This is a 1:17 Scale Model, based on Forester's novel The Gun. Forester describes the gun as
"...an 18-pounder, thirteen feet long, two feet in diameter at the breech and one foot at the muzzle."
By reference to old artillery specifications, this describes a Spanish Culverin, a long-barreled,
flat trajectory artillery piece. In English inches, the bore for an 18-pounder is 5.2-inches; divided into
156-inches (thirteen feet) gives 30, the length in calibers. To put this into perspective, this is the
same proportion as the primary armament of a 20th-century battleship!
The author assigns the gun a weight of 3,000lbs, but it might be closer to 5,000, judging by the old tables. No matter which, such a heavy piece would be as difficult to move around as the author portrays in the novel.
When the gun is discovered by the guerilleros, it has lain for two years buried under a cairn in a quarry, and the wood and iron work have deteriorated: "...the iron was honeycombed with rust, and lichen covered the carriage. The gun itself, being of bronze, was impervious to the elements." The guerilleros round up two local carpenters and "a smith of renown" to build a new carriage and wheels, and this is the basis of the model.
"Those wheels were the wonder of a district that had never known other than solid disks cut from a tree." As these were built by carpenters, not wheelwrights, whose main wheel experience would have been the solid wheels refered to , it is unlikely they would have been familiar with the concept of dish.. It is therefore my imagination that, as the wheels they examined were deteriorated, they would have interpreted the dish of the original wheels as part of the general collapse, therefore the model wheels have no dish.
The model tri-partite wheels and axle are based on a photograph of an actual old axle and wheels, and of wheels on many cart models shown on some Portugese web sites; there is a tradition of making model carts in parts of Portugal where these carts had been in use.
" Draft animals were hard to find, but the two asses and six oxen that El Bilbanito's men were
able to get soon had the gun under way."
