Arma virumque cano

Before failing eyesight made the use of smaller tools problematic, I used to be an amateur gunsmith.
This puzzles at least some of the people I know, those who think of me in terms of such harmlessness that the idea of me armed is inconceivable. Or they think of my frequent halting on stairs, as the next tread swims uncertainly into my myopic and monocular view, and wonder how I could ever have managed aiming a gun.
I used to assemble black powder rifles (although I did a kit version of a Remington Model 1858 percussion revolver once). They were in the style of the plains rifles made famous by the Hawken brothers of Saint Louis in the 1820s and 1830s. They were black power rifles from the period between flintlocks and metallic cartridges. Like flintlocks, Hawkens are loaded from the muzzle with black power, a cloth patch, and a lead ball (the last rammed down with a long wooden rod).
Unlike a flintlock, which uses a wedge of flint to cascade sparks from an iron plate into an open pan to ignite the power in the barrel, a "caplock" of the kind I assembled ignites the power with a cap - a tiny thimble of brass primed with fulminate of mercury fitted over a nipple on the barrel. When the trigger is pulled, the hammer hits the cap, the cap jets a small tongue of flame into the barrel through the nipple, and the shot is fired. I made rifles from parts I bought at a store in Anaheim. It was a sort of Home Depot for guys who made black power guns. They also dressed up as fur trappers and other "mountain men" and went to "rendezvous" where they pretended, like Civic War battle reenactors, to relive lives they had carefully researched in books.
I didn't.
Making a rifle, even if the parts are already cast or cut or let in, requires skills from woodworking to metallurgy. And when it was done, you didn't have a table or a piece of patio furniture; you had something that was both beautiful and lethal.
Of course, I was no shot at all. And I had few opportunities to become a better shooter, because public rifle ranges didn't welcome black power shooters (lots of smoke) and taking a rifle - even a historical looking one - on the bus wasn't possible.
I sold or gave my rifles away. Some years later, I was invited to attend the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in Vermont. I was the Bernard DeVoto Fellow that year. DeVoto was a much celebrated historian of the early West, the author of Across the Wide Missouri, which was about the fur trappers and "mountain men" and their Hawken rifles.
Image taken by Flickr user Kipp Baker. It was used under a Creative Commons license.