The customer wanted a Lancaster rifle and had already purchased some of the parts, but the stock profile didn't fit him. I happened to be building a Figthorn based rifle at the time, and he found the extreme drop of the stock to his liking and fit. This is our Reading-Wormlesdorf rifle with Lancaster influence.

Because of the extreme drop, not every blank will work for this application. I had 2 in inventory and he selected a quartersawn, hard maple blank with good curl. We sent the blank and a swamped Colerain .54 cal. barrel to Fred Miller to have the barrel and ramrod channels cut. Work commenced on the gun.

He chose an early style patchbox design from Kindig's book. It was copied and a paper template was made for its design to be transferred to a blank.

The lock was a Chamber's Deluxe Siler chosen because of the pinned trigger. The sear bar of the Deluxe lock is at the same location at rest, and in both notch positions. This allows the trigger to be preloaded to a preset let-off with no slop or creep. Trigger pull was set at 3 lbs. The lock was polished bright and lightly aged, as was the brass.

This gun had a swamped barrel. To accentuate it, and to make the forestock look thinner, the line of the forestock followed the bottom edge of the sideflat where it was narrowest, and a poured pewter nosecap faded to the bottom edge at the muzzle.