The Original 'Assault Rifle'...

Reaganite Republican ^ | 17 November 2013 | Reaganite Republican

[Terry L Smith]

Dear Schurmann,

One thing that we both know, but did not evoke, (until I read your latest comment ... call it a ‘Homer’ moment), I did run ‘afoul’ one time at the shooting range with that rifle, and it was all mine to own.

I forgot, i.e., “Did I shoot five, or six rounds?”, and so loaded the next one. When I touched off the round ..... er, do you remember that old cannon joke of the TV show “F Troop”? The barrel powder caught the spark, and expended its combustion through the touchhole, in a very loooong ‘fizzing’. Meantime, I had to clear the firing line, and take claim for it.

When I returned home, I had a nice long afternoon with an extra long ramrod, two ball pullers, two pints of ‘moose milk’ (machinists’ metalworking oil solution), and a vacted house, bereft of wife AND dogs, due to my vocalized displeasures. I finally got the piece free, and cleaned up the mess, and started thinking of my fortunate existence.

[calex59]

What a long winded post simply to avoid having to acknowledge the fact that the Spencer coffee grinder must have existed if there is a picture of one in my hands. The guy also has some Blakelee quick loaders displayed.

[schurmann]

“... “Did I shoot five, or six rounds?”, ... loaded the next ... touched off the round ... barrel powder caught the spark, and expended its combustion through the touchhole, in a very loooong ‘fizzing’. ...”

Extracting the projectile ahead of a dud charge was a never-ending nightmare in the muzzle loading era. If it hadn’t happened yet, it was just about to.

In our reenacting regiment, I was more than a little grateful on more than one occasion, that we were firing nothing more solid than wadding for blank rounds (which can be deadly themselves, if the range is close enough). Failure to ignite rarely demanded anything more frightful than long sessions with a garden hose (for the cannon) and rammer worm, or in the bathtub (for a musket) with a smaller rammer worm. Bad language wasn’t required, but it was rarely avoided.

The perils of a dual (triple, or more) load can be more than trivial.

Our reenacting regiment was invited to a USAF base open house, where the B-2 bomber was making one of its very first public appearances on static display. There it sat 150 yards distant, squat, wide, inscrutable, nose on to our grassy demonstration ground. We lined up, marched, deployed from column to line, fired a couple volleys, and retired from the field.

The musket of one dedicated new recruit gave trouble: all shiny and unrusted straight out of its box, it refused to fire. Both the arm’s owner and I were puzzled; he packed in round after round, but nothing would go “bang”. We pulled him from the line after he’d stacked up three charges, deciding to wait until we returned to our HQ (commander’s gun shop) to apply stronger measures.

The garden hose came in for heavy use. We cleared away the three unfired blanks, but we still were unable to clear the barrel and get water to squirt from the vent. At last, we shaved a fragment from the obstruction and succeeded in washing it from the bore.

It was a bit of lead.

Mystery unraveled, or so we concluded: someone had shoved a ball down the bore before introducing any powder.

We clamped the man’s musket barrel, muzzle down, to an iron stand in the back room of the shop and rigged a torch to play its flame on the exterior of the breech, certain that the lead would soon melt and trickle out of the lowered muzzle.

Problem solved! Subject only to a short wait for melting.

In minutes, we discovered how wrong we were.

While gunsmiths plied their trade and the sales force hobnobbed with customers in the forward reaches of the building, the few of us regimental stalwarts still present busied ourselves with other duties; relentlessly, the torch drove up the temperature of that barrel until we heard a “boom!” from the back room.

We scrambled to discover the cause, stopping short to peer uneasily around the doorjamb, filled with sudden doubt that the fireworks were over. Musket barrel, stand, and torch lay on the floor, smoke curling and rising in little gray tendrils from barrel muzzle and vent.

Someone had loaded a charge in the proper manner - behind the ball - then rammed home a ball. It failed to go off, or was forgotten. Some time after, the musket was sold “as new” to our recruit. He - gun enthusiast, well-read in book-like history, but a newbie in the hands-on management of military muskets - did not perform a thorough checkout of his new gun. And we - years beyond him in reenacting experience, and with multiple decades on active duty, plus hands-on experience with diverse modern weapon systems - assumed he knew what he was about, during the short time between his arrival and the culmination of the mad scramble to don uniforms, arm up, mount vehicles, and run the security gauntlet for access to the AFB.

We, as the leadership, let him down.

Mercifully, his hidden live charge remained inert through our demonstration, but survived the ducking we gave that barrel, waiting until the torch flame dried it enough to ignite. No holes were pierced in expensive military machinery; only some hardware sustained damage, minor at that. And our egos got dented.

If we had indeed shot a hole in a B-2, I suppose most of us would still be waiting to see the light of day.