Getting to Know a Brown Bess (Most Iconic Flintlock Musket)

recently I sold the old Astron percussion pistol to get a brown vest and this one is a reproduction but aged to give it that antique look for some reason it's a 69 caliber bore rather than the usual 75 if you're not very familiar with muzzle loaders and saw me load the percussion pistol you may be wondering how did they ever use stuff like this on a battlefield it's so slow and just meticulously filling the powder measure and then dumping it down the barrel and reaching for patches and putting the round ball in the patch and ramming that home etc and it takes quite a while however what the military used was paper cartridges so they took a round lead ball which was substantially smaller than the diameter of the bore put it in a rolled paper tube tied it off then filled it with a correct amount of black powder and folded it to close it up this makes it a lot quicker and easier all you have to do is bite off the end of the paper cartridge dump it off to the pan of the flintlock and note the hole here in the barrel it's called the touch hole it's right where the main powder charge was set and it's going to be ignited when sparks hit the priming powder on the pan and a flash goes through the touch hole closing the frizzen keeps the priming powder dry and prevents it from falling off then the remaining powder goes down the barrel and the paper forms a wad that fills the space between the undersized ball and the bore it also prevents the ball from just rolling out when the barrel is tilted down one could also use a led ball with the same diameter as that of the barrel and loaded without Patra paper but that would make it really hard to ram the ball down you would need to force it down with a mallet and after several shots the black powder residue builds up in the barrel making it even harder to load basically the loose of the fit the quicker and easier it is to load the musket which is of course essential for soldiers but it reduces the range and accuracy there is a reason why the flintlock is jokingly called flinch lock sparks a big flame and smoke going off right in front of your face makes it a little hard to avoid involuntary reflexes so it takes quite a bit of practice to get rid of a flinch or at least minimize it what that typically does is cause the shots to go low you can see that here in the slow-mo the barrel tilts down a bit if that happens after the ball leaves the barrel it's not a problem but if it happens before that and it'll pull it down and that's exactly what happened to me here a lot of my shots lent it lower than I intended I can't say too much about the accuracy yet because I haven't practiced much with it so far at first I was shooting at quite a short distance about 20 meters or yards and then I moved it out to about 50 meters the first shot landed almost exactly where I was aiming just a tad bit to the left and then the subsequent ones all went low with enough practice people can usually consistently hit a man-sized target at about hundred meters much beyond that it gets really difficult because of the crude front sight and the lack of rifling in the barrel and of course sometimes things go wrong if the Flint gets to dull it may not get sparks on the frizzen and sometimes if you don't use enough powder in the pan it fails to ignite the main charge but using too much powder in the pan isn't good either because then it takes longer to burn which causes a hang fire where there is a noticeable delay between pulling the trigger and the shot firing but if the Flint is well-maintained and the loading and priming is done right it actually seems reasonably reliable [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] this was the second time I took it out to shoot and I already managed to load it a bit faster than before [Music] and for comparison here is how long it takes me to load my medieval crossbows [Music] [Music] [Music] overall it's quite messy and challenging compared to modern rifles but it's also a lot of fun [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Skallagrim

Views: 116,892

Rating: 4.9742537 out of 5

Keywords: Skall, Skallagrim, fantasy, medieval, historical, crossbow, flintlock, musket, Brown Bess, Bess, firing, test, testing, paper, cartridges, loading, baroque, black powder, powder, lead, ball, smoothbore, antique, smoke, flash, awesome, impressive, target, accuracy, speed, time, century, napoleonic, iconic, ramrod, priming, pan, how to, pirate, muzzle, blast, fun, trying, first, attempt

Id: hZQfc5g8ffE

Length: 8min 9sec (489 seconds)

Published: Sat May 26 2018