Posted on 06/22/2018 6:46:21 AM PDT by marktwain
That bore diameter (of an 8 gauge) would be around .835”
That’s a lot of lead coming your way.
More that twice the diameter of a .410 bore shotgun.
A 12 gauge is .73” by comparison.
I swear, that goose gun was almost as large. We could have used a pony and cart to haul it from the car to the blind.
IIRC, they used blanks.
It was a neat place to visit and we frequently walk out there when hunting; it was maintained beautifully until corporate decided to shut 'er down. The employees would collect the soot that was knocked loose from the stacks, dispose of it and then tidy up to a degree that I always found astonishing. Once the TLC stopped - there were some persnickety guys who worked there for many years and treated it like it was their own - it got shabby fast.
When I last saw it, I thought it would still be there long after I was gone, but there isn't anything left of it now but a few patches of concrete in a field full of weeds.
I’ve seen a 4 gauge English single barrel shotgun up close (or 4 bore as they would say). It was a muzzle loader and designed to fire a 4oz lead ball, not small shot. Impressive weapon, and I would be glad to watch someone else fire it.
First time I ever heard of them was when I was reading James Michener's novel "Chesapeake".
My dad used to have an Ithaca 12 gauge double-barrel. It was my second real gun after I started out with a single-shot .410. He sold it a few years ago and I was irate when I found out - that was the main gun of his that I wanted to have. That and his bobcat rug are about the only things I really wanted as an inheritance.
We used one of those to blast slag in the power plant I worked at. The ammo has a shoulder in it so it can’t be used in a shotgun, if you could find a shotgun in 8 gauge.
Would have came in handy at the Frozen Chosin.
As a 10 year old kid I shot my neighbors .10 gauge shotgun once. His son and none of the other neighborhood kids would shoot it. I agreed if he would brace my should and stand behind me and he did. It kicked like an sob, but I hit my target!
“I believe there used to be an 8-guage shotgun called a “punt gun” that was used for waterfowl hunting. It was mounted on a swivel on a small rowboat.” [IronJack, post 10]
8-ga guns were possibly the smallest punt guns.
The shotshell chapter in _Cartridges of the World_ used to contain descriptions of shotguns as large as 4-ga and 2-ga, though the editors cautioned that specimens of that size were so rare that it was difficult to determine general dimensions: some rated as large as 2-ga appeared to be smaller.
Naming conventions also applied to muzzle loaders, before shotshells for breechloaders were developed.
Punt guns were used by market hunters in the days before hunting came under state regulation. Too heavy to carry easily and near-impossible to shoulder and swing, they were designed to take out the maximum number of birds possible in one shot, to give the hunters a better chance to get their “harvest” to market earlier.
They were civilian knock-offs of swivel guns and wall guns - shoulder arms or small cannon fired from mounts on warships or on walls of fixed fortifications, respectively. More easily loaded and more quickly aimed than artillery, they out-ranged and out-powered standard shoulder arms of the day. The mounts helped soak up the stout recoil.
Examples date to well before the flintlock period.
In the days before hydro-pneumatic recoil-absorbing systems, artillery was mounted on wheeled carriages or inclined-plane systems, allowing the gun tube to dissipate recoil energy by moving backward. Then it had to be loaded and hauled forward into place, usually by raw muscle-power of the crew, and aimed all over again for the next shot.
A 4oz lead ball... We often refer to projectiles in “grains.” For instance, the standard military .45 auto round uses a 230 grain bullet. A terrific bullet for hunting bear is the 300gr Sierra JFP. 300 grains. There are 437.5 grains in an ounce. Which means the 4oz projectile weighs in at 1750 grains!
No thank you.
Mark
Grand Dad had a 2 gauge on a swivel mount with a lanyard on the front of a his Jon boat for duck hunting. This was back in the day when he carried a 1911 and a BAR in his police service years hunting gangsters down.
Something like 45 years ago, I took a tour of a Cement making facility (part of an engineering class) Cement kilns are very long steel tubes that rotate. They are low on one end so that anything put in the high end will slowly make their way down to the low end while being thoroughly cooked.
At the bottom end, they had an 8ga, single-shot, slug-gun on a tripod. They used it to break up large clinkers in the steel tube. The slugs were zinc. When my son went through engineering school, he took a tour of the same place and they still had an 8ga shotgun mounted there (probably the same one).
When you look at the chemical makeup of cement you often see trace amounts of zinc. Now you know where it comes from.
You forgot to mention the $633.75 buyer’s premium.
I could buy a pretty nice 12 gauge for that kind of money.
Nobody needs a gun like that for duck hunting.
Why did they not make some sort of remote firing fixture?
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