If one loads a muzzle loading weapon like an old musket, could it be unloaded without firing it? I mean once you have all the powder and the bullet down there, just how would you get it out?
At the same way, I’ve wondered, those old cannons like the Napoleons, could they be unloaded or was it just simpler to shoot them?
There’s a tool that screws onto the ramrod, which, in turn has a screw on it. You use that to bore into the soft lead ball to draw it out. The only time I’ve used it is when I forgot to put the powder in. :smack:
Otherwise it’s just easier to fire it.
Texas Hunter Ed. Course
Unloading a muzzleloader.
I shoot old muskets. I have two special tools that go on the end of a ramrod. One is basically like a sharp screw. If a round is stuck, you can basically screw it into the soft lead of the round and yank it out.
The other tool I have has two small prongs that stick out, and is for removing cleaning patches that come of of the end of the ramrod and get stuck down in the barrel while you are cleaning the musket.
This is what they look like (the tampion is a plug to put in the end of the barrel to keep water out when it is raining).
Muskets also came with all-in-one tools that could be used to completely disassemble the musket. They came in various styles. Here are a few:
The needle is used to clean out the hole that goes from the percussion cap or the pan (depending on whether it’s a caplock or a flintlock) into the barrel. Percussion muskets have a removable nipple that can be taken out and cleaned.
ETA: If you get a misfire, it’s usually easier to shove a little extra powder in the pan under the frizzen, or under the cap nipple if it’s a caplock (and add a new percussion cap) and just fire the thing instead of trying to unload it. If you accidentally load it without powder though, you can use a ball puller, or, if it’s a caplock, you can screw a CO2 cartridge onto where the nipple goes and use the compressed CO2 to blow the round out of the barrel.
Seems like that would lose you a few points in terms of historical accuracy.
Bolding Mine.
Okay, on to the second part of the question; you’ve got solid steel shot in there backed by wet powder, now what?
I’ve been a shooter but never messed w muzzleloaders.
How much force do you need to extract the ball? A gentle tug, a sustained pull, or a mighty yank for all you’re worth?
A lot depends on the type of musket and how much you shot it before the ball got stuck.
Black powder leaves a lot of residue which very quickly fouls up your barrel. This makes it harder to both load and unload the musket.
A musket ball moves fairly easily up and down a clean smooth-bore musket. Hunters back in the day tended to use tighter fitting balls for more accuracy. Keep in mind though that a smooth bore musket always fires curve balls. The ball will randomly contact the side of the barrel on one side or another as it travels down the barrel’s length, which will make the ball spin in some random direction. It will go straight for roughly 50 to 75 yards or so. After that, where it goes is anyone’s guess. A tighter fitting ball helps your accuracy somewhat, but the thing is still spitting out curve balls.
Military muskets tended to use smaller, looser fitting balls as they cared more about rate of fire and quick loading than they did about accuracy. A line of musketeers firing in unison was basically like a huge shotgun-like blast at the enemy.
After you’ve fired a few shots, a looser fitting ball will travel much more easily up and down the barrel. A gentle push/pull is enough force for a loose fighting ball in a clean barrel. A bit more force is going to be required for a tighter fitting ball in a heavily fouled barrel. Either way, you’re nowhere near “mighty yank” forces. A mighty yank is just going to rip the screw right out of the ball anyway.
For older rifles, before you had the Minie ball (pre-1840s), the bullet/ball had to fight tightly in the barrel so that it could grip the rifling, otherwise you didn’t get any benefit to having a rifle and you might as well be shooting a smooth bore. Militaries usually didn’t use rifles much (Napoleon refused to have any at all in his armies) because the barrel would foul too quickly and make reloading all but impossible. Hunters could easily stop and clean their barrels in between shots. Soldiers didn’t have that luxury. If you have something like your typical Kentucky/Pennsylvania rifle and it’s been fired quite a few times, getting a round in or out of it is going to be significantly more difficult.
The whole point of a Civil War era Minie ball is that it has a hollow skirt. This makes it smaller than the barrel for easy loading and unloading, even with a fouled barrel, but when you shoot it, the skirt flares out and grabs the rifling, making it accurate. This isn’t going to be too much more difficult to load and unload than a smooth bore musket, though again it does get significantly more difficult when the barrel is heavily fouled.
In movies, they always ram the bejeezus out of the round whenever they load a musket, which you don’t need to do (typical Hollywood - looking cool is more important than accuracy). This gives people the impression that it’s a lot harder to shove the round down the barrel than it actually is. In reality, getting the round past the first couple of inches can take some effort (that’s why they make ball starters for muskets), but after that, all it generally takes is a fairly gentle push to get the round all the way to the back end of the barrel. You want to give it a firm push once you get it all they way in to the breech, but that’s just because you want to make sure there’s no air gap between the bullet and the powder, or your musket can become a pipe bomb that blows up in your face. But overall, there’s a lot less force required than most people think to make the round move up or down the barrel.
According to Cornwell, who is usually fairly accurate about such things, an English military musket, in the late 18th/early 19th century could be loaded by pressing the ball into the muzzle and dropping the gun onto its stock. For accurate fire with a rifle, thin leather could be wrapped around the ball. I guess this would have take a good shove to get it in.
During the Maori Wars in NZ in the 1860s, the Maori typically loaded their muskets by using undersize balls (knowing they had pretty average powder, rather than the better military-grade stuff the British were using) and banging the stock on the ground. It worked pretty well for them; they could keep up a pretty decent rate of fire by having musketballs in the web of their off-hand ready to go.
For what it’s worth, it’s hard to overstate the dramatic effect rifling had on the accuracy of firearms.
A Brown Bess flintlock musket or Pattern 1842 musket (basically the same thing as a Brown Bess, but with a percussion cap ignition) could maybe hit a man-size target half the time at 100 yards - hence the importance of volley fire.
A Pattern 1853 Rifled Musket, however, was sighted to 900 yards, was deadly accurate to about 300, would easily hit a man-size target to 600, and could hit a man-size target at 900 yards about half the time in the hands of a trained marksman. Bear in mind they didn’t have telescopic sights on them, either - that was using standard-issue iron sights.