My gun came about when I read about the Williams' gun while looking for a gun project in 1997 - 1998.

I had read that West Point had a Williams' gun in their collection and wrote to the curator who mentioned in his return letter that Watervliet Arsenal also had a Williams' gun and suggested I contact them also.  Ms. Marie Hutchinson at Watervliet sent me a large packet of pictures and sketches of the Watervliet gun.  My gun was built based on those pictures and sketches plus information from Brian Hack in Michigan.

My gun was started in late 1998 and test fired on May 23, 2002.  It took 400 hours or so to build the gun and carriage.  I did not keep accurate records and time does fly when you are having fun.

The gun project started with making a full scale drawing of the breech area.  The drawing was made using photographs that Ms. Marie Hutchinson sent me from Watervliet Army Arsenal and information that Brian Haack sent me.  Brian built the first replica of a Williams' gun.  From the drawing a six foot length of high strength seamless steel tubing with a 1.25" wall thickness was ordered and when it arrived it was time to start.

The breech work was done using a milling machine owned by a friend, Mike Colyar, who builds things other machinists say can't be done.  He spent a lot of time showing me the ins and outs of a milling machine.  The barrel and breech are all one piece.  With the barrel in the milling machine, the cuts for the "flat" places on the breech area are completed.  The rectangular opening in the breech area where the breech assembly fits is the next step in the construction process.

The barrel was turned in a 1926 vintage South Bend lathe.  The barrel was a piece of high strength steel tubing.  It was reamed to the correct diameter and then the bore polished using an automobile cylinder hone on a long handle turned by a big drill motor.

Wooden mockups of the breech cam and breech block assembly were made first to see the interaction between the cam and breech block.  The breech cam was made of 2-inch thick steel plate.  The breech block was made of 1.5-inch plate with .5-inch steel side plates.  A lot of the 400 hours were spent with a file doing the final fitting of the breech cam and the back of the breech block.  There was a time when what we call machinists were known as filers.  The sound of a file was the most common sound in machine shops for many years.  Part of an apprentice machinist's training was to file a perfect cube.

The spring of 2001 I had a working Williams' gun but nothing to mount it on.  After pricing wheels, I decided I had better learn something of the wheelwrights trade.  The wheels and carriage were built from oak bought at Home Depot.  That took a lot of the summer of 2001.  The first wheel took about 80 hours, the second about 40 hours.

A full scale drawing of the wheel had been made earlier.  From the drawing, metal patterns were made for the spokes and felloes.  The dish was built into the spoke.  The rough cuts were made on the band saw.  Jigs were made to hold the spokes for the hub angle cuts on a table saw.  After the wheels, the rest of the carriage was easy to build.

The photo above shows one of the cheek pieces for the carriage.  At this point, the cheek pieces had been sawed out of a 2-inch thick oak board and I was bending the cheek irons around that cheek.  The strap iron in this case is 2-inch wide and a quarter inch thick.  The clamps shown in the photo hold the iron in place and provide the final bending power.  The strap iron (really mild steel nowadays but still called strap iron) is quite soft.  It can be bent by hand when it is in long pieces but as it gets shorter some sort of clamping is necessary.  On a "regular" gun, the cheek pieces hold the trunnions.  I had in mind to use this carriage later on for a howitzer so I put the cheek pieces on.  The Williams' gun sits in a swivel mount.  The gun can be moved in azimuth and in elevation and some had an attachment like the shoulder mount on modern machine guns.  When it was being used as a giant shotgun against advancing infantry, the ability to swing it from side to side or up and down was very useful.  My gun is set on a conventional elevating screw and normally is not moved in azimuth except by moving the trail.

By this time the gun was completed and the carriage was coming along well.  I had not worked with wood much before the carriage construction so for me the wood work turned out to be harder than the metal work.

The carriage follows the general outline of cannon carriages but isn't a copy of any one.  The description of the Williams Gun carriage doesn't have much information other than it was mounted on a pair of small wheels and trailed behind a limber.

April 2002 I had a working gun on a carriage.  A trailer to haul it on was next.  I bought a travel trailer that had been rolled and made a cannon hauling trailer out of it.  The trailer has an electric winch and a crane arm.  Loading the gun on the trailer is mostly a matter of hooking a cable to the lunette of the gun and pushing a button.

I made arrangements with a friend to use his hayfield for the test firing and that was done May 23, 2002.  A round was made using 740 grains of cannon grade black powder.  I was worried about the breech seal.  It worked, video tape of the firing showed no leakage.

Several friends who also like cannons were there.  My wife said the greatest danger was dislocated jaws from the grins of the firing party.

There are several people who should be mentioned.  Without them, the gun would have been much harder to build and maybe would not have been built.  First Brian Haack who built the first replica Williams Gun.  His advice made life much easier for me.  Mike Colyar who let me use his milling machine until I got one of my own and showed me the ins and outs of a milling machine.  Joe Paul who kept my planes razor sharp and came up with the biggest C clamps I've ever seen that I used during the carriage building.  He also built the ball mould for my gun.

Then my wife who handed me an insurance refund check in 1998 and said "here's your cannon barrel".  For 52 years she has put up with muzzle loading rifles, homebuilt airplanes, cannons and other things scattered throughout the house understood why the big lathe and a milling machine were necessities and in general has made it possible for me to do these things.  The newest project she is putting up with is the building of a Civil War vintage Ager machine gun.

Editors note:   Even though the gun has been completed Lyle's reasearch is still ongoing.  If you find any additional information about the Williams' gun or its inventor please send it to me (mayorbob@sprynet.com) and I will forward it to him.  For more information and photos about the construction of this Williams Gun see the April 2002 issue of the "Artilleryman magazine".