How to make and install a Bean Style Patchbox in your Kibler Southern Mountain Flintlock Kit

i'm ethan i love muzzleloading today i'm going to be showing you how to add this traditional southern style patch box to your kibbler southern mountain rifle the kibbler southern mountain kit is my favorite of the two kits that kibler currently offers i just love the sleek lines one of the things i wanted to do to this rifle to add a little bit of my own touch to it was add this patch box to it now there are some good tutorials on this on doing this on the american long rifles forum and we're going to link to those down in the description of the video it's not as easy as some of the tutorials make it look it was a lot of fun figuring this out and making this entire box from scratch for reference while making this patch box i used this book by t dennis glasner it's the gillespie gun makers of east fork north carolina to get started i have a rough idea of my patch box here cut out just on some printer paper and i'm finding the center line from the lock plate down to the butt stock so i'm measuring a halfway point across the butt of the rifle and then i'm using my ruler and drawing a straight line from my lock mortise back to that center line now because this rifle has a little bit of a curve in it coming back through this stock here we're going to adjust this by hand but this center line gives me an idea of where the patch box needs to be set you're going to start we bit different because of that curve in that wrist but let's put a line on there and look at it now lay your patch box on there and see what it looks like and see if you have to adjust this front end up here in it yeah okay that looks bad i i didn't let me get rid of this because i just drew i just traced that first one just based on what i thought looked good and that may be how you put that on there yeah maybe that's because that has enough drop there that you're almost three quarters or two thirds over there and that doesn't look good i'm looking down the gun yeah see i think that's closer yeah and that's almost coming off of this top right but i would argue that if you took your pencil and instead of that calling that a straight line and you looked at this and you followed the center of the wrist which is more of an arc then i think you're you you line up better the straight line method doesn't work on this gun because it's too curved right here that wrist is smaller here it is up here i noticed that yesterday yeah it kind of bugs me yeah but it's really delicate man but see like right there that's about the center of that wrist yeah and that lines up nice with the center of your patch box i think that's where i want to put it yeah i agree with you do you think this is too far forward or do you think bringing it i don't like getting too close there but because this is where that comb starts to really yeah i can see that but this here is still pretty yeah we're okay right there i think i think they're pretty close there i think you can outline this here where we are it's kind of a general outline and then make the patch box up and then make it to you know then your outline will really be to that patch box that we made goes back to that you know you can get you can get something 90 of the way but that last 10 percent is a lot more i mean just trimming this down some really helped oh yeah and took away my skepticism on it off camera i experimented with three different sizes of patch box all based on original measurements and commercially available patch boxes in this style none of them really fit and really balanced with the rifle to me that's just my personal preference so i shrunk this by about 15 or 20 percent based on the measurements that i've seen to get my final box here with size and placement ready to go it was time to start making the box we head downstairs to the blacksmith shop and start cutting up some steel in the rough shape of the patch box and start forging and hammering the hinges in the shape i'm working on two different halves here making two totally separate pieces that we're going to mesh later what i look at here is i look to see who's got the best ends when i'm making a hinge i've not made a lot of patch boxes but i made a fair amount of hinges so all we're after is we just want to get some kind of an idea of how they did their hinge now see i think this one's over complicated it's a lot of knuckles it's a lot of knuckles so what i'm looking at here is this guy's got two pretty good ends on him so i'd make him my outside knuckles and typically the outside knuckles is the short end okay um that's just if you look at patch boxes and that's typically how they are so what you got to do is look at that keep our two outside ends and you can get real technical about this or you can just kind of mark it out but i don't know i think so we're going to cut this guy out and this guy out and then we'll cut this away this away and this away okay makes sense yeah so we're cutting out this and we're cutting out this okay just two knuckles on that side yeah i'm not above getting myself a starting line okay perhaps off so you can go in there with a file kind of like a wedding band yeah [Music] just get yourself a notch for that saw to go in you want me to cut them well show me one and i'll cut the other one so they're not quite through but they're closed and you just want to be careful because this stuff's fragile not so much in the steel but boy and brass you can bend your hands and do all kinds of bad things so there's your two there and so then you just need a couple of lines to get your center one there and you can leave your square side up against what