Early 17th Century Scandinavian Gun Lock

[Philip]

Originally Posted by rickystl

Hi Philip

About the lock on the OP: The small nub and pin on the frizzen plate would in fact interfere with the priming powder, not allowing the frizzen to fully close - assuming you filled the entire pan with powder. But that was not usually done since it would often act to smother the vent hole of the barrel directing the "flash" upward instead of inward towards the main charge in the barrel. Thus iqnighting the priming powder, but not the main charge in the barrel. I know this to be true from my own shooting experience. For optimum shooting the pan would contain just a small pinch of powder. So in that instance, the small nub and pin would not interfere.
Here is an interesting quotation:

"According to M.L.Brown the first evidence of snaplocks was in the 1540's and in 1556 they were refitting German matchlock arquebuses to take them"


Rick

Hi, Rick

Great that you provided a shooter's input as re the priming pan and its cover. It explains a lot in this case.

You also have the advantage of the piece in your hands, rather than just looking at pictures. Given what is known now, it might be interesting to mount this in a test stock, attach a shootable barrel, and construct a trigger for it based on what you and I have discussed, and find out how well this thing really works.

On the authenticity issue, have you thought of taking it apart, looking at mating and internal surfaces for out-of-place tool marks, rusting, etc. And those screws should be a dead giveaway: if Scandinavian locks predate the French Revolution (and hence the adoption of the metric system as a consequence) and come from a cultural area well outside the English sphere, then the screw diameters, TPI, and pitch should not match metric or English/American standards. Also, inspection of thread profile under magnification should tell you a lot since this is something that changed through history (illustrative explanations of this is online, I once saw a whole article on screw thread evolution, didn't save the URL but am sure it's easily google-able.)