Function of a patented breech?

The CVA and Traditions’s breech with the drum or touch hole liner connected to the smaller than bore size chamber is a poorly designed manufacturing expedient. Not much else needs to be said about it.

I regularly use 2 original flintlocks, my manton has a form of patent breech, and my jurdison, which is a bit older, late 1790's, just has a hole straight into the bottom of the barrel, and it works a lot better, goes off instantly every time, only give the lock a wipe on wet days, and can hit every clay on all the grounds i go to (although not every time!)

Shot and cleaned my 40 cal. Green Mountain barrel yesterday and took a picture of the breech. This is a drop in for a TC Renegade percussion. It appears to me the breech is cone shape. I do not have many if any misfires with this barrel. In the picture at 3 o’clock at the bottom of the cone, you can see the flash hole from the nipple. Seems to be a better design than the straight walled patent breeches.

I thought the main purpose of the coned breech face was that if you dry balled, you could get a few grains of powder into the area to shoot it out.
What exactly is a patent breech?

Red Owl said:

I thought the main purpose of the coned breech face was that if you dry balled, you could get a few grains of powder into the area to shoot it out.
What exactly is a patent breech?

Click to expand...

Go back to page one of this post and read.

I have several patent breach guns, some Pedersoli. I've never had an issue with reliability but I will say they are a pain to clean. I basically consider it as good as having to cleaning two barrels.

There's a couple I won't ever sell, but there are a couple I'd upgrade for among other things a flat faced breach.

Okay, so, if I read it correctly, if you drill or bore a hole lengthwise into the breech plug and the diameter is less than the barrel's bore- that's a patent breech. The angle of the nipple to this sub-bore can vary. What makes it a patent breech is this sub-bore hole in the breech plug.
Off hand- I don't see why that gives more reliable ignition, the distance from a regular drum to the bore is about the same. It would seem offhand the only advantage is if you dry ball you can trickle some powder into the area..

@Red Owl, the hole in the breech plug is part of the powder chamber. Thus the hole makes it a chambered breech. After all there is no patent applied for drilling the hole. The path from the nipple seat to the powder chamber can be angled. As Red Owl has surmised, there is no advantage to create a more reliable ignition than a conventional drum or touch hole. The advantage to the breech plug with a drilled chamber is that a breech plug can be either flint with a touch hole or percussion with a drum that can be threaded on any barrel with the proper threads. This is great manufacturing efficiency that brings the cost down to supply us with a good performing traditional muzzleloading firearm from a simple inventory of parts.

Many of us call such a chambered breech a patent breech because it's different from a traditional breech. But it's not a patent breech. Only Nock's patent breech is a true patent breech. Manton's breech is a patent infringement.

None the less, we need to be aware of the configuration of our breeches to prevent fouling from bridging over the flash channel.

So much for being ridiculously technical.
Let's just allow people to call chambered breeches, patent breeches. We can just roll our eyes and move on.

Thanks, appreciate it.

The chambered breech ala CVA, Traditions and Pedersoli is not a new design. I saw photos of a German built Jaeger with the breech disassembled. It was an 18th or 19th century gun. It was a long time ago that I saw. And there it was, breached like a CVA.

I don't remember if it was a flint or cap.

Found this interesting. At least the pics really show what is going on.
https://www.northwestfirearms.com/t...renegade-fire-channel-patented-breech.374193/

Center_shot said:

Found this interesting. At least the pics really show what is going on.
https://www.northwestfirearms.com/t...renegade-fire-channel-patented-breech.374193/

Click to expand...

Excellent post!!! That link should be archived somewhere for people to reference.

RM

Patent breeches were developed and used on quality guns because they were stronger and safer to use. In the old days percussion guns sometimes blew up for the same reasons they do today. Use of a patent breech kept nastiness a bit further from the shooters face and if vented with a gold or platine safety plug could keep the gun from bursting all together.