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Shooting Pietta Navies with red toy caps

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Some 65 years ago I received a Belgian turn-off pistol from a great uncle who had found it sitting in the cash box when, as a young man, he had inherited a livery stable that served London's West End.
About 50 years ago a colleague, who shot ML, invited me to try it out at a local range. He and his friends decided that it should be charged with priming powder but found their caps to be too big. I had a circular strip of red toy caps with me, as they seemed to be the right size for the slender nipple and they performed perfectly.
 

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Do they still make the rolled paper ones? Those were the ones that we played with. They were cheap but I was broke.
They do but they're a joke. Most of them just go "pap" and a wisp of smoke comes out

I used to love playing with the little. 38 snub ring cap guns and stuff like a Winchester lever gun that fired roll caps with a double action trigger, so you could just endlessly run around with your friends popping at each other

If the Govt finds out we're using toy caps to shoot guns, they'll probably regulate them or ban toy caps
 
Toy caps are not what they used to be. They are very weak, because of a US government standard limiting noise that's intended to protect children from hearing damage. I've been punching out the active "dots" from roll caps and inserting them inside the plastic caps to boost them. I still have very poor ignition with black powder and none with Pyrodex.
 
I'd say the red toy caps would be a last resort if no regular percussion caps were to be had. Read an article some time back by a well known black powder shooter/writer whose name most would ID that advised the toy caps were for the most part unreliable and had their own set of problems that added to regular percussion revolver woe's.
 
The caps of today are nothing like the ones years ago today's caps are wimpy. This experiment would be interesting to carry out again comparing the modern caps to vintage ones.
 
I'm going to try to bump my charge down to 15gr to eliminate the hammer blowback

These Star caps seem pretty hot, I need to pick up a few more packs
 
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