Flintlock Musket (Brown Bess)

hey Hickok here again another crazy video though to do something a little different in this video guess I haven't several loads where they're a little different right but a more serious video but with a rifle a type of rifle I've not done much with if anything and that is the assault rifle I've just not done many videos with assault rifles and you know military assault rifles and of course that's a an interest of mine anything that was used in a military are kind of interesting from a historical standpoint plus military rifles were just made well obviously they're made to work and to be very practical durable easy to break down and work with generally so and a lot of people who like the military assault rifles and the one I was going to demonstrate here in a minute is is one that's very crucial I think to our freedom into this country any kind of military weapon has course served an important role for this country but the law is going to demonstrate probably is as much responsible for our freedom as any and it happens to be a little bit unusual it operates with a piece of Flint you know this was the military rifle of the 1700s you know in the early 1800s this is a whole brown bess it's a flintlock and it was invented as I understand and the well the flintlock was invented in the 1690s as I understand before that with the matchlock in the wheel lock and this was the rifle in various configurations maybe with longer barrel generally not with the brown barrel in most cases but this was the barrel the gun that was used by Britain and also by the colonists I think as I understand the colonists had these guns the old brown buses although they didn't call them the brown bess at the time as I understand but this was the gun that some of the columns had because of according to my feeble recollection of history it was mandatory for any man to to have a rifle back in the early days oh the colonies is when we were subjects of course Britain and this was one of the guns that a lot of lot of the men had families had it later became known as the Brown Bess and there's a lot of controversy about why it was called that way or different thoughts on that but it is a flintlock and that's the main thing it's only flintlock I have I'm not going to give you a history lesson here necessarily on the on the brown bess I know enough about to be dangerous but it's the only flintlock I own I've just had a couple of years haven't shot it probably 25 times but I bring it out every now and then and try to hit something with it totally make an interesting video because probably most of you don't have one I think I'd be safe and saying that particularly if you're a Glock fan or you spend a lot of time shooting some of the other modern firearms that I enjoy as well but I'm pretty eclectic than my my firearms interest is you can probably tell by now so I dragged this one out and let me tell you just a little bit about it if you don't know much about a flintlock of course it's called a flintlock because it uses a piece of Flint to create the fire so just a little basics here hold this region you can see it I hope pretty pretty clearly of course the the hammer the [ __ ] you know holds the Flint and you go jaws here that squeeze that piece of Flint in in between them so that it will be held securely there all right and you need a sharp edge on it and this is the pan you look at the pan there this is where you put powder you know you if you don't have one or don't even know anybody who has one you've seen in the movies perhaps this is where you dump some powder close the frizzen [ __ ] the hammer you know and then when the the Flint falls it the hammer Falls that the Flint strikes the Frison there creates a spark goes down into the powder in the pan and you can lights the powder in the chamber now you can see maybe if I hold this really close the hole going into the chamber from the pan I believe you can see that there okay it's already a little dirty fired a couple of times so that's how they operate you have powder of course in the chamber in the barrel with a ball resting on top of it there and the powder here when it's ignited in the pan also lights the powder in the barrel and propels the ball so you have to close the prison once you get powder in there and that holds the powder fairly securely I don't think I'd want to climb a tree with it depend on it to save my life or anything but it'll hold it fairly well there for a little bit if you're out in the moisture in the rain you know the Pioneers or whoever you know damp moist day they had difficulty with you know keeping their powder dry I know you've heard that line before so that's how they operate you got the frizzen that's where the spark is created when the Flint hits it the spark is thrown down into the powder let me go ahead and put spool of trigger so you maybe see the spark others do it up here pretty close to the camera see if I keep from blowing up my camera okay a little spark there no powder though so nothing happened all right [ __ ] it back put the frizzen down that's how they operate seems pretty complicated to you probably you wouldn't want to have to rely on one today I guess but but it's fairly reliable the weakest point is at least I thought it was and getting the Flint right getting the Flint adjusted but it's actually worked pretty well hopefully it'll continue to work here here today I'm just going to take two or three shots with it but again this is known as a brown vest for about 150 years this was state-of-the-art from around 1790s 1869 excuse me up until around 1830s when the cap was invented it may have been invented before that but the cap lock rifles were in production I think in the late 1830s that's where you have a nipple coming out of the back of the barrel the breech and you just put a little cap on it and hammer falls on that and sends the fire down into the barrel you're more familiar with that I mean modern muzzle loaders use that technology the ones that you made ear hunt with of course now use that's that same technology one thing I did not mention is that this is a smoothbore you know these early guns of course were smoothbores like a shotgun there's no rifling in the barrel so they were not quite as accurate you know they're just slinging the lead out there and the ball is not necessarily spinning and it's hard to hit anything with it it really is not just because of that on a good day I've shot it a few times or actually hit the gong over there at 80 yards amazed myself but I just don't shoot it that thing it's really hard to hit because when you fire this they don't call these flinch locks for nothing you fire it you know you pull that trigger rather you get spark and fire coming out this way and then if you're the ones firing it it seems like about ten seconds before the powder in here is ignited and the bullet is propelled out the barrel now all during that time you need to course hold it on the target and you got this fire going off in your face so it's a real challenge again they don't call them flinch locks or nothing because you will flinch generally with one