Gun Conversion Question (Castle Episode)

This question is a spoiler for S02E04 of Castle, titled “Punked”; if you’re a fan of the show but you’re behind on episodes, you’ll probably want to skip this.

Blah blah blah making sure I’m running out the mouseover preview, and…

The end of the episode reveals that the killer converted a shotgun to fire a 200-year-old lead ball projectile, so that during a duel with antique pistols, one of the duelists would think he killed the other, while in reality the two pistols were so inaccurate that the duelists both missed each other (as they’d intended).

So, two questions:

1.) How easy would it be to convert a shotgun to fire a lead ball?

2.) How accurate would this weapon be?

If you start with a shotgun that has close to the same bore diameter as the dueling pistol, there really isn’t any conversion of the gun itself necessary. One would simply load a shotgun shell with a round ball of the necessary size. This is easy enough to do that it could be accomplished with just a few basic household tools; you wouldn’t even need reloading stuff.

Shotgun Slugs

"The earliest shotgun slugs were just lead spheres, of just under the bore diameter, allowing them to pass through a choked barrel. "

Very inaccurate. That was the problem with muskets-smoothbore and poorly fitting projectiles.

I hope it was not portrayed with sniper rifle-like accuracy, it would be worse than the pistols.

Duelling pistols should not be portrayed as inaccurate. Military muskets used loose-fitting balls for speed and ease of loading, especially as the weapon fouled. Duelling pistols used tight fitting projectiles and were more than sufficiently accurate for a duellist to take deliberate aim for his opponent’s vitals. Some duellists were, in fact, notably lethal marksmen. Read a bit on Andrew Jackson’s duelling career for interesting details.

The idea was that the pistols were incredibly inaccurate at the distance they were fired while his gun was accurate enough that he could fire at the same time from a greater distance (i.e., a distance from which he wouldn’t be seen at night, standing by a tree) and hit the man he wanted to hit. Which is what made me go :dubious:.

These were (a) antique pistols that were meant for display, not use, and (b) fired at “40 paces” from each other. The intention of the duelists was that they would miss each other. Does any of that information change your assessment of their accuracy?

Paging Uncle Cecil!

Were they genuine, albeit antique, duelling pistols? If so, duelling pistols were typically finely crafted items. They were expensive items, made for a very serious purpose. The complete cased set included a bullet mould to cast balls properly sized to fit the bores of the pistols. Duels were supposed to be as fair as possible, so the pistols were matched as nearly as possible for weight, trigger pull, accuracy, etc. Hitting a man-sized target with one at 40 paces, provided it was loaded with a properly sized ball is no great feat. If the modern day duellists really planned on missing each other, they’d have been well served to deliberately aim away from each other. Hair triggers and hidden (or scratch) rifling was not unkown in duelling pistols, either, which would have made shooting them accurately even easier.

They actually said in the script that the duelist who was killed, a math whiz (PhD who worked in finance), actually ran the numbers and determined that it would be impossible to hit each other from that distance. And there was an amusing sequence of Castle and Beckett at the firing range testing the pistols to see how accurate they would have been at distance.

ETA@Scumpup:

The pistols were shown as a matched pair in a box. I can’t remember 100% if they were referred to explicitly as dueling pistols, but I *think *they were.

There is no one type of dueling pistol. Some were smooth bores, some were rifled. The rifled ones were more accurate. Some were regular pistols, others were very ornate and were more meant for display. A short barreled smooth bore pistol isn’t going to be terribly accurate at 40 paces, but it most definitely has a non-zero chance of hitting the person you shoot it at. Duelists who just wanted to preserve honor intentionally fired in the air or significantly away from their target.

A smooth bore shotgun is going to have a different firing mechanism, but other than that it will basically be the same as a smooth bore musket. Smooth bore muskets always shoot curve balls, and the loose fitting ball just rattles its way down the barrel anyway. A longer barrel helps smooth out the rattling back and forth and point the thing in the right direction, but the ball is still going to randomly strike one side of the barrel somewhere and is going to spin. It will go straight for maybe 50 to 75 yards, but after that, where it goes is anyone’s guess. They used to say that you could stand 200 yards from a single musketeer and not worry about getting shot by him.

