paulvallandigham
Passed On
- Joined
- Jan 9, 2006
- Messages
- 17,538
- Reaction score
- 79
My hat is off to the N-SSA and their standard for these speed shoots. Fast reloading can be done, and its nice to hear someone admit that cook-offs do occur. It can be done with the guns described, and with the bullets as described.
But, people then want to do the same thing with a different style MLer, with deeper grooves, and with the PRB, or leave the patch off, and try to seat the ball by thumping the buttstock on the ground, or on the saddle horn if horseback. The Ball may, or may not seat on the powder. My club experimented with this issue using a variety of modern replica guns, including T/C, CVA, Browning, and an assortment of " Kentucky" long rifles.
In the test, we dumped powder down as described above, and then pushed a bare lead ball down the barrel, thumping the stock a couple of times to seat the ball.
THEN< before we fired the load, for safety sake, we checked where the ball ended up with a ramrod carefully run down the barrel. With the first and second loading of a clean barrel, we had NO trouble with the balls going down and seating on the powder. We did carefully raise the muzzles up, and then only lower them down on the target to shoot, so that the balls did not roll forward.
On the third shots, about half the balls did not get all the way down on the powder, and had to be pushed down with the ramrod. On the fourth shot, we were down to only one or two guns that let the ball go all the way to the powder charge. By the fifth shot, even those remaining rifles required the balls to be pushed down on the powder. We stopped the " test " at that point.
In our minds, we had determined the difference between shooting lubed minie balls down a shallow rifled barrel, and shooting bare balls in rifles with deep rifling, with no grease to soften the fouling. Frankly, most of us were disappointed that we would not be able to fire our guns the same way we knew the N-SSA guys were shooting. .
We had one cook-off of powder when it was poured in the barrel, and everyone became a firm believer in loading their barrels from a separate powder measure, and not from the powder horn, or flask! :shocked2:
My attention was somewhere else, and I did not actually see the cook-off. The shooter was an experienced, long-time member of the club, who had never experienced a cook-off either, nor had he ever witnessed one. He was shaken by the incident, but not burned. He dropped out of the testing at that point, and no one blamed him.
This began as a rather make shift, informal test, just to see what our guns were capable of doing, using the same kind of loading procedure as shown, and described. We were preparing to put on a public shooting demonstration, and were trying to decide what kinds of shooting we could do, and what we did not want to do. That is the only reason for the test, and the reason why we were not prepared to be more " technical " in collecting data. As a group, we decided that if we could not demonstrate volley fire, we would demonstrate accurate shooting, and turned our efforts to creating " trick " shots that spectators could see easily.
Oh, we did mount a bunch of clay targets on a wood backstop, and fired a volley of shots at them with our members. Everyone except one shooter hit his aimed-for clay target, but the impact of so many hits broke all the rest of the clays, leaving nothing for us to shoot at without first closing the firing line and putting up new targets. We tried several different thicknesses of back boards, and never did find a way to keep the rest of the targets from breaking under a volley of shot. Instead, we had shooters fire at the clay targets one at a time, and that kept the additional breakage down to a manageable level.We had the guys try to shoot the center out of clay targets while leaving the outer rings intact. That gave us " souvenires " to give to spectators, who seemed to love those filthy things.
We did hang clays from rubberbands, and string with modern fishing line to an overhead string, with a couple of fishing lines holding the clays from behind so they did not turn in the wind. That worked, and we were delighted at how lucky we were that people rarely hit those cross strings.
But, people then want to do the same thing with a different style MLer, with deeper grooves, and with the PRB, or leave the patch off, and try to seat the ball by thumping the buttstock on the ground, or on the saddle horn if horseback. The Ball may, or may not seat on the powder. My club experimented with this issue using a variety of modern replica guns, including T/C, CVA, Browning, and an assortment of " Kentucky" long rifles.
In the test, we dumped powder down as described above, and then pushed a bare lead ball down the barrel, thumping the stock a couple of times to seat the ball.
THEN< before we fired the load, for safety sake, we checked where the ball ended up with a ramrod carefully run down the barrel. With the first and second loading of a clean barrel, we had NO trouble with the balls going down and seating on the powder. We did carefully raise the muzzles up, and then only lower them down on the target to shoot, so that the balls did not roll forward.
On the third shots, about half the balls did not get all the way down on the powder, and had to be pushed down with the ramrod. On the fourth shot, we were down to only one or two guns that let the ball go all the way to the powder charge. By the fifth shot, even those remaining rifles required the balls to be pushed down on the powder. We stopped the " test " at that point.
In our minds, we had determined the difference between shooting lubed minie balls down a shallow rifled barrel, and shooting bare balls in rifles with deep rifling, with no grease to soften the fouling. Frankly, most of us were disappointed that we would not be able to fire our guns the same way we knew the N-SSA guys were shooting. .
We had one cook-off of powder when it was poured in the barrel, and everyone became a firm believer in loading their barrels from a separate powder measure, and not from the powder horn, or flask! :shocked2:
My attention was somewhere else, and I did not actually see the cook-off. The shooter was an experienced, long-time member of the club, who had never experienced a cook-off either, nor had he ever witnessed one. He was shaken by the incident, but not burned. He dropped out of the testing at that point, and no one blamed him.
This began as a rather make shift, informal test, just to see what our guns were capable of doing, using the same kind of loading procedure as shown, and described. We were preparing to put on a public shooting demonstration, and were trying to decide what kinds of shooting we could do, and what we did not want to do. That is the only reason for the test, and the reason why we were not prepared to be more " technical " in collecting data. As a group, we decided that if we could not demonstrate volley fire, we would demonstrate accurate shooting, and turned our efforts to creating " trick " shots that spectators could see easily.
Oh, we did mount a bunch of clay targets on a wood backstop, and fired a volley of shots at them with our members. Everyone except one shooter hit his aimed-for clay target, but the impact of so many hits broke all the rest of the clays, leaving nothing for us to shoot at without first closing the firing line and putting up new targets. We tried several different thicknesses of back boards, and never did find a way to keep the rest of the targets from breaking under a volley of shot. Instead, we had shooters fire at the clay targets one at a time, and that kept the additional breakage down to a manageable level.We had the guys try to shoot the center out of clay targets while leaving the outer rings intact. That gave us " souvenires " to give to spectators, who seemed to love those filthy things.
We did hang clays from rubberbands, and string with modern fishing line to an overhead string, with a couple of fishing lines holding the clays from behind so they did not turn in the wind. That worked, and we were delighted at how lucky we were that people rarely hit those cross strings.
