Are there any modern reproductions of volley guns?
According to the first link, they frequently broke the shoulder of the shooter. If there haven’t been any reproductions, is it because of liability fears? Or is there just not a market for them?
Are there any modern reproductions of volley guns?
According to the first link, they frequently broke the shoulder of the shooter. If there haven’t been any reproductions, is it because of liability fears? Or is there just not a market for them?
I want one!!!
All things considered, I can see why the one in the second link is in perfect, I would guess unfired or fired just once, shape.
As for a modern reproduction, for all the same reasons I can’t see much market for it. If you want to recreate the experience, a little carelessness when loading a Walker Colt will give volley fire and probably dislocate your shoulder.
I noticed that the gun in the second link had the word “Tower” on it. Was this a reference to the arsenal at the Tower of London? I think it is because the link also mentions the words “Broad Arrow” and one of the towers at the Tower of London is called the Broad Arrow Tower.
In the US I understand these types of guns, including 'Punt Guns" are as a class illegal. They were used for commercial harvesting of waterfowl and a re a violation of some sort of wildlife conservation law.
Passenger pigeons, too, which is why I don’t fear the Asian carp invasion. There’s a good market in China, fishermen along the Illinois River get three times what they used to get for the less numerous buffalo or regular carp (also an introduced species), and the things will literally jump into your boat. No sirree, American harvesters of wildlife have wiped out species before and they aren’t afraid of doing it again!
The Wiki article on punt guns do not say anything about the guns being illegal. (Market hunting is though.)
CMC: The Duckfoot is on my list. I have the pepperbox, but i need to do the final fitting and finishing. I’ll get around to it someday.
Johnny, do you want a firing replica? If so that thing might be damn expensive to make. I’m told that one of the reasons double rifles are so expensive is that fitting the barrels together is one of those things that is much, much harder than it looks. So fitting 7 together with attention to quality could yield an astronomical price.
What is that? Is it a giant shot gun or does it fire single huge rounds?
The Broad Arrow was (is?) the Ownership Mark of the British Crown (relating to military equipment), and you’ll find it stamped all over guns actually issued to the British Military. Incidentally, Broad Arrow markings show up on all sorts of other British military equipment- watches, mess kits, telescopes, backpacks, harnesses, bayonets, cleaning kits, etc.
It’s a very handy way of differentiating the civilian versions of military arms- military arms have Broad Arrows stamped on them, civilian arms don’t, as a general rule.
The “Tower” does indeed refer to the Tower Arsenal, initially located at the Tower of London. After the US Civil War ended, the Arsenal was decommissioned, and the London Armoury Company (who were basically a civilian company established on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government so they could flog British Military Arms to the Confederates without the political inconvenience of publicly supporting them) also went out of business, later being reformed as the London Small Arms Company.
Basically, It was cheaper, easier, and more efficient for the British Government to either have their arms made by RSAF Enfield, or through private contractors (London Small Arms, Birmingham Small Arms, Webley & Scott, Vickers-Maxim, etc), and there just wasn’t the available space in the Tower of London to support the assembly-line techniques required to manufacture the (then) new generation of breechloading and repeating cartridge-firing rifles.
Oh I’d want it to be a firing replica, boy!
Double rifles are meant to be fired one barrel at a time, so accuracy counts. A volley gun is pretty much putting out a lot of lead like a shotgun. According to the article, the later ones were smoothbores.
So the OP has been answered (there are no reproductions of volley guns), but now I have another question that’s been in the back of my mind for years: How do they actually weld the barrels together? I can easily see how six of them would go together, but what about the last one? It seems it could only be welded on the outer edges.