Rifling machines don't need to be powered from what I've seen. There are only a couple passes with each setup so it's not hard to do by hand. After a couple of strokes, the cutter is removed and a shim added to deepen the cut and clean out the chips. My kid, who had just turned 7 then, was able to easily run it.
I saw the pistol and rifle versions in progress at Dixon's Muzzleloading Fair in PA last summer. Also got to see them hammer out a barrel from a flat strip of wrought irion. Unbelievable how this stuff was done back in the day!
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norwegianwiking
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Posted: January 28 2013 at 6:45am | IP Logged
if you can locate it, there's a film made what looks like ages ago, about the gunsmith at Colonial Williamsburg with Wallace Gusler building a rifle from scratch, with a good voice-over explanation. Shows the old-timey rifling machine in use.
Fun fact, a machine like this was built and used here in Norway to rifle home-made STEN barrels for the resistance-made STEN gun copys
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bikergunnut
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excellent, I believed it had been pulled off of youtube.
I've seen it several times, but i can still watch it and never realize it's an hour long.
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Mech warrior
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Posted: January 29 2013 at 11:30pm | IP Logged
WOW! That was awesome! I watched the whole thing from start to finish. Hard to imagine what they went through to make as many as they did back then. I think a lot of people would be inspired, with our modern technology available to us today.
I remember a time or 2, when making stuff, how bad my hands hurt from all the filing i had done. And how good it felt, when i was done and it worked.
I will never complain about filing again.
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norwegianwiking
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Posted: January 30 2013 at 11:37am | IP Logged
The two most impressive parts, to me, is the welding of the barrel from a flat. That process is incredible. The second is the proofing, realizing that at that point, all that work may very well go up in a big bang with a burst barrel from a poor weld etc.
I've read a bit about Gusler, aparently he more or less rediscovered\reinvented some of these practices and methods, as they had become partially forgotten by the 1950's -1960's when he started getting into old-school gunsmithing.
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Stahlhelm88
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