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Thread: can you identify this rifle

  1. #1
    Boolit Master

    LUCKYDAWG13's Avatar
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    can you identify this rifle

    can you tell me about this rifle it has a 1864 date on it i just got it as a gift its going to rest along side my fireplace
    just wanted to know something about it Attachment 199992 Attachment 199993
    kids that hunt and fish dont mug old ladies

  2. #2
    Boolit Master
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    it is a 63 springfield rifled musket. that has been converted to a shotgun by one of the surplus dealers after the civil war. it can be brought back to original shooting condition. which would be better in the long run.

  3. #3
    Boolit Master

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    how hard would it be to find a rifled barrel for it
    kids that hunt and fish dont mug old ladies

  4. #4
    Boolit Master
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    not hard at all. send your old barrel to Robert hoyt Fairfield pa.

    he will bore out the old barrel and put in a liner. if the old barrel was cut then he will join it under the barrel band. there is a company making the front part of the stock. that joins under the barrel band also.

  5. #5
    In Remembrance / Boolit Grand Master

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    Before you start changing things, look into Springfield Forager guns. Some were arsenal converted for shooting game for food.
    Fact: Some people are alive simply because it's illegal to kill them.

  6. #6
    Boolit Master

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    thanks looks like the barrel has cement in it about 4" of it I think this one is just a wall hanger
    kids that hunt and fish dont mug old ladies

  7. #7
    Boolit Master
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    I have worked on worse barrels then that with hoyt. many are being used in n-ssa matches.

  8. #8
    Boolit Master
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    A 4 inch plug in the bottom of the barrel makes me wonder if it might be loaded?

  9. #9
    Boolit Master




    Scharfschuetze's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Eddie2002 View Post
    A 4 inch plug in the bottom of the barrel makes me wonder if it might be loaded?
    Could be. Many battlefield recovery rifles in the Civil war had many unfired rounds jammed down their barrels, although this one certainly wasn't a battlefield pick up. Get a worm and see if you can get it out. Lots of BP corrosion on the lock plate, so my guess is the bore is in similar or worse shape.

    The 1863 rifled musket was the basis for the 1868 and later model (1870, 1873, 1884 and 1888) Trapdoor Springfields.
    Keep your powder dry,

    Scharf

  10. #10
    Boolit Master

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    Quote Originally Posted by Eddie2002 View Post
    A 4 inch plug in the bottom of the barrel makes me wonder if it might be loaded?
    Definitely should try a worm or ball extractor. Last winter, a friend brought in an early 1840s-vintage double she'd inherited. No specific history but gun came out of the attic of her great-aunt's 1890s Victorian home and she'd asked if I'd clean it up for a wall hanger. Bore was badly pitted and right-hand lock was non-functional (broken mainspring, I suspect) but when I dropped a cleaning rod down the barrels, the left barrel gave yielded a satisfying metallic 'clunk' while right was more of a 'thud'. A few minutes with a ball extractor yielded 1 1/8 oz. of something close to #8 shot and roughly 62 gr of what appeared to be FFg. Touched a match to a pinch of the powder and POOF...nice flare with sulfurous white smoke.

    Bill
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    "Scarlet Begonias"

  11. #11
    Boolit Master

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    I'll see if my worm will dig in when I get home
    kids that hunt and fish dont mug old ladies

  12. #12
    Boolit Master

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    whatever is at the bottom of the barrel it's as hard as a rock I put a worm on the end of my range rod it would not dig in at all
    kids that hunt and fish dont mug old ladies

  13. #13
    Boolit Master




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    Quote Originally Posted by LUCKYDAWG13 View Post
    whatever is at the bottom of the barrel it's as hard as a rock I put a worm on the end of my range rod it would not dig in at all
    Odd. If it was converted to a shotgun, then most BP loadings used an over shot wad to hold the shot in the barrel. One would think that a worm would dig into that.

