Tweet
Recently a pard told me something really interesting. I was sitting next to our fire, bumming a handful of coffee off of him & talking about how to grind the whole-bean coffee I had in my haversack, when he mentioned that Sharps rifles came with a coffee grinder in the butt. Sounded like a really cool idea--little gizmo with, as he described it, a small chamber for the beans and apparently a little extendable crank, and once you'd done your grinding you just poured the finished product out of the chamber. Just wondering if any of the rest of you had heard of it. Doubt that there's a repro of such a thing. If a guy was a handy enough machinist with access to an original or a schematic thereof, you could probably make a little dough selling these to guys with repro Sharps weapons. That aside, though, has anybody else run across a reference to this handy-sounding accessory?
-
Micah Hawkins
Popskull Mess -
Re: Sharps Coffee Grinder...?!
There is a Sharps with a coffee grinder in the stock in the museum at Chickamauga. Lee White is on the boards frequently so perhaps he may provide a little background.Marlin Teat
[I]“The initial or easy tendency in looking at history is to see it through hindsight. In doing that, we remove the fact that living historical actors at that time…didn’t yet know what was going to happen. We cannot understand the decisions they made unless we understand how they perceived the world they were living in and the choices they were facing.”[/I]-Christopher Browning -
Re: Sharps Coffee Grinder...?!
I just found a page regarding the example at Chickamauga. Google kept giving me that frustrating little 'the page cannot be displayed...' bit all night until just now. Apparently the weapon at the museum, a '63 carbine, is one of very, very few extant examples with this modification, which was an after-market addition of someone else's design and was not a 'factory' offering from Sharps. In fact it looks doubtful that it was a coffee grinder at all. Kind of a neat 'gee-whiz' little piece of firearms history though, if anyone's interested...
crm.cr.nps.gov/archive/22-7/22-07-2.pdfMicah Hawkins
Popskull MessComment
-
Re: Sharps Coffee Grinder...?!
This would be a project and a half, and the original that I saw was cast and not milled. These coffee grinder sharps are pobably one of the most unusual and rare Civil War oddities.Originally posted by KentuckyReb
Last edited by hireddutchcutthroat; 05-03-2004, 06:22 PM.Robert Johnson
"Them fellers out thar you ar goin up against, ain't none of the blue-bellied, white-livered Yanks and sassidge-eatin'forrin' hirelin's you have in Virginny that run atthe snap of a cap - they're Western fellers, an' they'll mighty quick give you a bellyful o' fightin."
In memory of: William Garry Co.H 5th USCC KIA 10/2/64 Saltville VA.Comment
Comment