MikB
05-12-2003, 12:00 PM
Stinking like a fart from the ar$e of Hell, and heralded by a stab of dirty flame, three cubic yards of dense smoke belched from the muzzle and drifted gently across the firing point. Fellow shooters coughed politely as they knuckled the tears from their smarting eyes and squinted through the haze to try to re-acquire their targets, hoping they could get off a round or two before the thing fired again...
It wasn't one of the original conversions. The Marks I & II had consumed the stocks of completed rifle-muskets that the Widow at Windsor’s “poor beggars in red” had found themselves at risk of getting stuck with, in the face of new breech-loading rifles being adopted elsewhere. The Enfield iron barrels, able to deliver a 4” group at 100 yards and drive a bullet through 4” of building pine at 1000, had found a new lease of life using their old load canned in brass and fed through a sideswing trapdoor breech, provided at the cost of twelve shillings a rifle. Jacob Snider had won the competition to design the most practical and economical stopgap conversion, but Pusser prevaricated about paying up, and he ended his days in poverty and bitterness.
In the Mark III, a new steel barrel had been introduced, breech-loading from original manufacture and with a locking latch to the swinging block, instead of the previous spring-button detent that could occasionally blow open. Often, the lockplates bear dates much earlier, as parts laid off during percussion days were used up, so they’re no guide to the gun’s date of build.
These Mk. IIIs are the preferred shooters for today, and that’s what this one was. It had most of its original semi-matt blue-black finish and some remaining colour case-hardening of the lockplate. Nobody had blued the breechblock, so it was still the grey steel it should be. There wasn’t a paper-thickness of clearance around the block in its shoe, so well did it fit. When clean, the bore was so bright that it actually hurt to look down it with a little Maglite Solitaire jammed at an angle in the open breech. Someone had probably steamed a dent out of the stock at some point, because the army acceptance stamp was very faint, and almost raised rather than impressed. But overall, the gun was in lovely condition – when my wife first saw it, she said it looked new.
I pulled the hammer back to half-cock, pressed the knurled lever on the left of the block to withdraw the latch, swung the block over to the right and pulled it back ½” against its spring to extract the case, turning the rifle over to tip the stinking, stained thing into the cut-off plastic bosh of washing-up water laced with vinegar that was my latest attempt to neutralise the damaging effects of Pyrodex residue.
I picked up the next round. It was a NFDS drawn brass case 2” long with a large rifle primer, 70 grains blackpowder equivalent in Pyrodex RS and a heavily-lubed 535 grain Custom Bullets .592” hollowbase roundnose with a taper-turned wooden base plug and one of those greased felt cookie wad affairs. Dropping it in the trough exposed by the open breechblock, I thumbed it forward into the breech, noting that the fouling hadn’t yet caked up so far as to stop it going in enough to swing the block shut, which is what can happen after a couple of dozen rounds. The latch clicked home as I closed the block, then pulled the hammer back to full cock.
Sights are like a tall, narrow Aztec pyramid viewed through a railway cutting. You can set them up to 900 yards, but at that the angle of barrel elevation is very obvious and the vee is so far above the barrel that even a modest amount of cant would send your bullets falling so far wide of the enemy he probably wouldn’t even realise he was being attacked, less still if you’d misjudged the range by 50 yards or so. Tricky stuff, though some seem convinced they can do it.
But here, I’m just at 100 yards, and I take a ‘fine’ sight, which means only the top of the pyramid shows in the cutting. The trigger rolls smoothly back, an essay in polished and controllable creep, and the hammer falls once more on the thick, obliquely-angled, spring-loaded firing-pin whose butt-end sits where the nipple would have been.
Again the heavy jolt to the shoulder, again the flash and sparks, and again the billowing cloud of evil rolls forward. Some of the other shooters flash glances in my direction and I can see their lips move in a sort of sucked-in, murmuring way. I wonder what kind and complimentary remarks my earplugs are preventing me from hearing <img src="http://jsramsbottom.co.uk/bbs/e/icon_biggrin.gif" alt="Big Grin" width="15" height="15"><!--graemlin::D--> <img src="http://jsramsbottom.co.uk/bbs/e/icon_razz.gif" alt="Razz" width="15" height="15"><!--graemlin::p-->.
