The day I Made, "The List".
Tomorrow I will be driving out to pick up a hand built rifle I ordered over 2 years ago. Patiently, my name sat on a list for over a year while I waited for the phone call from a warm friendly voice belonging to a bearded, older gentleman whose craft is the art of fine firearm making - flintlock firearms. In late June, I received the call that he was ready to start my rifle. On July 1, I drove out to his place to deliver my Rice Barrel, purchased 6 months prior.
His home is a cabin he himself built in the woods. Adjoined to the cabin is a small shop, heated with a wood stove and smelling of hardwoods, oils and pipe smoke. As is with flintlock gun makers, the shop appears primitive and unkept, as if an artistic genius has it just the way is necessary so as to produce greatness out of chaos. Cold coffee sits in still mugs, metal filings sit in small piles, books sit upon books, a myriad of tools adorn the walls and finished rifles sit in racks with various styles represented; English, Colonial, and Fur Trade.
Few remain like this man. Few are capable of the stills required to sculpt both wood and metal with their hands, into a fine shooting rifle of the 17th and 18th centuries. His passion and knowledge on the subject are incomprehensible. His private collections that of a museum.
I have not lay eyes on my finished rifle yet. The only parts of it I have seen are the Southern Classic, 42" Rice barrel in .54 Caliber and the Chambers Deluxe Siler Lock. Both were raw, now yet touched or crafted by the gunmakers hand. The stock was to be formed from an old piece of Sugar Maple, cured for years in the corner of the shop. I saw the piece of wood that was destined to form the body of the rifle only 2 other times - never after touched by chisels or files.
The rifle is a Dickert rifle and I plan to write about it here later on. You will be acquainted I assure you. Part of me shakes with nerves to meet this finished rifle. It is as if I am about to be introduced to someone dear, who I have known for a long time - yet never met. Perhaps it is as a first date, awkward, new, afraid of doing something wrong.
Discussing Rifles with the Master.
Tomorrow I pick up my rifle. For 6 months it has slowly been carved, filed, chiseled, shaped, sanded, oiled, finished and polished. The barrel has been inlet, the lock placed, trigger set, sights placed into hand cut dovetails, and brass decor smoothed to be one with wood. This will be a Jacob Dickert tribute if there ever was one; a rifle that conjures the images of dead tyrants, just as the rifles that hurled lead at Fergusons men on Kings Mountain, or perhaps fired over the walls of the Alamo, maybe it ventured West with the Corps of Discovery, or belonged to a Free Trapper named Osborne Russell.
Here are other works by this builder - many of who's rifles are also featured in my flintlock videos.
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