The Arming of the von Hedwigs, with pistol and rifle.

Making and modification of weapons for Steampunk gear.

So far the lab has produced two hand held weapons that are unique and original in their formation. A couple of others still on the work bench, are incomplete and will be written up later.  The first is Madame von Hedwig needle gun, a pistol out of brass lamp bits and hobby supplies. The second is a modification of a toy cap rifle with Adolphus.

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Madame, being a women at ease with plants and their uses desired a weapon that could deploy her practical knowledge at range.  Thus a weapon that could rapidly fire needles containing a selection of sedatives, poison or toxins seem the best choice.  Being that Hera dislike bulky gear that distracts from her normal peaceful social interaction with the world a pistol was ideal.

Working with this in mind I mounted two home brew yeast vials on to part of some brass curved tubing that uses to hold electric lamps in a lighting fixture.  The barrel is a section of brass tubing from a hobby store, with a brass lamp base for the muzzle and a lamp shade finial as the butt.    I used plumbing solder to connect these three pieces.  The tamp was an early tinkering project, a cigarette holder, recycled.  I used a jig to bend the tamp rod hook out of a short section of uncoated brass welding rod. The welding rods stiffness dictated that it had to be heated with a torch to bend it in to the tight shape. Low temperature solder is the key to soldering next to a previously soldered joint, so that the first solder joint is not melted by the addition of a second. The muzzle was attached with plumbing solder and the tamper rod hook was affixed was a low-temperature jewelry solder, because with a moderate torch temperature the plumbing solder was kept in a solid state.

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These three parts, the 2 vial arms and the barrel assembly, were screwed to a simple yet elegant stock shaped out of two by six stock. I made the cover plate from scrap brass and copper stock , attached by brass brads to cover the modern screws.  The trigger is simply a bit of bent copper wire, but the trigger guard was a bit trickier. Using just a divot in my work bench and a small ball peen hammer I dished the strip of copper for the trigger guard, bent it to shape, then dished the bends.

The rifle was a project Adolphus and I did together.  For a start we disassembled a childrens toy caplock rifle. The hardware we might want to reuse we painted with bronze metallic paint.  Our starting point for conversion was a brass plated curtain rod for the barrel.  After digging through the salvage parts bucket in the shop (one of the thing I find most helpful it to keep a bucket of old brass and copper parts and scraps), we found a valve from a gas grill to be the breach and a male-threaded brass hose quick-connect to be the muzzle. The brass plating of the curtain rod, and that its external diameter was slightly larger than the internal diameter of the hose connect, made attaching the hose connector a little more involved that just soldering the two pieces.  We resolved this by using a hack saw to cut across the end of the hollow rod to form four cuts in a cross-shaped pattern about 3/8 inch deep.  It was just enough to start the rod into the hose connector with some hammer-tronics.  A few more taps had it in past the saw cut.

We attached the barrel with a screw in the same place the old steel one was and we replaced the steel strap that covered the screw with a copper one.  We remounted the painted trigger and hammer assembly to the stock with a brass screw. We were both suprised when the cap hammer on the side plate lined up perfectly with a flange on the gas valve. To hold the gas valve in place we cut a piece on scrap copper, dished then mounted it with three brass screws.  The wooden sight was just a re-purposed duck call attached through a screw hole in the top of the gas valve.