I’ve often heard that on flintlock firearms, there is a delay between the trigger pull and the moment the projectile leaves the barrel. I’m sure its a fraction of a second, but shooters report it is a noticeable delay. Apparently this is called “lock time.” Obviously different mechanisms, flints, and powders will produce different results, but:
Has anyone attempted to measure the average lock time of a flintlock weapon?
I own a replica 1756 British flintlock musket (long land pattern) which I shoot from time to time. The delay is fairly short, but it is noticeable, and you get a big flash right up in your face that you don’t get with the later Civil War era percussion cap muskets (I also own a replica 1853 Enflield rifle-musket). The percussion cap musket also fires pretty much instantly. You can feel the difference when you shoot the two of them.
I’ve never timed it myself. My gut feeling is that it’s usually somewhere around maybe 50 to 100 milliseconds. Looking at the time stamps on a couple of youtube videos, they seem to come out in that general range.
BTW, here’s a nice slow motion video of flintlocks firing:
If we knew what speed the video was running at it would be fairly easy to get a more accurate figure for the delay time.
Lock times are noticible, especially compared to modern arms. With a modern arm, after the trigger pull the bullet is gone long before you feel or can detect that it’s fired. With a flintlock, you notice the time between the trigger pull and the push of the recoil.
Counter-intuitively, the less powder you put in the pan, the shorter the ignition time… of course, if you put too little, you start to run the chance that a spark won’t hit powder and ignite the contents of the pan.
Regardless of the total time, it’s fast enough that a flintlock held upside down will spark, ignite the pan, and pass the flame through the touch-hole to the main charge before the powder can fall out the pan. There is video out there of this happening and it’s pretty cool to watch in slow-motion. This video is 5000fps, so you could probably get a fairly good estimate on lock time. Another forum’s posthas a bunch of videos, but I can’t confirm this is the right one as I’m at work and filtered from ‘sites that are remotely fun.’
Interestingly enough it is still referred to as lock time in present day firearms, just operates in a much smaller window.
its a big deal in long range shooting, even thousandths of a second matter when a fraction of a millimeter of barrel drift = missed by a meter 500 meters out
IIRC from my flintlock days, the lock time is around 1/16 of a second. slow enough that the shooter can notice it, by not slow enough that the shooter has time to flinch and ruin the aim.
I once took a cool photo (the timing was purely by accident) of a flintlock pistol being fired where you can clearly see the powder in the pan flashing off, but nothing has yet come out of the barrel.
I imagine the lock time could be more significant back when gunpowder routinely varied in quality from batch to batch.
The number I always heard from the slipstick types out the National Ranges in Friendship (indiana) was 1/20 to 1/10 of a second. The argument arises over just when the flash starts (first sparks falling) and just when the “boom” (projectile leaving muzzle) is. Most of the flash you see is actually (should actually be) after the ball is moving down range. The biggest amount of smoke at the lock can be coming from the barrel charge venting back through the touch-hole.
(One of the great all-time arguments I remember came from two serious science types on which was slower - the time from the trigger being pulled to the frizzen fully open or the time from first spark to ball going out the muzzle)
In these examples, the lock time ranged from 0.0312 to 0.0536 sec. but a flash-in-the-pan doesn’t mean the powder in the barrel ignited or that a ball exited a barrel.
The lock is fired electrically, and time is measured until a flash in the pan triggers a photoelectric cell, stopping the clock.
*Flintlock Timing, MuzzleBlasts January 1990 -
This article is the first in a series of three reprinted articles that measure a flintlock’s ability to ignite black powder. L&R’s Durs Egg and Manton locks are the subject of this article. Both performed well and provide a standard of comparison for flintlocks in future articles*.
The condition of the weapon affects it as well. If everything is clean and your flint is nicely napped then it will fire fairly consistently and reliably. Once you’ve been shooting for a while and everything is fouled up with powder residue and your flint is starting to get dull, your misfire rate starts to climb dramatically and the lock time starts to vary a lot more. Sometimes you’ll get a really poor spark that just smolders for a bit and then barely manages to ignite the powder in the pan. I’ve had the main charge go off more than a second after I’ve pulled the trigger on a couple of occasions.
Pay close attention to the last shot in this video:
If you have any other flintlock questions, feel free to ask.
The delay can be long enough that flintlock-using sportsmen found game birds jinking in flight when the trigger was pulled and before the gun could fire. That led to the invention of the percussion cap.
[quote=“engineer_comp_geek, post:9, topic:691706”]
Pay close attention to the last shot in this video:
[/QUOTE]That last discharge caught the man by surprise. He had already taken the butt of the rifle off his shoulder! (I assume his mind was focused on speed. 
)