you're wanting to say right and put the angle towards the where you cut away out yeah and then you can you can leave that guy a little wide then you can file him to what you want you can kind of file things into what you want sometimes i think developing a really light touch is the most important thing in hand work is it's bigger that's far enough got a line coming here you don't want that it's like pop it out of there so there you go so those are out of there so now you can start so this guy these guys are pretty good they're pretty close this one's a little long but not bad you can shorten him just a little and then figure out what where you are using a square file i start to clean up the knuckle side so the knuckles are more even in size across the entire hinge and this also works well to clean out the bottom of the where we've removed knuckles so that the next hinge that we put in there those knuckles can rotate freely all the way around so now what you got to do look at that this guy's still a little narrow yeah using a file with a safe side putting the safe side at the bottom of the hinge allows us to true up the sides of each knuckle without affecting the depth of the hinge now if you're going to bend this thing much you want to kind of get a bend in it and kind of fit your hinge bent otherwise when you bend it you'll have gaps right this i don't think is going to be bent a whole lot we're going to look at your gun here in a second that'll find out but see it's going to require some bend not so much down here but right in here right where the hinge is right where the hinge is going to require some damage so we're going to put that in there so those ears are out a little farther but i'm more interested in lining up the edges of the metal so we'll just come over here where we've got something to go by the edge of this other board i'm going to put my line on the outside i'm cutting that away cutting that away cutting that away we repeat the same process on the other half of the hinge filing and hacksawing until we have something close enough to start to match so all you got to do now is go ahead and file and get those fit off each side yeah we look at that we say well we'll just come over here and we'll file this guide now should i be doing those at an angle well yeah what you want is to get everybody to be a good mating surface so yeah you're gonna want so i want this one to kind of come in like this and what i would concentrate on there is getting my center gap kind of get my center one to catch because you can kind of check him because he sticks out there just a bit right and then your sides just kind of work that in gently just it's all a matter of the light touch being careful working your way in slow i actually really enjoyed this part of the build it was a lot of fun just meticulously going in and filing and removing and checking and fitting it was really like a small puzzle which was a lot of fun to really put together i'm not saying i want to do thousands of these but it was neat to go through this process and getting the angle lined up at the end was so satisfying with the hinge now fully functional and the hinged knuckles themselves cleaned up it was time to start fitting the box to the stock before this everything was just kind of rough eyeballing getting it the proportions that we wanted and getting an idea of where we wanted it to go on the stock but now it's time to start removing material on the stock so we want the patch box to be the shape that we want it to be when it's done we did a little forming early on you saw with the brass mallet and the vise but that kind of gave us a a single point of angle there where we wanted the box to be more of a dome looking at the book there that we used for reference all of or most of the boxes on these rifles were domed in some way and looking back on it now doming that patch box makes it look a whole lot nicer it gives you a little more definition on the rifle and just gives it just a really good look so if you're making one of these i really recommend working on the patch box a little bit more before you attach it to the rifle and dome it's um to do this i used a small ball peen hammer and a wooden stump and flip the box over on his backside so that we were hammering on the what would be the interior of the box and just started painting it with a small pin of a ball peen hammer if you do any sheet metal fabricating or any sheet metal work you're going to be familiar with this if not i encourage you to practice on a few pieces of metal before you jump into it in the end it gave me the exact look i wanted even though that this box was really clean overall with the material it's not a forged box we didn't forge the sheet out from a bar this gave us that appearance that this was made in the hills of the southern united states and you can see in the close-ups of the video we have some of these peen dimples all through the patch box lid and just that gives us a nice sense of of roughness and of homemadeness that i think really adds to this kibbler kit first of all i just want to get one in there and kind of test it you know okay so you don't open all the way what i would do with it is i'd leave that pin in there and i would take a file and i'd work it okay on the outside even it up see they're not really even but they we've it's forged so you know yeah so i would take a file to it and i think that's all you'll need then probably okay back at the vice now i'm using a file with some safe sides to clean up these knuckles so our box can open farther we really want it to be probably about a hundred degree angle just a little bit past 90 just so when you open your patch box