• This community needs YOUR help today. We rely 100% on Supporting Memberships to fund our efforts. With the ever increasing fees of everything, we need help. We need more Supporting Members, today. Please invest back into this community. I will ship a few decals too in addition to all the account perks you get.



    Sign up here: https://www.muzzleloadingforum.com/account/upgrades

American Pioneer Powder is Back in Business & Available

Muzzleloading Forum

Help Support Muzzleloading Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
IDK about a patent, but at the bottom of post #32 are 2 references of firearms history, click on one, and then in the left hand column there's a chapter listed about pellet BP [chapter XXV].

Those are for cannons.
Big difference between cannons and rifles.
 
Those are for cannons.
Big difference between cannons and rifles.
Not sure what you are saying or missing as you read. Curious about your idea of a cannon? 5/8” diameter 100 grain cannon charges??? Here is a screenshot of a page describing a 19 century BLACKPOWDER PELLET machine and process. Believe link has been posted here before, if not on other forums, likely by @arcticap, as I have seen and read it previously.
1604014145762.jpeg
 
Not sure what you are saying or missing as you read. Curious about your idea of a cannon? 5/8” diameter 100 grain cannon charges??? Here is a screenshot of a page describing a 19 century BLACKPOWDER PELLET machine and process. Believe link has been posted here before, if not on other forums, likely by @arcticap, as I have seen and read it previously.
View attachment 48329

Thanks, I guess I missed that.
Do you have a link for that page ?
 
Thank you, that helped jog my memory.

Those pellets were all designed for cannons, very large ones. (not rifles)
You will have to excuse my ignorance, but you are saying that the blackpowder pellets referenced were made for ‘cannons, very large ones’, correct? The same pellets referenced as ‘5/8 inch diameter, 5/8 inch height and depth of the hole is 1/4 inch and each pellet weighs about 100 grains’? Please provide reference where these 100 grains pellets were intended for and used for cannons. Ready to learn from your impeccable research.
 
I like black powder because our guns were designed to shoot black powder, Not APP.

APP and all of it's other names were designed for modern muzzleloaders. I liked Black MZ, just not in a traditional muzzleloader.
Nice to get news about new kinds of powder, would be nice to see a thread without all the “politics“ . The way it gets on here reminds me of trying to divide people into either a real black powder only group or a substitute only group. I’m a U.S. citizen and am free to use whatever works best for me.

I was at my range that I’m a member of at the time when a group/ black powder club came up to shoot on an invite type of thing. I was shooting my great grandpa’s old target rifle when one of their club members came over to “inspect” me and my gear. He told me that I couldn’t shoot my rifle in their matches because it had an aperture sight. Then he told me how I should get me some buckskins & on & on. I told him that I wasn’t interested in shooting in their matches or joining their group . I was just there shooting like I always do. I thought it was pretty silly how a guy driving a new F250 and shooting a replica bp gun had the audacity to tell anyone about how one should “try to look the part” as he was telling me while seeing me with a 150 yr. old family heirloom and telling me my gun didn’t qualify. I even shoot Black MZ in it and will continue to do so until I run out. Then I might bite the bullet and buy some APP. If it’ll keep my guns making smoke, why say it’s not OK to use it? Who knows, it might chase away Corona virus. Come to think of it, I haven’t caught it yet.

Have fun fellas and try not to bicker so much . We can watch that on the news all day long.
 
You will have to excuse my ignorance, but you are saying that the blackpowder pellets referenced were made for ‘cannons, very large ones’, correct? The same pellets referenced as ‘5/8 inch diameter, 5/8 inch height and depth of the hole is 1/4 inch and each pellet weighs about 100 grains’? Please provide reference where these 100 grains pellets were intended for and used for cannons. Ready to learn from your impeccable research.

Yes, I'm saying that these were cannon powders. (costal and Naval guns mostly)
The pellets were a way of making extremely large "grains" for huge guns.

5/8" diameter ? What British long arm or pistol did they use that in ?
 
