You remind me of me. I like some of your interests too. Some things I enjoy:
fountain pen collecting/use
antique typewriters
vacuum tube radio collecting (or, in my case, acquiring radios & promising myself I'll fix them EVENTUALLY.)
old clocks and pocket watches
78rpm records & Edison cylinders
The phonographs to play those records, all before 1930
Kerosene lamps, the more intricate the better.
Writing novels & stories & poems
Victorian, Edwardian, Great Depression-era middle and working class clothing
Collecting old books
Automobile repair
Horsemanship (for the love of Mike, why are riding-lessons so hard to find? Did the motor industry kill
that many horses?)
Incandescent Edison type lightbulbs
I'm worried that I am getting into black-powder firearms, because today I have been down a YouTube rabbit hole on the history of the Konyak Naga tribesmen of the border between India & Myanmar. The Konyak Naga people were headhunters and craftsmen. (One might as well have something to do with one's heads.) They were skilled blacksmiths and produced locally made firearms, which look, to my guess, to be copies of 1860s-1870s Victorian English pieces, both single and double-barreled percussion guns. This matches their discovery by Baptist missionaries in the 1870s. If the Konyak Naga had been able to measure & examine the missionaries' guns, no wonder their own pieces match the general profile of a mid-19th c. British piece: halfstock design, long tapering tang and trigger guard, pistol grip on stock, and (interesting note!) late English style, bar profile, percussion locks, which were an 1840s development, and the high straight hammer associated with that design. The Catholic priest at church says when he was a boy he went shooting with his father's muzzleloader very often. This was in India about 50 years ago. He is now proving himself quite capable with a .22 rimfire rifle and didn't seem too impressed with the old muzzle-loader, so down the rabbit hole again I went:
the muzzleloading gun lives on in the wilds of rural India, just like it never disappeared from Appalachia until about 1950.
Now I already (
legally!) owned a few older guns but have recently been blacksmithing a single-shot 10-gauge back into working order. It is 140 years old but should work fine with home-rolled shells. There's a 16-gauge double I'm fixing up as well; I believe it to be 1876-1886 based on some numbering I found inside. Now it DOES work, but the stock is cracked. That arrives to-morrow I think, and I'll have to start many weeks of work trying to adapt a rough-cut walnut stock to fit the shotgun. (Then, assuming the thing works--which it may not--I still have to hand-engrave the checkering to match. And all for a $275 shotgun charitably described as an "JABC gun," short for "just another Belgian clunker.")
Why do I have antique shotguns?
Because I think craftsmanship like this is pretty nifty. Enjoy a silent-era documentary of barrel makers in Europe. These small shops would forge the steel tubes for the barrels, and sell them to gunmakers who would join them together with iron ribs & solder, then fit them to a lock and wooden stock & grip.
Modern demonstration by some of the young fellows of the Konyak Naga tribe. I do not recommend them as models of safe marksmanship. But I do think their devotion to the old traditions are commendable. Four are carrying classic percussion side-lock pieces and the one on the left appears to have a primitive form of what would become the modern inline muzzleloader. Someone introduce these guys to us down in the Southern US. We also enjoy standing around outside messing with guns that should've been thrown away a long time ago.
Anyway: Picking an interest to pursue. This is the hardest part of all; I suggest slowing down & just relaxing some on it. You may find that it'd be more fun to focus on stuff that doesn't cost you any money, or that you can do yourself. Uranium glass is nice, but costly. Take time & enjoy your less expensive interests as you figure out what to put the most work into.
It would cost me hundreds of dollars to build my own muzzle-loading shotgun from scratch. The work is harder than simply welding a couple pipes together--you never use pipe, and a good double is always soldered instead of welded (plus the barrels must be regulated to a single point of aim at 40 yards.) Of course I'm building a double-barrel; might miss with the first shot!
Can't afford to build the thing now, but I can learn Barton's Formula--an old mathematical trick for calculating the working load of a piece of tubing.
And it goes like this:
P = 2
ST / (
OD)(SF), where P = Fluid Pressure (in PSI), T = pipe wall thickness, in inches; (OD) = Outside Diameter, (SF) = Safety Factor, and S = Material Tensile Strength in psi. (Considering I am talking about building a replica of a 19th-century muzzle loading shotgun it would need to be yield strength. A gun goes "out of proof" if the barrels are bulged slightly--you do not want to be stuffing a charge of powder and shot into a warped-up tube.
The piece I was planning to construct was going to be a traditional black powder smoothbore. It would not need the complication of a rifled bore. Some people use DOM (drawn over mandrel) electrically welded steel tubing to construct these; it's been popular in the United States during the 1960s-1980s muzzleloading revival period to use DOM tubing to craft muzzleloader barrels. Unfortunately, it's also very easy to blow up DOM tubing if it is made out of a crappy steel. I could get high grade tubing for $25 USD per barrel, and have only to solder the two barrels together and lay the ribs. But I'd have to proof-test both of them beforehand, which you do by double-loading the barrels, clamping them to a test stand, and lighting them with a fuse. Measure the barrels at all dimensions before and after the proof loads. If they survive proofing with zero change, good--you can probably get away with using your barrels. The English are strict about proof tests. I am in America; we don't have a proof test for muzzleloaders here & you could get away without proofing your gun--but I'd much rather use one that I've already tested.
Anyway, why all the minutiae about building an historically authentic replica of a 19th-century fowling piece? Because I can spend any number of happy spare moments scratching away at mathematics, researching appropriate stock geometry in both English pieces & the artisanal pieces of the Konyak Naga, dismantling my father's old Pedersoli muzzleloading double (itself a copy of a Wm. Moore or Joseph Manton c. 1840-1870) for the details of how to make a "patent" or hooked breech and how to drill the breechplugs themselves for the percussion cap nipple, calculating the strength of steel or the pressure of a 20-bore black powder shotgun charge or the best way to mix a batch of Armstrong's Mixture so I can make percussion-caps --
and none of this costs me a dime. Research is free, and it stays free until I start making stuff go. In the meantime, anybody want to come research the barrel wall thickness of muzzleloading shotguns with me?
No?
I didn't think so.