lid it gets right out of the way and when you're forging or using a forged hinge patch box like this the knuckles aren't going to be totally even so just going through and kind of evening them up with your file in areas that are going to catch on the lid of the box just helps open up that movement and makes the box a lot more user friendly next it's time to establish the shape of the box just using my belt grinder in kind of the metal working area of the shop i follow along with my traced pattern here to get the shape of the box where i wanted from my design and this is the overall look of the patch box that we're going to go for we're going to do a little bit of cleanup on this a little bit of filing a little bit of sanding but this is the overall established shape so an easy way to do this when you want to get some screws kind of in the same places on two sides you can take one of these guys you can line him up so he say he lines up here and he lines up over here you don't have to really lay all that out you're just eyeballing it off with a knuckle right and i actually might want a little larger one of these i think a larger transfer punch but you can just kind of take that and i'm doing this from the back because it's domed this way and i won't take anything out of it if i turn that over and hit it i'm going to flatten it when i center punch mark it so let's kind of look at that see what it looks like it's going to hit it soft see i don't think that's too bad for a place for screw so let's do the other side here but these transfer punches are kind of an easy way to eyeball things in place i'm just going to kind of eyeball this one up here more or less in the center and by setting still off that edge i keep my edge separation the same right all the way around so i got those and now i can take a regular center punch i can go back now we're finally ready to start getting this patch box onto the rifle i use two kind of just temporary brass screws i really recommend using a steel or iron screw though the brass screws have a tendency to just strip or the head will just come right off so use a steeler iron screw and i start by using two screws to mount the box temporarily but these will be the permanent holes to the stock so i can begin laying out where we're going to be removing wood i'm going to be using the same process here as i used in our toe plate video so for more of an in-depth look at just kind of the laying out of what will be this wood inlet check out that video we'll have a link in the description with my layout lines now established and then deepened some with another chisel it's time to start removing wood to set this patch box in now because this patch box is going to rely on a bit of a ledge to hold the lid of the box above the cavity we want to inlet the entire box in at the same level as that ledge before we go in and start removing material for the actual box cavity itself to do this i'm using the same set of tools used in our toe plate video just kind of switching back and forth between a palm handled skew a palm handled just flat chisel and my x-acto knife to go around and carefully remove this wood this cherry stock is pretty hard as far as cherry goes and i don't want to risk any kind of cracks or break out so i'm making sure my tools are sharp and i'm going very slowly as we go through this once i've got this ledge established i get out a larger chisel and start evening out the depth of this patch box in the center i'm not too worried about the looks of this part of the rifle because this is most of this wood is going to be removed or covered up so using this large chisel and a mallet that's a very important point here is that we're using this mallet and making sure that we're not splitting out any of the stock as we're removing this wood after a lot of test fitting we now have the box itself inlet and i think ready to go you can see up close here the green structure isn't very pretty inside here but it doesn't need to be we're only worried about that edge and now we're ready to move on towards laying out and establishing the patch box cavity of all the inlets that i've done which isn't very many i'm very pleased with this one there are a couple little gaps here and there but checking often with my inletting black really helped being somewhat of a naturally nervous person um at this point when i'm removing this much wood i enlist the help of my father to to really do this part for me um i was kind of getting towards the end here getting real excited and i really didn't want to mess anything up so we drilled out a nice small cavity here we ended up going a little bit deeper than is shown here just to accommodate the springs and then i came back in with my chisel and carving tools here to clean up the box and get it ready so that we could start figuring out how to mount the hardware issue i see making that latch is getting that height's got to be just perfect for that to work yeah that's true that bottom bend down there that's going to hold your screw you got that bend's gotta be in exactly the right place make that work to ensure that the hinge pin itself can't get out of the hinge we collapse a knuckle on either side of the patch box with a center punch just enough to contain that pin you don't need a whole lot of force here and you definitely don't need to totally deform that hinge knuckle and you certainly don't want to it's going to affect the usability of your hinge so just a little tap on either side should contain that pin now that we have the box the hinge is working and it's inlet to the stock it's time to start working on actual mechanics of the box all of these boxes that i've seen it in