From: bakc@giraffe.ru.ac.za (MR KR COMAN)
Newsgroups: rec.guns
Subject: Re: Cleaning freq. of a muzzle loader in the old days
Date: 11 Jan 93 16:18:51 GMT
Organization: Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa

#From: malodah@srv.pacbell.com (Martin Lodahl)
#Subject: Re: Cleaning freq. of a muzzle loader in the old days
#Date: 9 Jan 93 14:25:08 GMT
#In article <01GT9ZDQRK6AEWWAW9@UMAECS> jhwelch@ecs.umass.edu writes:
#
##As sort of a historical question, I can't imagine a civil war soldier
##doing any kind of cleaning until the end of a battle at the earliest --
##and that's assuming cleaning supplies were handy.  My question is,
##how did they keep their rifle operational all day long?
#
#You've just hit upon the reason nitro-based powders were such a
#revolutionary development:  Yes, even in the middle of battle it
#was necessary to stop and clean, if you wanted to be able to get
#that next Minie ball down the spout.  If you could only get it
#halfway down and fired anyway, chances are the barrel would burst.

	Interesting.  I've dabbled a bit with black powder longarms.  Using 
a Minie hollow-base bullet in a 1853 Enfield replica, my brother and I fired
over 50 rounds in a couple of hours without cleaning the barrel.  The Minie 
bullet is actually slightly *undersize* for the bore, and if well greased 
and even after such a period of firing should slid easily down the barrel.  
My understanding is that this was one of the main benefits of the Minie 
bullet -- on firing, the base expanded to grip the rifling and on its 
passage down the bore acted to sweep out any crud left from the previous 
shot.  Similarly, by being a tad undersize, the next bullet to be rammed 
down wasn't unduly hindered by fouling from the previous shot.   In theory 
therefore a Minie equipped rifleman with appropriate sized bullets could 
perhaps have kept up a steady rate of fire without developing a cold sweat 
about his next round jamming part-way down the barrel.    
	Conversely, using my brother's Hawken replica with round ball and 
patches was another story.  Here, loading became increasingly problematic 
due to barrel fouling after a short a period as 5 or so shots  -- cleaning 
out between shots (or at most two shots) was literally mandatory to prevent
incipient problems and frustrations.  (I imagine that a smoothbore equipped 
soldier would be very careful to fill his cartridge box only with radically
undersized ammo -- stuff accuracy, I want firepower in a prolonged fight.)


#The advent of cartridge arms changed the nature of the failure but
#didn't eliminate it.  Trap-door Springfields were known to pull the
#heads off of cases upon extraction when the chamber was too badly
#fouled, and I'm told this took many rifles out of action at Little
#Big Horn.  

	Wasn't this largely due to the poor quality ammunition issued?  I
understand that Custer's men had recieved a consignment of ammo with 
an excessive copper content in the case-brass alloy.  Cases were thus
soft and liable to both over-expand in the breech and allow the extractor to 
tear thu the rim  -- or is this all merely yet another item of Custer 
mythology?

	On a parallel track, the same sort of problem plagued the 
contemporary Martini-Henry rifle having coiled brass cases with iron
heads.  Fouling tended to build up in the breech (not the barrel) meaning 
that in a hot action the cases tended to stick.  In worst instances, the
extractor would pull the head off leaving the brass case jammed in the 
breech.  In less serious cases partial extraction occured requiring the 
expert use of a pocket knife or cleaning rod to clear.  The extraction force 
of the early model M-H's was also limited: later models had a longer lever to
try to overcome this problem by permitting greater leverage.    In either 
instance, old soldiers knew that with coiled brass cases, personal survival
sometimes rested on the speed with which a fired case was ejected -- a case
left for more than a few seconds in a hot action could be relied upon to 
stick.   (Did Custer's men carry cleaning rods?)
	BTW having had the pleasure of firing a M-H on a number of 
occasions, cleaning out between shots does tend to improve accuracy on the 
target range but is not really obligatory  -- such cleaning does however 
help to keep the breech clear of fouling, which is a great assistance during
a period of load-testing.
Cheers,
Keith Coman
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"If we pay dogfood salespeople more than we   :  Dept of Management
 do teachers, we should not be surprised if   :  Rhodes University
 our dogs eat like kids, and our kids end     :  Grahamstown, 6140
 up reading like dogs."                       :  Rep of South Africa
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