Last edited:
The 1911 edition of Encyclopedia of Britannica under gun powder explains how "modern" cannons at that time used large grains of gunpowder to slow the ignition process and provide a longer combustion time to shoot father without blowing up the barrel. The grains were in inches. I'll see if I can get a scan of some of the information copied and shared.
 
Simply put, all the information I have found regarding "pellets" or compressed powder relate to cannons, Including information directly from the patents themselves.

If they were ever designed for use in a shoulder fired weapon please tell me which one.
 
Simply put, all the information I have found regarding "pellets" or compressed powder relate to cannons, Including information directly from the patents themselves.

If they were ever designed for use in a shoulder fired weapon please tell me which one.

A cannon is a traditional muzzle loader.
They come in all different shapes and sizes including scaled models.
The original handguns were called hand cannons.
And "rifles" were nothing more than shoulder cannons that could be fired using a match.

Cannon developments have been transferred to shoulder guns in the past.
For example, wooden sabots were first designed for cannons and then experimented with in rifles very early on by Henri-Gustav Delvigne.
That means that irrespective of what a patent was granted for, no one can know what all others experimented with or ever made in the past, whether it was by using a product that was designed to be used with something else like a cannon, or a random independent idea.
So when you ask if pellets have ever been designed for use in shoulder fired weapons, perhaps yes or perhaps not.
I'm not sure that anyone can prove that they weren't throughout all of world history.
Someone was bound to experiment with a firing a solid lump of black powder in a shoulder gun.
IMHO since pellets were used in cannons justifies their existence as being traditional today.


There have been a number ‘traditional’ side lock guns, percussion and flint, designed for use with pellets.

I think that SDSmlf was in part referring to the TC Firestorm flintlock and the Traditions PA Pellet flintlock.
 
Last edited:
A cannon is a traditional muzzle loader.
They come in all different shapes and sizes including scaled models.
The original handguns were called hand cannons.
And "rifles" were nothing more than shoulder cannons that could be fired using a match.

As far as I can tell most if not all of the pellets were designed outside the forum's timeline (post 1865) making them non-traditional. They were also designed mostly for breechloading guns, also making them outside the forum guidelines, and since they were for cannons, This discussion is in the wrong subforum, and since they weren't made from APP they are a bit off topic. 😜
 
As far as I can tell most if not all of the pellets were designed outside the forum's timeline (post 1865) making them non-traditional. They were also designed mostly for breechloading guns, also making them outside the forum guidelines, and since they were for cannons, This discussion is in the wrong subforum, and since they weren't made from APP they are a bit off topic. 😜

Carbon,
You seem to be making a lot of faulty generalizations.
Rodman's cannons were muzzle loaders and his compressed black powder experiments began before the war.
The article below has more facts about Rodman's compressed powders.

"The Rodman gun, developed in the mid-19th century, was the technological apex of smoothbore, muzzle-loading artillery," --->>> The Man Behind the Rodman Gun

More info here;
" General T. J. Rodman first suggested and employed the perforated cake cartridge in 1860, the cake having nearly the diameter of the bore and a thickness of 1 to 2 in. with perforations running parallel with the gun axis. ..."
--->>> 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Gunpowder - Wikisource, the free online library
 
Last edited:
Carbon,
You seem to be making a lot of faulty generalizations.
Rodman's cannons were muzzle loaders and his compressed black powder experiments began before the war.
The article below has more facts about compressed powders

"The Rodman gun, developed in the mid-19th century, was the technological apex of smoothbore, muzzle-loading artillery," --->>> The Man Behind the Rodman Gun

That's why I said "most" not all. I knew one of them was slightly earlier. Still none of them were designed for shoulder fired weapons. That wouldn't happen until the 20th century.
 
That's why I said "most" not all. I knew one of them was slightly earlier. Still none of them were designed for shoulder fired weapons. That wouldn't happen until the 20th century.

It's plain and simple, muzzle loading cannons are traditional guns.
Muzzle loading is about more than shoulder fired guns.
 
Back
Top