Brown Bess Accuracy

never shot my tuil at more then 50 yards. never shot at a deer farther then that. Back in the 70s when I fisrt got into ml I read a book on ml. It had one story about a man that hunted with orianal bb muskets. He killed bear and moose with them I bet he could hit a 2x2 square 8or 9 times in 10 shots,maybe 19 in 20.Any way I think I wouldn't feel very safe a 100 yds from a bbshooter if he was mad at me

How'd ya fire a bow then?

B :thumbsup:

If 9/10 was possible at 100yds, why the hell are they lining up at 50 yds and just banging away?

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Because...,

to fire an entire box of ammunition,... you need a much smaller ball

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And this is a myth...,

If they were lucky British Soldiers got to fire five or six live rounds in practice in a year.

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The British DID practice firing-at-marks. It was up the commanding officer how often, but it was much more common than once thought. It wasn't the lack of practice that gave the muskets a bad name. The Brits had "marksmen" armed with Bess muskets who made custom loads to ensure the accuracy.

The problem was that the speed loading ammo used in combat did not allow for accurate fire, and the marksmen in each company, like a rifleman, could only fire a few of their accurate loads before they had to swab the bore, OR switch to standard ammunition.

LD

Allegedly some special cartridges swere issued with larger ball. The problem with that notion is that such cartridges have never been documented. As you are well aware, bores run from about 0.750 to 0.800. The largest ball found is 0.690.

Who's that distinguished gent behind you? Looks a lot like me. Uh, it is me.

Mike,
Maybe there is a clue here in the General Orders of 1757. (The running ball / heavy ball thing)
The Men for Guard in Camp ye Cov-
ering & Working Party's to Lode their
First Cartrages with Runing Ball for
Which Porpos a Proper Proportion of
Powder & Ball will Be Deliv.d to Each
Corp from ye Artilery. ””

The Piqt & Guard for ye Future to
lode with ye havy ball & ye Commandg
offrs of Corps are to Apply to ye Train
for ye Quantity of Cors powder they will
want.
Oh! That defiantly is a distinguished gentleman behind me.
Bill

"Custom Load" is not necessarily made with a large musket ball folks. :wink: To get accuracy capable of placing a musket ball into a man sized target, anywhere on the target at 100 yards or less (let us agree that taking a hit from a lead ball of nearly an ounce anywhere on your body probably takes you out of the battle) merely requires rolling a cartridge that is uniformly snug to the bore of the musket, yet loadable without damage to the paper tube..., plus consistant powder loads. This may require several more layers of paper than a standard musket cartridge needed. In effect you are making a paper "sabot" for the ball to remain in the same position each time it is fired, thus allowing you to learn the proper aim because the musket has become consistant with where it launches the ball.

There are references to men in marksman companies, making the cartridges. Each musket was probably made its own loads by its user, so no actual "set" combination of powder, ball, and paper, existed. So we need to experiment with our own loads to determine what works..., probably just as they did.

The problem though is after several rounds, the bore is so fouled, you can't get these loads down the bore, so..., either you swab the bore, or you switch to the overall smaller, standard cartridges, and as the battle progresses, you may even end up loading bare ball without any paper around the ball at all.

LD

while i agree with most of the things you said, you seem to forget one important little thing.

if you fire a rifle, you use a ball smaller than the actual caliber and fill the gab with a patch (lubrincted or wet or...) the "job" of such a patch is not only to close the gab, but also to clean the barrel when loading.

if such marksman did exist - which i believe - and if they made their own special charges for their muskets in order to make some well placed shoots, they used a patched ball - a patched ball that cleans the barrel every time one loads the gun. that minimize the influence on fouling.

just my thoughts.

ike

we maybe should use youtube a little more...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trgZmM9fNS0

ike

Some things to consider is the powder charge ,much heavier then most modern shooters use %50 more and the make up of the cartridge itself, whilst the basic colonial type was a single paper tube twisted and tied off with powder and ball the ord. type when issued was made up of 2 or 3 cyclinders and the ball end was lubed , an earlier version of the Enfield rifle cartridge of the mid 1850's

That area target represents a French column advancing towards the line .Bear in mind that some of those hits would be going through more then one person

