Homemade Toy Musket
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We are members of the Manitoba Living History Society, so we spend a lot of weekends during the summer out re-enacting the Selkirk Settlers of the 1812 time period. My kids see the guys who do military re-enacting and love running around pretending to attack our campsite and storm the gates of whatever pretend fort they can find. We have a set of play muskets that are cut out of 1×3 material, but they are just plain flat wood cut in the proper shape.
For Christmas 2009, we decided to have everyone in our family make a gift for one other member. I drew my eldest son’s name and decided to make him a more realistic musket. Here it is with a 1 foot ruler for scale:
(click any picture to see it larger)
I looked for a musket that I liked in Google Image Search, and printed it out in large scale. I traced it onto a piece of 1×6 pine, cut it out and the rounded the edges and shaped it with a rasp and sandpaper.
I mounted a 3/4 inch dowel onto the body using normal joint dowels. As an experiment, I used three dowels into the bottom of the barrel through the stock, because I couldn’t think of another way to make it strong enough to handle being tossed around by my kids. It seems to be rock solid, I’m definitely going to do this again when I make more. In this picture you can see the three holes that I used.
The trigger guard is a scrap of brass stock I recycled from another project, bent into shape and ground smooth. The lock/firing mechanism is actually a window sash lock that I found while wandering Canadian Tire one day. It cost a couple of dollars and I think it gives a really nice looking mechanism that actually works. It lets the user flip the lock up to “load” and the snap it closed before firing. It’s a solid strong piece that should last longer than the rest of the gun. The small brass plate in front of the lock is probably going to have his name engraved on it eventually, and is mostly just there because I had more scrap brass and I wanted more googaws on the musket.
The other half of the lock looked interesting too, so I mounted it on the other side of the musket. Again, I’m not sure what it’s supposed to actually represent, but it looks cool.
The stock is painted with super gloss brown polyurethane, and the barrel is painted with flat black rust paint, both of which I had in the shop. I bent the u shaped strapping around a leftover piece of barrel dowel and ground it to shape and smoothed the corners. The trigger guard is mounted with small brass screws. I mounted the strapping for the barrel with small box nails, but they are already loose. I will be replacing them with matching brass screws. The nails were far easier, but they haven’t even withstood indoor play.
Left to do are strap mounting swivels and replacing the nails with screws. But I have to pry it out of his hands to do that. It might be a while…
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October 27th, 2011 at 11:40 am
Thank you so much! My son wanted to be the ghost of a Minuteman for Halloween and, of course, to him it was all about the gun. I found your site and it helped so much! The sash lock for the trigger mechanism, in particular, is brilliant and something I would have never thought of on my own.