My heart has always been with the cannon, but after reading so much about the mortar and finding a chunk of 4"X5" iron in the basement, I thought I would take a swing at one.
The machineing was done on a 10"X24" Logan lathe. I left as much stock on it that I could, for size and I was haveing trouble getting a good cut , due to metal, bit angle, lathe speed, or probably inexperiance.
I first turned a long shoulder so as to have a good chuck bite. That would be the trunnion end anyway. Then contured the barrel, you can see they are shallow cuts. Next was drilling a 3/4" hole the length of the barrel including the powder chamber which finnished out at 3/4"X 3/4".
From here on I have enclosed some pictures. The first one is of a homemade boreing bar, which is appropriatly named. I found that I could only get about 3 or 4 thousands cut on each pass. You can see that the bar isn't attached to the cross feed. so the cutting bit had to be adjusted each time. ( Boreing) The bore finnished out at 1.709".
The next one is of the reversed barrel end being rounded. That cut was done free hand, and then filed to smooth.
Here we have one of the buisness end. Notice that the vent hole could be a little more forward. Picking the almn foil is a bit tricky.
This is one of cleaning up the handles after being forged and drilled.
The next two are of hacking out the furniture. I inleted the barrel to a stationary 45 deg.
This is all the pix that I can have for this post.
Thanks to RickK, Radio 2, and Double D, for your help in trying to get my pix posted. Well it took a while, but with some extra help their
in. I'll wind it up on the next post.
Div Arty