Paper Cartridges

I think the army corrosion issue was real but as I said they didn't care- the soldier would be killed or the war over by the time it became a problem. If I recall I think they also used a larger than normal flash hole in the nipple. This may have been to insure more blast from the cap ruptured the case and exploded the powder.
I think the testing was pretty fair- I think. I might be confusing the manufacturer but I think it was Johnson and Dow had some case-less cartridges. The powder was a solid and varnished. The army would soak the stuff underwater for 4 hours and see if the rounds still worked and sometimes they did and sometimes they didn't so it was an on again- off again thing. It would be neat to play around with the idea- no case no worry about unburnt paper or fouling in the chamber.

Be a touch wary of these.

The boxes he sells are VERY sensitive to OAL and bullet profile. You will be limited to very light powder charges if you buy those boxes. Trust me, I know.

Out of curiosity, I went to the trouble of making a bunch of paper cartridges for my .45 Remington revolver. I had similar experiences to yours in that I had several misfires and I had to brush out the chambers on the cylinders before loading to get out the paper bits and ash before reloading. I must admit that it was a fun experiment learning how to make paper cartridges from cigarette papers and loading and shooting them. But, once I had done it and satisfied my curiosity, I went back to the old way of loading. It may be a bit slower but is a lot less trouble than paper cartridges. Come to think of it, it may actually be a bit faster since I don't have to brush out every chamber before reloading it and I don't have the misfires that I had with paper cartridges.

BTW, when I had some misfires, it was due to the cap not breaking the paper to ignite the powder. When this happened, I just used a fine wire to prick the cartridge through the nipple like pricking a charge in a cannon. Once they were pricked, they usually always fired. I guess if I was going to spend more time making and shooting paper cartridges, I might have made it a practice to prick every chamber in the cylinder before attempting to fire them. Naw, I prefer the old way of loading......but it was fun to try paper cartridges.

An afterthought, how does a magician ignite flash paper? If it ignites very easily, wouldn't it be an extreme safety hazard when working with black powder? Obviously many people have used it and lived to tell about it. Maybe only the ones who lived are here to tell us about using it???? :haha: Just a thought.

Crockett, you're probably thinking of Doremus & Budd, they patented compressed powder attached to the bullet employing a hollowed base or a projection cast onto the bullet, with the round waterproofed using applied collodion. Bartholow I seem to recall mixed powder with collodion to form ammunition without any casing.
The top selling revolver cartridges look to have been of the Johnson & Dow pattern employing a nitrocellulose casing. Colt produced about the same thing after they gave up on the foil casing. In terms of corrosion from chlorides, water cleaning handles the problem. I imagine that the Union Army stressed cleaning much as the Army did when I was in, so corrosion wasn't a problem unless the weapon was stored uncleaned.
When you look at the subsequent patents registered by makers of caseless cartridges, it's pretty obvious there were problems with them. Inventors experimented with progressive burning, increased available oxygen, and various schemes related to waterproofing and bullet attachment as follow-ups to their original patents.
Nitro lacquer in theory is about the same thing as collodion. I bought a can of it a couple of years ago to try as a cartridge adhesive, but have never gotten around to trying it as a way of consolidating powder. Pyrodex probably experimented pretty thoroughly with the concept before settling on their pellets, which I believe rely mostly on basic compression without an added adhesive.

Bill, magician's ignite flash paper electrically with a concealed igniter. That's an excellent point you make about the combustibility of nitrocellulose, because its flash point is considerably lower than powder. I've never had a round go off by accident, but I carry my rounds in packets made from drilled wooden blocks like Root and Colt patented, and which Capandball sells. I also don't make up more than a couple hundred cartridges at a time, and store them at around 40 degrees in a refrigerator. They're very handy when walking around in the great outdoors shooting cans and such, but I generally load loose at the range. Most people who experiment with cartridges seem to go back to loading loose once the novelty wears off, or compromise by measuring their powder charges into individual small containers, and loading the ball and wad separately.