Yes it's a nice video and I salute them for using proper sized ball for the test, though I don't understand why they used a rest for the solo firing when the bess is normally fired in the "off-hand" position in combat..., they could've used a bench and sandbags to demonstrate the accuracy of the load "from-the-barrel".

they used a patched ball - a patched ball that cleans the barrel every time one loads the gun. that minimize the influence on fouling

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Funny..., :haha: ..., but since there is zero documentation of anybody loading a smooth bore with a patched ball during the 18th century, let alone the military, that is a leap of faith. Further, I have fired both rifle and smooth bore with a patched ball, and there is no "minimizing" of the fouling. Finally, I have tried using simply the paper cartridge and the undersized ball, and they do indeed shoot much straighter with cartridge that is sized to the bore when finished being wrapped and filled with ball and powder, and after several shots, you can't load them and must resort to the standard cartridges.

LD

They are Rifles, for their time frame Light Infantry practised fire and movement. In open order the front rank knelt and fired the rear rank then moved foward and knelt and fired while the then rear rank reloaded , repeat as necc..

There are some prepatched balls in an English collection from the Rifles of this time frame ,they are loose balls with a shrunk and glued on thin leather patch.The patches have radius cuts from the sprue back theser are to alow the patch to come away after fireing, they also apear to have been lubed as well .

i have been in the czech republic a couple of years ago for shooting black powder.

those guys there shooting the Pedersoli Brown Bess from a bench - the target was up hill about man size. painted on wood, red top, black hat, white pants, and white stripes across their chest.

the only thing you can have differences in it is the ball size and powder charge. the later was a min. of 70 grains to a max. of 180(!) grains. the ball needs to be patched.

each time you must fire 5 shots. the distance the guys shooting at was 200 meter! which is about 220 yards.

i remember that one of those shooters hit the target 4 out of 5 times. and he did this 3 times in a row.

i remember i was VERY impressd with that. the only BP gun i had at those days was a Pedersoli Hatfield in flint .54 caliber. because i was a guest from germany, they let me use my rifle for fooling around a bit. i remember that i was able to hit the target 5 from 5 times - shooting off hand - 200 meters is a distance you cannot try your gun here in germany.

just something to think of...

Was the Bess the preferred musket on the battlefield of it's day? In other words, would an American soldier tend to discard his gun if a bess became available? Was there a preferred infantry weapon?

A lot of US troops used Besses exclusively because pre AWI the colonies were British, therefore a lot of state units were provincal British units .

i go along with 1601phill.

the requirements giving above for shooting in CZ was because to have a kind of standard in order to be able to have a consistent point to start from.

looking at the new "Brown Bess Book" and looking at the number of Bess muskets produced untill the start of the AWI, i do indeed believe that there were at least 50% of all the muskets used in the AWI a brown bess type if not a "original" bess.

by all thats said about the AWI and the french import muskets, we should not forget that the bess was already there for a long time. nobody throw the bess away (as trash) just to because they could have a frnech musket right now. that was not the case.
we know of british muskets that have been restocked in the colonies - an indicator of how much the colonists have been in need of arms. that (for me) is an indicator that everything that was "useable" was used in the AWI.

ike

I feel that untill the US made the 1795 Springfield the French Muskets were allways thought of as second rate. Since the early 1740's captured French guns were held in storage, repaired and issued when no others could be found.

Remember that not all Besses were alike. One pattern, but different makers and different amounts of use.

I was in the Tower of London once and looked at the racks of Besses there. Some of the bores were worn oval by repeated rammer scrubbing and the tulips on the ends of the ramrods were almost worn away to the diameter of the rod. The vents were pushing an eighth-inch diameter. Good luck hitting a cathedral from the inside with that. I'd pick a new Charleville over an old Bess.

From what I've read, the British spent more time practicing bayonet fencing than shooting. Cold steel never misfires.

I've shot ball from a Bess, and the problem is as much trigger pull and slow lock time as anything. I developed a technique of hanging my trigger finger halfway off the end of the trigger for maximum leverage and getting a death grip in the wrist so the gun wouldn't "fall off" the trigger. The Bess required rock-like follow through as well.