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MY GUNS AND THINGS

By Jonsig Eirik.
An excerpt from my memoirs, ‘the farm’.
Further along the road through the woods and off to the side a little was partridge rock.
It was about four feet high and stuck out of the ground like a wedge, and partridges, or
sometimes called fool hens loved to sit on it and preen themselves and flap their wings,
which made the strangest sound. They started flapping slowly, then faster and faster, till the
flapping petered out. This performance lasted about four seconds, to be repeated every few
minutes.
These fool hens came by the name quiet honestly. When they started roosting in the
treetops, usually about dusk, I often went under the tree and shot them with a 22, usually
through the head. One would fall, the others would look around and when I didn't move,
they would settle back, and I'd get another one, I seldom bothered with more than three
enough for a pot of soup. But they weren't all that good, especially late in the fall when
they must have been on a diet of willow bark; they sure tasted very bitter.
I must take this opportunity to elaborate on the 22. I found a barrel from an old one in
the blacksmith shop and decided it would make one fine piece of artillery. The model T
ford sparkplug could be unscrewed in the middle and the porcelain removed. I filed the
barrel till the top part of the spark plug, small threaded part slid over it then using a ball
peen hammer, I secured it in place. Half the breach!
The larger part that screwed into the motor block was the other half of the breach!
By placing a small stick like a burned match against the rim of an empty casing shoved
in place in the barrel, then pouring it full of lead, I had my breach made and all that
remained was to remove the match, which provided a hole for the firing pin. A two-inch
nail filled the bill for that.
Next a stock was delicately carved with an axe and a wood rasp, a groove cut out to
hold the barrel, which was securely anchored with top quality haywire.
Behind the breach was a spring-loaded bolt that was held in the cocked position by
another nail through the bottom of the stock and activated by small piece of iron, shaped at
right angles for a trigger. A strip of inner tube around the stock and under this delicate
assembly, plus of course a trigger guard out of a piece of tin, precisely placed and anchored
with two roofing nails into the stock completed this magnificent firearm.
Jake Ho! Pull back the bolt, and the nail jumped up to locked it in place. Unscrew the
breach dig in you pocket find a round shove it in the barrel screw the breach together take
aim??? Where did that fool hen go? There she is! Take aims pull the trigger."CLUNK"
Oh. Firing pin fell out no problem! Whole pocket full, for this emergency pull bolt
back replace firing pin take aim pull trigger.” BANG.
What the heck! Bullet must have hit a limb; the hen was still snoring away in the same
place. Oh well, didn't really want to shoot her anyway.
There was only one minor shortfall. The empty casing had to be extracted with a
pocketknife; otherwise this whole exercise could be completed in less than ten minutes.
As a sequel to this project, I made a pistol with about a six inch barrel where the only
basic difference was that the barrel unscrewed making it more convenient to load and
reload, also after some detailed research I found that by putting rubber cement around the
firing pin it wouldn't fall out, but had ample movement. A great technical advance. A
wonder I didn't kill myself.
I must add one thing more. When I served in the army during WW2 I had the
opportunity to watch the big coast guns being fired and when I saw how the breach worked
my heart skipped a beat. The dirty beggars stole my idea! They had improved on it by
cutting away some of the threads so it slid in place and locked with a quarter turn! Now
why didn't I think of that? I could have cut firing time by at least a minute. But for a twelve
year old I didn't do too badly.
Somewhere in his travels, dad acquired an old rifle that went somewhere back to the
last century, might have been some old thing cooked up by Winchester....'cept the breach
was a bit different than say a 30 30. It was a lever action though which operated a round
bolt that slid back allowing the round to be lifted from the magazine to be loaded in when
the bolt came forward. Like the 30 30, except for the round bolt.
What a cannon! The barrel was hexagon steel, looked like hard rock drillstock with the
air hole enlarged. The whole thing was just plain big.
Dad thought it might be a 40/60, and bought a box of shells, but they didn't seem to fit,
so they sat on the shelf until one day, when the nosey kid decided to see if they would
work. Ah, yes!
I tried the bullet in the end of the barrel, and found it would slide into it with no
difficulty, so therefore it would come through the barrel, it seemed a little loose but so
what! I wasn't going moose hunting.
So this gem of artillery was lugged up in the bush by partridge rock and securely tied
to a couple of poplars with some bailing wire. Binder twine was tied to the trigger and
spooled out about fifty feet to a safe vantage point behind a clump of trees. A shell was
nervously placed in the chamber and the lever pulled up, the breach was locked, the cannon
loaded.
Commence firing when ready!
I made certain `Seppi' was not in the line of fire, and then yanked on the string."POP"
That was it? Where was that loud bang that was supposed to happen? I went over to the
cannon and ejected the casing...yes, the bullet was no longer in it. I blew in the barrel and it
was clear, so the bullet must have gone out the end. This needs further research.
I went back to the shop and found a large piece of cardboard that I set up, probably
about twenty feet away, and then repeated the whole performance. But the target didn't
have a mark on it, so I figured the bullet must have fallen out of the barrel somewhere into
the leaves. I looked but I couldn't find it, so I scrubbed the whole experiment and snuck the
cannon back into the house when the coast was clear. Best this whole exercise remain under
wraps.
While on the subject of guns, weapons, and other deadly inventions.
One of the things this kid dreamed up was using a pipe about two feet long with about a
quarter inch bore mounted on a rifle stock. A strong rubber band was tied to the front of the
pipe, and went around the back of the pipe, then by using a heavy gauge wire about a foot
long or more the rubber band would propel it through the pipe. Like a guided missal, and
accurate to about ten feet. This worked well till one day I pulled it back too far and the wire
came out of the pipe and went through my coat sleeve.
Discard! Unsafe device.
But slingshots! Never leave home without one! There was lot of red willow along the
frog ponds around the farm and I remember spending many an hour getting my feet wet to
get just the right willow for a perfect slingshot. Then a strip from an inner tube and a piece
from and old boot would do the rest.
Now in the summer an ample supply of stones could be had for ammunition, but not so
in the winter. A few buckets of carefully selected pebbles were gathered before the snow
came and put away in the blacksmith shop. Never run out of ammo!
A bow and a few arrows were always somewhere on hand, but these were never as
good as I would have liked as I never seemed to find very good wood to make the bow
from. Also to find a perfectly straight piece for an arrow seemed next to impossible.
Jonsig Eirik.

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