Actually I've read somewhere that the original nipples had a smaller flash channel like many of the aftermarket nipples.

I bought two of each caliber for display purpose. I like the boxes and will not be using them with loaded paper cartridges -- thanks for the warning :thumbsup: .

Wicket, I was surprised to read that you store your paper cartridges in the refrigerator. I haven't heard of anyone doing that and just assumed it was because of humidity problems.
I take it that you haven't experienced a problem with that happening?

Gene, refrigeration is just a precaution I take to lengthen the shelf life. Residual acid can get trapped in the cell structure of cellulose and continue to react; degrading the product. To protect against moisture I keep everything refrigerated in zip lock bags.
I swear by the wooden cartridge packets, and they're easy to make since I have a drill press and table saw. I shellac mine so that they don't swell during damp weather and make them stick tight in the card stock jackets. They'd probably be real easy to seal with some scotch tape run around the lid, but I've never bothered to try it.

It was Bartholow, I forgot the name and what I was wondering is if there was any way today's shooter could do the same thing and forget the case altogether. Just mix fffg with some sort of binder and put in a mold along with the bullet that locks in place. That would be pretty neat.
For those not that familiar with all this- there was another major producer- D C Sage of Middleton CT that also sold millions of rounds to the Union Army. He used a fish gut that would "crisp" upon firing and not hold an ember.
In the interest of bonding with the past I sort of did the whole thing. I found some very thin tin/aluminum foil and tried that. The cap was powerful enough to rupture the foil case and fire the round about 50-70% of the time. Colt used one type of tin imported from Germany.
The tin is waterproof and shouldn't hold an ember but the fouling was bad. Well, so what, I kept on loading but when I crammed in the third re-loading there was so much fouling in the chamber that I couldn't seat the round below the end of the cylinder. The cylinder could not rotate around the barrel and I had to pull the wedge and take off barrel and cylinder. On a Remington you would have a real major problem.
Next I tried newsprint. Newsprint is three times thicker than cigarette paper but I got almost 100% ignition. There was a lot of partially burnt paper in the chambers and in the interest of safety I had to remove it before reloading.
I then went on the the cigarette paper. The way I make the case there is only a single layer of paper near the flash hole and I get 100% ignition however this cigarette paper doesn't fully burn up. Now there may be some confusion on this (and I may be the one confused) but it is my understanding cigarette paper keeps burning. Pure tobacco- like in a pipe or cigar will go out if you don't keep smoking it but cigarettes- they keep burning- like when you leave one in an ashtray.
Finally I made the small wood boxes these rounds were originals packed into. These boxes had a shellacked wrapping and a pull string. You grabbed the box, pulled the string and loaded the 6 rounds.
As said- a lot of this was plenty of work and I undertook it to experience how these percussion revolvers were often used. BUT, for "rambling" and carrying some compact ammo in the field, I use an Altoids container with all the various components.

The tobacco in cigarettes is treated with chemicals to keep burning. There are 100% pure tobacco cigarettes that will also go out such as American Spirits.

Crockett, it's my understanding that the nitrate was in the tobacco, but that it's been eliminated because of all the public suspicion about additives. my only experience with employing additives to consolidate powder was sealing the open ends of filled cartridges with a bit of thinned Duco cement, which works at least as far as the cartridges firing, my suspicion is that it retards the burn rate of the powder, but I have no evidence to support my position. The idea of gut cartridges in which the protein shrivels into a compact mass and exits the muzzle with the flash and smoke is very appealing, but if you look the patents over you notice that the manufacturers had to take steps to strengthen the cartridges to make them durable enough for field service, which increased the difficulty of manufacture and the potential for cartridge remnants to remain in the chamber. Considering the advances in plastics since the Civil War, I would be almost willing to bet that there's something out there related to shrink tubing that would resist combustion by the powder charge, shrink, and exit the chamber with the combustion products of the powder. Tea bags contain plastic fibers which strengthen them and permit the seams to be heat sealed during manufacture. They make very clean burning cartridges by all reports, but are flimsy to work with. Considering the heat and pressure inside the chamber during firing, it seems absurd that nothing has appeared on the market to serve as a safe consumable wrapper for blackpowder cartridges.

rodwha said:

The tobacco in cigarettes is treated with chemicals to keep burning. There are 100% pure tobacco cigarettes that will also go out such as American Spirits.

