Shooting fun.

Bou was talking about shooting over at her blog. It started me thinking about this last weekend. I had never fired my Musket live before this weekend. I had plans to do it but something always came up to prevent it from happening.

My Brown Bess is a .75 caliber flintlock smooth bore muzzleloader made by Davide Pedersole in Italy. The barrel is 42 inches long with an overall length of 58 ¼ inches and weighing in at 8.8 pounds. The stock is made of English walnut. She is a beautiful piece and I love the way she feels. I’ve held other flintlocks both rifle and musket and I’ve found many that I really like. However, none of them gives me the sense of power that my Bess gives me. My Bess is my favorite flintlock. After live firing her, that opinion didn’t change.

I’ve done mock battles with it, loading nothing but powder down the barrel. Due to the large caliber and the length of the barrel, I really have to put a lot of powder in her to get her to make a good loud thump. The ones that have rifles don’t have that problem; rifles tend to make a loud staccato crack with a standard charge. Since most of the rifles are .50 cal, they also don’t need as much powder. You can definatly tell the difference between a rifle and a musket firing. That tends to hold true even with live fire.

Friday night I took my Bess down to the live fire range and started firing off rounds out of it. Grau brought his rifle down and Littlejoe had his Kentucky Pistol. We just plucked away at sticks in the sand backdrop. I would say the fireworks display was most impressive coming from the Bess with its four-foot flame spout out the barrel and explosion in the pan when I’d fire her. Except Grau wins the best fireworks display award when he fired his mini-musket. (It’s a .69 cal smooth bore pistol that looks like a cut down musket) When he first tried to fire it, it would flash in the pan but not ignite in the barrel. To remove the round, he put priming powder in through the touchhole until he could blow the obstruction out. When it finally went off, this glowing sparking wad came out the barrel (The ball rolled out of the barrel right before the wad and landed 10 feet from where it was fired). We went to check out the wad and apparently last year Grau either cleaned out the pistol with a baby wipe or he used it as wadding. Because the glowing 1756 signal flare he made was a mix between an old baby wipe and black powder. That was rather impressive.

I shot Friday night, Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning. Sunday morning I was starting to get some regularity to my shooting. I was starting to consistently hit targets. They had one target that was half way down the range of ½ inch steel in the shape of a shamrock On my first shot I hit it dead center… and bowled out the target. The old timers running the range where rather impressed by not only the fact that I hit it with a smooth bore, but also the fact I bent the shamrock. One of them asked what kind of round I was shooting and my friend Jim threw him one of my lead round balls and not for the first time that weekend I heard someone exclaim, “You’re balls are huge!” They also joked about how each shot I’m throwing ¼ pound of lead down the range. When I’d hit the hanging shamrock, it would dance and tug at the stand. When one of the other guys using a rifle would shoot it, it would sway a little. On one of my last shots, I hit the shamrock and made it dance so hard that it pulled the stand out of the ground. I had to go out and reset it before I left.

I had a lot of fun shooting and am looking forward to doing some more. I only had two small accidents while shooting. The first happened when I fired my Bess by using a course grain black powder in my pan. A burning chunk of it flew out and went down my collar giving me one heck of a burn on top of the powder burn I was already developing. The other incident happened because I didn’t have the but of the Bess set properly in my shoulder when it went off. I was shooting using a 90-grain charge. (That’s a large charge for those that don’t know about black powder) When I pulled the trigger, it jumped and caught me in the arm. I have a bruise where it kicked me.

I guess I should mention I spent 2 hours cleaning it Saturday night. I never had the tools to properly clean it until this weekend. Therefore, it never was cleaned. Well it’s been cleaned out completely now. It’s in a like new condition. I plan on keep it that way, after I shoot it, I will clean it. I do owe Grau a 12 gauge cleaning brush; I ruined his working on my barrel.