Rampa room artillery, Don't know how we missed this one. Jointing more white oak is making me jumpy, especially when the motor pulley's key fell out of the keyway and the resulting screech was enough to make me jump back several feet!! What most people have a hard time understanding is reconciling the factory-new look of ordinance and what we kindly call an "aged" or "weathered" appearance of a model. We DO NOT make models. We make exact recreations of arsenal or foundry-new artillery. Our website goes into the differences between an 'exact recreation' and a model or replica. Basically, models can be made out of wood, plaster, aluminum or any other material as long as the "look" is correct for a particular moment in time. After four trips to Fort Moultrie in Charleston, South Carolina we know for a fact that most of the reinforcing bands were machined on the 7" Treble-Banded Brooke Rifle that we are building. Ours will be as well. We have already showed all the tube photos that we have time to do; we have yet to show everything together and there are no Platform photos yet. We are building that now and the entire Company Brooke Rifle (Second prototype) will be ready by Christmastime. Photos are planned to be show after that, with maybe a few of the woodwork before that time.
Information?? How about something that most manufacturers would fight to keep SECRET. As you guys know by now, our price point is quite high at $15,000, so the vast majority of our customers would never even think of firing their seacoast gun. They are collectors and they want to protect their investment; that isn't hard to understand. So why even make them functional at all? Despite a lot of hand wringing by our lawyers, Mike and I decided to make each and every one as functional as the original were, only a little smaller!
The SECRET is that we failed on the first attempt to make an accurate tube for the Brooke on the First Prototype. We carefully cut that rifling as accurately as we could and raced out to the high plains range and very carefully loaded and shot round after carefully-made round. The first five shot group at 100 yards was as big as, no bigger than, a basketball!! Why shoot more than five with those disappointing results? But we did, and another basketball group proved 'something' was wrong. We went back to the shop and triple checked everything like bolt dia., length, cavity depth, skirt thickness, etc. and the powder charge weight as well. All checked out O.K., so the rifling was checked next, and there was the problem. A math error had defeated us by causing the rifling form to be off by .011" on the origin of the hook in the hook/slant form of rifling, which caused an irregularity in the intersection of the hook where it intersects the land. Also called triangular or sawtooth rifling, Brooke's rifling form was a little different from that of the Blakely seacoast gun rifling, but not too much.
The second proto had a slight error in it as well when the indexing collar slipped during manufacture, but this tube proved that the new Swedish Steel cutter with the corrected form was good. Even with the mfg. error, this tube will do 3" to 5" for five shots at 100 yards. The second proto tube, version 'B', using a new 7 set screw collar instead of 4, has done 1.5" at 100 yards and will do less than 2.5" every time. In early December we will be starting on tube production for a batch of four that we hope to complete by the end of March.
That's the latest, Rick. Thanks for asking!
Mike and Tracy
