For my own personal holsters, I kind of prefer the simplest plainer style. So recently I made myself a “taco style” holster that folds and wraps around the pistol. I wanted something for my old M1917 Colt New Service revolver. I wanted something that I could knock around in the backwoods with and it didn’t need to be fancy or pretty. It needs to be utilitarian and built like a tank. Keep in mind this is not a step by step tutorial, but it will give you an idea of how I make

A lot of times you can salvage an old gun when you think it's beyond repair. As long as the gun hasn't been in a house fire, it's probably salvageable. Recently I had an old Winchester 94 come in that was pretty badly rusted. Bluing wasn't going to help because of how deep the rust pits were. Also, the bolt was rusted in the receiver. This looks like a custom job. ... The first thing I did was scrap the old stock set. Then I sandblasted the rust off the action and polished i

Next, I turned my attention to making a new stock. And since we're going wild here on this project, I wasn't going to make any old wood stock work. Instead of a factory replacement, I opted to carve one from a tree stump. My intention is to make a gunstock with a blend of wood and colored epoxy…. Sort of like one of those nice waterfall tables you see these days. I built a mold from thin plexiglass to put the stump wood in. I mixed two part epoxy with some blue dye, and po

Now I am ready to carve a stock blank. I put the blank in my stock duplicator and began to cut. Here's the rough carved stock. It’s got a long way to go before it’s ready. You can see it shows well in the Sunlight. The epoxy part of the stock is see through,

Now I begin the process of sanding the stock and fitting it to the rifle action. I start with 80 grit to get the roughness of carving smoothed, then work my way down to 220 grit. The project is progressing nicely. At this point I’m down to 400 grit sandpaper. The first of several coats of clear epoxy finish on the stock. There's a lot of burl, and spalt in the stump wood. Spalt is a type of fungus that grows in the wood and gives it interesting color patterns. The tree s

The beginning of the end of the project. I carved a new fore end and gave it the same epoxy treatment. The buttplate was cast from an original in a mold from the same blue epoxy, mixed with just a touch of teal green to make it look separate from the stock. The gun had the new stocks fitted. I gave the barrel and magazine tube a slow rust blue that results in a deep dark blue / black finish. The receiver got a gloss clear spray on Cerakote to protect the color case harde

In this video I shoot a Swiss Vetterli rifle converted from rimfire to centerfire cartridges. The rifle is an early model of repeating bolt action rifles and was a game changer for the Swiss military at the time. The Swiss Vetterli was magazine fed from the beginning in 1869, but later the mechanism was adapted to a single shot Italian Vetterli rifle with a slightly longer cartridge. But even the Italian Vetterli was adapted to be a repeater with a 4 shot box magazine, instea

An easy to load premade compressed powder charge caseless cartridge for black powder Walker Colts.

British revolvers are inexpensive enough for beginner collectors to hoard for their treasure trove.

Half the fun of owning an antique firearm is being able to shoot them as they were intended.

I make cartridge cases for my hard to find .50-95 Winchester rifle. It takes a steady hand and a lathe to peel off a minuscule amount of brass.

Part 1 of the gear that you would see in the Possibles Bag of a mountain man or eastern long hunter to keep his flintlock rifle running in the field.

Test firing the Evans Late Model >44 Long

Firing 1867 Dutch Snider

A simple solution for misaligned cylinder cranes on Colt DA revolvers.

A quick way to recrown a barrel after trimming it to a carbine length, and still get satisfactory results.

Modern sport shooters of black powder revolvers don’t realize that paper cartridges were the thing back in the day when these guns were...

One of my favorite rifles is the M1A (M-14) platform. I wasn’t issued one in the Marine Corps — we only had the M-16A2, not even the...

The .30 Remington cartridge was developed in 1906. It was Remington’s rimless answer to the Winchester .30-30. It was available...

I won’t go into detail about this rifle, except to say that there’s quite a few of them on the surplus market today. Most of them are in pretty decent shape considering they were made in the 1870’s and on, but there’s a reason they are not worn out. The ammunition is impossible to find since these guns utilize a rimfire blackpowder cartridge. So if you want to play around with the guns, you have to convert them to centerfire and make your own ammunition. I’d like to remind yo