Look what I found!

[ptdunk]

I recently discovered something quite interesting whilst conducting a renovation to an extremely lightweight bellows gun (more on that later).

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The bellows was not holding air and was obviously leaking somewhere.
As it was made up of three different pieces of parchment I decided to take the plunge and try to replace them with a single piece of parchment which should reduce the chances of leaks in the future.

When I started to remove the parchment I noticed it had writing on the inside face, and seemed to be an old handwritten Parchment document.

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With some advice from John G about how to de glue it (water disolves old animal glue) I got the two pieces off and was very pleased to discover they were cut from the same document and they fitted together.

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Thanks to Jeorg, a fellow collector for translating what he could, he worked out the following bits of text:

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And he said:

'This is a Part of a certificate of employment written by Johann Kasbar In... for a Person that some time before had served in the Bataillon of the guard unter a commanding officer von Neitsschütz . There was a Rudolph von Neitschütz (* 1627; † 1703) who was a lieutenant-general of the Electorate of Saxony. He was head of the Life Guards on Foot and had been Lord of Gaussig since 1696. That is pure speculation but that would fit.'


I told him I'd been informed that the Bellows gun was probably made around 1780, he said:

'That may as well been made in 1740 but that is naturally more a feeling than evidence. The trigger guard is a bit too elaborate for 1780.
Saxony is possible.
The neighbourhood Thuringia with the towns Zella-Mehlis and Suhl is a good guess, too.
For a southern german provenience it is a bit too plain, I think.'

So an early example of recycling and a fascinating window into the world and a time that this airgun was built in.

I made a paper template, then a parchment one, then glued it on to the repaired woodwork and the animal glue has now cured and when I get a chance I'll be refitting it and testing.

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I thought that may be of interest, I'll report back in when it's tested. There will be a nice video in the future.

For anyone unfamiliar with bellows guns here’s another one I worked on:

https://youtu.be/hwZ_O8j62Vg

Cheers,
Matt