A smooth bore pistol, by comparison, is going to be accurate to maybe 25 or 30 yards tops. 40 paces isn’t too far out of that range. You aren’t guaranteed to shoot someone in the chest, but if you don’t intentionally miss, you stand a very good chance of hitting him somewhere. A riled pistol could accurately kill someone at 40 paces, though that is near the top end of its accuracy range.

An old muzzle loading rifle will be accurate to 200 to 300 yards, even with a round ball. You can buy brand new reproduction muzzle loaders, or (probably more appropriate for the show) a modern muzzle loader specifically designed for hunting black powder seasons.

As Scumpup said, there is no conversion necessary for the shotgun itself. All you do is load the round ball into the shotgun shell.

Even assuming the worst case (short barreled smooth bore pistols) that’s just silly. The round ball will have a bit of a random spin to it, but it certainly isn’t impossible for it to hit someone at that distance. The most you could claim was that it was a fairly lucky (or unlucky) shot.

Here is an older article from Smithsonian about the duelling pistols used in the famous Burr-Hamilton duel. Some interesting stuff about duelling pistols in general in it. Whether the hair triggers were genuinely “secret” is debatable. Single set triggers were, and are, pretty common. If Hamilton deliberately concealed that the pistols did have such, he was seeking an unfair advantage. OTOH, plenty of folks who have an interest in the history of duels are of the opinion that Hamilton ended up screwing himself by firing prematurely.
I have a flintlock rifle with a set trigger and it is very easy to mess up a shot by firing before you actually meant to. I confine its use to the range and use the trigger conventionally when hunting.

More details from the show:

1.) I don’t know what this says about the type of pistol, but they were shown as being loaded with a piece of paper or cloth under the bullet. (And yet, they also talked about test-firing a bunch of antique pistols owned by an earlier subject to compare those bullets to the one used to kill the victim.)

2.) When they were testing the pistols’ accuracy on the firing range, they were shown (obviously for comedic effect) to be impossible to aim accurately at the range they were using (even with the gun strapped down, aimed with a laser sight, and triggered with a string).

Fascinating information, all! Keep it coming. It really sounds like the show’s writers really dropped the research ball on this episode.

Was it a flintlock or a percussion lock?

Here’s the wikipedia article on flintlocks:

And for comparison, here is the wikipedia article on percussion locks:

The main difference is that in a flintlock, a piece of flint on the end of the hammer comes down and strikes a piece of steel (called the frizzen) which makes a spark in the pan. The powder in the pan goes POOF and this ignites the main charge in the barrel, making it go BANG. So flintlocks go poof-BANG and make a really big poof directly in front of your face.

A percussion lock, by comparison, uses a cap that contains mercury fulminate to make the spark. There isn’t any pan. The spark from the cap goes directly into the barrel and makes the main charge go BANG. A percussion lock is much more weatherproof (you won’t ever be dueling in the rain with your flintlock) and doesn’t throw up a big spark and cloud of smoke directly into your face.

If it is a flintlock, it’s almost guaranteed to be a smooth bore. Rifled barrels were considered cheating in the early days of dueling. Later, rifled barrels became more acceptable. Percussion locks didn’t take off until about 1840 or so, so if it had a percussion lock it was definitely a later dueling pistol and may have been rifled.

The way you fire these weapons is that you first load powder into the barrel. Then you place a cloth patch or paper wad and the round ball into the barrel and use the ramrod to shove it down against the powder. If you leave a gap the barrel can explode, but you don’t have to ram the thing down repeatedly like a maniac, like they usually do in the movies. One simple shove will usually do the trick.

If it is a flintlock, you pull back the hammer to half cock, open the frizzen and pour a small amount of powder into the pan. Then you close the frizzen, and pull back the hammer to full cock, and now the weapon is ready to fire.

If it is a percussion lock, you pull the hammer back to half cock, put a percussion cap on the nipple, and pull the hammer back to full cock, and it is ready to fire.

Neither type of lock will fire when the lock is at half cock (unless the lock is broken).

