The Rifle Shoppe — Kit Gallery

Several pictures are still missing. Not every one of the 529 kits has a photograph yet, and some of these arms do not appear to have been photographed anywhere public at all. More will be added as they are found. Where a card has no photograph it says why.

I am not affiliated with The Rifle Shoppe in any way. This page is for informational purposes only — I don’t sell these kits, take orders, or speak for the company. The order links go to their own site.

→ Open the Kit Gallery — 529 kits, browsable and searchable.

The Rifle Shoppe, Inc. of Jones, Oklahoma sells investment-cast parts sets for something like five hundred historical firearms: Brown Besses, Charlevilles, wheellocks, matchlocks, doglocks, hand mortars, blunderbusses, Continental military muskets, and a long tail of locks, bayonets, gorgets and spontoons. It is one of only four real routes to a blunderbuss kit (see Blunderbuss Kits Compared) and the source of the Ketland and the 819 hand mortar.

Their catalogue has one frustrating gap: it publishes almost no pictures of the finished gun. You get a description, a parts-and-price list, and sometimes a photograph of the raw castings — but not the arm you are trying to decide whether to spend twelve hundred dollars and a winter building.

1.1 What the gallery does

It pairs every catalogue entry with photographs of surviving original arms of the same pattern, so you can see what the kit is a copy of.

Each card carries the Rifle Shoppe’s own description, its full parts-and-price table, a link straight to their ordering page, further reading, and — where one was found — a short line naming the exact arm photographed. There is search, and filters by section, type and period.

Most photographs come from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose arms-and-armour collections are both openly licensed and superbly photographed. Where neither holds the arm, the photographs come from the Royal Armouries, the National Army Museum, the Musée de l’Armée, and the auction houses and dealers who have handled originals.

1.2 What it deliberately does not do

It never shows a different gun and lets you assume it is the right one. Where no photograph of the actual pattern could be found, the card says so and stays blank rather than showing something close. Three cards are blank for that reason today.

Where the photograph is of a related arm — the musket a musketoon was cut down from, the Long Land Pattern a contract musket copies, the second-model Virginia Manufactory when no flintlock first model has been photographed — the card says which, in as many words.

Modern reproductions are excluded on purpose. A Pedersoli or a contemporary-maker build is precisely what these kits are an alternative to, so showing one would defeat the point.

1.3 Caveats worth knowing

The photographs are of originals, not of finished kits. Nobody’s completed Rifle Shoppe build is pictured here — including mine. What you are looking at is the target, not the result.

Museum records name the family far more often than the dated sub-pattern. NMAH catalogues “Brown Bess Musket”, not “1728 Long Land Pattern”, so where a kit reproduces one particular year’s variant the card says the photograph may not be that exact variant.

Prices and part numbers are as scraped from the catalogue and will drift. Treat the order link as the authority.