March Humpday Triviola Madness

Re: March Humpday Triviola Madness

This is a WAG, but I am going to say location, location, location. ;-)

Keep Wagging...nope.

I'll take a shot

My shot at his would be that it came from Europe where Walnut was plentiful and Maple was not and it evolved in the colonies into a longer sleeker model. A kentucky user is most famous for the Americanized version of the jaeger. Remember the Alamo.

Lee

Yes and No

You are correct in deducing that the answer refers to the Pennsylvania and Kentucky long rifles. However your reasoning for the more likely presence of curly maple is off the mark.

So you currently get half a Golden Uni!

The later part of the question remains up for grabs

Tom

Re: Yes and No

The availability of maple in Pennsylvania was what I was referring to. Hmmm......... Need to think of another reason for the maple.

Hint

It's a common sense reason.

We could be stumped

The answer has some of us stumped, but it shouldn't throw us a curve.

Lee

In reading between the lines....

...you are cryptically incorrect sir!

Re: Hint

I am going to make another wag. They have a bunch of these rifles at the Greenfield museum and one of the things that I seem to remember is that many of the stocks looked like curly maple, but were actually faked with string and flame or something like that. Could it be because you could get a more accurate fake grain with curly maple than figured walnut?

Think I'll give this one up....Answer

The guesses are not on track so I think I'll spill it. Curly maple and other figured woods were, like today, considered fancy woods and used for nicer, more expensive rifles. The owners would typically be wealthier types who did not use the rifles for daily hunting and generally cared for them more.

The plainer woods were used in rifles for the common man who used them constantly until they were essentially "used up".

Therefore the less used and highly cared for rifles faired better at surviving the last 200 years.

Thanks all who played!

Re: Think I'll give this one up....Answer

The information combined from a couple of different sources indicated that the straight grained english walnut of the original short barreled larger caliber european jaeger was dropped in favor of the more plentiful maple and that they used wood from the stumps which tended to be curly and have the curvature they were looking to make the drop in the stocks for the butt. The longer barrels and smaller caliber of the Kentucky rifles were a result of the high cost of lead. They could cast more bullets in a smaller caliber from a pound of lead and the longer barrel utilized all the power from a smaller powder charge giving the shot increased velocity. The result was a highly accurate smooth bore gun.

Lee