books and in person all run on two simple springs now i say simple looking at them they seem very simple making them is a whole nother game here so the two springs that you need are the first one being the lid spring that controls the actual opening of the lid so this lid opens itself this is placed underneath the hinge and the front of the patch box and the second spring being the lid catch spring this spring is located at the back of the patch box and holds your lid down so that your contents of your patch box aren't just dumping when you're out on a hunt or out at a chute this is where the video for making the springs kind of cut off we got into a little bit of trouble here and there trying to figure out how to do it and it just didn't feel appropriate trying to film that so i'm going to try to give you a little bit of a recap here on some of the things that we learned on making these springs and again if you want to see a more step-by-step process on the actual spring development click the link in the description below we have a link to the american long rifles forum there's a beautiful tutorial there on making one of these patch boxes complete making it very traditionally and it's the tutorial that we used in reference to making this box on this kit the lid spring the lid opening spring the first spring that you're making here is relatively simple it's the simpler of the two it's just got a kind of a single bend to just propel that lid open the catch spring is more complicated and it was made even more complicated by uh not making the toe or the i guess mounting part of the spring long enough we looked at it and thought well that doesn't make any sense why they make the base of the spring always so long going out almost in the center of the patch box we shortened that up that pushed it back to the back of the patch box and in turn made it really hard to screw and unscrew so the first tip i have for you in making that spring is make sure that you keep the base lobe of your box catch spring an inch and a half two and a half inches long put it out into your patch box make it easy for you to mount and unmount because you're gonna be taking this in and out quite a bit as you set and figure out this spring assembly the second tip i have for you when making one of these springs is to make it in accordance to your patch box we didn't think to measure the height of the spring and thought that we could just inlet our way out of it making it a little long just so we knew we wouldn't have to remake the spring but in the end that gave us a lot more work because we had to do a lot more inletting for the spring a lot more than we really needed to so measure that depth of your patch box and make your spring in accordance to that i think the rule of thumb in just about everything is the planning of it is 75 and the production of it is an extra 25 percent put the time in and measure that and get an idea before you make those springs so you're not doing extra work down the road when it came to setting the spring we got the spring height figured out we got the spring depth figured out but the next issue that we ran into was getting enough room for the spring to move back and forth so the catch actually worked the spring stock that we're using was really stiff and as a result needed a lot of pressure and a lot of room for our thumb to actually push it and disengage it from the patch box lid you can see on the finished kit that the inlet goes pretty much all the way back to the point where it would start to be uncovered by the patch box catch there so don't hesitate about removing that much wood as long as you're keeping it pretty well hidden underneath the cap of your patchbox spring that you can see there you're going to be fine it's going to look like the southern mountain rifles that you see there in some of the originals and referenced in books it's really nerve-racking to get to this point where the kit is almost done and we're starting to just hog out wood but having done it now i'm feeling a whole lot better if i were to make another one of these or make another southern style rifle from a blank that i'm not going to be as timid when it comes to removing this wood as i was on this first round in some of the deleted clips you'd hear dad and i kind of cautiously worried as we continue to remove wood trying to get the spring to work but in the end it all worked out so we can't complain and it looks pretty good i think here you can see the patch box finished up on the rifle and it's all in all of its functional glory like i said it's a nice patch box i think for our first try doing this i'm really pleased with it and i hope this video maybe encourages you to try one of these out on your own kibbler kit this is a lot of fun and just adds you know depending on how long you take on it a couple days to the build process which on one of these killer kits really isn't that much time once again i'm ethan and i love muzzleloading if you'd like to learn more please visit ilovemuzzleloading.com and subscribe to the channel so you don't miss out on the next i love muzzleloading video thank you you

Channel: I Love Muzzleloading

Views: 3,828

Rating: 4.8956523 out of 5

Keywords: Muzzleloader, living history, Flintlock, Longhunter, Long Rifle, US History, Traditional Craft, Kibler Kits, Kibler Longrifles, Jim Kibler, Longrifle class, Longrifle building, flintlock kit, flintlock staining, muzzleloader building, muzzle loader kit, CLA, muzzleblasts, traditional craft, handmade, hand tools, Kibler Southern Mountain Rifle, Kibler SMR, SMR, Toe Plate, flintlock toe plate

Id: v8w0fpm2bSk

Length: 27min 3sec (1623 seconds)

Published: Thu May 27 2021