The BladeForums.com 2024 Traditional Knife is ready to order! See this thread for details:
https://www.bladeforums.com/threads/bladeforums-2024-traditional-knife.2003187/
Price is $300 ea (shipped within CONUS). If you live outside the US, I will contact you after your order for extra shipping charges.
Order here: https://www.bladeforums.com/help/2024-traditional/ - Order as many as you like, we have plenty.
If i get an 1863 Sharps, I want to get stupid and buy the longer barreled sporter and put one of the Leatherwood or MVA Malcolm scopes on it
I would prefer .45 or .50 with the fats twist barrel so that I can fire long heavy bullets. By the way........what the hell is with all of these BP guys talking about BOOLITS? Is that some kind of silly affect that you have to adopt when you start messing around with traditional black powder guns?
If i get an 1863 Sharps, I want to get stupid and buy the longer barreled sporter and put one of the Leatherwood or MVA Malcolm scopes on it
Next time I'll take it to the range and shoot it from the bench.
The .45 pedersoli is what I was looking at. it has a 1 in 18 twist barrel which says that it is set up to stabilize big, long 500 grain bullets. I have heard that the chamber capcity on the percussion Sharps repro's can vary not only among the makers, but also from rifle to rifle. One guy said that he is able to get 100 grains of loose powder in behind a "christmas tree" bullet and others can pnly get 65-70 grains. It's confusing and worries me a bit as far as these rifles being potent enough for some types of hunting. I have read some posts by some of the long range BP shooters where they are putting loads of 100 grains of Swiss 1 1/2 or 2Fg behind the 535 grain bullets in their .451 Pedersoli Gibbs rifles to shoot 1000 yd matches. These loads are not only accurate enough to compete against custom rifles, but the Gibbs have set a few new records recently. Do the percussion Sharps just not have the ability to use heavier loads like the 1874's? Your load is only about 65% of what you would get in a 45/70 or 50/70, which are the shortest "big bore" cartridges for the 1874. I figure that if I can't get at least 70 grains in a .45 or 50 cal paper cartridge with a 500 grain bullet, i might go with one of the muzzle loaders like the Gibbs or Whitworth instead.Shiloh makes a .50 caliber rifle. They are hard to find used. Pedersoli makes their version of a 1859 Sharps sporter in .45 caliber. You would probably have to special order it. http://www.davide-pedersoli.com/?item=ArmiCategoriaDettaglio&CategoriaId=250&lang=en
I shot my .54 carbine today. I just took it to the boonies to test it. With 45 gr. of Swiss 1 1/2 in Charlie Hahn tubes and a 475 gr. ring tail bullet, recoil was light. A lot lighter then I expected. I also tried it with the bullet seated and the chamber filled. I don't know how much powder it took, but recoil was a lot heavier. At 40 yards, off hand, I shot a 10 shot pattern of about 8 inches. You notice I didn't say a group. It was more like a shotgun pattern, but that's about as good as I can shoot these days without some sort of support.
What a blast.....
True about the muzzle loaders. I have heard of guys stuffing 120 grains behind a 500gr+ bullet in some of the better Whitworth replicas!!! Of course, that is nothing like the 175 grains+ that guys load in the reproduction dangerous game rifles. I don't remember if it was an 10 or12 bore I was reading about, but the recommended "standard' load for the rifle was 175grains behind a 600+ grain round ball!!!!
I know that modern 8 bores fire a ball that is in the 750 gr range, I saw an auction listing 1850's 8 bore Westely Richards double that had been rebarreled for 1390 gr (!) conicals driven at 1500fps+by 10 drams of black powder. I think that is around 300 grs. The sales pitch said that the muzzle energy was in the same range as a .577NE .That is getting in to the range of recoil that can cause nerve damage! Imagine if you had a "chainfire"!!!!!
A real man shoots a 2 bore. It shoots a 3500 grain bullet at about 1500 fps. The muzzle energy is about 17,500 ft/lbs.
That's just silly!!! Half a pound of lead driven by what? almost 500 grains of black powder?That's nothing. Those are girlie-man guns.
Watch the video. No one was knocked off their feet. My guess is that the recoil velocity is slower then the .577 T-Rex even though the f/p are about the same.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXoa5zNn0TU
But the .577 T-Rex is built on a modded 1917 Enfield action, albeit with a FAT butt, thick recoil pad and THREE mercury tubes!!!!. But it still can't weight more than 11 or 12 pounds. That 2 bore weighs what? 26 pounds? That is not really any heavier than the 4 bore doubles and I think that the 8 bore doubles typically weighed in at 20+ pounds or so. You have to figure that with a gun designed to fire conicals, you don't need anything bigger than am 8 bore for black powder dangerous game hunting, even for elephant or a pissed off, andrenalized buffalo. That Westley Richards supposedly produced energy that put it smack between a .577 and .600NE and the .577 is considered by most to be the perfect gun by PH's for saving their customers' bacon from a big animal that doesn't want to go down before turning everyone present into road kill.Just for the helluvit, I plugged some numbers into a recoil calculator. I had to guess at the velocity.
There are two charges used. 12 drams = 328 grs. 16 drams = 437 grs.
I estimate about 1250 fps with the 12 dram load. 312 f/p of recoil energy.
With 16 drams I'm guessing 1500 fps. 368 f/p of recoil energy.
I may be a little bit off, but not much.
The 577 T-Rex only generates 150 to 180 f/p, but I think the recoil velocity would be much higher.
Edit: I am wrong about that. The recoil velocity of the T-Rex is about 25 fps. The 2 bore is about 30 fps.
The traditional A-Square action is a modified 1917 Enfield. Apparently, the Pattern 14/1917 was the only action that was readily available at the time that could be safely opened up to handle HUGE cartridges like the .505 Gibbs. You have to mill off the rear sight "ears" to fit the rear scop mount and convert the bolt to "cock on open" but it was a hell of a lot cheaper starting point than having someone build something like a custom magnum Mauser action! Nowadays, something like the big Dakota action would work, but they are pricey.
I checked out the A-Square site and the "normal" factory load for the .577 T-Rex is more powerful than the .700 NE ad that is with "only" 9500 Fp's or so!!!
A nice 1917 goes for $550 to $600 and up these days.
Or move to France. Last I heard, they are one of the EU countries that are still okay with muzzleloaders and other black powder guns.I have an IAB carbine in .45. They're the cheapest and you need to put some work into them before they perform well. If I knew the correct terminology in english I'd tell you more.
I'd love to tell you how it shoots, however, I live in nazi europe, so I'm not allowed to shoot mine. I'd have to join a club (don't join any clubs when germans are involved, trust me!!!) and fight through a huge pile of paperwork before getting a blackpowder license. I rather stay sane and enjoy my life.
