Firing the LeMat Revolver

hi i'm michael of you and as many of you know on the black powder editor for guns of the old west magazine and today we're out at the range with the LeMat revolver this is one of the ID balls of the Civil War you might say heavily favored by the Confederate forces not used by the Union and I already have a video on the channel that covers a lot of the history and the features of the lamont we're not going to cover a lot of the same ground today what I'm going to do is a little more shooting with it and I'm going to show you the shot shell loading or the shot loading technique that I'm using now for the shot barrel as well as just regular pistol loading and hopefully we'll have a little bit of fun with it so let's take it out to the range in this video I'm not going to go over the entire history and background on that revolver because we have another video called shooting the LeMat revolver on the channel that does exactly that in this video I'm going to try to concentrate a little bit more on actually giving you some load information and doing a little more shooting with a gun and I'll also talk about the weaknesses it got a bit more than I did in the first video well you know the Matt revolver is a gun that I call basically the tourist judge of the 19th century though to be honest with you that's probably an unfair characterization unfair to the judge as most of you know this is a gun that combines a regular revolver pistol type assembly with a shotgun barrel right and in order to do that it has two Stryker modes to hit the nipples the standard Stryker mode of course hits the revolver nipples and then will thumb flick you drop it and it strikes the nipple foot shotgun now I'm not a big fan in fact I have had this particular gun probably a dozen years and I've probably only fired at five or six times range sessions just because I don't really find it that much fun to shoot and if I was a Confederate officer during the Civil War I would probably be looking for a 1851 Colt Navy or 60 Colt army to pick up on the battlefield to replace Milam added this is what I was armed with this this is a gun that was favored by a number of Confederate generals and it's probably a good general officer's gun because it's the sort of gun that Jeff Cooper would have characterized as a gun to carry often and shoot seldom it's got some interesting features it's got some problems with it this is the reloading assembly and it would bolt on right here and it pushes upward cam balls in here it's very weak assembly and in this rain session it actually broke off and my understanding is that that is not uncommon that a lot of these limits and there were never that many of them made but but a fair number of them have been recovered come down through the ages with no loading assembly on them and that's probably because they broke just like mine did the spring that retains the Ramar is what broke off and at that point that rammer is just useless it's just flopping around and it's more of a problem than it's worth so I unscrewed it and apparently that's what a lot of guys did so I'll show you the video what happens with that Ram are on each shot and you can see exactly why it is no fun let's load it up and take it out to the range see what it will do alright I'm loading up the cylinder using dick dastardly's tower power and I'm loading it with 25 grains of 3 FG go X I'm just going to pour that into a measure dump that in now I'm going to top that with a lubricated felt lied and all these wads do is they provide lubrication down the bore to keep the fouling soft in the cushion the bottom of the ball or the bullet from the impact of the burning powder so it doesn't deform they don't stop chain fires and neither does greasing the chamber mouth stop chain fires chain fires occur generally from the rear of the cylinder and they're from ill-fitting caps or caps of the falling off so I just want to show you this we see the bullet you will get this ring a lead because the bullet is going to the ball in this case going to be a little bit oversized for that chamber and the chamber mouth shaves off that ring of lead which proves that the ball is now a perfect force fit into that chamber and new spark can get by it alright this is how you know you're not going to get a chain fire from the front this is what really stops at a good fitting ball not grease not wads this is what you want to see every time you're seating the ball well evil Roy is back knees scouting for the federal cavalry and it's up to us and our trusty LeMat to stop them from getting back to Custer let's see if we can take them down well evil Roy is off licking his wounds and plotting his revenge so let's see what we can do want some water bottles with the LeMat well that certainly did put them down all right certainly the most unusual feature of the LaMotte or LeMat is that the cylinder Arbor is a shotgun barrel of approximately 20 gauge and that really is a powerful little weapon uh though it's a little bit clumsy and one of the things to note about that shotgun barrel is it has its own nipple and that is reached by the hammer by flipping basically the striker so that it strikes down but that nipple is actually smaller than the nipples on revolver and really the nut the remington number ten caps i've been using on the revolver and i've been using on the nipple are a little bit too big for that nipple they want to come off during recoil and then you got nothing to shoot so if you're going to use this gun seriously you'd have to carry two different kinds of nipples with two different kinds of caps growing to number Ten's for the revolver and then CCI number ten the shotgun and CCI number 10s are quite a bit tighter than Remington number tens and you can't really use them on the revolver nipples unless you took a knife and slice them so that they would open up more but don't work on the shotgun well the last time I showed you loading the bilam at which is in that first video I talked about I use normal cards and wads you know the modern modern version really now what I'm going to show you is a more period-correct version that actually works a lot better so first thing you're going to know is that the shotgun loading lever for shot gun rammer is inside the loading lever so I'm just going to pull that out and put it down here I'm going to load with a 40 grain charge of powder which is not incredibly strong but given this is a small barrel I don't want to overload it so I'm going to I'm going to pour 40 grains of powder into the shotgun barrel now I'm going to take a ball of CHO and this is this is a ball of towel if you can see it and I'm just going to pop that right in right on top of the powder and I'll Ram that down and that's going to be our wanting now what tow is so you can see it tell where the rough fibers of the flax plant and these are the fibers that would eventually be carded and spun into linen and I'm just going to pull off a little piece of it this is you can get this a lot better comb than than this but the rough stuff is pretty inexpensive pound of it because it's very light last for a long time I'm just going to take this and I'm just going to work it work it into a ball walking into a ball between my hands pretty simple now that's probably even a little more than I need and that's what I just sent down the barrel and that's what's going to go over the shot so I'm just going to put that aside for now I'm going to be loading this with birdshot later we'll do it with buckshot as well so I've got a shot scoop here and I've got a set for 1 ounce yeah we go got a set for 1 out so I'm just going to fill it up with shot all right so that's one ounce of birdshot number six shot and I'm just going to take that and send it right down the bore and then I'm going to take our second ball towel I'm going to work that into the muzzle and take the rammer and send it down and now it is all loaded up with shot and ready to go well let's try some bird shot on a clay bird this time well I've got the LeMat loaded with 50 grains of 3fg black powder and with nine to blow buck shots let's see what we can do to a honeydew melon well I have to admit that from 15 yards I didn't devastate that honeydew quite the way I expected so I think we're going to have to move up that's better well still some left well let's finish up with the bad guys view with the LeMat revolver you

Channel: duelist1954

Views: 942,115

Rating: 4.8950343 out of 5

Keywords: Shooting, guns, firearms, Civil War, confederacy, confederate, South, LeMat, cap & Ball, C&B, shotgun, buckshot, cap and ball, Mike Beliveau, duelist1954, Evil Roy, Red Dead Redemption (Video Game)

Id: P5M-QQIOc5k

Length: 14min 25sec (865 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 08 2014