German take on restoration/reconstruction
During my visit to Coburg Castle this year (2024), I came across a very interesting set of objects in the exhibition, it was a tableau with restored rifles, at that moment I said to myself "this is exactly the thing for me". Upon closer examination, I was, let's say, surprised not by the quality of the restoration work, but by the approach that seemed very unorthodox to me, let's take a look.
Before we move on to the topic of unorthodox restoration itself, I will mention that the cocks of these flintlock weapons are permanently cocked on the first rise/safety bar, something that in my opinion should not be done in an long term exhibition, especially in such a prestigious institution with an extensive collection, but that is my opinion.
The restoration work itself, although unorthodox, is still interesting. When we look at the exhibit itself, apart from the cocked hammer, highly polished surface and beautiful markings, the restoration work is indeed minimal. However, even I would not have known what was reconstructed without the label on the panel.
So what is this, you ask? This specimen had a broken hammer in the neck, so the jaws and screw were missing, which brings us to what I can say is a truly "exotic" approach. In the collections there is an almost identical piece from the same gunsmith that was complete, where his parts served as a reference.
Here we can see reference samples that have been pressed and moulded into plasticine which is ready to be cast. Yes, casts are used, it is a standard process, it saves a lot of work and many hours by not having to file the entire cock by hand from ground up (on the other hand, every competent gunsmith/restorer of firearms, shoud be able to do) and constantly measuring each piece to make it fit, the cast also of course has to be adjusted but the time spent on adjusting the cast to the lock plate is significantly less than making it from scratch.
This brings us to the last three panels, where I learn the interesting fact that "ah, they wouldn't actually cast an iron or steel cock in plasticine, so what did they use?" And finally I found out that it was tin, all parts of the cock were cast from tin, they were subsequently cleaned and modified. Then the tin casting was added to the original rest of the cock and attached in place. Finally, the surface was polished and unified. The enlarged black and white photo shows where the fracture on the body of the hammer is.
Notice the difference in the material.
When I looked at the entire tableau and read all the information, I stopped for a few minutes and started to think feverishly, why such an approach? Why tin? Why not supplement the broken part with iron/steel? But tin is too soft for such use, isn't it? And similar questions racked my brain, the only explanation I came up with is that this method was the simplest at the time. Of course, we don't know the situation the restorers were in at the time or the collection itself, so I can't condemn them for their choice, but I presented my opinion here and my approach would definitely be to either create a completely new hammer, either from a casting or from a block of material or weld a correspondin piece of metal to the broken part and then using files, work the material to its final form according to the refference piece on hand. This approach is really interesting. Last thing to add, I do not know when this restoration took place.
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