I superglued a grub screw in place to test alignment and protrusion distance. The firing pin itself, unfortunately, seems to be made of pretty good steel, and I'm having much more trouble drilling into it. I also drilled through the bolt face to make room for the firing pin.
I got the receiver fully stripped and all the internals put back together: Shouldn't be too hard, and I think the worst of it is done with. Either cold blue or paint all the metal parts to refinish Remove the rear sight from the old barrel and attach to the new barrel
Strip the wood stock, reshape the forend to fit the barrel, use wood hardener to preserve, and either restain+finish or just finish the wood Reshape the extractor to accommodate the APS shells (somewhat larger than. Build up a new firing pin with a collar so that it can't trigger a live 12ga shell Procure piping to make the replacement barrel, cut them to shape, assemble, and fix in place The to-do list looks something like this: So, I now have a bare receiver and a fully-functioning action.
#CLEANING FRANCOTTE HENRY FREE#
With that section removed, I could now use the vise to crush the remaining barrel segment, which flexed it enough to pop it free of its rust and allow me to unscrew the stub. This took an hour and a half of hacksawing. I had to cut the barrel off in front of the chamber, then stick the hacksaw blade through the chamber and cut two slots so that I could remove a section of the barrel. This thing was stuck, and no amount of penetrating oil would loosen it, so I had to cut it off. Now I turned my attention back to the barrel. I cut the AEG spring to length and, while I was at it, cut off the crappy firing pin: After some testing, I found that an AEG spring was slightly smaller and a perfect fit: I tested fit and function, and discovered that the reason the trigger didn't do anything was that the firing pin was stuck forward, due to it being some kind of DIY job that was poorly fitted to the bolt, and the firing pin spring was too large and stuck in place. It would never have been a functional firearm without historicity-destroying levels of intervention, so might as well make use of it.Īll the parts I could get off the gun went into Evapo-Rust:Īnd after a day, came out surprisingly clean: But this gun is littered with stress fractures, bad fitment, scary headspacing, and rust in critical areas, so I don't really feel bad about chopping it up to turn it into a toy. Just to be clear, if the gun that arrived in the mail had turned out to be a British Martini, or even a Nepalese one in good condition, I'd have abandoned the project here and kept it intact as a historical artifact. The wood trapped moisture for a hundred years, everything behind the wood was seriously pitted, and the interior had rust on critical surfaces underneath the rancid yak fat.Īt this point it was clear that this gun was no longer a shooter. The action cycled with great difficulty, and the trigger didn't seem to do anything. I think this will be more effective than stuffing VSR internals or something into it, and reduces the amount of modification needed. The basic plan is to convert the gun to use APS shotgun shells, imitating the functionality of the Martini-Henry-derived Greener GP shotgun while retaining the overall appearance of the Martini-Henry. In the US these are antiques and thus not legally considered firearms, so there are no legal hurdles there. It dawned on me a while back that while a rusty century-old knockoff is basically a pipe bomb with live ammo, as long as I could get the mechanics working it would be just fine for airsoft use. But it turns out that Nepalese Martini-Henry copies are fairly cheap ( $225 US for a Francotte pattern). I've wanted a real Martini-Henry for a long time, but authentic British-made ones are fairly expensive and the only realistic source of ammunition is reloading, something I haven't yet felt like getting into.