Russ T Frizzen said:
What sort of load do you use in the 1853 Enfield in England? Do you have any information on the original lube used back in the service period of these rifles. I seem to recall that the Sepoy Rebellion was caused, at least in part, by misconceptions about the materials in the lube. Dan
There are four P-H [not the post P-H versions, held to be somewhat inferior] in our club, and all of us use the same load - 2.5 drams of fine rifle powder or the modern-day equivalant. Some use Elephant powder, some use Swiss, but we all use around the 65grain mark. The bullet that works best in mine is a 2thou undersized Lyman, lubed with a mix of 50/50 beeswax and Neat's foot oil. It sets into a medium hard lubricant that suits my guns well, or seems to. Most commercially-available stuff that we get over here, made in the USA, costs more ££ than they do $$$, and like most folks these days, I'm averse to firing money down-range that I don't have to.
The Sepoy Rebellion was an artifically induced mutiny helped on by rumours that the new-fangled cartridges were lubricated using pig fat - that upset the Moslems - or beef fat - that upset the Hindus. Needless to say, the fire was fanned by troublemakers of both religious pursuasions.
The fact of the matter is that, as far as my research goes, neither of these two fats were actually used to make the cartridge lube, which most historians agree was actually mutton tallow - totally inoffensive to all concerned.
Incidentally, the P-H guns are not, strictly speaking, copies. P-H 'borrowed' the original master gauges, jigs and patterns from the MoD Pattern Room to set up their tooling. Every metal part was identical is every respect to the original sealed pattern musket/rifle held by the MoD Pattern Room, now part of the Royal Armouries in Leeds.
The late and much-missed Herbie Woodend, Curator and principal collector for the Pattern Room and a good personal friend, spent far too much of his precious time and energy trying to get them back from the fading P-H company, and I was in the office back there in Nottingham, in the late 1990's, when they finally, and grudgingly, got returned, apparently without a word of thanks for the almost twenty-year loan of a large engineer's chest of priceless historical tools.
tac
