A Good and Rare Austrian Combined Wheellock and Matchlock Musket, ca. 1665-70

[fernando]

Originally Posted by Matchlock

... The then director was of course involved and shot himself in his bureau a few years later when the scandal came up ....

If he at least used an early wheellock example, to make it a honorable gesture

[Matchlock]

A detached early matchlock mechanism would do for me, 'Nando!

m

[Matchlock]

My Salzburg pikes at Christie's exhibition rooms on September 19, 1990 (#2 and 3 from top).

m

[fernando]

It's good they're back home safe

[Matchlock]

Well, actually they are now about 150 km north of where they used to be for more than four hundreds of years; they are extremely early, mid-16th c. (!), and were shortened by about 1 m during the Thirty Years War when they were already 70 or 80 years old.
They remained unsold while the auction ran; immediately afterwards I spoke to Christie's and they told me that probably the stabiliziation for shipment and the transport itself of the almost 5 m long pikes would be the real expense factor. At first I had been planning on buying just one of them but how could I display one single pike in my collection when originally they came in mere masses and their squares dominated the battlegrounds for at least 300 years? Then Christie's offered me two for the price of one so the thought immediately jumped to my mind that two of them would in a way stabilize each other and also make a much better display.

To cut a long story short: I ordered them to be stabilized by one long beam 6 on 6 cm, bound between them, and just wrap them thickly with bubbles. It worked out perfectly. The air freight from London to Nuremberg airport, the customs import tax (on both the pikes and the air freight) and the special taxi transport to Regensburg, where I lived then, summed up to double the price that they charged me in London though. There was a third at Christie's, the tip of the pike of different shape; today I feel like I should have bought that one as well ...


Anyway, just one aspect of adventures in a collector's life.
They have been with me for 23 years now and I have only seen a handful of those with their irons still retaining their original bluing - the ones in Salzburg, and a few of those exhibited at the Basel Historic Museum, Switzerland (images attached, suspended hovering high above the famous Basel bronze cannon barrel Drach/Dragon), dated 1514, length 4.93 m.



Best,
Michl

[Matchlock]

Another instance of the same Austrian model M 1686; it was estimated at 5,000 euro at a local Bavarian auction house and almost doubled its price; even the ramrod was the original.
On the close-up of the forestock, the characteristic half-moon shaped beechwood pattern is clearly visible.

The pierced buttstock denotes that this musket too came from the Hohensalzburg collection.


m

[Matchlock]

A dealer had this on his site, labeled 'price on request'.

Although it has been heavily altered it still is an interesting piece to study.

I'm giong to tell you what the dealer did not say in his description:

From the foregoing we know that the hole drilled through the butt horizontally denotes that this musket, too, comes from Salzburg where it was screwed to the walls of the exhibition rooms.
What is further remarkable is the fact that the wheel shaft has been sawn down. It is now much too short to enable the main spring to be spanned. This was certainly done during the gun's working life as it was the easiest method to render the wheellock ignition inactive. Only the matchlock serpentine could still be employed.

We can but speculate what the reason may have been. From many samples, not just from this series, that I have closely researched and tested, including my own muskets, I can tell that the wheellock action was extremely accident-sensitive and certainly often failed to work, especially in the heat of a fight.

And our gun in discusssion of course was a real 'military' musket.


In most cases, either the brim of the spanning recess in the wheel, and/or the nose of the sear designed to rest in it, will very soon tend to lose the decisive keenness of both their respective edges - resulting in the wheel not being kept in the 'spanned' position any longer. In the experimental arrangement of my researches, some 20 years ago, and with an original wheellock mechanism of ca. 1600 clamped in a jaw vise, and spanned and triggered every 45 seconds - in order to simulate the loading action of a musket - , the action started to falter after around 10-12 times of repetition, and failed to withstand at about the 15th test. The sear nose was retained no longer.



What more can be commented? The Suhl barrel marks of this specimen are extremely faint and impossible to identify, which can rarely be observed with muskets from this series.
The trigger is in a position way too far at the rear end stop, which may denote that either the trigger spring is broken or the lock has been mounted both crudely and inadequately.

Nothing else? Really?
Notwithstanding the fact that the trigger is in the correct position now, this is the very same, identical gun that I presented in the previous post #20! Just compare the incised V-shaped musketeer's inital and the nicks on the buttstock!


Always keep your eyes open for each tiny detail before buying a gun!!!



Best,
Michael