Building The Steven's Favorite

[TomG]

The following installment brings the Steven's build thread up to date. The next task will be to make and fit the extractor and that will complete the internal components.

Tom


A little update on the Steven's: I haven't been making many chips lately but the project has been far from idle. After two re-designs, the link/cam is finally moving the hammer to half cock properly, without binding. That turned out to be a bigger problem than expected because many of the parts in the linkage do double duty and changing one of them can have a significant effect on how the others behave.

I've also been designing a tang sight. It won't be an authentic Steven's design because I don't have access to one for reverse engineering. Instead it will be a blend of different features on various tang sights that I've found across the internet. Elevation adjustment will be made by loosening the threaded eye cup and sliding it to the proper graduation on a vernier scale on the side of the frame. There will also be a windage adjustment via a small dovetail slide in the block that the eye cup mounts to. So far I have the base designed along with the frame, the sliding nut and a first crack at the eye cup/windage adjustment. There are still a few details to work out before the design is complete.



There has also been some progress in figuring out how to drill and rifle the barrel. I've found an inexpensive hydraulic pump to pump the oil through the gun drill, so that problem is solved, but am still waiting for a drill the correct size to show up on eBay. Once it does, and I make a cat head for my lathe, it'll be time to drill the barrel, using the spindle on my mill to drive the oil pump. I've come to the conclusion that it's just not practical to rifle the barrel on my lathe. There is a nice video on Youtube of a guy who built a gear train on his lathe to twist the rifling tool as it passes through the barrel. It looks like it would work very well but I would need to modify my lathe to mount a gear on the saddle hand wheel and I'm not willing to do that. I'll probably end up building some sort of dedicated fixture to do the rifling, so I'll definitely need to make more than one barrel to justify the work.