of these I have difficulty hitting even one of these big closed targets right here I really do I just hit one a minute ago just trying it out to make sure it was shoot but then I missed it the second time so but mainly whether I hit anything or not I just thought you might like to see it operate all right so it's a interesting piece of history and it might just be something you've not seen operate all right so let's load him up and one thing I did not show you is it shoots a large ball the brown vest was 75 caliber and it's 75 here it is up against a 9-millimeter bullet just to give you some perspective okay the difference so it's a big heavy ball getting heavy one all right so first thing you do is you load the barrel put some powder and I just used right out of the can with our fighting in the Revolutionary War where I probably do not carry this kin with me and where's my powder measure there I put about 70 grains in down the barrel okay I've got powder in there I need a patch actually you can fire it without the patch it's not like you're going to lose a whole lot of accuracy anyway there's the ball starter is it started to pipe the beginning they're usually right at the muzzle have it on down it's really important with a muzzle loader of any kind to have a powder or have the ball pushed right down seated against the powder okay it's you can have a wide range of powder you become your own hand loader in case you didn't know if you've never messed with with muzzle loaders you're essentially your own hand loader if you want to shoot five grains of powder or you want to shoot the 90 grains you can do that but you then it doesn't matter as long as the bullet is down against the powder otherwise if you've got the ball out here and the powder down here what's that equal tight ball right okay so you want the bullet seated against the powder now it's time to charge the pan now some guy I've got some really fine black powder in this I use sometimes I'm just going to go ahead and use the coarser powder that the double left here it seems to work all right - so we put enough powder in the pan close the prison now if everything is going to operate it shoots fire if my flame is still sharp it ought to go I'm gonna stand back here where maybe you can you can get a feel for what happens here alright now I'm going to try to hit that big yellow target right there but there's a good chance I'll miss it but anyway watch the gun the way to operates and that's the main purpose of this video oh that makes me happy because it's easy to miss so how was that for some fire and smoke now this is real black powder - this is not a black powder substitute on fire I always use a real black powder when I get this stuff out so let's try that again powder measure sometimes you might have a smouldering patch in your barrel so you want to be aware of that you know when you start pouring powder back down here that's one reason you'll pour right out of the can if it were to ignite this amount of powder who wouldn't be catastrophic or anything I've never had that happen all right powdered patch ball we know it's pretty involved once you get going with it and going your stuff out here it's not too bad and see I'm loaded again I just need to charge the pan I'm ready to make a fire powder in the pan I'll be coming up here closer so you can see what I'm doing again now I'm going to be careful it is loaded although there's no priming involved yet so what I do is I just put some in that pan there spread it out a little bit okay close the frizzen keep it pointed downrange here you see that close the prison over that powder hammers [ __ ] so it's ready to go all right let's try again if I get that thing twice in a row I'll be happy yes sir all right get this out more often hmm a little smoky here you might see some smoke come out of that hole hey that's the same hole that of course the fire enters the chamber through all right let's go one more powder if you've shot most of load as much traditional Muslim letters like this ah smell that black powder sitting here if you've done this very much you've probably done what they call dry ball that's where you forget to put powder in it's really easy to do when you're doing a video and you're not thinking about everything squarely here of course I wouldn't know anything about that but if you do that you put the ball down in there and there's no powder that's not a good thing of course that ball goes in a whole lot easier then it comes out by any manual methods I'm aware of what you have to do in is get some fine powder and and just work some down into that little fire hole there with a toothpick or a needle for a little while and you'll get enough down in there to where you can just fire it out it doesn't take much and get five grains it will send the ball out probably okay one last shot I hate to end on a Miss but I'm going to do it anyway I'm going to shoot across the hill if I actually hit something over there be careful because I'll probably just jump up in the air for joy but I am going to shoot it I won't use that yellow Ram one of the other difficulties of shooting this gun is you can't see where your ball went you when you miss because of all the smoke so you may have missed me by half an inch to the left or or three feet high you just don't know to readjust I'm gonna try for him okay here we go I hope you went low I usually know where it goes when I miss it goes low because during the interval if you can see it on the camera but when you fire the gun pull the trigger you tend to when up pull down like that before it actually fires the bullet so I need to practice with this but anyway thought you might enjoy that too bad you can't smell the sulfur of the smoke in the air so smoothbore no rifling the bullet has no spin to it your sheets a round ball 75 caliber in fact this is equivalent to an 11 gauge shotgun because a in friendship Indiana a couple years ago I bought the supplies and wads and everything to use it as a shotgun I just easily sheet shot out of it's a smoothbore and they told me that I needed all the accouterments for an 11 gauge that's the size of the boar so it's a little bigger than 12 gauge but essentially you're talking about a 12 gauge here 11 gauge shotgun or a right I'm not a rifle a musket and a pure sense a rifle would have rifling in the barrel you know spin the ball flintlock this was again the gun of the Revolutionary War the most prominent weapon especially on the British side but also used by the colonists and that's how it operated so thought you might enjoy seeing that old thing let you see the dirt here as we sign off okay see you later

Channel: hickok45

Views: 836,737

Rating: 4.9360876 out of 5

Keywords: military, assault, rifle, flintlock, flint, frizzen, pan, fire, hole, hammer, lock, cock, black, powder, musket, Uberti, Brown, Bess, ramrod, flash, .75, caliber, trigger, Revolutionary, War, American, Revolution, targets, instruction, guns, firearms, lead, bullets, training, pigs, turkeys, rams, buffaloes, plates

Id: wz56I4n9O4U

Length: 15min 49sec (949 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 17 2009