Black Powder shooting

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

I don’t know who made the 2nd- and 3rd Generation Colts for Colt. I thought I heard it was Uberti, though it may have been Pietta or another company. They look very nice though. I heard that the parts were made in Italy, and they were finished and assembled by Colt.

Brands I can think of off the top of my head are A. Uberti, Pietta, Pedersoli, Armi San Marco, and Navy Arms. I think Navy bought ASM back in the '60s or '70s, but I’m not sure. Dixie Gun Works sells guns with the DGW stamp on them. One of my Uberti Navies has Dixie markings – but it’s an Uberti, delivered in an Uberti box with all of the paperwork and with the s/n on the Uberti box label. DGW also sells kits. I don’t know who makes them. Cabela’s and other mail-order places sell BP revolvers, too. Again, I don’t know where they get them.

ASM guns have a mixed reputation. Some people like them, claiming they work great and were inexpensive. Others say they’re utter crap, with too-soft steel and parts that break or don’t fit. I haven’t heard anything about Navy Arms. Pietta has a good reputation, but I’ve not seen any of their offerings. For me it’s Uberti. I bought my first one at the late Pony Express Gun Shop, so I actually saw what I was buying before I bought it. My 1851 Navy Revolvers have functioned perfectly. Their fit and finish (and on the other models that I haven’t fired yet, too) are very, very nice. Pretty accurate, too. IMO, you can’t go wrong with an Uberti! :slight_smile:

One thing that irritates me for some reason is the Navy pistols in .44 caliber. By definition, Navy caliber is .36. Maybe someone made ‘counterfeit’ Colt Navies in .44 calibre, but Colt Navies were always .36 caliber. Another thing about the less-expensive guns is that they often have brass frames. Many Colt-copies made by Confederate gunmakers were brass-framed. My worry is that brass is soft, and that over time the holes for the various pins will become worn. A brass-framed revolver might be OK if you’re just starting out and don’t want to spend a lot of money, or if you’re specifically looking for a Confederate copy or a different kind of gun that has originally had a brass frame; but for a Colt I want steel.

Speaking of ‘want’, Howdah 'bout this? :smiley:

22

Want.

23

How does it compare to cartridge?

24

Originally, cartridges used black powder. For example, the .44-40 used a (nominal) .44 caliber bullet and 40 grains of black powder. I suspect that the howdah pistol, which is offered in 20 gauge, .50 caliber, .58 caliber, or 20 ga + .50 caliber, would have energy equivalent to the same size projectile with the same amount of black powder as a cartridge of the same era.

Comparing it to a cartridge-loaded howdah pistol, the cartridge-loaded one would be faster to load.

Comparing it to a modern firearm? Smokeless powder creates higher pressures than black powder; so I’d guess you’d get a bigger punch out of less lead with a modern gun. But then, that’s not black powder shooting. :wink:

25

To fire that style of weapon, you measure out powder, pour it in the barrel, put in the wad, put in the ball, stuff it all down the barrel with the ramrod, replace the ramrod on the front of the weapon (an important step because otherwise people tend to forget and leave it in the barrel and shoot their ramrod downrange), pull back the hammer to half cock, take out a percussion cap, place it on the cone, pull back the trigger to full cock, aim, and fire.

That’s one shot. Now you get to do it all again to do the second shot.

This is why guns like the howdah pistol in the link were invented. You pre-load two barrels, and you can fire one shot and then another shot fairly quickly after it. Then you have to spend an eternity reloading the thing, but at least you get two shots off at whatever is attacking you instead of one.

Compare this to a cartridge, where you open the weapon, load the cartridge, close the weapon, pull back the hammer, aim, and fire. The cartridge is much simpler, and much, much faster.

Most pistols like the one in the link were smooth bores, and quite honestly, their accuracy sucked. First of all, you’ve got the relatively short barrel of a pistol. Secondly, you’ve got a smooth bore firing a round ball, which pretty much always fires curve balls. The one in the link can be ordered with rifled barrels, which did exist back then but weren’t very common on pistols. A rifled barrel would be more accurate, especially if it was firing something like a minie ball, which isn’t a ball at all. It looks like this:

Cartridge pistols were almost always rifled, and therefore were much more accurate.

The pistol in the link isn’t designed to be a particularly accurate weapon. It’s for close combat with something that surprised you, like a bad guy sneaking up on you or a tiger that just ran out of the brush. You don’t need accuracy. You need a short weapon that can swing around easily and fire a couple of shots quickly.