If you have a Minie ball (which isn’t a ball at all, but instead is a bullet shaped thing with a hollow skirt) instead of a round ball, you don’t use a patch or wadding. You just grease up the bullet and shove it down the barrel. Minie balls also didn’t show up until the 1840s, and while they quickly replaced round balls on the battlefield, they were rarely used in dueling pistols. Minie balls are very accurate when compared to modern bullets.

A short smooth bore pistol is going to perform very poorly compared to a modern pistol, so there is some element of truth to this part of the show. You can expect something like a six inch group at 25 yards, but at 40 yards it wouldn’t surprise me if you had a 3 foot group. That means if you draw a circle with a 3 foot diameter, the shots will all land somewhere inside that circle. The important point is that the shots could land anywhere inside that circle, including dead on in the center bull’s eye. If you aim for a guy’s heart, you could easily miss him, or you could hit him in the head, or you could hit him in the crotch, or you might just get lucky and actually hit him in the heart. This is the part that the show really screwed up. You aren’t guaranteed to miss.

One other thing to mention though is that if you’ve never fired a flintlock before, you might jerk the pistol when the pan charge goes off, which is going to royally throw off your aim when the main charge goes off. Once you are used to the big flash going off right in front of your face you are much less likely to do this.

Here are some videos you may like:

A double barrel flintlock pistol (shows loading as well as shooting):

Note the delay between the pan and the main charge going off.

A percussion lock pistol:

Note that there isn’t a delay. As soon as the hammer goes down the pistol fires.

This is something you never see Hollywood flintlocks do:

A well maintained dueling pistol isn’t likely to have problems like the pistol in the last video. A couple of antiques yanked off of the shelf might though.

Your shotgun will need to be bored cylinder to shot the ball safely. Most [reasonably] modern shotguns will have some degree of choke that can make it hazardous to shoot a solid ball though them, especially English guns which will, in general, have thinner barrels than US ones.

Not exactly. What you describe is the result of using too much powder in the priming pan, a common error among unpracticed flintlock shooters. Typically, they overfill the pan to the point where the powder covers the flash hole. Since the powder burns from the top down, there is a delay between initial ignition and hot gas entering the touch hole. There’s also a lot of unnecessary flash and smoke in front of the shooter’s face. A properly primed flintlock has no perceptible lag between ignition of the primer and ignition of the main charge. There is also minimal flash and smoke from the pan.
How much priming powder is enough? One fellow I know recommends moistening the tip of your finger by touching your tongue, then moisten the inside of the pan by touching it with your finger. Prime the pan and shake out the powder. What adheres to the inside of the pan is enough. The main idea is that you have a thin layer of powder and not obscure the flash hole. More is not better.

Edited to add: A properly knapped flint that hits the frizzen at the correct angle so that a goodly shower of hot sparks ignite the priming powder also speeds up the process.

Hrmmmm, I’m not sure. I don’t remember any “poof,” which suggests percussion lock. I also don’t remember them half-cocking and then doing something else, so it’s possible they were just skipping that step (or didn’t even realize how the guns were actually loaded and fired).

If I remember, I’ll go back and watch the gun testing part of the episode again and get you more details and/or a link.

Re: the shotgun scheme.

I gather that the guy with the shotgun is some distance away. The projectile would have a longer distance to travel to the target. Assuming the shot was possible, if he fired at the same instance as the duelists, even with a faster projectile (longer barrel, smokeless powder) I think there might be a detectable delay between the shots in the impact. If he timed his shot such that the ball would arrive on target at the same time the pistol ball would have, then the report of his shotgun would be heard before the reports of the pistol. And he’s have to guess exactly when the pistols would be fired. (Of course there’s the speed of sound to consider.)

Not that far–a bit farther than the duelists, behind some trees. Not like across a field or anything.

Stroke of midnight. (No, seriously–they were listening for the bells.)

That seems flawed on its face. If the guns are wildly inaccurate, the ball would be just as likely to hit the other duelist as any other man-sized piece of the surrounding scenery. Very unlikely, but certainly not impossible.