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Barnebys HQ
Brahegatan 10
BOX 5038
114 37 Stockholm
All auctions / Medals, Arms & Armour / American Flintlock Holster Pistol, Black Walnut, 1810-1840
North America, United States. A full-stocked flintlock holster pistol whose American black walnut stock swells into a deep, gracefully rolled grip, the wood still carrying the low honeyed gloss of long handling. The flat beveled lockplate bears a gooseneck cock and a punched rosette where a maker's signature would ordinarily sit, betraying its origin in the unsigned export trade rather than a named American shop. Brass furniture, buttcap, trigger guard with its generous bow, ramrod pipes and forward cap, warms the whole against a browned barrel pinned into the forestock. Pistols of this class rode in saddle holsters and coat pockets along the young republic's roads and rivers, carried by travelers, militia officers, and rivermen for whom a single heavy ball was insurance rather than ornament. The pistol is a study in early American assembly practice. Its lock came from the Birmingham or Liege export houses, which crated unsigned locks by the hundred for shipment to American importers; the punched rosette standing in for a signature is the trade's fingerprint. A local gunsmith then stocked it in black walnut, the New World timber that served as the standard American gunstock wood of the period, and fitted brass mounts. Such an arrangement was ordinary commerce, not a later marriage of mismatched parts. The metallurgy brackets the date from below: the brass runs 31.5 to 32.6 percent zinc, a proportion achievable only by alloying copper with metallic zinc, a technique that reaches commercial use in the 1780s. The upper limit is historical rather than chemical, since American makers abandoned the flint for the percussion cap across the 1830s and 1840s. Barrel and lock are carbon steel, the working metals of the trade. Item # 204471
Estimate:£643.23
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Hammer price:
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Estimate:
£643.23
OCT 23 | 8:00 AM
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