I cleaned up and refinished this Pennsylvania Rifle for a friend of mine. It was made by James Golcher in Philadelphia between 1830 and 1850 (or at least in his shop). It spent years up in her father's attic. It was very, very rusty, the wood probably couldn't be any dryer or more brittle.
She doesn't know the full story behind the rifle except that it came with her family when they came to Kansas to homestead in the 1870s. She said that she had seen it in the attic before and her father (now deceased) said that it was his great grandfather's but he had never fired it or seen it fired and that it had been in the attic as long as he could remember. The House was built in the 1880s and lived in continually by the family until 2014 when her mother died.
It was truely in relic condition. It has a broken wrist repair made with a sheet of copper and 48 small square nails. I pried up some of the nails and glued as much of the cracked area together as I could and reset the nails. The nail heads were rusty so I did polish them and blue them. I tried to preserve as much patina in it as I could. However I did clean the lock and barrel down to bare metal and browned the barrel and blued the rest of it. The stock was very dark, almost black. I didn't want to make the wood look like new but did lightly sand it to show much of the nice tiger stripe maple grain. I rubbed in six coats of boiled linseed oil and then waxed the entire rifle, wood and metal with two coats of Johnson Paste Wax. I like the way it came out.
Apparently the Golcher's were a family of gunsmiths in Philadelphia for three generations. They were prolific gun builders; rifles, pistols and fowlers.
I didn't think to take pics during the project but these are stills from a panoramic video that I took of it.