One disadvantage of a cartridge is that it can only fire that cartridge. A muzzle loader can shoot pretty much anything that will fit into the barrel. You can fire a minie ball, round ball, buck and ball (a round ball plus buckshot, for a little extra damage to whatever is attacking you) or shot, though the shot pattern coming out of a rifled barrel is a bit weird.

Cartridges were usually smokeless powder, and it is much, much, much easier to clean a smokeless powder weapon than a black powder weapon. Black powder (at least if you are using the period correct stuff) contains sulfur, and absorbs water out of the air to create sulfuric acid. You absolutely have to clean the weapon fairly soon after shooting it. You can’t just shove it in the closet and forget about it for a couple of weeks. A lot of cartridge shooters won’t do black powder just because they are such high maintenance weapons.

By the way, the pistol in the link is a bit of a hand cannon. I’d expect it to have some pretty serious recoil issues.

The one good thing is that it’s a percussion lock instead of a flintlock. Side by side flintlocks like that had an annoying tendency to sometimes accidentally fire both barrels at once.

26

I find cleaning my Colts to be much easier than cleaning my modern firearms – though a lot messier.

I just clean them with hot water and dish soap. Dry them inside and out, and give them a coating of oil. The only bad thing is that the residue is as black as ink, so you have to be careful not to splash it.

Re: the howdah pistol. The Pedersoli I linked to seems to have a captive ramrod, to prevent it being left lying somewhere.

27

I bought a .45 cal Philidelphia Derringer kit back in the 80s but never finished it.
All I need to do is finish the stock and blue the barrel.
Considering all the trouble I went through to get a permit for it, I really should shoot it at least once…

28

Howdah pistols were generally sawn-off (or heavily modified designs based on) rifles in .577 Snider (most commonly) or 12, 16, or 20 bore cartridges. Robert J. Maze’s excellent book Howdah To High Power is well worth checking out if you’re interested in the evolution of cartridge firing handguns. I’ve no doubt there were muzzle-loading designs produced in quantity, but everything I’ve read indicates that the vast majority of Howdah Pistols were cartridge affairs, not muzzle-loaders.

Don’t you have a Bore Snake for your modern guns? :smiley:

29

Pedersoli makes the Kodiak, a double barrel percussion rifle, in a couple of different calibers. There’s one that’s half 12 gauge smoothbore, half .50 rifled. I want it SO bad and I was making plans to save up for one but then I realized that if I keep buying things like this I’ll end up homeless.

30

Is that like a Drop Bear or a Bunyip? :dubious: :stuck_out_tongue:

I’ve got cleaning kits, of course. I don’t like any grey on my patches when I’m cleaning, so I tend to go through a lot and all the changing of patches and putting solvent on them is a drag. With a charcoal-burner I just wash it like I’m doing dishes. (I tend to be a little obsessive about scrubbing dishes as well.) Once I do that, I don’t have to mess with many patches to dry and oil it. I do make sure to grease the chambers when I shoot, so that the fouling will be easy to clean when I get home.

31

Obsessive cleaning is, at best, a waste of time. Absent corrosive priming or corrosive BP residue, the whole “clean patch” business is no more than a hold over from yesteryear. Copper and lead fouling won’t hurt the gun. Powder residue won’t hurt the gun. Guns need the bore cleaned when accuracy begins to degrade, no more.
More guns are damaged by excessive/improper cleaning and by improper disassembly than are ever worn out by excessive shooting. I have, in my possession, a beautiful Savage 99 that has never had a screw turned since the day it left the factory. It’s killed a lot of deer over the years and shoots beautifully. I wipe it down after a day in the woods and punch the bore with an oily patch at the end of the season. No more.
Contrast this with all the used guns you can see at shows or in gun stores that feature buggered screw heads, damaged crowns, scratches (idiot marks on 1911’s are especially common), missing parts, and other evidence of “got to play with it” syndrome.
It’s a gun. They are not like some kind of maintenance-intensive foreign sports car. In fact, the better quality they are, generally, the less you need to fuck with them.

32

For those who are leery of black power revolvers, here’s one I’d never want to shoot:

http://www.uberti.com/firearms/images/1858_target_carbine_lg.jpg

It’s a carbine with a revolver mechanism.
The reason why I wouldn’t want to use it is because black powder revolvers have a nontrivial risk of multiple chambers firing at the same time (flashover).
Any experienced shooter slathers the chambers with grease after loading to avoid flashover, but it is still a risk. If you are firing a Colt Navy revolver and two or three chambers fire, it will be a memorable experience, but you will likely survive unscathed.