The butt-marker points his paddle at the Figure 11, somewhere near where the tip of the pyramid had hovered. These are my sighting shots for a timed series of 6 to be shot in 1 minute for part of our ‘Quad’ shoot. I’m going to use nitro for the actual shots, so I’d better change now to make sure point of impact’s somewhere near.
The nitro load is milder than the Pyrodex, 14 grains of Alliant Unique with a filler of polenta flour, like a sort of coarse-grained yellow semolina. Once I’d used rolled-up wads of bog paper, but this left tatty bits of brightly-coloured confetti scattered about the place. I’m not a tidy person, but that offended even me, so I’d been pleased to find the polenta just dispersed invisibly on firing, and had adopted it. The other really magical thing about this load is the way it removes every trace of Pyrodex fouling from bore and chamber, so really careful detail cleaning is only needed in the breechway and rim-recess.
It shoots comfortably and smokelessly, and does about 1000 fps compared to 1230 for the full-house Pyrodex charge, but at 100 yards, there’s no difference I can see in point of impact.
The other shooters note my change of ammunition, stop standing around in muttering groups looking at me from under lowered brows <img src="http://jsramsbottom.co.uk/bbs/e/icon_wink.gif" alt="Wink" width="15" height="15"><!--graemlin:;)-->, and apply themselves to their own pieces again.
Once sighting’s finished, I fire my 6 rounds in a minute without difficulty. I wait with bated breath for my score. It comes back as 19 out of 30, each bull on the Figure 11 scoring 5.
Well, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Probably 5 3s and a 4 – something like a 12” group offhand in an uncomfortable kneeling position. I won’t know how much of that’s just down to rotten shooting by me and how far I’ve solved the crap accuracy problem I used to have before I put the wooden base plugs in the bullets till I can get down to Minsterly of somewhere I can do a proper test. But I do know I’d have been lucky to get 3 hits without the plugs.
But hey, who cares? Benjamin Zephaniah refused his OBE because he despises the institution he thinks it represents – well, I might not agree, or think much of his poetry, but I can see his point of view. The Empire must have looked a stony and oppressive thing from a lot of angles, but it left some amazing stuff in its wake for some of us to pick up and wonder at. The Snider’s one of them, a thing made in another world from the one we live in now, and to use it gives a fleeting glimpse of what it’s like in there, even if you might not wanna stay.
It wasn't one of the original conversions. The Marks I & II had consumed the stocks of completed rifle-muskets that the Widow at Windsor’s “poor beggars in red” had found themselves at risk of getting stuck with, in the face of new breech-loading rifles being adopted elsewhere. The Enfield iron barrels, able to deliver a 4” group at 100 yards and drive a bullet through 4” of building pine at 1000, had found a new lease of life using their old load canned in brass and fed through a sideswing trapdoor breech, provided at the cost of twelve shillings a rifle. Jacob Snider had won the competition to design the most practical and economical stopgap conversion, but Pusser prevaricated about paying up, and he ended his days in poverty and bitterness.
In the Mark III, a new steel barrel had been introduced, breech-loading from original manufacture and with a locking latch to the swinging block, instead of the previous spring-button detent that could occasionally blow open. Often, the lockplates bear dates much earlier, as parts laid off during percussion days were used up, so they’re no guide to the gun’s date of build.
These Mk. IIIs are the preferred shooters for today, and that’s what this one was. It had most of its original semi-matt blue-black finish and some remaining colour case-hardening of the lockplate. Nobody had blued the breechblock, so it was still the grey steel it should be. There wasn’t a paper-thickness of clearance around the block in its shoe, so well did it fit. When clean, the bore was so bright that it actually hurt to look down it with a little Maglite Solitaire jammed at an angle in the open breech. Someone had probably steamed a dent out of the stock at some point, because the army acceptance stamp was very faint, and almost raised rather than impressed. But overall, the gun was in lovely condition – when my wife first saw it, she said it looked new.
I pulled the hammer back to half-cock, pressed the knurled lever on the left of the block to withdraw the latch, swung the block over to the right and pulled it back ½” against its spring to extract the case, turning the rifle over to tip the stinking, stained thing into the cut-off plastic bosh of washing-up water laced with vinegar that was my latest attempt to neutralise the damaging effects of Pyrodex residue.
