This is a kit from Pecatonica River Outfitters. The cost was $420 and it was complete with the exception of the forend tip and sights. Overall the components were very good. The barrel is a 45 cal 18" twist Green Mountain 32" octagon that's 1" across the flats. It came in a milled finish and I paid them to fit the patent breech to it. The barrel did have to be drawfiled and then polished. The wood was very precisly inletted straight grain walnut that is inletted a bit small so you can fit the various parts. All the metal bits were high quality sand castings, except the lockplate, which was finished, as are the lock's internals. If you want to call them 'finished'. They supply an L&R lock which looks okay, but a 5 pin Davis would have been better. Both have fly detents, but the Davis carries the trigger on a seperate screw rather than on one of the bridle screws. This allows a much lighter trigger. Truth be known, there are NO really good produciton locks out there. A fine custom one would run about what the entire kit did, or more! I did do some tinkering with some of their supplied parts. I'll mention them as we go. I don't have any 'before' pictures. They're all basicly 'after' ones!The biggest mod I did was to cut off the short tang on the standing breech and weld on a piece of 3/32" hot rolled steel. The original tang was way too short to fit a tang sight. Another little 'Whoopsie' on their part for a rifle like this. In this photo of the just completed rifle, the tangsight mounting base hadn't been put on yet.A view showing the English type bar lock with drip bar. The hammer in this photo is at full cock. It has a short fall for a fast lock time. These long range rifles normally use a charge of 75 to 90grs of 1.5F to 2F sporting grade powder to propel a 500 to 560gr conical bullet to 1000 yards. With their patent breeches they operate at fairly high pressure. A standard nipple will burn out causing poor accuracy after about 50 rounds, and usually less. I use Ampco beryllium-copper nipples which last longer. The hot setup is either platinum lined or carbide lined nipples.This is a rather poor photo of the tangsight mountingbase. I silver soldered it to the tang. I soldered it rather than welding due to the possible alignment problems. It might have to come off a time or two. Very lucky for me, this didn't happen!A photo of the rifle complete with sights. To me, these are very graceful and pretty rifles. Kind of like the slim and slender Kentuckys. I believe the long straight barrels and gentle curves complement each other well. Hope I didn't sound too 'artsey-fartsey', sorry :-). However appealing to the eye they were/are, they are capable of some truly astounding accuracy. What they are is equivilent to a muzzle loading 45-90 ballisticly. That white thing on the butt is a sticker with sight setings. Very usefull for old forgetfull guysFor sights the tang types for cartridge rifles don't fit low enough for these type rifles with their straighter grips and wrist. To use one the front sight would have to be 3" tall. Besides, a MVA tangsight costs about $500. Since I can't do any competition shooting due to my work scheduale, I wanted some capable sights I could use which would give me the accuracy I wanted at a price I could afford. So I had to make or modify my own. My poor lathe and milling machine just aren't up to the task, and neither are my machining skills. I had to modify and existing one. I bought a Pedersoli tang sight to modify.I cut the staff off the factory base and then fabricated my own out of keystock. I then MiG welded the staff to my new base. I milled the slot in the base to snugly fit over the mounting base on the rifle's tang. This is what I was talking about mentioning alignment :-). This slot, the sight staff and the base on the tang all had to be parallel to each other and lined up right. And as it turned out, they were (thank God!)The sight installed. On top of the sightbase below the staff you can just make out a setscrew. Under this is a springloaded plunger which rides in a milled slot in the tangbase. This keeps the sight positioned up or down. The spring and plunger is the ejector from an M1 Garand!And another. Since there is essencially no windage adjustment on the rear sight, it had to be on the front. And really, that's the way it was back in the 1860's too. You had to stand up to reload after each shot, and this allowed you to easily make a windage adjustment since the front sight was up there at the top. I couldn't afford a real honest to gosh windguage type front sight, so again I had to cobble. Below is what I came up with:I believe it looks nicely period for the era it's supposed to be. What it REALLY is, is the front sight setup used on the Swedish Ljungman Ag42 gas operated semi auto rifle, HA! I cut off the original base and then me and the Nicholson mill cut the flats in to match the barrel. There are 2 reasons the sight is set back about 2.5" from the muzzle. Both authentic reasons. One is that in those days, should the crown get damaged from all the activity up front, it could be cut off a bit and renewed. The second is that I intend to have the barrel turned round to a 1" diameter and a 1" depth so a false muzzle can be fitted to start bullets easier. Because this barrel is really a cartridge rifle barrel and the lands are only .004" tall, it really needs paper patched bullets. There is an extreme lack of moulds to cast a suitable bullet of .443" diameter. This is needed so you can patch them up to the bore diameter of .450-.451". The other option is to use hardened bullets. With the usual very soft lead used in other MLing applications, these bullets have an annoying habit of slipping the lands a bit. This isn't real shiney for accuracy. Using an alloy of 16-1 lead tin it's pretty well eliminted. However, tin is kind of expensive and paper patched bullets just look so cool they HAVE to be the way to go. Besides, I can use them in the Whitworth too. I've ordered a swaging setup with press from Richard Corbin to satisfy the need. If my wife finds out about it, I'll be nothing more than a memory! Accuracy testing has proven (with reduced loads) that accuracy at 200 meters runs sub 3" for 5 rounds. This is with the Saeco #745 at 532grs and 75 grs of Elephant 2F, which is more a musket grade BP that the sporting grade (Swiss) BP you'd normally use. Boolits are scaled to .3grs and the charges are weighed and kept in 1/2" copper tubes (water pipe with rubber stoppers). ............Buckshot