I had a great night last night, OR, Black powder is FUN!!!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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Neighbor up the road is trying to make a living making and selling black powder rifles and accoutrements. Yesterday he threw a party for friends, relatives and neighbors, a ‘grand opening’ of sorts for his new set up.

After dark we started setting off the fireworks - all $1200 worth of them. Mike made a run to Wisconsin and picked up $800 worth, but it was a 2 for 1 deal and “only” cost him $400. Then his uncle brought out HIS box of things-that-go-boom…Wow. We’re talking professional-grade, blow-your-hand-off, call-the-cops type stuff, folks. Good thing Mike lives in the middle of nowhere. I’ll never look at a bottle rocket in the same light EVER again, especially not after lighting off something with a fuse the size of a small rope :cool:

After spending four freakin’ hours (never thought I’d get tired of fireworks - we’d finish a box, look around, and someone had brought out yet ANOTHER one) lighting fuses, burning hands, and saying “Look out!!” we finally exhausted the show and went out to his firing range with three black powder rifles, which I had never used before.

Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaamn.

More fun than the fireworks. A lot of work, though… First you measure the powder and pour it down the barrel. Then you grease a small wad, center it over the barrel, center the slug over the wad, and ram 'er in. Next you prime it - pull the hammer back one click (ever hear the phrase half-cocked?), put a small amount of primer under the flint (attached to the hammer), pull the strikeplate back, cock the gun fully, aim, and pull the trigger. Every 8-10 shots you have to clean the damn thing - so much powder stays in the barrel you can’t ram the slug down anymore. I still can’t believe they used to fight wars with those things.

Best part? I managed to hit something with each of the three rifles out there :smiley: Had the best luck with a .58…bore? caliber? Whichever. The .50 Mike had just made was a sweet-looking rifle, but the barrel was toooooo long for me - couldn’t hold it steady enough. And the other guy had a factory-made something that was REALLY pretty - brass fittings and etc. Only shot that one a couple of times. I was standing, unfortunately, to his right, and his gun gave off a LOT of shrapnel when he fired. Good thing it was wet and rainy last night or I’d have no hair left - would’ve burned off.

How much fun did I have? Well, I finally hung it up shortly after 5 a.m.

I wanna do it again :smiley:

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Smells better’n smokeless, too!

Built a black powder pistol from a kit once. Took one look at it and put it aside, vowing to never fire anything I had made. Trust the pros for that.

(sigh) There’s no place I know of around here where I could shoot BP so I don’t even have a gun. But I can shoot BBs in my bedroom now!

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Ah yes, I’ve been shooting all black powder in SASS competition for some time now. Non fronstuffer rifles in our spoort but a '73 Winchester replical, a pair of '51 navies and a mule ear side by side 12 gauge. For long range I’m getting a trapdoor springfield. I now wear the sash of the soot lords as I have gone completel to the dark side :smiley: I figured I earned it when I loaded my brace of navies in the rain and they still went “boom” ten times.

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Dropzone - Oh, yeah…I love the smell of gunpowder in the (very, VERY early) morning :slight_smile: There was a black powder pistol floating around last night as well, but I didn’t have a chance to shoot it. Too bad, cos I’m a much better shot with pistol than rifle.

Padeye - I … um. I understood about 36% of your post - sorry. Mule ear? Trapdoor? Navies? :confused: [sub]Give me some good lines I can use to impress the boys the next time I head up there, eh? [/sub] :smiley:

I forgot to mention what a dirty hobby black powder is…I’m still scraping crap out from my (short) fingernails. Mentioned that after my first couple of rounds and Mike’s uncle said “I know…cool, ain’t it?”

Agreed :smiley:

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Amen!

I have an Airstrike pistol and a little paper target holder. I can sit in bed and casually fire across the room, at the target. The weight and feel of the pistol are exceptional. Great target practice, lots of fun, legal. Yay.

LC

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Chique

Please tell me the next time you plan on blowing up the countryside. My son and I love things that go “boom.”

I’m glad you had fun and that you still possess all of your hair and extremeties.

Rys

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The problem I have is that the room, at nearly 20 feet long, is too short to be all that challenging. And it’s infested with dogs much of the time. And I can’t lay in bed and shoot because of the windows.

The Trapdoor Springfield was the Army’s first breechloading (cartridge in the back, through the trapdoor, not a muzzleloader like you were using) except it started as a muzzleloader converted to breechloading. It’s what served Custer’s men so well. :rolleyes:

A “Navy” is a Colt Model 1851 revolver as produced for the Navy. The main difference is the the Navy had an octagonal barrel while an Army had a round barrel.

I’m assuming that a “mule ear side by side” is a double-barrel shotgun with external hammers sticking up like a pair of mule ears.

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Dropzone, that’s a myth about Colts. The so-called navies were all .36 caliber (.375" round ball) as opposed to the .44 caliber (.451") Army and Dragoon models. The navy designation was entirely Colt’s, had nothing to do with which service use them. The classic '51 navy has the octagon barrel but the .36 caliber '61 navy has the round profile sculpted barrel of the '60 army.