I picked up the next round. It was a NFDS drawn brass case 2” long with a large rifle primer, 70 grains blackpowder equivalent in Pyrodex RS and a heavily-lubed 535 grain Custom Bullets .592” hollowbase roundnose with a taper-turned wooden base plug and one of those greased felt cookie wad affairs. Dropping it in the trough exposed by the open breechblock, I thumbed it forward into the breech, noting that the fouling hadn’t yet caked up so far as to stop it going in enough to swing the block shut, which is what can happen after a couple of dozen rounds. The latch clicked home as I closed the block, then pulled the hammer back to full cock.
Sights are like a tall, narrow Aztec pyramid viewed through a railway cutting. You can set them up to 900 yards, but at that the angle of barrel elevation is very obvious and the vee is so far above the barrel that even a modest amount of cant would send your bullets falling so far wide of the enemy he probably wouldn’t even realise he was being attacked, less still if you’d misjudged the range by 50 yards or so. Tricky stuff, though some seem convinced they can do it.
But here, I’m just at 100 yards, and I take a ‘fine’ sight, which means only the top of the pyramid shows in the cutting. The trigger rolls smoothly back, an essay in polished and controllable creep, and the hammer falls once more on the thick, obliquely-angled, spring-loaded firing-pin whose butt-end sits where the nipple would have been.
Again the heavy jolt to the shoulder, again the flash and sparks, and again the billowing cloud of evil rolls forward. Some of the other shooters flash glances in my direction and I can see their lips move in a sort of sucked-in, murmuring way. I wonder what kind and complimentary remarks my earplugs are preventing me from hearing <img src="http://jsramsbottom.co.uk/bbs/e/icon_biggrin.gif" alt="Big Grin" width="15" height="15"><!--graemlin::D--> <img src="http://jsramsbottom.co.uk/bbs/e/icon_razz.gif" alt="Razz" width="15" height="15"><!--graemlin::p-->.
The butt-marker points his paddle at the Figure 11, somewhere near where the tip of the pyramid had hovered. These are my sighting shots for a timed series of 6 to be shot in 1 minute for part of our ‘Quad’ shoot. I’m going to use nitro for the actual shots, so I’d better change now to make sure point of impact’s somewhere near.
The nitro load is milder than the Pyrodex, 14 grains of Alliant Unique with a filler of polenta flour, like a sort of coarse-grained yellow semolina. Once I’d used rolled-up wads of bog paper, but this left tatty bits of brightly-coloured confetti scattered about the place. I’m not a tidy person, but that offended even me, so I’d been pleased to find the polenta just dispersed invisibly on firing, and had adopted it. The other really magical thing about this load is the way it removes every trace of Pyrodex fouling from bore and chamber, so really careful detail cleaning is only needed in the breechway and rim-recess.
It shoots comfortably and smokelessly, and does about 1000 fps compared to 1230 for the full-house Pyrodex charge, but at 100 yards, there’s no difference I can see in point of impact.
The other shooters note my change of ammunition, stop standing around in muttering groups looking at me from under lowered brows <img src="http://jsramsbottom.co.uk/bbs/e/icon_wink.gif" alt="Wink" width="15" height="15"><!--graemlin:;)-->, and apply themselves to their own pieces again.
Once sighting’s finished, I fire my 6 rounds in a minute without difficulty. I wait with bated breath for my score. It comes back as 19 out of 30, each bull on the Figure 11 scoring 5.
Well, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Probably 5 3s and a 4 – something like a 12” group offhand in an uncomfortable kneeling position. I won’t know how much of that’s just down to rotten shooting by me and how far I’ve solved the crap accuracy problem I used to have before I put the wooden base plugs in the bullets till I can get down to Minsterly of somewhere I can do a proper test. But I do know I’d have been lucky to get 3 hits without the plugs.
But hey, who cares? Benjamin Zephaniah refused his OBE because he despises the institution he thinks it represents – well, I might not agree, or think much of his poetry, but I can see his point of view. The Empire must have looked a stony and oppressive thing from a lot of angles, but it left some amazing stuff in its wake for some of us to pick up and wonder at. The Snider’s one of them, a thing made in another world from the one we live in now, and to use it gives a fleeting glimpse of what it’s like in there, even if you might not wanna stay.