Curly Maple Cane and Pistol by Customer Neil Dorgan

 

Neil recently dropped by the shop to show us his latest project made our of some of our Curly Maple.
Beautiful piece with some amazing figure. It's always fun to see our wood in functional pieces of art!


He also emailed us over some neat images of a pistol he completed out of a similar piece of Curly Maple.

Below is a great write up he included about the project:


"....I finally got around to taking the 'final' pictures of the Early American pistol that I finished last year. I had it about 10% completed when Shannon was born, but then had so many other priorities that I shelved it for about 30 years. The 1st green photo marks my 'restart' with the block of curly maple, barrel blank, and breech plug. Not shown are the misc. brass furniture sand castings, and the flint lock which I had about 80% completed. (Note: If you ever get a chance to take a bag of sand castings and a block of wood - and turn them into a working flintlock, trust me - pass it up!)

I will spare you all the details of the sketching, designing, cutting, sanding, scraping, fitting, shaping,
fabricating, incising, carving, bending, browning, hardening, tempering, filing, grinding, measuring,
timing, aligning, heating, staining, sawing, inletting, drilling, tapping, threading, annealing,
rubbing, polishing, testing, proofing, deburring, crowning, loving, hating, and cursing.

I must also give credit to my friend Ron Collings (a master engraver from England's famous Holland & Holland) and my beloved daughter Shannon. After I signed the top flat on the barrel, Ron 'chased'
my signature with a graver, and then hammered 24K pure gold into the channeled groove. Shannon was instrumental in choosing the final design of many of the fittings which provided the pistol's character and unique appearance.

After all that work I expected a lot of questions like..."Did you put a fly in the half-cock notch?"...or...
"What is the measured lock time?"...or..."Did you put a bridle on the tumbler?"...or..."Did you carbon
harden the frizzen?"...or... "Do you patch your balls?"...but no such query's were received. Instead, the questions have ranged from "Is it real?"...sure, go ahead and touch it..."I mean, could you kill somebody with that?"...for problem resolution, I usually prefer diplomacy... "No, seriously, could you kill someone with it?"...yes, actually I could kill everyone on earth with it at the rate of one every 40 seconds, but it would take a very, very long time..."Does that barrel thing have a hole down there in the middle of it?"...huh???"

Thanks for the images and write up Neil!