Black
Powder by Chris Risebrook
Black-Powder by Chris Risebrook
This month, Chris deviates from his first love – black-powder and features some of the air-rifles in his collection.
Off on a completely different tangent this month – air-rifles! Yet another collecting interest. A few years ago, I sold my collection of air-rifles at an Arms Fair and so, it was with some embarrassment when asked recently how many air-guns I had, that I had to admit to twenty!
Mind you, I think there is some sort of perverted law of physics here; if you put air-guns in a dark cupboard, they tend to multiply. I have noticed the same thing happens with arrows - but we won’t go there - this time!
At my old club, I became known as the ‘airgun nut’ and people would present me with unwanted air-rifles - mostly simple break-barrel jobs which I used to enjoy rebuilding, re-bluing and re-finishing the stocks for no better reason than I could not bear to see these guns in a neglected state.
Of course, occasionally something different would come along. A Spanish Setra arrived, a Sheridan Blue Streak lookalike - inevitably missing its bolt. Just to prove its valves were working, I made up a dummy
bolt from brass rod and Gerard Cardew kindly ran me up a version in steel. The stock was made from a piece of softwood and, if you just showed it a chequering tool, it just turned to fuzz. It was a stinker to refinish and was my first attempt at the walnut dust and glue finish mentioned in a previous article.
I was once presented with an Original 50 - in the usual state - in kit form - bits missing and with the spring dangling out of the action. This has to be one of the most frustrating guns to re-spring and gunsmiths of my acquaintance thought them inventions of the devil, designed purely to torment them.
When I was a student, after college, I would visit a gunsmith in Bayswater (should have been studying really). On one occasion, on entering the shop, I found him by following the stream of profanity. In his workshop he had an Original 50 clamped in a bench vise and he was compressing the spring with a six-foot length of ‘four by two’ jammed in the window frame. I beat a hasty retreat. I never did discover if he re- sprung it; every time I mentioned anything to do with air-guns, he turned a nasty shade of purple.
Original 35s and 50s are very easy to dismantle. All you have to do is drive out two through pins and bingo – in kit form - bits everywhere! Actually, although not a fan of the currently fashionable elf ‘n safety’ ethic, a hard hat and safety glasses are really ‘de rigeur’ because on removing the last pin, the piston flew past my ear - hotly pursued by the spring and embedded itself in the wall in a most impressive manner. This required an extremely large restorative g&t!
However, knowledge comes from taking things apart and wisdom from putting them together. The difficulty with an Original 50 is that it is necessary to compress the spring whilst at the same time fitting a sleeve with an inner sleeve, which has three ball- bearings around its circumference, whilst also fitting a stud on a coil spring between the sleeves. To add to the problem, the spring is at 140lbs. at rest!
Needless to say, two of the ball bearings fall out - gravity being what it is. Puzzlement! The answer was a home-made sash-cramp of enormous proportions, massive vertical dowel rods and chains (yes, literally, but with lots of padding). This enabled me to spend - I won’t tell you how many - days just doing it over and over again until it finally gave in and fitted together. The end result is shown on Photo 1 - and that spring is just going to have to last!
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