However, if you are holding one of these carbine-revolvers in a standard rifle pose, with left hand gripping the gun forward of the chamber, your hand and forearm will definitely be injured if multiple chambers fire. :eek:

To the OP, I have a few BP revolvers, but it has been many years since I have gone shooting. NJ is not a shooter-friendly state, so I can’t just go out back and plink away, and indoor ranges don’t allow BP guns, for obvious reasons.

I love the feeling of loading up a revolver and blasting away, with huge tongues of flame and billowing clouds of smoke :cool:

33

I have a lot of guns, but the billowing clouds of smoke always make me smile more than using the modern ones.

34

Pardon a slight hijack, but has anybody ever fired a matchlock musket repro? I’ve wondered how accurate those were (the type they’d have used in Jamestown for instance) or if they were just sort of “load with scatter shot, point in the general direction and hope for the best”.

35

No, it’s a marvellous kind of pull-through that combines brush and cloth- all you do is put a bit of cleaning oil on the brush part, feed it through the breech and down the barrel, pull it through, and then after that you give the exposed metal on your gun a quick wipe with a gun-cleaning cloth and you’re done.

A friend of mine in the US put me onto them a few years ago and they instantly changed post-range/hunting trip cleaning from a tiring, messy chore into a 30 second breeze for me, so I they get my big rubber stamp of approval.

36

I’ve never shot one, but they are as accurate as any other smooth bore musket. They were just as accurate as the smooth bore flintlocks that followed for the next couple hundred years. The only difference is they used a burning piece of rope instead of a spark from a flint to set off the powder. Flintlocks improved the firing mechanism. They didn’t improve the accuracy.

The longer the barrel, the more accurate a matchlock will be. Since it’s a smooth bore, the round ball will randomly contact the sides of the barrel as it comes out, which is going to make it spin. With a reasonably long barrel the ball will go straight for about 50 to 75 yards. After that, where it goes is anyone’s guess.

They were a lot more accurate than “point and hope” but a lot less accurate than a rifle.

A modern repro is probably going to be slightly more accurate than a real matchlock from way back when, just because modern manufacturing techniques can more easily produce a straighter barrel. Back then, blacksmiths used to pound out a flat piece of metal and then fold it around a rod to make it into a round barrel. I got to watch a blacksmith demonstrating this once. It was really fascinating to watch. It was also really slow, and I only saw him make a few inches of gun barrel that way.

37

Here’s a matchlock demo at Jamestown you might find interesting.

38

Part One - if you stick to modern made firearms of good quality (IE - avoid the cheap shit that comes through Canada without the touch-hole being pre-drilled) and commercial black powder “bought fresh” from a reliable store, you almost have to load smokeless on purpose to get one to fail dramatically. The hunter ed team I work with tried to blow a TC Hawkins to have as a visual aide – it took more attempts than I want to admit and in the end we did have to go smokeless and a double ball. YOU DO NEED SPECIFIC TRAINING in them but they really are as safe as any firearm.

Part Two - I shoot way more than average people; modern and antique, smokeless and black. The only guns I’ve had come apart on me have been cartridge models. WW I and II models and one modern/current Remington where someone had “improved” the bolt. That one came close to leaving a scar. Oh - and a .22 rimfire semi that turned uncontrolled automatic due to dirt in the system. Luckily I held it steady while the magazine emptied.

Part 3 ------ ya got me there. After getting up at 4AM to go hunting, hunting to 6PM, getting home at 8 doing a full cleaning sucks and you do really need to do it.

Back to the OP - I had a fair collection of the Belgium-made revolvers back in the early 70s and had a ton of fun with them. Until I found my first .62 and .75 belt pistols. There is something about shooting 6 inch 16 to 12 gauge shotguns that just rocks.

39

Ahhhhh - if you were only old enough to have been down Cannon Hill when Val Foggett (sic?) was starting. He used to bring all kinds of odd crap like that for us to try and break.

Serpentine were pretty good; especially if you fired them from a yoke the way they were designed. The “snaphaunce”/snapping (sic?) style were a little tougher. The locks of the repros I’ve tried all had such a snap to them that they throw you off; sometimes even from a rest. Higher misfire rate as well.

And don’t mention wheel-locks. If I HAD to use something to survive, I would take a serpentine over a wheel-lock any day.

40

Thanks. Amazing how loud that is even on digital AV.

When did matchlocks die out? For that matter, when did paper cartridges come in?

Did anybody see Pawn Stars recently when a guy brought in an 18th century key that was also a matchlock? It’s easily the most impractical weapon combo I can think of- a battle ax & waffle iron combo might be slightly more inefficient- but I had to wonder what the story of that was.