Zoli Zouave Musket Refurb pt 2, Wood refinishing

After some consultation the lock is pretty well a write off, the tumbler was hardened with a blow torch and a poor understanding of metallurgy it seems, the points were too hard, the body not hardened at all so it tore itself apart, the nose of the seer is having the same problem, so It looks like i'll be ordering new parts all around for the lock, I'm thinking I might send the lock plate off to get re colour case hardened too, as the color on it now sucks.
the wood work came along pretty well though

Stripping off the old finish went pretty well, I use Circa 1850 furniture stripper, I find it does an excellent job peeling off what ever gunk that got applied to these guns, this had a glossy hard coat on it that took some time for the stripper to chew threw but once it got through that it ate down to the wood really well. You can see the finish starting to peel off in the photo here, it took 2 coats of the stripper to have it down to the bare wood.

After the stripper is cleaned off I give the stock a wipe down with acetone to pull out any oils that are still in the wood, this will also finish off any tiny bits of finish that are still lingering. The wood is a white wood, i'd say a beech from the way the grain pattern on the bottom of the stock, the orig Zouaves had a walnut stock with a oil finish giving them the nice rifle red color you see on older guns, its going to be hard to match with this wood but i'll give it hell

First coat of stain applied, im using minwax special walnut as a base color, the grain is showing and the beech doesn't like to take stain well, my next project im going to try using alcohol dyes instead of stain.

After the special walnut I applied 2 coats of red mahogany to get that nice rifle red, and after that one more coat of special walnut to cut back on the redness of the stain

There it is, after its all stained and dried, its ready not for a multi coat oil finish, I'll be using a boiled linseed oil finish, first 2 coats I used a 50/50 mix of blo and turpentine, helps the oil to penetrate into the wood better, then i'll use 2 coats of 75/25 blo to turpentine, then 3-6 thin coats of just blo, i'll go until im happy with the semi gloss finish that I get out of the blo, sometimes i'll use tung oil instead of the blo, its a lighter oil and it penetrates hard woods well, it also doesn't have the problem of getting a hazy in damp conditions, its got a nicer smell too but where this musket was done in blo originally i'll go that route this time.

Zoli Zouave Musket Refurb pt 1, the low point

Traded a enfield no 4 mk 1 for this, it looked really good on the outside but when I got it home and started looking it over better I was kinda disappointed, the list of things that need to be fixed grew really quickly. it was dirty as hell even though I was led to believe it was clean, there is rust on the screws and some under the barrel, the brass has some corrosion on it, I bought it knowing there was a half cock problem, but i'll get into that in a bit. there is something in the barrel that traps the jag and I had a hell of a time getting it out, I didn't have my bore light so I haven't looked down on there yet, but im not exactly sure what i'll find. and the wood needs a proper stripping and refinishing in a proper color and oil finish.
now the serious problems
When i took the lock off I expected to find a geometry problem with the half cock, but what I found was much worse, a overly poor hardening job on the teeth let to the outside edge being overly brittle and breaking off and then some years of shooting if have rounded that edge off and also wore the lip of the seer, not a overly hard problem to fix really, i'll just cut a new edge and its good as new...not so lucky, when I was putting the mainspring back in to test my initial filing job i heard it ping, and on inspection there was a crack in the mainspring right at the bent...that spring is fucked, it was poorly shaped too, the leaves of the spring actually touched about a 1/4 inch down the length leading to some odd pressure at the closed end, i expect this led to its final demise, after about the 3'rd removal the poor spring had had enough and killed itself, with that fucked, i might as well bite the miniball and get all new parts to replace the worn ones. that will give me lots of time to refurb the wood.

Im starting to think i got the crap end of the deal stick though

Broken half cock, this is after a touch with the file so that it would catch, its probably best to replace the whole show

Clean Barrels don't produce patches of this color

Two Peices of a Spring...thats a drag

Colour case hardening is wearing off too, leading me to belive that its probably not the best job hehe









Next! the refinishing of the wood!