In competition I shoot a pair of '51 navies, '60 armies, a Walker Dragoon and a second model dragoon.

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To add:

Yes, mule ear means external hammer. They aren’t required, just SxS for the category I shoot but mule ears are more authentic for the 1876 time period of my character.

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Is it possible to get functional reproductions of duelling pistols from the Regency period? I’v always thought they are the neatest looking pistols imaginable.

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P.S. - chique - when I saw the title of this thread I thought: “Oh, oh - the gravy got burnt.”

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Rysdad - This party is (most fortunately) a once-a-year-event, but I’ll let you know if it’s on next year :slight_smile:

Dropzone and Padeye - thanks for the info…much clearer now.

Northern Piper - Check your email re the first question; and the gravy…um. Well, that didn’t turn out so well. We coped, though :wink:

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Oh!

One question, Padeye…The whole caliber thing.

The rifle I liked best was a .58, which means I had to drop a .57 ball in as the wad took up the rest of the space. The pistol I saw loaded didn’t have a wad, so why is there a difference between bore and ball? And…oh, wait. You’re saying the pistol ball is larger than the pistol bore? <stick that confused smiley here - I don’t want to actually use it twice in the same thread>

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Black powder does indeed rock. My father, brother and i used to go pre-1840 style camping, Buckskin rendezvous (ron-dee-voo!!!) type stuff. We were pretty hard core. Had about 4 rifles, from .45 cal to a .50 cal, and a .50 cal pistol. That pistol, which looked like something out of a pirate movie, was The BOMB. It was such a blast to fire. It was a lot of fun to go camping for a week up in the Taos area of New Mexico, up near Raton, south of the CO border, dressed in deerskin pants, mocs, pistol in your belt, knives, hatchets… man. Good to go. Memories. :slight_smile:

While i don’t go camping or shooting anymore, my father still goes out to the range at Ft.Bliss in El Paso to shoot now and then. There are organizations around the country that promote both buckskinning and black powder shooting, in case anyone is really interested.

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Yes. Pushing the ball home, using the barrel for leverage, force fits the ball to the cylinder. You don’t do that with the long guns because, with such a long barrel and the need to fit the ball into the rifling grooves (the cylinder on the pistol is not rifled, although the barrel is), a ramrod just doesn’t provide enough force.

Thnks for the info, Padeye. Many years ago I saw a comparison between the penetration power of BP vs modern handguns. A Walker Colt was nearly a match for a modern .44 magnum, a regular .44 Colt matched a modern .38, and a .36 had the stopping power, if you can call it that, of a modern .25. Since I’m more interested in cheap plinking than killing folks I looked at a .36 Sheriff’s Model repro once. Damned thing had such a hair trigger that I couldn’t raise it to firing position before it went off! Good thing I was dry firing.

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Another myth Dropzone. The Walker was the most powerful handgun of its day for certain and possibly the most powerful until the .357 magnum came out in the thirties but not even close to a match for the .44 magnum. The cylinder will take up to 60 grains of powder but such a big charge starts beating up the gun pretty badly, battering the wedge that holds the barrel in place. I generally shoot mine with a 40 grain charge of FFg which is plenty stout but won’t shorten the life of the gun. The Army uses the same size ball but as the smaller cylinder is actualy a modified version of the navy’s cylinder I only load about 30 grains FFg. The navy gets 25 grains and I load finer FFFg powder to get it a little more oomph.

Caliber is a funny thing, sometimes it’s specified by the larger groove diameter of a rifled barrel - typical in the US - or by the smaller bore diameter as is often done in europe. The rule isn’t hard and fast though. A .44 caliber Colt '60 Army is actually the same caliber as a .45 caliber '58 Remington.

The cap and ball revolvers have the ball rammed directly into the cylinder and are sizes so that a tiny ring of lead is shaved off to make a perfect seal. If this is not done or lube not added over the ball there is a risk of the flame spreading to the other cylinders creating a chain fire. It’s pretty dramatic but rarely causes injury or damage to the gun because of the relatively low pressure and soft pure lead balls. I’ve had that happen with poorly made irregular balls.

The front stuffer you shot is made for a patched ball or an expanding skirt Minie ball. Those are generally bore diameter or a little smaller rather than groove diameter.

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This diagram should explain the bore/groove thang. Sorry about the BMP format but I’m at work and don’t have editing software.

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Hmmmm, wonder if I still have that book from 1974. Probably not, but I pretty much memorized it. I could swear they got nearly the same pentration in oak as a .44 magnum. Either way, I’d hate to be on the receiving end.

You folks got me back to looking at that sort of stuff, though. Lots of cool stuff for very reasonable prices! What’s the current status of buying bulk powder? Nothing else requires a permit (hehehe!) but it’s hard to imagine that was still unregulated.

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You think black powder is fun? For a REAL good time, you should try WHITE powd…

…oh.

{slowly backing out of the thread and away from the Gun Nuts}

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No! You have (some of) us wrong, Ike! Black powder isn’t about GUNS as much as it’s about EXPLOSIONS! It’s a very different fetish.