Stocking a rifle

Victor

Back in the day, about 1800, did rifles have detachable stocks or would that have been a thing that would have only been done in a workshop?

meathstevie

Victor wrote: »

Back in the day, about 1800, did rifles have detachable stocks or would that have been a thing that would have only been done in a workshop?

Early 19th century would have been the days of muzzle loader single shot muskets and rifled muskets. Removing and fitting a new stock was possible and done quite regularly I reckon. It definitely wouldn't have been as easy as nowadays when unscrewing a couple of screws or pushing out a few pins basically allows you to remove a stock and essentially field strip most rifles.

Sparks

More to the point, that's prior to the standardisation of parts and manufacture that came in during the industrial revolution. I mean, 1800 is when the first screws made in a standard way start showing up - before then, every fastener was hand-made and different in size from every other manufactured fastener, and standardisation of larger parts took even longer to get going. So swapping out any part for any other part in anything, firearm or otherwise, wasn't simple maintenance, it was straight-up manufacturing.

cookimonster

I'm no expert in muzzle loaders etc but have watched a good few videos on related subjects and have seen many demonstrations on the complete stripping and reassembling of various styles of muzzle loaders. Barrels where often removed to have boiling water flushed through them to clean out the foweling left from black powder.

The following link is the first one grabbed off UTube and shows how easy they are to strip (ignore the modern day bedding job)

https://youtu.be/cbxxyn_74D8

gunny123

Sparks wrote: »

More to the point, that's prior to the standardisation of parts and manufacture that came in during the industrial revolution. I mean, 1800 is when the first screws made in a standard way start showing up - before then, every fastener was hand-made and different in size from every other manufactured fastener, and standardisation of larger parts took even longer to get going. So swapping out any part for any other part in anything, firearm or otherwise, wasn't simple maintenance, it was straight-up manufacturing.

Companies still have (or did) their own individual thread forms though, "The Cadillac screw thread", "The Waltham watch screw thread", "The Lowenherz thread". Done i reckon to make sure no one but the parent company could make spare parts.

I remember having to replace a screw on a gun years ago, and i could never find out what it was. It certainly was not a standardised thread.

Sparks

But that's what I mean - if you bought a Waltham thread screw, it *would* fit; whereas before, *every* screw was hand-made and unique. Which is why you don't see many screws before 1800 and not many until they invented the screw with a pointy tip about 20 years after that. And then they pretty much took over from nails in a short space of time (because machine made screws were better than machine made nails (which were far worse than handmade nails)).