This is the beginning of the next project, a 16 Bore(.669″) Purdey style caplock side by side muzzleloader. This project is going to be very similar to the 10 Bore double rifles that I built last year so I’m not going to be doing a lot of video with this build. I will be posting some update pictures as I go along though just to let everybody(especially my customer) know how things are progressing. If you'd like to see the videos of the 10 Bore builds you can visit my blog at stolzergunsmithing.wordpress.com

I Started by turning the barrel blanks down to a straight taper, then breeching them and then clamping them to a steel plate for soldering together.

I use silver brazing rod and flux to join the barrels for the first couple inches at the breech end.

Both sides of the valleys were fluxed and soldered.

A shot of the muzzles… .669″ bore.

I don’t run the barrels exactly parallel with the bore line, I actually like them to convert slightly, so that later on when it comes time to regulate them I can drive the wedge in and spread the barrels as needed. After some careful measuring I determined that parallel would leave a .215″ gap so I went .200″.

The next step is to make the top and bottom ribs, to machine the radius in the bottom rib I soldered it onto a piece of 1/2″ x 1″ bar stock so it would be easy to clamp in the mill and easy to clamp in my vise to clean up and fit the ramrod pipes to it.

As you can see it makes it very easy to machine this way.

That's it for this update, I’m actually a little farther along but those pictures will have to wait for the next update.

Colin