at all, and I was in serious danger of stripping the screw heads as the screwdriver kept slipping. Note the clamp used to compress the spring slightly so there was no pressure from the frizzen.
The solution was to soak everything in Plusgas (my favourite aerosol penetrating oil), and then leave it to soak for a couple of days with occasional additional applications. It's not nice stuff, and my wife did comment on the evil stench emerging from the living room !
Even with all that time for the penetrating oil to break the corrosion down, a screwdriver wouldn't turn the screws. So I reached for my trusty mole grips 😁 I added a strip of leather to minimise the damage to the screw heads. That didn't work, but with the leather removed, the screws turned - they were stiff, but moved smoothly, which was a relief.
Once that was done, I finished stripping the lock down. The two screws that just wouldn't budge were the recessed one holding the mainspring and the pan. Although I could possibly have got them out with an impact driver, I decided that it was probably better to leave them as they were and clean around them rather than risking damage.
These next two photos show the lock stripped down, from front and rear, revealing the true horror of the level of corrosion around the frizzen spring and pan.
With everything (mostly) apart, I was able to wash each part down with more WD40, then use a mix of Autosol and fine wet & dry paper ( a variety of grits from 400 down to superfine 3000) to remove the worst of the corrosion. As I said earlier, I was aiming for functionality rather than perfection, and I knew that if I sanded away the worst of the corrosion it might lead to structural weakness, so I focused on just getting rid of the worst of it and inspecting each component carefully.
One part which needed a little bit of work was the frizzen screw. The slot on the head was far too shallow, but a little bit of careful work with the hacksaw solved that. It was then a case of working the screw in and out a half turn at a time with lots of WD40 to wash away the corrosion in the thread so it would turn nicely again. As you can see, I'd also been able to get rid of the worst of the rust and corrosion on the lockplate under where the frizzen spring sat.
Finally, it was time to put it back together again. Yay !
On these shots of the inside of the lockplate, you can see I didn't get rid of the corrosion totally; that's because I focused on removing surface corrosion, not the cosmetic stuff. The last thing I wanted to do was weaken the mainspring by sanding it !
Also, a lot of the brown you can see is now nice gooey grease. It'll protect the surfaces from further corrosion and ensure moving parts don't wear each other down.
This is the outside, ready for the frizzen to be replaced. The upper jaw of the hammer is already in place. The large ring on the top dog screw is a peculiarly Spanish thing, but it's actually wonderfully practical because you can tighten it down enough to hold the flint without messing around with screwdrivers of combi-tools. It makes a field flint-change in the middle of a battle far, far easier !
With the frizzen back on, it was time to replace the spring. Look at all that wonderful grease ! I use Pro-Natur, because it's long-lasting and non-acidic (which means it won't eat into the steel over time).
Here's the lock re-fitted to the musket. Again, the woodwork and brass aren't perfect, but they are a lot better than they were (not to mention that the ramrod is no longer welded in place by rust !). It's a functional re-enactment weapon, not some kind of pretty but useless wall-hanger.
The final step was to make sure it all worked. So I fitted a new flint and recoded a little video of dry-firing just to establish if it'll behave. It made a decent little shower of sparks - result ! I'll probably take it out at the next re-enactment event to see how well it behaves on the battlefield.
All photos and video by me