Click to expand...

In my younger days I was a summer time logger. Tailor made cigarettes were viewed as a more serious fire hazard as they kept burning if dropped. Roll your owns would not, we believed it was because the paper was treated differently.

You are presumably buying roll your own papers so based on my somewhat dated experience, I would expect a fair amount of unburnt paper to be left behind. Just a thought.

Jamie

Which leads to the question whether an untreated paper cartridge burns at all when fired, or simply gets shredded, with some portions exiting the barrel while other portions remain behind. A simple speed test for powder is to ignite a small pile of it on a piece of ordinary paper. Fast powder will barely scorch the paper.

Using the 100% flax papers from American Spirits I found small shards of paper left in the chambers maybe 1/3 of the time.

Two quick points:
1) Bugler is Turkish, untreated and will go out
2) Paper cartridges in revolvers was almost always a military deal and was virtually always with pointed nose, rebated base conical bullets. They were designed for quick reloads for cavalry. Now as then, they're a general waste of time and effort...I invite you to read the percussion revolver history section of Elmer Keith's book "Sixguns". He quotes both Union and Confederate cavalrymen who lived it. The only thing they agreed on was paper cartridges were virtually useless with the possible exception of foraging hogs! Modern research into ballistics came to the remarkable conclusion that conicals in handguns are 16% less effective in "one shot kill" rating than round ball. The test was run three times because everyone kept getting what they thought was the wrong answer.

The test was run three times because everyone kept getting what they thought was the wrong answer. [/quote]

Musta been a bunch of teachers....my teachers always thought I go the wrong answers.... then I grad-u-ated, musta stunned a few of em :nono:

Note, also, that the conicals used were pointed as the ones I've seen from then generally were. These have always been known to allow flesh to stretch creating a much smaller wound channel than the caliber of the projectile.

For handgun hunters of hogs a wide meplat and a hard cast are sought after because of the wound and penetration capabilities. These beat out even a round nose, which is something like a ball. Elmer Keith did this and made it popular and is why we have them.

There is a group of percussion revolver hog hunters that use Kaido's conicals based on the 255 grn Lee Colt bullet, but one of these fellows uses a Walker loaded full of 2F T7 and prefers a ball within 25 yds claiming the wound is much more devistating. However this doesn't seem to be the case with the other guns (1860 Army, Remington NMA, and ROA) as the powder capacity doesn't allow for a much higher velocity.

Also mentioned was gain twist rifling, which most of the repros don't have. So you either have a slow twist that works well with a ball, and possibly one of my short conicals, or a faster twist like what we see in modern pistols, which would certainly shoot a conical well as I see with both of mine.

The flash paper- does that actually burn up? If so, maybe I'll try it. How is the price and where do you buy it? Magic shop? If anything- I get some funny looks when I buy Bugle Cigarette paper these days.
On the case-less, if you just want to knock around with some compact ammo- a Pyrodex type pellet that had an attached conical would be very good.

I've heard the flash paper indeed burns up but haven't tried them as I have a bunch of American Spirits papers, which I've read people sell on eBay quite cheap.

I never had problem using the American Spirits papers despite the bits of paper left behind, although I didn't test it beyond 3 cylinders full as I ran out by then.

I save my cigarillo tins for paper cartridges but don't know that I'd use them in the field. I doubt I'd need more than my six shots for the day and could always reload back at camp that evening. Mine are really just for range days.

Those Pyrodex pellets would be easy but at that price I'll pass, and you get better ballistics with Olde E or T7, especially in my ROA where it's more accurate load is 35 grns.