    You have piqued our interest with your weapon.
    Keep your powder dry,

    Scharf

  14. #14
    Boolit Master

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    IDK I was thinking about picking this up just to see what the heck it is https://www.amazon.com/Fantronics-En...pe+for+android
    kids that hunt and fish dont mug old ladies

  15. #15
    In Remembrance



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    Luckydawg:

    I would unscrew the breech plug and look at what is inside the breech. You might be surprised. Start by removing the nipple (if you can) and soaking the lower 6 inches of the barrel in penetrating oil or even kerosene for about a week. A sturdy bench vise and a breech plug wrench would help but things can be improvised. Don't use heat! I have pulled numerous Civil War musket breech plugs and many of them were still loaded. It is not uncommon for a musket coming from New England to have some cement or mortar poured down the barrel so the gun would be rendered "safe." I have worked on several that had this done to them. In most cases, the "plug" was able to be removed allowing the barrel to be relined and made usable again.

  16. #16
    Boolit Master
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    So what makes you think it is cement? It might be hard to distinguish that from compacted wadding even with that endoscope. It could even be cement on top of a load, and the trouble is that it rules out the us pse of heat, a near-indispensable aid to unscrewing the breechplug.

    You could probably get the nipple out, to see if there is powder in there. If necessary you can destroy it, for musket nipples aren't hard to find or expensive from people like www.trackofthewolf.com . If you squirt water in there for quite a while, it should leach away either the powder or the saltpetre in it. I don't think there would be any harm in then clamping it in a safe place and heating the breech area. Any powder residue can still ignite when it dries out, but with the nipple threads open I can's see that even a total blockage will endanger the gun. with the nipple threads still open.

    It doesn't look in bad condition, and very possibly you will prefer to keep it the way it is. But you can see a good range of rifled liner tubes in the Track of the Wolf site. Both stocks and smoothbore barrels are catalogued but listed as "notify me" by S&S Firearms, which might mean available by special order.

    http://www.ssfirearms.com/products.a...8&filter=stock

  17. #17
    Boolit Grand Master bedbugbilly's Avatar
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    If there is something in the bottom of the barrel - you might want to pull the barrel and remove the breech plug. Usually, the breech plug on the rifled muskets come out fairly easily It certainly wouldn't be unusual to find that it has a load in it. I worked on original guns years ago and often would find them loaded - especially ML shotguns. You might think that it would be easy to worm out a shotgun load but that isn't necessarily so, especially after it has been in the barrel for decades. Just be careful in whatever manner you choose to remove it and always assume it is a "hot load" until proven otherwise.

    I can't tell from your photo if your gun has a barrel band spring or not. If it has a split barrel band with a screw, it would be the 1863 - if it has a barrel band spring, it is the second version of the '63, sometimes referred to as a '64. They went to split barrel bands with screws for the '63 which proved to be unsatisfactory as they would loosen and then went back to the barrel band spring as an improvement on it.

    Bannerman's and others sold thousands of such altered military guns. Usually the barrels were bored smooth and chopped as were he stocks - not always though. I had a 1861 patter Watertown contract rifled musket, stamped 1863, that was bored out and the tulip head ramrod tip was filled in so it could be used as a shotgun - it was not a "forage gun". It had no other alterations to it.

    Hoyt, etc. can do miracles with barrels - reline, extend, etc. but the question is if it is really worth it. Yours could certainly be "restored" back to the original form and it has been done many times - chopped stocks grafted, etc. While we all like the original forms of the rifled muskets, guns such as yours also have a very important place in terms of history. Veterans often purchased their rifles and brought them home - some obviously sporterized theirs to use as shotguns to put meat on the table. The majority were either chopped or assembled out of surplus parts and sold - and they gave many people the opportunity to have a cheap gun to put meat on the table. I find the chopped ones just as interesting as the unaltered ones.

