Henry Nock,Walter Dick and Charles Lennox,The Duke of Richmond,and the Journey to the Final Designs of the Nock screwless lock

This paper introduces the Duke of Richmond’s Muskets and their precursors as made by Henry Nock and others. It particularly explores the development pathway for Nock’s Screwless locks by examining the production variants, the known prototype and experimental versions and in particular the prototype breech loading muskets. There are now known to be three breech loading prototypes, two very similar guns with locks marked by Henry Nock and a similar gun that appears by comparison to locks known to be by Walter Dick to have a lock made by Dick. This examination indicates that Nock was likely to have been instructed to make the production lock smaller than the prototype and that a key design step that enabled this was the use of a small double-ended mainspring linked to the cock and actuating the steel (frizzen) via a lever as developed by Dick.