Thread: wheel lock
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Old January 30, 2001, 09:30 PM   #3
Alex Johnson
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Join Date: February 16, 2000
Location: Grand Forks, ND
Posts: 812
Unless Dixie's got something new in their catalog I think the musket your referring too is a Matchlock (a pretty nice one though). Wheelocks can be very reliable if their made correctly, the trouble is that there are some serious weaknesses too the mechanisim. In all fairness a lot of the complaints about the reliability of wheellocks came from the really complicated ones that had self priming pans, automatic pan covers and a host of other innovations. The dead simple models, used by the military and non-royal hunters were often more reliable in these respects (the more tricks and gimics a mechanisim has the more that can go wrong with it, it's true with mechanical and electrical systems to this day). Today a properly made wheellock can prove to be almost as fast as a good flintlock and considerably faster than a flintlock that missfires on the first shot (wheellocks seldom do this). I'm building a reproduction of a wheellock mechanism right now, I might even get it stocked some day. I beleive that there are some companies that supply wheellocks fully assembled and ready to shoot, but I didn't think that Dixie was one of them.
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