    I had a single barreled shotgun in my collection at one time that utilized a smoothbore barrel off of a 1842 musket - had a underbid soldered on, a back action lock, etc. - not a work of art but obviously it served the purpose of a shotgun for someone. I had a guy who wanted to buy it so he could use the barrel for a 1842 "build". I finally refused his offers as I didn't want to see it parted out for the barrel as it was a great example of the type of shotgun used by common folks in the late 1800s.

    Sometimes folks just don't realize how much "surplus" there was after the Civil War. Surplus places sold Civil War "haversacks" for years - I remember my Dad telling me that he had one that was used as a "book bag" for school when he was in elementary school in the early 1900s - he would have entered kindergarten in 1913. Bannerman's, which was on Bannermans Island (NY) was one of the largest surplus dealers in the country. I have ia friend in NY who gave me a 45-70 barrel that came off of Bannermans Island from their "pier". He visited the island and the cement pier was falling apart - it hadn't been used in years. Bannerman had so much surplus that they used 45-70 barrels - with the action on them - for "reinforcing rod" when they poured the cement piers.

    Lucky - your "shotgun" looks to be in good shape. I wouldn't clean it or polish any of it. It certainly has taken on a good patina. If you can get whatever is in the barrel out - I would still pull the breech plug and check from that end as well as see what the bore looks like. It has probably been bored out and if it is in good shape, the bore could be polished fairly easily. A new military style nipple could be installed and that won't detract from anything. If it was in good shape, I would "proof" the barrel and then shoot it as a shotgun. The bore, if bored out, will probably be around .600 or so - just shy of a 20 gauge probably (.620) so a patched .575 RB would work as well. A few coats of BLO rubbed in to the stock would not be out of order and you will have a nice looking piece of history. If nothing more, it will look nice hanging on the wall!

  18. #18
    Boolit Master
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    Yes, there were foraging shotguns, but the impression we could form from sales catalogues and auctions is that the nation maintained foraging forces, with an occasional subsidiary role in military action. Most such firearms were surplus, altered either for or within civilian ownership.

    An exception is smoothbored Enfield rifled muskets, which were Indian Army issue, and quite common. It wasn't just a matter of not trusting native troops. I have an 1896 manual for the Bengal and Punjab cavalry, and troopers from over or near the border were allowed to take a "gun", but not a rifle, on leave. That gave him pretty good protection from bloodfeuds, robbery and suchlike Border social intercourse, and yet didn't make him as attractive a target.

    If conventionally loaded and not much weakened by rust etc., you could simply cap and fire this gun, no doubt with a long piece of string. But it isn't conventionally loaded any more, if ever it was. It could be cement or any other sort of plug, secured by any sort of adhesive or rust. Someone may even have left it unfired after hearing a rumour that you shouldn't just tip in the contents of a smokeless cartridge. This one needs something that doesn't involve heat to be done to the charge area.

  19. #19
    Boolit Master

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    Ok I got the barrel off and have it soaking I will let it soak for a week or so thank you all for the links if i can get the breach plug off
    I will see if i can find the parts to restore it the gun is 153 years old if i dont do it it might not get done
    kids that hunt and fish dont mug old ladies

  20. #20
    Boolit Master
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    And so the adventure begins.
    Good luck.Have fun.Be safe.
    Leo
    People never lie so much as after a hunt,during a war,or before an election.
    Otto von Bismarck

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Abbreviations used in Reloading

BP Bronze Point IMR Improved Military Rifle PTD Pointed
BR Bench Rest M Magnum RN Round Nose
BT Boat Tail PL Power-Lokt SP Soft Point
C Compressed Charge PR Primer SPCL Soft Point "Core-Lokt"
HP Hollow Point PSPCL Pointed Soft Point "Core Lokt" C.O.L. Cartridge Overall Length
PSP Pointed Soft Point Spz Spitzer Point SBT Spitzer Boat Tail
LRN Lead Round Nose LWC Lead Wad Cutter LSWC Lead Semi Wad Cutter
GC Gas Check