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Buck or shot from a Brown bess

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mudd turtle

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Can shot or buck shot be fired from a Brown Bess musket and if so how would you go about loading it ? Thanks Mudd Turtle.
 
The Bess will digest and shoot almost anything that you can stuff down the barrel.

To load buck shot or bird shot you will need some wads. An over powder wad, a cushion wad and an overshot wad. The overpowder wad is a hard thick cardboard designed to protect the cushion wad from the blast. The cushion wad used to be made from cork but now is usually 1/2" Celotex board. Then the shot. Conventional wisdom is to use the same measure for the shot that you use for the powder. Finally an overshot wad to keep the shot from rolling out the end of the barrel.

Circle Fly makes wads for almost any size barrel. BTW, your Bess is most likely an 11 gauge.

That is the basics. There are lots of pages here of discussion about how best to improve the pattern.

Many Klatch
 
What Many Klatch said! Besses are just fun to shoot but you will really have to work at it to get patterns with buckshot good enough to hunt with. Almost impossible without plastic shot cups which don't really come in 11 gauge, though some might work. Paper or cardboard cups can be made. Buckshot was mostly a military load used to create extra casualties in battle, though the English military didn't use them. They are fun to spray aggressive beer cans with though! :thumbsup:
 
I've tinkered with buckshot loads in my Japanese made Bess. I use the same .310 RB my 32 caliber rifle shoots. At 25 yards it's a force to be reckoned with. I tried it at 50 yards and increased my payload to 15 balls. It staggered me backwards when I shot it, and had only one shot on the backer board.
 
Yeah pretty much the largest load would be a dozen .32 caliber balls or Single 0 buckshot. Buck and ball is often a ball and three or six buckshot..., there is a debate on whether the ball is on top or the bottom of the projectile column.

Buckshot has pretty much always been about a 30 yard round. The 870 shotguns that I use in my job have cylinder bore barrels and with 00 buckshot past 30 yards were pretty useless. Then came the "reduced recoil" rounds with special shot cups, and still the range is the same. With a Bess and black powder or a modern shell, velocity is velocity and a cylinder bore alone will only give you so much range...

LD
 
Works well. Be sure to mike your bore before spending money on wads. There's a whole lot of variation among Bess models, even from the same manufacturer.

I use shot in mine more than I use ball. I tried loads of .310 and .350 "buck" just to see what's what. Kinda fun, but I couldn't find any need for it so haven't done it since.

Shot is a different matter. When I'm in the mood I hunt with it and really enjoy it. Really credible results out to 25-30 yards with 1 5/8 oz of shot. Good enough you'll want to keep doing it.
 
I use fiber wads for both over powder and oer shot. if you need some send me a pm with address and I ll send 150. got 700 with my bess when I bought it. just repay shipping cosrs
 
Lot of good advice given so far, except the part about using plastic. :barf:
Do re-read, what I would say has been said. I will repeat the part about shooting a 'Bess to be fun. Yes, it is. One of the funnest guns to shoot I have ever had. :haha:
For wads, you can contact Flintlocks, Inc. They used to provide sample packs to find the right size without making a big investment. http://myflintlock.com/
 
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I got good results using 20 #1 buckshot, and the circle fly wads, in my Japanese Bess. The one time I tried it at 50yds, it put 5 in a 1 1/2' diameter. Can't say if it would do it again, but it did it that one time. #6 shot was very impressive on squirrel and small game at common shotgun ranges.
 
Tow makes a good wadding greased with some animal fat,as does blanket scraps. Felted hair works well but smell funny.(I've used dog hair from my yorky). Wasp nest and shopping paper bags also work. You use them about 3/4 inch thick under your shot and 1/4 or so on top. You don't have to buy over powder/chusion and over shot wads.
These products work well and you may find they work best for you, however the more traditional stuff also works well.
That big ball will put paid to any north american game, buck or buck and ball loads limit your range some and may not be legal in your state. As far as small shot,the bess is an oversized 12 gage(or undersized 10) and will give you bunnies and turkeys well. the longer heavier barrel will make shooting the flying or running a bit more of a challange.
 
I shoot both ball and shot from my Pedersoli Long Land Pattern Bess. For shot shooting I use 12G Circle Fly wads and put 90gn of Wano 5FA, over powder wad, cushion wad, 1-1/8oz of 7-1/2 shot, and an over shot wad. Smashes the clays - if I can hit them!. The Carbine version might be better than waving the long barrel of the Land Pattern around!
 
Fyi, The CSN & CS Marines used a lot of "converted to percussion" surplus Bess (and other) muskets for guarding prisoners, guarding government facilities, repelling boarding parties & LIKED them at "shipboard ranges", as the Bess was available, CHEAP & DEADLY.

According to the staff of The Imperial War Museum, the Bess was routinely loaded with "fluff", which was a mixture of shot, nails or bits of scrap metal & broken glass.
(I sure that enemies would have FEARED being fired upon with that load. = It must have made a "bloody mess" out of anything that it hit.)

yours, satx
 
It was said the sherrif that was murdered by billy the kid kept a shotgun loaded with dimes. Balistic test showed dimes didn't cause much dammage to a hog. Nails are deadly in home made bombs at close range. The sort of range you would have abord ship. But I wonder how effective "lagrange"would be.
 
Frankly, I'm not sure that hitting a prisoner with a stack of silver dimes (IF that is factual) was intended to KILL.
(For example, when the MP ran military stockades/prisons, worldwide, POWs & military prisoners were guarded with riot-guns loaded with #7.5 or #8 shot, so that the "receiver" would only be wounded, rather than killed.)

During the war in RVN, some units had 12 gauge shot-shells loaded with fleshettes, which were sort of like nails with fins & those were DEADLY out to 50M.

yours, satx
 
I have only shot balls or shot out of my guns. Always worrierd about hurting the barrel with some other sort of odd shaped hard stuff. You may be right about the dimes intending to stun instead of kill. After all they wanted to hang the kid not just kill him. I kind of thought this story was a hollywood or just westren myth. The idea of a stun load makes sense however.
 
Lot of MBBW has been written and told about shooting all sorts of garbage out of riot guns and blunderbusses. Granted, once or twice in history someone may actually have done so but misc. stuff has a great variety of weight, velocity and flight characteristics that would make anything but point-blank shots chancy, at best. Scrap iron can be very damaging to barrel bores. The old horseshoe nails and broken glass sounds good but glass might shatter into even tiny pieces and lose velocity so fast as to practically worthless. Nails, links of chain and all the rest would fly to every part of the surrounding area. Most militaries molded or dropped large shot for these applications. Although the British army never used buckshot, the Royal navy appears to have bought quite a bit for 'repelling boarders', and other little adventures.
 
I suspect that "fluff" was DEADLY even with a small wound in those PRE-antibiotic days, if only because the victim died of infection. - Further the range for repelling boarding parties may have been 20-30 FEET.

Also, Bess muskets were DIRT CHEAP during TWBTS & thus "disposable", if/when the barrels became un-usable. - As I've said elsewhere, a period family letter (in my cousin Beverly L. A____________'s custody) indicates that an ancestor bought a Bess for 25 CENTS in 1861, so that a 17YO could go to war ARMED.

just my opinion, satx
 

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