Chapter 16

Karen

“Severe storm approaching the northern Big Horn mountains,” said the announcer. “Access to 14 and 14A is closed by order of the Highway Patrol.” HORN-HORN-HORN “Attention: Campers, hikers, hunters. If at all possible make your way to the main roads and evacuate the area.” HORN-HORN-HORN “Severe storm accompanied by cloud to ground lightning strikes, sustained winds of 60 miles per hour. Wind gusts in excess of 90 miles per hour have been experienced in Cody. Access to 14 and 14A is closed by order of the Highway Patrol.” HORN-HORN-HORN “The National Weather Service has received official reports of baseball sized hail and downpours exceeding 3 inches an hour. Seek high ground.” HORN-HORN-HORN

The first reports were this morning. The Weather Service was expecting the Bitterroot mountains west of Cody to block the worst part of the storm ... or at least dissipate it. Driven by the worst central Oregon Pacific storm in a hundred years, the storm was building instead of failing. Heated air from grass fires in the Great Basin combined with wind accelerating down the north face of the Colorado Rockies and cold air from a freak storm in British Columbia had combined over Dubois, Idaho and increased the depth the Pacific’s front.

The unexpected storm, although only fifty miles wide, was three hundred miles long and gathering strength by the second. Now the worst of the storm was north of a line between Saddlestring, Wyoming and Dubois, Idaho and south of the Montana Wyoming border. No one was making predictions as to the severity after crossing the Big Horns.

I was getting ready for the fourth week of my classes on Flintlock Rifles.

Heeding the warnings I fished out the lockbox and took out the envelope with the strap and the Colt 1908. On the way through town I picked up two boxes of Winchester .380 hollow-points, a pound of ffg and some English sawn flints. I had half a priming horn of ffffg and at least a hundred balls...

While my students were working with Uberti half stock J&S Hawken kits, I was scratch building an early .53 caliber S. Hawken full stock flintlock. Most of mine was guess work.

We’d been through drawfiling, fitting under barrel staples, casting pewter nose caps and cleaning up the Uberti castings, trigger guard, buttplate, and ramrod thimbles.

At the same time as each individual project was being performed by the students I was building the same part from iron sheet. A .53 cal round ball ramrod needs a half inch ramrod entry thimble. This I formed from sheet iron using a vise, a drill bit and a hammer.

Making a CAD template ... CAD ... Cardboard Aided Design ... to insure a proper fit around the drill bit I cut out a similiar piece of sheet with my Carl Klenk metal shears, placed the metal on top of the open jaws of the vice and whacked the drill bit laid on top of iron. Continuing the hammering I closed the jaws of the vice and pinched the sheet around the drill bit. This left a tube with ears. I turned the thimble over and squeezed the ears into a neck and soldered the top of the neck shut.

At the lathe I turned a steel model and put the model on the anvil. Using the model as a dolly I hammered a hump of sheet iron filed it to fit the curve of the ramrod pipe and welded the two together. Some judicious file work and I had a Hawken style ramrod pipe.

Cheating, I cut a piece from a one and a sixteenth inch hexagon steel bar and turned one end round on the lathe about an inch in length. I used the lathe to thread the plug 3/4-16 I had previously lathe drilled the barrel 11/16ths” and tapped the barrel 3/4-16. I screwed the plug into the the barrel until it was of a reasonable tightness ... but not Tight I was planning on at least a sixteenth more turn after I insured the plug was face matched to the face drilled and threaded barrel. It wouldn’t do to have powder blow-by ... That’s my eye looking at the joint.

Lamp-blacking the face I insured a good fit. Disassembling the barrel and steel bar I coated the threads with loctite to insure I could dismount the steel bar. Threading the bar into the barrel I used a pair of wrenches to tighten the bar that extra sixteenth turn and lined up the flats. The flat that lined up the best decided the top flat of the barrel. Since I had taken such care to make sure the hole in the barrel was centered ... it didn’t matter which flat I used. My choice was arbitrary. With ONE blow of a sharp chisel I witnessed marked the bottom flat. Then I disassembled the two again.

One of the beauties of the Hawken is its convenience and ease of cleaning. Remove the wedges holding the barrel to the stock, lifting the barrel to release the hooked breach the barrel will pop out. Cleaning is a simple matter of flushing the barrel with boiling water and scrubbing until the water runs clear. The stock stays dry,

I center drilled the face of the threaded end using a 5/8ths” drill at least an inch deep ... the powder chamber. I would drill and tap a 1/4 inch hole into the powder and ... using a platinum rod. drill a 1/16 in hole through the rod and choosing which end would be powder and which end would be flash hole, thread the rod to screw into the powder chamber ... later.

I cut the bar on an angle ... just like the original Hawken then rough hacksawed the hooked breach. Fine three faced files completed the hook. I drilled the cut end of the remaining steel hex rod and filed a matching hole for the hook.