Pedersoli Brown Bess

MaxGen

A friend of mine bought me a Pedrsoli Brown Bess Kit. I'm trying to figure out how i should finish the wood. The Wood is Walnut, so should I be using an oil to bring out the grain or stick with stain then satin polyurethane?

If I use a stain, should it be a mahogany or dark walnut, if I should use oil, what kind?

I’ve seen some pictures of Brown Bess’ but I’ve never owned a Flintlock before. I see they are dark, but I know stain’s will show differently based on the wood being applied to.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks

Croppy Boy

First of all MaxGen, welcome to the forum.

Do you realise that Pedersoli guns are firing replicas and require a licence whether you use it or not. The Brown Bess is a 0.75" calibre smoothbore making it an 11 bore shotgun and should be licenced as such.

Regarding your question as to staining the stock, I would use a dark walnut stain, giving it several coats to make it good and dark, let it dry completely and rub it well with linseed oil.

I should add, if you are planning to fire it, DO NOT under any circumstances use modern gun powder. The gun could quite possibly explode in your face, use only blackpowder if you can find some and the best of luck to you in your quest for that.

MaxGen

Croppy,

Thank you for the response and warm welcome, this is exactly what I was looking for. Appreciate the advice as well.

Before I saw this post I just went out and bought a Dark Walnut stain and a satin Varathane this morning. I'll return the Varathane and purchase some linseed oil. I'm assuming I should lightly sand between coats?

About licensing, I'm actually in Toronto and from what I can tell, flintlocks do not require a license here. I'm going to double check that again though. I may be mistaken.

Again, thank you for respponding, it is much appreciated.

MaxGen...

Croppy Boy

Your welcome.

I'm sorry, I assumed you were in Ireland. I know in the US traditional muzzle loaders are not catagorized as firearms and don't need to be licenced and I think Canada is the same. You do need some sort of a permit to hold blackpowder but it seems to be easily enough got. If you do decide to shoot it, start with 80 grains of FFg blackpowder under a .715 round ball patched with a lubed pillow ticking patch, you can prime with the same powder.

Have plenty of fun.

The muzzleloading forum in the US is very good, there are plenty of guys there will give all the help you need.

www.muzzleloadingforum.com

MaxGen

Thanks again Croppy. I'm going to need plenty of advice with this as it's my first flintlock. The link you provided looks great.

...Just got back from buying the linseed oil too.

Regards,

MaxGen...