Scratchbuilt 1/12th scale Napoleonic Cannon

Here is a 1/12th scale Napoleonic Cannon, made from the drawings of Barrie Voisey and sold under licence by John Thompson.

Started with the wheels, made all the ‘fellies' as cake slices and glued them together, then I made the knaves/hubs and spokes and drove the spokes into the knaves.

Each spoke is fulling hand worked, to get the correct shape required for each spoke, took quite a while with “two different cut files”, to get them ALL roughly to the correct shape.
The reason the spokes are shaped like an oval, is that it not only lightens the weight of each wheel, it strengthens the spoke as well, it makes things like branches or rocks slide of the smooth edged spoke if bumped by the wheel, without doing to much damage to the spoke at all.
Now if the spoke is not oval shaped and left in the squarish section and it runs into something, instead of just sliding away on the smooth spoke, it now jags the square edge of the spoke and can and will tear the sharp corner away from the spoke.
One stuffed spoke now as that spoke needs replacing, so now you see why it was done.

So if a model horse drawn vehicle has squarish spokes or round spokes, then that is all wrong.

Turned the fellies to the size required and then ground down the spoke ends, so they just fitted into the fellies, ‘Voila', wheels all the same size.

All the wheels have ‘dish' built into them, as per the full sized Cannon and Limber that DOES have ‘dish' built into each wheel.
There is a reason why the old time Wheelwrights added Dish to the wheels as well.
If anybody is interested in this subject, then possibly a Google search is in order to find out the facts yourself.

Axle is made from Brass square section rod, the axle then fitted into the axle body and then the stock and cheeks were added.

The cannon is made from brass, as per the drawing, and even fitted the trunnions to it as well.

All the bits that are meant to work - do so, only I made sure the cannon could not be fired, I drilled the barrel shorter than the vent/firing hole.

Fitted 'Straked Tyre's to the wheels as per what a Cannon in a museum in England has fitted to it's wheels.

Straked tyres are bit different to a full sized steel tyre, this is the “old” way of ‘tyring a wheel', before the full steel tyre became popular..

When finished I looked around the web and saw plenty of these models made as polished brass and lacquered wood, saw one of these Cannons in a museum in England painted with grey wood and the metal work blackened, the cannon was made from bronze and had a slight rubbed down Bronze look about it.

Liked this look better than the polished ones, so took to the brass cannon with a sand blaster and made it look like the one in the museum.

The Limber is straight forward as per the drawing and no nasty surprise's were waiting to be found.

Even had Barrie Voisey's son email me and congratulate me on making it as per what they should have looked like, he used to package all the bits into the kits that his father sold to the public, many, many moons ago now.
So he had seen numerous versions of this model as a polished model, but he had never seen one done as they should have looked like a working one.

Sorry about the size of the pictures, had to retrieve them from "Websnots" before they shutdown and you could only retrieve a smaller version of the original photos. All originals have been lost, due to a few computer crashes.

12 additional images. Click to enlarge.